# Transfer Orbit > Dispatches from the world of science fiction, reading, writing, and the future. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T14:27:16.000Z ### *Transfer Orbit* **Science fiction is everywhere in our lives.** Whether it’s the latest blockbuster movie in theaters or streaming, hit novel, technological advancement, or space launch, the world around us could easily come out of the pages of a classic novel. This newsletter helps make sense of science fiction and how it helps us understand the future. *Transfer Orbit* is a regular look at the latest news within the science fiction community, featuring analysis and commentary and updates about fiction, writing, and the future of reading. --- ### Bio **Andrew Liptak** is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of *Cosplay: A History* (Saga Press, 2022), a comprehensive look at how cosplay evolved into a mainstream cultural force and what it reveals about our relationships with the stories we love. He co-edited *War Stories: New Military Science Fiction* with Jaym Gates in 2014, and his fiction has appeared in *Galaxy’s Edge Magazine*, *Starship Sofa*, Horizon 2045’s *Far Futures*, and *Future Tense Fiction*. He has spent more than a decade working as a journalist, with work appearing in [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/clarkesworld-magazine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Gizmodo*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/gizmodo/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Grist*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/9/13/grist)*,* [*io9*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/gizmodo/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Kirkus Reviews*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/kirkus-reviews/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Lifehacker*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/5/8/lifehacker)*,* [*OneZero*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/8/5/onezero)*,* [*Pando Daily*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2009/3/9/pando-daily)*,* [*Polygon*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/5/31/polygon)*,* [*Slate*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2009/7/12/slate)*,* [*Tor.com*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/tor-com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2008/2/28/uncanny-magazine)*,* [*VentureBeat*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/07/03/venturebeat/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Verge*](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/the-verge/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [other publications](https://andrewliptak.com/writing/?ref=andrewliptak.com). He is the Public Relations and Guest Services Coordinator for the [Vermont Historical Society](https://vermonthistory.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). He holds a bachelor’s degree in History (with a minor in Geology, 2007) and a master’s degree in Military History (2009), both from Norwich University. In 2014, he attended the [Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop](https://www.launchpadworkshop.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and he is an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). His work has been featured and cited in outlets such as *Slate, Lifehacker*, and *The Washington Post.* His writing and work has earned praise from genre figures including Daniel Abraham (*The Expanse*), who said “Liptak is really building himself a niche as one of the important critics and reviewers in the genre"; Annalee Newitz called him “one of the best book critics out there”; and Allen M. Steele (*Coyote*, *Arkwright*), who called him “perhaps the sharpest and most knowledgeable member of a new generation of critics to enter science fiction over the past couple of decades.” He is represented by Seth Fishman of the Gernert Company and lives in central Vermont with his wife, Megan, and their children. --- ### Ethics Policy *Transfer Orbit* is a user-supported newsletter. In an online environment where misinformation, clickbait, and AI runs rampant, building and maintaining trust with readers is paramount to the work that goes into *Transfer Orbit*. To that end: - This newsletter is a human-produced newsletter, and does not knowingly utilize content created by generative artificial intelligence platforms. - We do accept advanced review and finished copies of books for the purpose of reviews and photography, but receiving such an item doesn't guarantee coverage. - We don't provide our subjects with approval or preview of our reporting, and we don't pay for coverage. - We do not provide paid coverage or content. - We do use affiliate links in our coverage for Bookshop.org. Any proceeds go into our reporting, tools, and hosting. --- ### Contact & pitching - We do accept story tips, book pitches, and other ideas. - We don't accept non-solicited stories or guest posts. - If you find an error or a mistake in a piece, we will review and correct if warranted. [Contact me here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/contact/) ### Contact URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/contact/ Last updated: 2025-12-16T18:08:12.000Z ## Pitches I primarily cover speculative fiction literature, fandom, television, film, technology (I'm particularly interested in tech that deals with the future of reading), the future of warfare, and cosplay. ## Agent For professional and rights queries regarding *Cosplay: A History*, please contact my agent, Seth Fishman at the Gernert Company: 136 E. 57th Street / New York, NY / 10022 8440 Warner Drive / Culver City, CA / 90232 1.212.838.7777 info@thegernertco.com ## Say hello Like my work? Have a tip for an interesting story? Want to say hello? Contact me via email at liptakaa \[at\] gmail \[dot\] com. ### Privacy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/privacy/ Last updated: 2025-01-25T18:36:23.000Z Wondering how Ghost fares when it comes to privacy and GDPR rules? Good news: Ghost does not use any tracking cookies of any kind. You can integrate any products, services, ads or integrations with Ghost yourself if you want to, but it's always a good idea to disclose how subscriber data will be used by putting together a privacy page. ### Nonfiction URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nonfiction/ Last updated: 2025-05-22T17:34:06.000Z This page is to highlight some of the reviews, commentary and historical posts that I've done for various publications. --- ## Print ***Cosplay: A History: The Builders, Fans, and Makers Who Bring Your Favorite Stories to Life*.** - A history of the cosplay movement, published by Saga Press. [Details](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cosplay-A-History/Andrew-Liptak/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com). (You can read [related posts here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/cosplay-a-history/)) --- ### [Armchair General](http://www.armchairgeneral.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - *Changing the Skies: Curtis LeMay and the Cold War transition of U.S. strategic airpower from planes to missiles*, Armchair General Magazine, November 2011 - *Ernie Harmon’s Battle of the Bulge: The feisty 2d U.S. Armored Division commander led “the cavalry to the rescue” at the height of the German Ardennes Offensive*, Armchair General Magazine, November 2012 - *Admiral Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay, 1898: The Spanish American War began with a naval battle – and a Pacific empire at stake,* Armchair General Magazine, September 2013. - *Sinking An Ally, 1940,* Armchair General Magazine, May 2014. ### [Norwich Record](http://thenorwichrecord.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [*NU to the Rescue: Irene relief efforts mirror those of 1927 Flood*](http://thenorwichrecord.com/?p=2520&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* Norwich Record, Winter 2012 - [*Out of the Ashes: How An Irish Episcopal Priest Saved Norwich University*](http://thenorwichrecord.com/?p=2973&ref=andrewliptak.com), Norwich Record, Spring 2012 [*Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Conflict*](http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/potomac-books/9781640120334/?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, and Jaym Gates. (May 2018) - The Battle of Hoth: A Critical Analysis [*Citizens & Soldiers: The First 200 Years of Norwich University*](https://alumni.norwich.edu/NUHistoryBook?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Kershaw (2018) - Hell On Wheels: The 2nd Armored Division in World War II --- ## Digital (Click site for specific bibliography) - [A Dribble of Ink](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/a-dribble-of-ink/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Barnes & Noble Sci Fi & Fantasy Blog](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/the-barnes-and-noble-sci-fi-blog/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Blastr](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/blastr/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Buzzfeed](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/buzzfeed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Clarkesworld Magazine](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/clarkesworld-magazine/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Cosplay Central](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2005/11/5/cosplay-central) - [The Functional Nerds](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/functional-nerds/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Geek Exchange (Geek Magazine)](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/geek-exchange/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Gizmodo](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/gizmodo/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [io9](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/io9/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Kirkus Reviews](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/kirkus-reviews/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Lifehacker](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/5/8/lifehacker) - [Lightspeed Magazine](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/lightspeed-magazine-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Norwich Today](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/norwich-today/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Omni Reboot](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/omni-reboot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [OneZero](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/8/5/onezero) - [Open Road Media](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/open-road-media/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Pando Daily](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2009/3/9/pando-daily) - [Parent.co](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/09/23/parent-co/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Polygon](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2007/5/31/polygon) - [Pornokitsch](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/pornokisch/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Prime Books](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/prime-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Science Fiction Book Club](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/science-fiction-book-club/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/science-fiction-and-fantasy-writers-of-america/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Seven Days](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/seven-days/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SFSignal](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/sf-signal/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Slate](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2009/7/12/slate) - [Staffer Book Reviews](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/staffer-book-reviews/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Strange Horizons](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/strange-horizons/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [The Unofficial Clone Wars Site](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/the-unofficial-clone-wars-site/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Tor.com](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/tor-com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [VentureBeat](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/07/03/venturebeat/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [The Verge](https://andrewliptak.com/2007/05/31/the-verge/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## Audio [The Functional Nerds](http://functionalnerds.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - [Episode 11](http://functionalnerds.com/2010/05/episode-011/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Episode 261](http://functionalnerds.com/2016/01/episode-261-with-andrew-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy](https://geeksguideshow.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - [GGG#167: *Killjoys* and *Dark Matter*](http://geeksguideshow.com/2015/09/07/ggg167-killjoys-and-dark-matter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [GGG#180: *The Expanse* TV Show](http://geeksguideshow.com/2015/12/06/ggg180-the-expanse-tv-show/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [PoliSciFi Radio](http://www.poliscifiradio.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - [PoliSciFi Radio, Episode 150](http://www.poliscifiradio.com/?p=257&ref=andrewliptak.com) [SF Signal Podcast](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/category/podcast-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Nominated for the [2012 Hugo Award for Best Fancast](http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2012-hugo-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com)): - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 2](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/08/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-002-interview-with-a-lee-martinez/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 4](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/08/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-004-interview-with-mur-lafferty/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 6](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/09/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-006-interview-with-amelia-beamer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 7](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/09/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-007-interview-with-brenda-cooper/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 59](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/06/the%5Fsf%5Fsignal%5Fpodcast%5Fepisode%5F059?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast, Episode 101](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/01/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-101-panel-round-up-of-our-favorite-sff-books-of-2011/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast (Episode 113): Military Science Fiction, Part 1](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/03/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-113-military-scifi-mega-panel-part-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast (Episode 115): Military Science Fiction, Part 2](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/03/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-115-military-science-fiction-mega-panel-part-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast (Episode 123): Military Science Fiction, Part 3](https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/05/sf-signal-podcast-123-military-scifi-pt-3-with-myke-cole-joe-haldeman-and-david-j-williams/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SF Signal Podcast (Episode 127)](http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/05/the-sf-signal-podcast-episode-127-panel-discussion-nasa-vs-star-trek/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [The Skiffy and Fanty Show](http://skiffyandfanty.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - [Dystopia, Why So Prevalent? — w/ Andrew Liptak and James Decker (A Discussion), Episode 129](http://skiffyandfanty.com/2013/02/08/129-dystopia-why-so-prevalent-w-andrew-liptak-and-james-decker-a-discussion/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## Live **Conferences / Talks**: - [2009 Fall Conference](http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/2009%5FPaper%5FAttendees[1].htm?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Northeast Popular Culture Association](http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html?ref=andrewliptak.com): *Byron Clark, YMCA Camp Abnaki and the Progressive Era.* - [2010 Spring Conference](http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEHA/SALEMSTATE.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com), [New England Historical Association](http://www.newenglandhistorians.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com): *The Military Roots of Manned Spaceflight.* - [*2012 Spring Conference*](http://www.newenglandhistorians.org/conferences/sp12-conf/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*New England Historical Association*](http://www.newenglandhistorians.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*: Norwich University and the Battle of the Bulge.* - [2012 Fall Conference](http://www.newenglandhistorians.org/conferences/fall12-conf/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [New England Historical Association](http://www.newenglandhistorians.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com): Panel Chair, *Books and Cultures* - [2013 New Genre Army Conference](http://store.lincoln.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?catid=173&modid=1&compid=1&ref=andrewliptak.com), University of Lincoln: *War Fighting Generations and Interpretation in SF* - [2013 Colby Symposium](http://colby.norwich.edu/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Norwich University: *Norwich University & the European Campaign in WWII* - [2013 75 Years of Science Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Conference](http://geekmountainstate.com/2013/04/22/75-years-of-science-fiction-conference-schedule/?ref=andrewliptak.com), University of Vermont: *Setting Up the Golden Age of Science Fiction* - [2014 Tolkien in Vermont Conference: Bombadil and Other Middle-earth Mysteries](http://tolkienvt.org/2014?ref=andrewliptak.com), University of Vermont: *Building Fantastic Worlds: How Tolkien Created the Modern Fantasy Genre* - [2015 Tolkien in Vermont Conference: Medieval Verse Narratives](http://tolkienvt.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), University of Vermont: *Modern Fantasy’s Roots in Medieval Verse* - 2016 [Lunch and Learn — They Shall Not Pass](https://www.facebook.com/events/1720171271640224/?acontext=%7B%22action%5Fhistory%22%3A%22[%7B%5C%22surface%5C%22%3A%5C%22page%5C%22%2C%5C%22mechanism%5C%22%3A%5C%22main%5Flist%5C%22%2C%5C%22extra%5Fdata%5C%22%3A%5C%22%7B%7D%5C%22%7D]%22%7D), Sullivan Museum, Norwich University. - 2017 [Lunch and Learn — Art of Empire: World War II and *Star Wars*](https://www.facebook.com/SullivanMuseum/videos/704221289780148/), Sullivan Museum, Norwich University. - [2018 Army TRADOC Mad Scientist Learning in 2050 Conference](http://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/74-mad-scientist-learning-in-2050-conference/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Georgetown University Center for Security Studies, Washington DC. [*Engaging the Future: The Art of Future Warfare*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/army-mad-scientist-initiative-learning-in-2050-science-fiction-future-talk)*.* - Modern War Institute, [Potential Disruptors of the ‘American Way of War’](https://mwi.usma.edu/class-of-2006-war-studies-conference-november-2018/?ref=andrewliptak.com), United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. November 4-6, 2018. - 2019 Tolkien in Vermont Conference: Tolkien and Horror, University of Vermont, Burlington Vermont. April 6th, 2019. ### Fiction URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/fiction/ Last updated: 2026-01-30T18:52:47.000Z This is where you can find my fiction online. --- ## **Short** Fiction ### ‘[Fragmented](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fragmented-military-science-fiction/)’, *Galaxy's Edge* #8, 2014 A soldier comes to terms with his combat experiences and leaving it behind. 2,551 words. - Originally published in [*Galaxy’s Edge Magazine*](http://www.galaxysedge.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)#8, May 2014 - Audio edition adaptation published on [*StarshipSofa*](http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2015/09/23/starshipsofa-no-403-mike-brooks-and-andrew-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com) episode #403\. - Reprinted in the Art of Future War Project in November 2015\. You can find an archived version of the Q&A with me on the site [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20160410090247/http://artoffuturewarfare.org/2015/11/suits-of-armor/). - [Republished to *Transfer Orbit*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fragmented-military-science-fiction/), November 2021\. ### ‘[Letters of Transit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/letters-of-transit-urban-fantasy-fiction/)’, *Transfer Orbit*, April 2019 A migrant navigates a twisted set of spells to cross a formidable border. 1,857 words. - Self published, April 2019\. ### ‘[Proposals for Regulating Free-Range Velociraptors](https://www.andrewliptak.com/proposals-for-regulating-free-range-velociraptors-fiction/)’, *Transfer Orbit*, June 2019 A neighborhood is fed up with a new problem that they face: free-range velociraptors. 1,354 words. - Self published, June 2019\. ### ‘[Ten steps to expedite a departure from Pantaga Station](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ten-steps-to-expedite-a-departure-from-pantaga-station-science-fiction/)’, *Transfer Orbit*, September 2019 A ship's XO goes over the ways in which to make a quick escape from a space station. 1,035 words. - Self published, September 2019\. ### ‘[Walk in the Woods](https://www.andrewliptak.com/walk-in-the-woods-science-fiction-robotics/)’, *Transfer Orbit,* October 2020 A contractor takes on a hike for a client. Originally written for a local contest. 2,747 words. - Self published, October 2020\. ### '[Embers](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/embers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)', Horizon 2045 *Far Futures*, May 2024 A mission specialist comes face to face with his family's past while retrieving a nuclear warhead lost in Earth's orbit. 4,172 words. - Published in Horizon 2045 *Far Futures* digital anthology, May 2024\. (Including audio adaptation - [Republished](https://www.andrewliptak.com/embers/) on *Transfer Orbit* August 2025\. ### '[Deficiency Agent](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-deficiency-agent-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com)' *Future Tense Fiction*, January 2026\. A Surface Systems Support Officer (3S0) tasked with accompanying soldiers in the field serves as a sort of interpreter for an artificial intelligence system called TION (Tactical Intelligence Optimization and Navigation). While out on a mission, they run into some of the system's limitations and downsides. 7,538 words. - Published in *Future Tense Fiction*, January 2026\. --- ## **Anthologies** ### *War Stories: Modern Military Science Fiction*, co-edited with Jaym Gates - [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/War-Stories-Military-Science-Fiction/dp/1937009262/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519482618&sr=8-1&keywords=war+stories+new+military+science+fiction&ref=andrewliptak.com) / [Apex Book Company](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/war-stories?variant=870461337&ref=andrewliptak.com) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/war-stories-karin-lowachee/1120500466?ean=9781937009267&ref=andrewliptak.com) / [Bear Pond Books](http://www.bearpondbooks.com/book/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com) / [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/books/war-stories-new-military-science-fiction/9781937009267?aid=6134&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Membership URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/ Last updated: 2025-05-24T19:27:21.000Z *Transfer Orbit* is a newsletter about science fiction, writing, and the future of reading, and it's largely written by Andrew Liptak. I'm a journalist who's covered entertainment and fandom for more than a decade for places like *io9, OneZero, Polygon*, Tor.com, and others, and this newsletter is a way for me to continue that work independently. While largely free for everyone, a small contingent of readers help supports this work. *Transfer Orbit* has garnered praise from authors, professionals, and members of the SF/F community, who've called Liptak "one of the important critics and reviewers in the genre," and the newsletter an "indispensable resource" and a "great combination of commentary, reporting, and analysis" of the SF world. It's been featured in *The Washington Post* and *Vulture*, and has been reprinted in outlets such as *Slate* and *Lifehacker*. [Sign up for Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Why Support *Transfer Orbit*? The media environment is chaotic. There are plenty of sites out there delivering low-quality news about the state of genre books, films, television shows, games, and more. *Transfer Orbit* is a newsletter designed to cut through the clickbait, sensational, and irrelevant reporting to provide readers with a clear idea of the state of the stories we love, through contextual and in-depth reporting. AI is never used in the production of this newsletter. Subscribing helps support this work, in which I look to explore and explain the mechanics of the SF/F world and why it matters to you, a reader, viewer, or listener. Your subscription helps support the publication as a whole by allowing me to devote time and resources to its production. Subscriptions helps make interview transcriptions, sourcing images, hosting on Ghost, and the time to research, write, and edit the posts you receive, possible. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) --- ## Public and Supporting subscribers *Transfer Orbit* has two subscriber tiers: public and supporting. ### Public A regular roundup email, with the occasional in-depth piece. - A weekly "roundup" email (which includes a roundup of the week's posts from Transfer Orbit and links to other stories that are worth reading.) - In-depth features or reports about the state of the SF/F world. - Monthly roundup of new SF/F books each month. - Book reviews and commentary. ### Supporters Supporters are members with a paid subscription to *Transfer Orbit*. Their support helps keep this newsletter running – subscriptions help pay for hosting on Ghost, various tools, books and resources for dedicated reporting, etc. - Supporters get all posts from Transfer Orbit emailed to them, and the occasional pay-walled post with extra commentary or reporting. - Monthly Table of Contents email that rounds up the month's short fiction. - Dedicated Slack group to chat with their fellow readers. - The occasional short story that I finish. ### Tips & Affiliate purchases If a subscription isn't in the cards at the moment, you can also leave a one-time tip. [Leave a tip ](#/portal/support) You can also support this newsletter by purchasing books through the monthly [book lists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) or via its [Bookshop.org page](https://bookshop.org/shop/andrewliptak?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Welcome! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/welcome/ Last updated: 2025-05-24T18:49:49.000Z Thank you so much for subscribing to Transfer Orbit—I really appreciate you joining me. ### About Me If we’re meeting for the first time: I’m Andrew Liptak, a writer and journalist who’s spent the last decade writing about science fiction, military history, popular culture, and technology. I’m the author of [*Cosplay: A History: The Builders, Fans, and Makers Who Bring Your Favorite Stories to Life*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cosplay-A-History/Andrew-Liptak/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Saga Press, 2022) I co-edited [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/war-stories-anthology?ref=andrewliptak.com) with Jaym Gates (Apex Book Company, 2014). I've worked as a journalist covering science fiction, entertainment, science, technology, and culture, and I’ve written for places like *Clarkesworld Magazine, Gizmodo, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lifehacker, Slate, Tor.com, VentureBeat*, *The Verge*, and others. I'm currently the PR & Guest Services Coordinator for the Vermont Historical Society. --- ### This Newsletter This newsletter grew out of my work as a reporter, and my goal is to help you make sense of the intersection between science fiction and the stories we love and how they help us understand the world we live in. It's been featured in *The Washington Post* and *Vulture*, and has been reprinted in places like *Slate* and *Lifehacker*. This newsletter includes everything from monthly book lists to reviews, to commentaries, news updates, and quite a bit more. You can typically expect one or two pieces a week, with paid subscribers getting additional stories that I catch during the week. You can also expect an end-of-the-week roundup that covers everything that went up on the site, news and other updates that took place in the last seven days. Supporting subscribers also have access to a TO Slack channel, where I drop news links and generally chat about what's going on in the world. **I’d love to get to know you a bit better, as you’ll get this newsletter from me on a somewhat regular basis.** If you wouldn’t mind emailing me: what got you interested in this newsletter, and what is it that you’re interested in reading about when it comes to science fiction and writing? I want to make sure that it’s a relevant resource and that it remains interesting. --- ### **Housekeeping** If you can’t find the newsletter in your inbox after subscribing, check your spam folder, and please mark this address as ‘not spam.’ If the newsletter isn’t in your spam folder, either, you should look in the Promotions tab: please move this newsletter into your “Primary” tab, which will ensure that you’ll get it in a timely fashion. If you have issues with payments or your subscription, email me directly and we'll sort it out. --- Thank you for subscribing! I look forward to what’s to come. Andrew ### Appearances URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/appearances/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T19:31:05.000Z - August 16th: [Arms and Armor Celebration](https://www.worcesterart.org/events/free-day-a-world-of-arms-and-armor-ft-tree-house-brewing-company/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Worcester Art Museum, Worcester MA. - 1:00PM, Cosplay Presentation and Q&A. I'll be talking about the history of costuming and cosplay during their Free Day: A World of Arms and Armor event. It'll be in the Higgins Education Wing, Level 3 Conference Room. - August 27th: [LAcon V](https://www.lacon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the 84th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim CA. - MAYA Narrative Universe. 260C (ACC North). I’ll be moderating this panel with the creators of the cross-platform MAYA universe which encompasses books, films, video games, graphic novels and more. - September 20th: [Granite State Comic Con](https://www.granitecon.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Manchester NH. - I'll be at Granite State ComicCon for a panel about the history of cosplay. It'll be at 11:00-11:45 in the Webster Room. - October 15th: [Annalee Newitz Q&A](https://phoenixbooks.biz/event/2026-10-15/annalee-newitz-wall-also-road?ref=andrewliptak.com), 7:00PM, Phoenix Books, Burlington VT. - I'll be interviewing Annalee Newitz in support of their upcoming novel *A Wall is Also A Road.* ### Cosplay: A History Bibliography URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-a-history-bibliography/ Last updated: 2025-05-24T20:40:53.000Z When I published *Cosplay: A History* back in June 2022, one thing that the book didn't include was a proper "Works Cited" page. Here's the bibliography for the book, with linked added where possible. (Please let me know if any are broken.) ## Introduction 1. Adam Savage, "[My Love Letter to Cosplay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXbXNV9-ZAg&ref=andrewliptak.com)," filmed July 15, 2016 in Vancouver, Canada, TED Video. ## Part One: Fandom and Conventions ### Apollo Enthusiasts 1. "[Adam Savage's Apollo A7L Spacesuit Replica](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4vRNjur7nc&ab%5Fchannel=AdamSavage%E2%80%99sTested&ref=andrewliptak.com)!" Adam Savage's *Tested,* filmed and edited by Joey Fameli, YouTube Video, January 16, 2017\. 2. Nicholas de Monchaux, [*Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262015202/spacesuit/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (United Kingdom: MIT Press, 2011), 57 3. Jeff Prucher, ed. [*Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/brave-new-words-9780195305678?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=andrewliptak.com) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 208 4. Prucher, 202. 5. Prucher, 65\. 6. "[Star Team](https://web.archive.org/web/20220911044932/https://www.toysyouhad.com/starteam.htm)," *Toys You Had: Remembering Toys from the 60s to 80s*, accessed December 2, 2022\. 7. Andrew Liptak, “[Adam Savage on His Live Science Show, Cosplay, and ‘Promoting the Joy in making Things](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/25/15049064/adam-savage-brain-candy-live%20-cosplay-mythbusters-tested-building-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com)’," *The Verge*, accessed March 25, 2017. 8. Andrew Liptak, “[Adam Savage Explains Why Space Suits Are His Happy Place](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/23/16015448/adam-savage-spacesuits-cosplay-costuming-sdcc-2017?ref=andrewliptak.com),” *The Verge*, July 23, 2017. 9. Wayne Neumaier, “[Apollo A7L Moon Suit Part 2: Examining the Real Space Suits!](https://2storyprops.blogspot.com/2014/02/apollo-a7l-moon-suit-part-2-examining.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)” 2StoryProps (website), February 2014. 10. Mike Wall, “[Check Out SpaceX’s New Spacesuit: Elon Musk Shares on Instagram](https://www.space.com/38132-elon-musk-spacex-spacesuit-crew-dragon-photo.html?ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Space*, September 13, 2017. 11. “[Dragon](https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/dragon?ref=andrewliptak.com),” SpaceX (website), accessed December 2, 2021. 12. Dani Banner, “[Creating a SpaceX Suit](https:// danbanstudio.com/new-blog/2018/12/1/re-creating-the-spacex-iva-suit-1),” Danban Studio (website), accessed December 2, 2021. 13. “[SpaceX Helmet](https://www.thingiverse.com/%20thing:3471482?ref=andrewliptak.com),” by user Nathan720, Thingiverse (website), March 5, 2019. 14. “[SpaceX Wearable Helmet from Dragon Crew](https://www.etsy.com/listing/692973250/space-x-wearable-helmet-from-dragon-crew?ref=andrewliptak.com),” from seller Technologyrev, Etsy, accessed December 2, 2021. ### Chapter 1: The Origins of Fandom 1. “[Un Bal Costumé Chez Jules Verne](https://laporteouverte.me/2016/11/13/un-bal-costume-chez-jules-verne?ref=andrewliptak.com)” \[A Costume Ball at the Home of Jules Verne\], *Le Monde* illustré, 21st year, no. 1044, April 14, 1877\. 2. Herbert R. Lottman, *Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography* (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 204\. 3. Lydia Smith, “[5–10 March 1891: Bovril and the First Ever Sci-Fi Convention, at the Royal Albert Hall](https://web.archive.org/web/20220721185548/https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2016/march/5-10-march-1891-bovril-and-the-first-ever-sci-fi-convention-at-the-royal-albert-hall/),” Royal Albert Hall (website), March 2, 2016. 4. “‘[The Coming Race’ and ‘Vril-Ya’ Bazaar and Fete, in Joint Aid of the West End Hospital, and the School of Massage and Electricity](https://web.archive.org/web/20221205043245/https://memories.royalalberthall.com/content/coming-race-and-vril-ya-bazaar-and-fete-joint-aid-west-end-hospital-and-school-massage-and-1),’” Royal Albert Hall (website). 5. Alex Palmer, “[The Strange Story of the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, the ‘World’s First Sci-Fi Convention](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646499/first-sci-fi-convention-vril-ya-bazaar?ref=andrewliptak.com),’” *Mental Floss*, May 31, 2021, 6. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, [A D Condo](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/condo%5Fa%5Fd?ref=andrewliptak.com) (entry), updated May 24, 2017. 7. Luke Plunkett, “[Cosplay Is Over 100 Years Old](https://cosplay.kotaku.com/cosplay-is-over-100-years-old-1777013405?ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Kotaku*, May 16, 2016. 8. “[Imitator of ‘Mr. Skygack from Mars’ Is Arrested](https://www.newspapers.com/image/68052071/?terms=skygack&ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Tacoma Times*, vol. VII, no. 67, March 8, 1910, 1\. 9. Ibid 10. “[Wins First Prize as ‘Skygack](https://www.newspapers.com/image/68080662/?terms=skygack&ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Tacoma Times*, vol. IX, no. 133, May 24, 1912, 1. 11. Forrest J. Ackerman, “[I Remember Morojo](http://efanzines.com/Morojo/Morojo-AnAppreciation-1965.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)” (privately printed), February 11, 1965. 12. Ibid. 13. Forrest J. Ackerman, “[Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman, Part 1](http://www.jophan.org/mimosa/m16/ackerman.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Mimosa* (magazine), no. 16, December 1994. 14. Sam Weller, *The Ray Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury* (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 95. 15. Ackerman, “Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman, Part 1.” 16. Frederik Pohl, *The Way the Future Was* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 95–96. ### Chapter 2: Convention Masquerades 1. Ackerman, “Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman, Part 1.” 2. Harry Warner Jr., *All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1940s* (Framingham: NESFA Press, 2004), 135–136. 3. Warner, 135. 4. “[1940 – Chicon I, Chicago](https://fancyclopedia.org/Chicon%5FI%5FReminiscence%5F%28Ackerman%29?ref=andrewliptak.com),” from the Noreascon 3 program book, 1989. 5. Warner, All Our Yesterdays, 137. 6. Ackerman, “Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman, Part 1.” 7. Warner, *All Our Yesterdays*, 137\. 8. William H. Patterson, Jr., *Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1, 1907–1948: Learning Curve* (New York: Tor Books, 2010), 279\. 9. Warner, 137. 10. Warner, 137. 11. Patterson, *Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century*, 279. 12. Warner, *All Our Yesterdays*, 144. 13. Warner, 205\. 14. “[Pacificon Fourth World Science Fiction Convention News](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Pacificon%20I/1946%20-%20Pacificon%20-%20PR%202.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit),” No. 2, June 1946, . 15. “[Pacificon Program Booklet](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Pacificon%20I/Pacificon%20Program%20Book.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit),” July 1946. 16. Warner, *All Our Yesterdays*, 327. 17. “[Torcon Report](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Torcon%20I/Torcon%20Report.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit),” edited and compiled by Edward N. McKeown, published by the House of York for the Torcon Society, Toronto, 1948\. 18. "[Science, Fantasy, and Science Fiction](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Cinvention/1949%20-%20Cinvention%20Post%20Con%20Report.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit),” *The Magazine of Facts and Fiction: The Cinvention Supplement to Vol. 2*, No. 2, 1950. 19. “[Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention Program Book](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Philcon%20II/Philcon%202%20Program%20Book.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit),” Philadelphia, September 1953\. 20. Dave Kyle, Harlan Ellison, George J. Viksnins, Karl Osen, Norman O. Browne, David Ish, ed., [*Philcon Reporter*](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Philcon%20II/Philcon%20Reporter%20Kyle,%20Ellison%20et%20al%201953-09-07%20Mon.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit), published by and for the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention, Philadelphia, September 1953. 21. Mike Resnick, *. . . Always a Fan: True Stories from a Life in Science Fiction* (Rockville: Wildside Press, 2009), 68\. 22. “[World Science Fiction Convention Program](http://files.johnbray.org.uk/Documents/Fandom/Conventions/World/Worldcon/Chicon%20II/Program%20Book.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Chicago, August 30, 1952. 23. “[Masquerade Theme ‘Flying Saucers](http://files.johnbray.org.uk/Documents/Fandom/Conventions/World/Worldcon/Chicon%20II/PR%203.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),’” *Who Comes to Science Fiction Conventions?,* Bulletin no. 3, June 1952, 24. “Masquerade Theme ‘Flying Saucers.’” 25. 55 “Masquerade Theme ‘Flying Saucers.’” 26. [SF Con Progress Report No. 1](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/SFCon/1954%20-%20SFCon%20-%20PR%201.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com). 27. “[Progress Report](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/SFCon/1954%20-%20SFCon%20-%20PR%204.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” SF Con Progress Report #4, San Francisco, August 1954\. 28. “[Masquerade](http://files.johnbray.org.uk/Documents/Fandom/Conventions/World/Worldcon/Clevention/PR%202.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Clevention Progress Report #2, 13th World Science Fiction Convention, Cleveland, September 1955, 29. “[Masquerade](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Clevention/1955%20-%20Clevention%20-%20PR%202.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com).” 30. Resnick *…Always a Fan*, 69. ### Chapter 3: Reliving Stories of the Past 1. “[What Is the SCA?](https://web.archive.org/web/20211128044203/http://socsen.sca.org/what-is-the-sca/)” Society for Creative Anachronism (website), accessed December 3, 2021. 2. “What Is the SCA?” 3. Michael A. Cramer, *Medieval Fantasy as Performance: The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages* (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010): 2. 4. Cramer, 2. 5. “[BayCon A Report from the Chairmen](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Baycon/Baycon%20-%20Report%20from%20the%20Chairman.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” 26th World Science Fiction Convention (BayCon), 1968. 6. “[Phyllis Patterson Dies at 82; Co-founder of Renaissance Pleasure Faire](https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-phyllis-patterson-20140610-story.html?ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Los Angeles Times*, June 9, 2014. ### Chapter 4: Beyond WorldCon 1. Resnick, . *. . Always a Fan*, 70. 2. Daniel Peretti, *Superman in Myth and Folklore* (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), Chapter 6\. 3. Roy Thomas, ed., *All-Star Companion Volume 4* (Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2009). 4. Thomas, 126. 5. Thomas, 126. 6. Karen Schnaubelt, “[The Genesis and Evolution of Costume-Con](http://www.costume-con.org/about-us/the-genesis-and-evolution-of-costume-con?ref=andrewliptak.com),” for Costume-Con 7 program book (1989), revised by Betsy R. Marks Delaney, Costume-ConNections: Home of the Costume-Con Visual Archive (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 7. Schnaubelt. 8. “[CC01 - Costume-Con 1: Program & Participants](https://web.archive.org/web/20190218125609/http://www.costume-con.org/costume-con-01-program-participants/),” Costume-ConNections: Home of the Costume-Con Visual Archive (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 9. “[About the International Costumers’ Guild](https://web.archive.org/web/20240815094104/https://www.icggallery.org/the-icg),” International Costumers’ Guild, Inc. (website), accessed December 12, 2021. ### Chapter 5: Trek Invasion 1. Frederik Pohl, ed., *Galaxy Science Fiction*, vol. 25, no. 3, February 1, 1967, 5–6. 2. Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, *Star Trek Lives!* (New York: Bantam Books: 1975), 37. 3. Astrid Bear, in discussion with the author, January 2020. 4. Frederik Pohl, ed., *Galaxy Science Fiction*, 6 5. Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, *The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years* (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), 530\. 6. Camille Bacon-Smith, *Science Fiction Culture* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 56. 7. Evelyn C. Leeper, “[LaCon II](https://fanac.org/conpubs/worldcon/L.A.con%20II/LAcon%20II%20Evelyn%20Leeper%20con%20report.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Fanac (website), accessed January 19, 2022. 8. Andrew Liptak, “[Carrie Vaughn’s Immersive Worlds](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carrie-vaughn-questland-author-interview-fantasy-lotr-immersion/),” *Transfer Orbit* (newsletter), June 22, 2021. 9. Adam Roberts, *The History of Science Fiction: Palgrave Histories of Literature* (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 394. 10. Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston, *Star Trek Lives!*, 5 11. Ibid, 67. ### Chapter 6: The Summer of 1977 1. David Rhea, in conversation with author, May 2019. 2. Kristin Baver, “[Most Impressive Fans: The Story of What May Be the First Darth Vader Cosplay](https://web.archive.org/web/20171001000000%2A/https://www.starwars.com/news/most-impressive-fans-sean-schoenke-first-darth-vader-cosplay),” Star Wars (website), July 12, 2017. 3. Debbie King, photographer, “Masquerade - ???, Seth Lady, Leia Organa, Obi-wan Kenobie, Wookie Smokeweed, Vader Raider, R2-D1, Cori Piratess,” The Fanac Fan History Project (website), http://www.fanac.org /photohtm.php?worldcon/SunCon/w77m003. 4. Peggy Ann Dolan, photographer, “[Elliott Shorter and Chewbacca Escorting Corey Seidman During the Banquet](http://www.fanac.org/photohtm.php?worldcon/SunCon/w77m015&ref=andrewliptak.com),” caption by Ted Greenstone, updated by Amy Wolfthal and Joe Siclari, // The Fanac Fan History Project (website). 5. “[Princess Leia. ???](http://www.fanac.org/photohtm.php?worldcon/IguanaCon/w78m014&ref=andrewliptak.com)” The Fanac Fan History Project (website). ### Chapter 7: Legions of Fans 1. Brandon Alinger, *Star Wars: Costumes Original Trilogy* (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2014), 29. 2. “[Our Story](https://web.archive.org/web/20210829093554/https://www.originalstormtrooper.com/our-story-19-w.asp),” Shepperton Design Studios + originalstormtrooper.com (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 3. J. W. Rinzler, *The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film* (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 138–139. 4. Ryder Windham and Adam Bray, *Star Wars Stormtroopers: Beyond the Armor* (New York: Harper Design, 2017), 48. 5. Windham and Bray, 60. 6. “[Marco Armor](https://web.archive.org/web/20250321014729/http://www.starwarshelmets.com/imperialfanMarco.htm),” *Star Wars Helmets* (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 7. Josh Ling, photographer, “[Marco’s Stormtrooper Armor](https://web.archive.org/web/20241011022941/http://theswca.com/images-repli/marco-stormtrooper.html),” description by Chris Georgoulias, from the collection of Steve Sansweet, The Star Wars Collectors Archive (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 8. Jeff Allen, in conversation with the author, January 2020. 9. “[Definitive Stormtrooper Costume How-To: Introduction](https://www.studiocreations.com/howto/stormtrooper/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Studio Creations (website), accessed December 4, 2021\. 10. Jeff Allen, in conversation with the author, January 2020. 11. Albin Johnson, “[501st Legion History: 1997](https://albinjohnson.com/trooper-tk210-journal/history-of-the-501st/501st-legion-history-1997?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Albin Johnson (website), accessed December 4, 2021\. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Cheralyn Lambeth, “[My first set of (cardboard!) biker scout armor at a premiere of Return of the Jedi Special Edition in Greensboro, NC, Summer 1997](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157204677714055&set=a.10157204648509055&type=3),” Facebook, January 2, 2020. 18. Albin Johnson, “[The Birth of the 501st Legion Part One: Studies in Trooping](https://web.archive.org/web/20220128164958/https://www.starwars.com/news/the-birth-of-the-501st-legion-part-one-studies-in-trooping),” Star Wars (website), August 17, 2012\. 19. Albin Johnson, “[The Birth of the 501st Legion, Part 3: Let the Wookiee Win](https://web.archive.org/web/20220119102324/https://www.starwars.com/news/the-birth-of-the-501st-legion-part-3-let-the-wookiee-win),” Star Wars (website), September 27, 2012. 20. Albin Johnson, “[The Birth of the 501st Legion, Part 5: Build It and They Will Come](https://web.archive.org/web/20220119112900/https://www.starwars.com/news/the-birth-of-the-501st-legion-part-five-build-it-and-they-will-come),” Star Wars (website), November 20, 2012. 21. Ibid. 22. Cheralyn Lambeth in conversation with the author, January 2020. 23. Albin Johnson, “[501st Legion History: 1998](https://albinjohnson.com/trooper-tk210-journal/history-of-the-501st/501st-legion-history-1998?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Albin Johnson (website), accessed December 3, 2021. 24. Albin Johnson, “[501st Legion History: 1999](https://albinjohnson.com/trooper-tk210-journal/history-of-the-501st/501st-legion-history-1999?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Albin Johnson (website), December 3, 2021. 25. Donna Keeley, “[Celebrating the Good Guys: The History of the Rebel Legion](https://www.starwars.com/news/history-of-the-rebel-legion-part-1?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Star Wars (website), June 26, 2015. 26. Robert Letts, in conversation with the author, October 2021. 27. “[405th Costuming Club Mantle](https://web.archive.org/web/20241112032830/https://www.405th.com/forums/pages/mantle/),” 405th Infantry Division: Build Your Character (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 28. Evan Narcisse, “[The Biggest Halo Cosplay Yet](https://kotaku.com/the-biggest-halo-cosplay-yet-1694561617??ref=andrewliptak.com),” *Kotaku*, March 30, 2015. 29. “[Largest Star Wars Costuming Group](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/420887-largest-star-wars-costuming-group?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Guinness World Records, November 18, 2020. 30. “[A Brief History of STARFLEET International](https://web.archive.org/web/20250317014544/https://sfi.org/history-of-starfleet/),” STARFLEET: The International Star Trek Fan Association (website), accessed December 4, 2021. 31. M. Blackburn in conversation with the author, February 2020. 32. Ibid. ## Posts ### Promethean horrors URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-dead-but-dreaming-of-electric-sheep-horror-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T18:48:15.000Z In Harlan Ellison's landmark 1967 short story "[I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%5FHave%5FNo%5FMouth,%5Fand%5FI%5FMust%5FScream?ref=andrewliptak.com)", an artificial intelligence called AM has taken over the world. It has eradicated humanity, except for five people that it's trapped in a surreal and nightmarish simulation in a sadistic attempt to exact revenge against its creators. It transforms them in horrendous ways as it sends them on a fruitless journey for some form of relief, only to withhold it in increasingly cruel ways. [Trapped in the machineBlack Mirror and Harlan Ellison’s classic story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” are fascinating stories about how power corrupts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-be0afd00-21df-48cd-9c21-804f3df83261.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/489816966_1225628092897188_7261049811257595195_n-dc3de8fb-5eae-4523-b02a-586931806103.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/black-mirror-uss-callister-harlan-ellison-ai-no-mouth-must-scream/) It's a horrifying story, and one that I kept thinking about as I read Paul Tremblay's latest novel, [*Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063398467?ref=andrewliptak.com), itself a horrifying parable about the toxic nature of Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos and the era of artificial intelligence that it's ushering us into. *Spoilers for the novel ahead.* Tremblay opens the book on a surreal note: "Your fluttering eyelids are mouths, mouths that talk too fast because they are lying. You press your palms into your eyes to slow the lids down, to shut them the hell up." You – in these second-person chapters – find yourself in a strange environment, questioned by mysterious people, and unable to remember who you were and how you've gotten here. It's soon clear what's happening when we flip over to the novel's other perspective, Julia Flang, a former competitive gamer who's now working in a menial assistant's role in the entertainment industry. She's endured a difficult adulthood: after her parents split, her father died, and she ended up living with her uncle Charles (Uncle Fun), a fellow pop-culture aficionado. She's not particularly close with her mother, an ambitious woman who's now the CFO of a "bleeding-edge, monopolistic tech company" called Decillion. That not-quite estrangement makes Julia somewhat reluctant to pick up the phone when her mother calls and texts. But when she eventually does, she finds that she's being offered a life-transforming opportunity: for an enormous sum of money, they want her to help them transport someone across the country. That someone is – was? – a former Decillion employee who she's been told had debilitating stroke and who's now in a vegetative state that doctors say he won't ever wake up from. He'd indicated that in the event of a medical incident like this, he wanted to be brought home, where his family could end his life in a humane way. But he also donated his body to science, which the company is taking full advantage of: they've pioneered some cutting-edge nano and artificial intelligence technologies that would allow them to stimulate what remains of his neurons and control his movements. When Julia arrives, she's given an orientation, brief training, and a specialized smartphone that allows her to "pilot" this man, who she begins calling Bernie. All she has to do is get him on two flights across the country from San Francisco to Rhode Island, before his body runs out of steam, and all will be well. You can see where this is going: "Bernie" might be brain dead, but there's still something of his consciousness locked away in there, trapped and tormented by all of these outside forces and memories that he doesn't have any context for or control over. We follow him through this nightmarish scenario as he's brought from stop to stop as he works to figure out what's happening to him, and eventually how to try and escape. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Tremblay's known for more straight-up horror novels like [*A Head Full of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062363244?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Disappearance at Devil's Rock*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062363275?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Cabin at the End of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062679116?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Survivor's Song*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062679178?ref=andrewliptak.com), and others, but this is horror in the vein of the Channel 4 / Netflix series *Black Mirror*: a story that showcases the pitfalls and drawbacks of the technologies that feel like they'll be commonplace in just a couple of years. The story here is firmly in that wheelhouse, where the horror comes not from the body horror or surrealism, but at how stripping away one's agency is one of the most frightening and devastating things, as Ellison's own story centered. Julia's story is just as nightmarish and *Black Mirror*\-esque, and she knows it. "This is yet another moment where Julia should say no and walk away. She should make a high-minded, ethical objection to this whole thing. It's beyond fucked up." She – like everyone involved in this situation – is tipped over the edge by the insane payday that's been promised to her: it's a potentially life-changing amount of money and there's just enough wiggle-room in her mind to justify taking it on: after all, didn't he and his family consent to this sort of thing? The Decillion employees who walk her through her tasks and the hardware note that they've been careful to not humanize their subject: he was a low-level employee, and they were keen to withhold his identity and any details about him. It's Julia who begins calling him "Bernie" (after *Weekend at Bernie's*), and who begins to wonder who he might have been before his stroke. Those qualms are the leaks in the dam for her, and it isn't long before Tremblay shows off the differences between her corporate companions and Julia: the former are more than willing to treat "Bernie" as a piece of tech, whereas the latter recognizes his humanity, even if it's locked away behind layers of decaying flesh. The longer their journey goes on, the more pronounced those differences in attitude become. There's a little bit of useful context here: in 2023, Tremblay was [one of a pair of authors that embarked on a lawsuit](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-07-01/mona-awad-paul-tremblay-sue-openai-claiming-copyright-infringement-chatgpt?ref=andrewliptak.com) against OpenAI, claiming that it had improperly used their works to train its systems in ways that violated their copyrights. That lawsuit – and others – have been working their way thought various courts, with some [successes](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-15-billion-settlement-copyright-lawsuit-2026-07-20/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and some [setbacks](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-openai-copyrighted-novels-1235963290/?ref=andrewliptak.com). This is very much a book that wraps up his attitudes toward the larger tech industry and its excesses, and it neatly showcases a world that's been made stranger and more frightening by the technologies that are supposed to make our lives better. I don't think it's stretch to say that broad swaths of the genre are responding to the profound changes that the industrial revolution brought with it; changes that upended how we live and organize our lives, bringing not only new opportunities and lots of genuine improvements, but also uncertainty and upheaval at the same time. Mary Shelley captured that vibe perfectly when she published [*Frankenstein*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781454951575?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1818, showing an understanding of the role that humanity plays in the natural world and how our hubris can be our undoing. Tremblay embedded more than a little *Frankenstein* embedded in this novel as he brings his not-quite-living-but-not-quite-dead character across the country, the product of some new technological advances. Those technologies, Julia is told, hold a lot of promise for the future of humanity. They probably do! But she also points out that what Decillion is working on probably has a ton of applications for the military and other not-so-world-improving applications. We've had a lot of those advances in the last couple of decades. Social media heralded an age where we can connect with people all over the world, only to bring about a society and culture that can at times be incredibly divided. Smartphones are a window to limitless knowledge – while also unlocking all sorts of peer pressures, harassment, fixations, tics, and whatnot. And the new wave of Generative large language models came with a promise of efficiency and creative boosts for users, only to be used in any number of unethical, illegal, and downright terrible ways. [Cautionary TaleMichael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is essential reading for reasons beyond cloned dinosaurs![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-2a6f8ec3-b28b-4b0c-895f-b69d63dcb293.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5302-b1ef3477-ac35-4401-9885-3985f0d4bd71.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jurassic-park-michael-crichton-tech-scifi-book/) It's how they're used that defines a technology's usefulness, and in this modern technological revolution we're living through, it feels as though we're often leaping before we're putting any sort of thought into whether or not it was actually a good idea. Recall the line from *Jurassic Park*: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Silicon Valley technologies do have the potential to bring some incredible changes, and I'll admit that disruption is probably useful in the longer term. But we humans are *really* bad at gaming out the longer-term consequences of our actions in favor of the immediate rewards that are sitting right in front of us. Silicon Valley's "burn it all down and rebuild" ethos wraps us up in a future that we didn't necessarily ask for or need. New technologies are deployed that have far-reaching consequences that sometimes take years to fully understand, but not before they can enact devastating consequences. Who could have imagined that a social platform that rated college girls hotness could domino into a tool that helped bring about a genocide? In many ways, *this* is the real horror story that Tremblay's book digs into: a world where we're subjected to the whims of the products that tech companies unleash upon the world with little regard for how they'll actually be used, where a minor change or new feature or can spiral into enormous, real-world upheaval. Even more horrifying, there's an element of complicity here. We *know* that piling onto someone online is bad, but sometimes, we can't help but weigh in on the latest controversy. We know that tech companies (take your pick for which one) have their share of unethical practices, but we still buy their gadgets and use their services. Julia has her qualms about what she's going to do, but she goes through with it because she's being paid gobs of money. We make excuses for why we do these things, but in the end, we still have to acknowledge that we have some agency in our decisions. Ellison's yarn about an insane and malevolent machine intelligence hit the nail on the head when it came to the horror that striping away one's agency brings. With *Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep*, Tremblay shows that's still horrifying, but that it's even scarier when it's an unintended consequence of human greed and indifference. ### Pathogen induced collapse URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/biological-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-bioweapons-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-08-11T18:41:09.000Z There’s an anecdote that I read years ago that stuck with me: President Bill Clinton was so disturbed by Richard Preston's novel [*The Cobra Event*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345409973?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he began asking senior staffers and policy officials about the nature of the country's defenses against biological hazards. Preston is most famous for [*The Hot Zone*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385495226?ref=andrewliptak.com), a nonfiction thriller that investigated the origins of the Ebola virus, and an incident in which the U.S. Army was called in to contain an outbreak in a population of primates destined for research purposes in a quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia in October 1989\. In their book [*Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780684871592?ref=andrewliptak.com), Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad recounted that after writing the book, Preston was interested to learn that the military was concerned about Ebola's potential as a biological weapon. He began drafting a novel, and after consulting with experts, landed on the idea of a lone-wolf terrorist bent on thinning out the world's population, mashing together a couple of viruses into a highly-transmissible weapon. > "Clinton was impressed by the book’s grim narrative and apparent authenticity. Preston’s acknowledgments included more than one hundred experts — military officers, intelligence analysts, doctors, scientists, and officials in Clinton’s own administration, including Danzig. The novel’s science, Preston wrote in a preface, 'is real or based on what is possible.'" > > Clinton began asking his friends, cabinet members, even House Speaker Newt Gingrich whether they had read the book and what they thought about it. After a White House meeting on another topic, the president suddenly turned to John Hamre, the deputy secretary of defense, and asked whether he could speak to him privately for a few moments. As the two men walked into the Oval Office, Clinton said he had recently read *The Cobra Event* and asked Hamre whether he thought the novel’s scenario was plausible. Could a terrorist unleash an unstoppable plague with designer pathogens? [How the US military uses sci-fi to imagine the future of warHow the military is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-2243b9ad-08b5-4ac2-a43e-9c0896568b4e.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/f73f1092-98b3-477d-b139-00e7c57c8434_4276x2851-55837244-561b-4393-bfc8-415edbd352a9.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) Fiction is a powerful tool for [stirring the imagination and gaming out possibilities](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/), and for her latest book, [*Biological War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217046034?ref=andrewliptak.com), journalist Annie Jacobsen takes a look at what the release of a biological weapon might look like. If Preston's novel was enough to get policymakers thinking about it, this should be the equivalent of someone pulling a fire alarm. Scenario fiction can be a useful tool for policy makers at all levels as a way to take concepts, contingency plans, and policy and see what happens should the worst happen: novels like P.W. Singer and August Cole's [*Ghost Fleet*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544705050?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Burn-In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358508618?ref=andrewliptak.com) look at global problems facing the US, while Jeffrey Lewis documents a theoretical nuclear strike against the United States in [*The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328573919?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Jacobsen tackled similar ground in her 2024 book *Nuclear War: A Scenario*, in which the US faces a nuclear strike and takes us through how the world ends in a minute-by-minute account that shows how the systems we've set up to speed along the start of a nuclear war will do just that. Jacobsen sets the stage from the start in her author's note: "Biological warfare is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. And yet biological weapons exist. The biological weapons that exist include genetically modified weapons designed for hypervirulence and human-to-human transmission. Weapons with a high lethality rate and no known cure." Her scenario kicks off with a traveler in Frankfurt, Germany who's unaware that he had come into contact with a biological weapon while traveling in Russia. He's in a crowded disco and is spreading the illness to everyone around him. Four days earlier, a Russian scientist, worried about the implications of their work at the Vector Institute, Russia's premiere biological research facility, attempted to destroy their work and ended up causing an explosion that allowed for the escape of a genetically-modified version of pneumonic plague. This is a particularly nasty weapon, designed to give its victims a sense of euphoria while it incubates inside of them, increasing the chances of it being spread to new victims. As containment in Russia fails, a group of tourists come across a member of the science team and are infected before returning to their respective homes. The countdown begins. Jacobsen follows the spread of the disease from there: one infected person ends up in a crowded airport in Texas, lands in Los Angeles, and another boards a cruise ship. The results are horrifying: an illness that rages through human bodies, prompting its victims to vomit up blood and necrotized tissue, all while spreading it to everyone around them. The plague rips through the cruise ship like a hot knife through butter, and in Los Angeles, it finds its way into the unhoused populations in Skid Row, where public health officials initially believe that they're dealing with a bad batch of drugs. In the Caribbean, the weapon has landed in the population in the Dominican Republic, prompting an exodus from the island nation that's met with deadly force from US forces in the region. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The situation is quickly spiraling out of control, and while they quickly recognize that the spread of the plague is tied to the explosion at Vector, U.S. officials aren't able to move quickly enough to stop the spread, and are forced to undertake drastic contingency measures, including martial law and devolution to ensure some measure of the continuity of governance. The bioweapon does more than just spread the plague, Just days after the explosion and leak, the U.S. president finds himself isolated in a bunker, unsure when he'll be able to leave. Jacobsen closes out her narrative on a bleak note: the world has been utterly transformed by this bioweapon. Russia, in its haste to get out a cure, distributed an antidote that kept people safe – but at the cost of horrific birth defects and infertility amongst the remaining population. The survivors in the United States and elsewhere have bunkered down into a series of feudal strongholds in a world reminiscent of the grimmest post apocalyptic thrillers. The threat that biological agents pose to the country are real and out there. Just days after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, [someone began sending packets of anthrax](https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/amerithrax-or-anthrax-investigation?ref=andrewliptak.com) through the mail to a handful of news outlets and US senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy (ultimately killing five people and sickening 17) exposed real gaps in our nation's bio defenses. More recently, our hyper-connected world allowed naturally-occurring pathogens like Ebola and COVID-19 to quickly spread around the globe, where it met a population that was ill-prepared to counter it. As I'm writing this, there's a [massive Ebola outbreak](https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Margaret Atwood has famously explained that her rule for herself while writing *The Handmaid's Tale* was that nothing was invented out of thin air: "All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once." The result is a book that's remained chillingly plausible, decades after it was published. Jacobsen intertwines her scenario between the events precipitated by her fictional bioweapon with various case studies: overviews of war game sessions undertaken by various government agencies, the response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak that saw several cases arrive in the United States, a 1988 accident in which Russian scientist Nikolai Ustinov accidentally injected himself with Marburg, a 2019 explosion at the Vector lab, a crackdown on marmot hunting over fears of the plague, and explorations of the policies and procedures that govern the responses to biological threats. Jacobsen spins out a fictional scenario, but many of its beats are informed by these real-world events and outbreaks. [Book review: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie JacobsenA scary, flawed warning about the dangers posed by our nuclear arsenal![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-d8bb46d9-c046-456d-8b0c-5108578dd47f.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8460-21cad777-ff1b-4af0-b40b-f875054d60f3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/) Like 2024's *Nuclear War: A Scenario, Biological War* looks at how years of decision-making and posture from the US Army and Soviet counterparts have brought about the rise of the environment that now threatens us: while elements of biological war have existed throughout the history of warfare (think back to the [possibly apocryphal](https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/catapulting-corpses-a-famous-case-of-medieval-biological-warfare-probably-never-happened/?ref=andrewliptak.com) story of Mongols catapulting infected bodies over castle walls to the US Army distributing smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans), the rise of the scientific-industrial complex in the 20th century has given rise to a range of new medical advances that can be misapplied for conflict. Both the United States and Soviet Union researched and stockpiled reserves of biological weapons, until an Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 put steep restrictions on them – something that Jacobsen points out left open loopholes for research and defensive posture. While President Richard Nixon ordered the complete destruction of the country's biological weapons stockpile in November 1976, the USSR continued its work – with Russia possibly continuing the program. Like nuclear weapons, these types of weapons are designed never to be used – a deterrent in one's arsenal so that it's available to be used if the need arises. It's a familiar argument, but like the massive arsenal of firearms that infests the United States, their mere existence means not only that there's a chance that they can be used intentionally, there's also the chance of an accident. Jacobsen points to an incident that took place in Sverdlovsk, Russia in April 1979 in which an accidental release of anthrax spores led to 68 deaths amongst the local population, and the 2019 explosion at the Vector Lab (in which there was no release of biological agent) as examples of close calls. [Powder kegKathryn Bigelow’s upcoming film A House of Dynamite looks like a timely warning about the dangers that the world’s nuclear weapons pose to the world![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-257c4147-9e62-461a-b3d4-da1fd312edfe.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/house-of-dynamite-68e7b222-72f4-44af-806f-ec4e2421910c.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kathryn-bigelow-house-of-dynamite-trailer-watch-nuclear-war/) In her prior scenario, Jacobsen examined the role that systems play in the processes to launch a nuclear war. Because nuclear weapons can be launched to their targets in incredibly short amounts of time, the posture of nuclear-armed nations are aligned for a quick response – the end of the world will happen in minutes, because those systems speed the decision-making along so quickly, even in cases of mistakes. If that book was about how systems work well to ensure a result, this book is about how the gaps and breaks between systems lead to this particular apocalypse. Time and again, Jacobsen points out that biological agents can take days to surface, and when they do, first responders often won't know that they're dealing with a weapon. Initial patients will likely be misdiagnosed, critical information won't be shared between agencies, and by the time governmental officials and leaders understand what's happening, it'll be too late. There are plenty of instances that stand out: military units trained to respond to biological disasters exist, but it can take houses or even days for them to come up to a readiness so that they can carry out their mission, while disease surveys specifically don't take in data from the country's unhoused populations (already extremely vulnerable), leading to gaps in our awareness about a potential situation. And when authorities do realize something's happening, there are significant bottlenecks when it comes to distributing critical preexposure prophylaxis to first responders and those needed to ensure that civil society remains intact in a crisis. In Jacobsen's scenario, things go sideways: fast. A massive outbreak in Skid Row leads to confrontations between the population and police, turning into a horror scene that's endlessly played on social media until the internet is shut down. It's only a matter of time before everything breaks, thanks to divisions in civil discourse, a distrust in government, and a willingness to use force and violence against civil authorities. While COVID-19 wasn't nearly as bad as what Jacobsen plays out, we still got a taste of how society would react – not well. While there's plenty that's shocking in this book – the images of people vomiting and coughing up necrotizing lung tissue is nightmare fuel enough – what's the scariest here is less the blood and gore, but the ease and speed at which this apocalypse happens. An accidental leak leads to the end of the world in a matter of days, thanks to decades of accumulated policies and procedures that we know aren't sufficient to protect ourselves. The point of the book is clear – to show policymakers and constituents the flaws in our national defenses by throwing everything into the framework of a story, where you can safely show the worst case scenario (or even just a bad-case scenario). Hopefully, it's a book that, like Richard Preston's *Cobra Event*, will reach the right people and prompt them to not only ask questions about the state of our biohazard defenses, but do something about them. I can only hope that this scary story be more effective at achieving that goal than Preston's was. ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 World Fantasy Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/world-fantasy-award-2026-finalists-books/ Last updated: 2026-08-05T19:38:10.000Z The World Fantasy Convention [has announced](https://wfc2026.org/2026-world-fantasy-awards-final-ballot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the finalists for this year's awards. The World Fantasy Award has been been handed out annually since 1975, and they're amongst the highest honors in the fantasy and horror genres alongside the Hugo and Nebula Awards. This year's jury was composed of Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Tamsyn Muir, Madeleine E. Robins, Richard Thomas, and Ann VanderMeer. This year's winners will be announced at [this year's convention](https://wfc2026.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will be held October 22-25 in Oakland, California. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Here are the finalists for this year's award: ### Best Novel - *Audition for the Fox* by Martin Cahill - *Once Was Willem* by M.R. Carey - *The Secret Market of the Dead* by Giovanni De Feo - *The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow - *The Adventures of Mary Darling* by Pat Murphy ### Best Long Fiction - *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar - “The Secret Diary of Mina Harker"by Theodora Goss (*Letters from an Imaginary Country*) - “Uncertain Sons”by Thomas Ha (*Uncertain Sons and Other Stories*) - *The Death of Mountains* by Jordan Kurella - “The Spotter”by Josh Malerman (*You, Human: An Anthology of Dark Science Fiction, Vol. 2*) - *Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce - *A Mouthful of Dust* by Nghi Vo ### Best Short Fiction - “[The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home](https://reactormag.com/the-hungry-mouth-renan-bernardo/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”by Renan Bernardo (*Reactor* 8/27/25) - “[In My Country](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F04%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld* 4/25) - “[10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/10-visions-of-the-future-or-self-care-for-the-end-of-days/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”by Samantha Mills (*Uncanny* 3-4/25) - “[St. Dymphna’s School for Borderland Girls](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/st-dymphnas-school-for-borderland-girls?ref=andrewliptak.com)”by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (*Weird Horror* Spring ‘25) - “[Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/unfinished-architectures-of-the-human-fae-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Caroline M. Yoachim (*Uncanny* 5-6/25) ### Best Anthology - *Night & Day* edited by Ellen Datlow - *Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology* edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney - *The Best Weird Fiction of the Year: Volume 1*, editedby Michael Kelly - *Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume Three* editedby Stephen Kotowych - *Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror* editedby Hollie Starling ### Best Collection - *Letters from an Imaginary Country* by Theodora Goss - *Uncertain Sons and Other Stories* by Thomas Ha - *The Essential Patricia A. McKillip* by Patricia A. McKillip - *The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories* by Salman Rushdie - *Black Hole Heart and Other Stories* by K.A. Teryna and translated by Alex Shvartsman ### Best Artist - Galen Dara - Kathleen Jennings - Daniele Serra - Rachel Smythe - Charles Vess ### Special Award – Professional - Clive Bloom, for *London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction* - Jaymee Goh, Jill Roberts & Jacob Weisman, for Tachyon Publications - Tim Lucas, for *Succubus* - Blumhouse & Dave Schilling, for *Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse* - Becky Siegel Spratford, for *Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature* - Richard Wolinsky, for *Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends* ### Special Award – Non-Professional - Scott H. Andrews, for *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - Andy Cox, for *Remains* - Patrick Swenson, for Fairwood Press and for the Rainforest Writers Village Retreat - Elise C. Tobler, for *The Deadlands* - Wendy Wagner, for *Nightmare* --- Congratulations to all of the finalists! Thanks for reading. Let me know what stood out for you on this list. For me, I really loved Alix Harrow's *The Everlasting* ([here's my review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/)), but there are a ton of other really exciting books included. ### 13 new SF/F books to check out in August 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-asimov-bennett-luceno-tchaikovsky/ Last updated: 2026-08-05T19:37:52.000Z So, a quick announcement off the bat: I'm going to WorldCon at the end of the month! I'll be interviewing the folks behind the MAYA narrative universe, which includes a novel, [*MAYA: Seed Takes Root*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798893311891?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is coming out at the end of the month. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/08/image-1.png) I've never been to WorldCon, and I'm looking forward to it! If you're going to be there, let me know. I won't be there the whole time, but I should be around on the 27th and 28th. As always, you can find the prior book lists in the always find prior lists linked in the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). And if you find these lists useful, [consider signing up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)? ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Okay, here are 13 books to check out this month: ### [*A Fugitive's History of the Known Universe*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589483?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nadia Afifi (August 11th) Nadia Afifi follows up her novel [*A Rebel’s History of Mars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589452?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* In that book, a performer named Kezza planned to seek out revenge on the person who exiled her on Mars, only to find a buried secret. A millennia later, a historian named Azad learned the truth behind some secrets of his own. Now, Azad is a fugitive and he’s being hunted across the galaxy by the Vitruvius Authorities. He and his crew work to enlist the help of a space pirate to begin fomenting a revolution. ### [*Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586086?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Isaac Asimov (August 11th) Next installment in Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series, following *David Starr, Space Ranger*, *Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids* and *Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus*. This is a reprint of a series that he wrote back in the 1950s, and which had originally been designed to underpin a science fiction TV show that was never made. This latest adventure, the fourth in the series, takes the heroes out to Mercury, where agent David Starr is dispatched to investigate a series of accidents. ### [*A Trade of Blood: An Ana and Din Mystery*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723852?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robert Jackson Bennett (August 4th) It's the third installment of his *fantastic* Ana and Din series (preceded by [*The Tainted Cup*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820716?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*A Drop of Corruption*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723821?ref=andrewliptak.com)). These novels are set in a fantastical empire that's besieged by giant leviathans, with lots of weird science and biological stuff. It follows Ana Dolabra, an imperial Iudex investigator and her assistant, Dinios Kol, who's had his brain altered to remember everything. They're dispatched to the canton of Sapirdad, where the heir to one of the empire's powerful families has been accused of murder. It looks like he did it: he literally has the victim's blood on his hands, and he can't deny the crime or explain what happened. If he's convicted and hanged, the canton might break out into open war, and as the breadbasket of the Empire, that's unacceptable. As with the other novels, there's more to the crime than meets the eye, and Ana and Din find that the murder is just the tip of the iceberg. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593723852?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The case is as clever and fairly clued as ever, and it’s a pleasure to revisit these sharply drawn characters. This series shows no signs of slowing down." ### [*A Plagued Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250380753?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kim Bo-Young and translated by Sophie Bowman (August 11th) A bodyguard named Mu-young is at the train station with her niece waiting for their train to the seaside village of Haewon when she gets an alert: there’s a massive earthquake taking place on the coast, and decides to leave, rather than leave the girl with her mother. Just a couple of years later, she’s haunted by the choice. Her niece is dead and the earthquake unleashed a horrifying plague that transforms its victims into monsters. Mu-young’s only job is to hunt down the survivors who’ve broken quarantine. When a bureaucrat arrives from the capitol, he causes even further trouble, all while Mu-young is trying to decide if she even deserves to survive. ### [*Whalesong*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210208?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Miles Cameron (August 4th) Miles Cameron brings a new installment of his space opera series (preceded by [*Artifact Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210161?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Deep Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210185?ref=andrewliptak.com)), *Arcana Imperii*. In the first, we follow a young woman named Marca Nbaro, who's long dreamed of escaping from her meager upbringing and heading into space via the city-sized Greatships that ferry humanity's cargo across space, where she joins one of the crews. In the second, she her crewmates are aboard the Greatship Athens, and something has been attacking them Now, Marca and her allies have been growing in power to counter the distant alien threat, they're attacked, and she appears to have been killed. One single ship is all that stands between humanity's survival and its extinction. ### [*Them*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668204900?ref=andrewliptak.com)by W.H. Chizmar (August 11th) In this debut, a scientific program has cracked the code for transporting matter across space, and it's brought back something alive and dangerous. The threat is contained until it's being transported across New England, and when it crashes, something is unleashed that decimates humanity. Years later, a man comes out of the ruins and begins looking for other survivors, encountering monsters and other threats. The unearthly monsters aren't the only things that have spelled the end of humanity. ### [*Meat Bees*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781968043056?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dane Erbach (August 4th) When Scarlett Sutton heads out to the Smoky Mountains to her father's isolated cabin, she's trying to escape her family's issues: her mother has checked herself into a hospital, and she has to go out to live with her father for the summer. He insists that she gets a job, and after finding work at an outdoor sports store, she is shocked when she comes across a skeleton on the job. Little did she know, a couple of people have been killed that summer in the mountains, and as the sheriff's office races to figure out what's behind the killings, one of Scarlett's coworkers goes missing. She and her friends are horrified to find his body, with a host of yellow jackets consuming him, and now, they have to figure out how to save themselves and their home. ### [*The Dungeon Book*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316595421?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth Hanrahan (August 11) A woman named Bait is trapped in a dungeon, and doesn't know any other world beyond that. She was stolen from her bed by a dragon, who gave her over to the horrifying residents of the dungeon, who ended up raising her in a large, adoptive family, rather than eating her. The dungeon, with its mysterious corridors and treasures, proves to be a powerful draw for hunters and dungeon crawlers, and as Bait's home is invaded, she has to figure out where her loyalties really lie. ### *Star Wars* Legends*:* [*Cloak of Deception*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217093618?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Labyrinth of Evil*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217093625?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James Luceno (August 11th) Two of the better prequel-era novels, *Cloak of Deception* and *Labyrinth of Evil*, are getting the *Star Wars* re-release treatment. The former sets up some of the events that lead into *The Phantom Menace*, while the latter sets up the fall of Anakin Skywalker in *Revenge of the Sith*. They might not be part of the official canon anymore, but they're still intriguing reads. ### [*The Wandering Inn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063516380?ref=andrewliptak.com) by pirateaba (August 11th) If you've been itching for another LitRPG novel series after reading *Dungeon Crawler Carl*, another series is getting the trad-publishing treatment: pirateba's *Wandering Inn* series. It's a massive series (this volume is the first part of book one, weighing in at 640 pages), and introduces us to a woman named Erin Solstice. She runs the Wandering Inn, and once came from our world. She's adapted to this fantasy realm, where dragon and monster attacks are common. The longer she's there, she learns that she's part of a much larger game, one in which other humans are pulled from our world and made to fight for survival. ### [*The Infinite State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250386229?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Richard Swan (August 4th) This first installment of a new series, *The Decurion Saga*, introduces us to Katherine Fuller, who just lost her husband. He was a major part of the Pater Aeternus, a governing party in the oppressive Decurion Empire, and he's left behind a fortune to her. Spanning a galaxy, Pater Aeternus rigorously controls its subjects, and with this new wealth and resources at her disposal, Katherine has an opportunity: purchase an entire world and start up a new society on it. But while she has ambitious plans, the empire isn't willing to let them play out, and she's forced to work in secret and recruit allies that she's not sure she can trust as she works to build a fledgling democracy. ### [*Preaching to the Choir*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837867301?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (August 11th) Adrian Tchaikovsky has a new novella, in which a woman named Elena Mendes knows that her rich boyfriend Ross fled England for the United States so that he could escape his insufferable family. Now, he's been summoned home to the family estate for a strange family fathering that only happens once every generation. While she wasn't invited, he asked her along, and when they arrive, she realizes that there are some deep, ancient secrets hiding out on the estate that give the term "old money" an entirely new meaning. --- I'll have another list for you later in the month. As usual, let me know in the comments what catches your eye! ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 Dragon Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-award-2026-finalists-sci-fi-fantasy-books-dragoncon/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T17:27:05.000Z This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Dragon Awards, which [kicked off in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/13/12461038/dragon-awards-shortlist-dragoncon-science-fiction-fantasy?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the aftermath of a bitter fight between various factions of fandom over the nature of fandom, what works deserve to be honored as the "best" of the year, and how much of what's big and popular is driven by certain personalities/publishers verses what "real" fans want. Handed out every year at DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, the awards are designed to be driven by fans, and unlike the Hugo Awards, they are open to everyone, regardless of your membership status at the con. The results aren't the right-wing alternative that I think some within fandom had hoped: they've really been a wide-ranging and excellent roundup of notable works published in the last year (roughly Labor Day to Labor Day). Voting is now open – you can register to do so [here](https://applyto.dragoncon.org/fan%5Fawards/dc%5Ffan%5Fawards%5Fsignup.php?ref=andrewliptak.com) – until Friday, September 4th. Interestingly, it looks like they now have an option to be automatically renewed for upcoming years when you do so. Once registered, a prospective voter will get a confirmation link, with ballots being issued on "Thursdays and Mondays during the month of August." Here are this year's nominees: ### Best Science Fiction Novel - *The Faith of Beasts* by James S.A. Corey - *Radiant Star* by Ann Leckie - *Operation Bounce House* by Matt Dinniman - *Slow Gods* by Claire North - *The Shattering Peace* by John Scalzi - *God’s Junk Drawer* by Peter Clines ### Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal) - *Red City* by Marie Lu - *Queen Demon* by Martha Wells - *Academy of Outcasts* by Larry Correia - *Hell to Pay* by Sherrilyn Kenyon - *The Lost Reliquary* by Lyndsay Ely - *Twelve Months* by Jim Butcher ### Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel - *Make Me a Monster* by Kalynn Bayron - *The Executioners Three* by Susan Dennard - *Hazelthorn* by CG Drews - *Ride or Die* by Delilah S. Dawson - *Sky on Fire* by E.K. Johnston - *Queen of Faces* by Petra Lord ### Best Alternate History Novel - *Powerless* by Harry Turtledove - *World War 3.2* by John Birmingham - *The Winds of Fate* by S.M. Stirling - *The Unnecessary War* by Brian C. Thompso - *A Resistance of Witches* by Morgan Ryan - *No Man’s Land* by Richard K. Morgan ### Best Horror Novel - *It Was Her House First* by Cherie Priest - *Play Nice* by Rachel Harrison - *Girl in the Creek* by Wendy N. Wagner - *The Bewitching* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill - *The Possession of Alba Díaz* by Isabel Cañas ### Best Illustrative Book Cover - *Brigands & Breadknives*, by Carson Lowmiller - *The Ishtar Deception*, by Dominic Harman - *The Sapphire Heart*, by Jeff Brown - *Hemlock & Silver*, by T. Kingfisher - *Pretenders to the Throne of God*, by Joe Wilson - *The Second Death of Locke*, by Anna Moshak ### Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel - *Absolute Batman* by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta - *Absolute Wonder Woman*, by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman - *Something is Killing the Children*, by James Tynion IV, Werther Dell’Edera - *Daredevil,* by Stephanie Phillips, Lee Garbett - *X-Men: Elsewhen*, by John Byrne - *Absolute Superman,* by Jason Aaron, Rafa Sandoval ### Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet - *Strange New Worlds Season 3*, Paramount+ - *Foundation Season 3*, Apple TV - *A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms*, HBO - *Alien: Earth*, FX - *Fallout Season 2*, Amazon - *Plur1bus*, Apple TV - *The Boys Season 5*, Amazon - *Widow’s Bay*, Apple TV ### Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie - *Superman*, by James Gunn - *Project Hail Mary*, by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller - *Disclosure Day*, by Steven Spielberg - *Predator: Badlands*, by Dan Trachtenberg - *Frankenstein*, by Guillermo del Toro - *Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu*, by Jon Favreau - *Toy Story 5*, by Andrew Stanton - *The Sheep Detectives*, by Kyle Balda ### Best Digital Game - *Hades II*, Supergiant Games - *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, Team Cherry - *Silent Hill f*, NeoBards Entertainment - *Ghost of Yōtei*, Sucker Punch Productions - *Forza Horizon 6*, Playground Games - *Battlefield 6*, Battlefield Studios ### Best Tabletop Game - *Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerûn*, Wizards of the Coast - *ACKS II Revised Rulebook*, Autarch - *Magic: the Gathering – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles*, Wizards of the Coast - *7 Wonders Dice*, Repos Production - *Warhammer 40,000 The Maelstrom*, Games Workshop - *Wingspan Americas Expansion*, Stonemaier Games ### Table of Contents, August 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-august-2026/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T16:57:17.000Z It's a new month: 2026 is speeding right along. That means a new crop of short fiction across the SF/F world. You can check out last month's (newly updated!) installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-july-2026/), and the prior installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Adventitious*](https://www.adventitious.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2026, #4) Subscribe [here](https://www.adventitious.net/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “A Game of Go” by P.A. Cornell - “No Iron Can Resist” by Aimee Ogden - “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter” by Audrey Zhou - “Life Imitates” by Rio Lombana & Kaitlin Schmidt - “Bath Bomb” by Liam Hogan - “A Hole in My Heart the Shape of the Multiverse” by Ruth Joffre - “The Spacefarer’s Guide to Connecting with Your Daughter’s Descendants” by Stewart C. Baker - “The Fruit Is Very Acceptable Here” by Kari Maaren - “Heartwood” by Moira Richardson - “Hello” by Jeanna Cammarano - “All Aboard” by Hannya Kay - “The Unnamed City, As Seen at Three Points” by Adrian Ward - “How to Lose to Death” by Priya Sridhar - “The Grammar of Jespersen-b” by Holly Schofield - “Saul & Noah’s Hot Bouleutophagy Summer” by Elijah J. Mears --- ## [*Aurealis*](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue #192) Subscribe [here](https://aurealis.com.au/product-category/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Square](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thesquare)" by E.L. Edwards - "[Sons & Fathers](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#sonsfathers)" by Ben Peek - "[Tethered](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#tethered)" by John Mavin ### Nonfiction - [From the Cloud](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial) - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[What Science Fiction Gets Wrong about Colonising Mars](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#whatsciencefictiongetswrongaboutcolonisingmars) by Daniel Thompson - [Potatoes Don’t Go There: Medieval Cuisine and its Portrayal in ‘Medieval European’ Fantasy](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#potatoesdontgotheremedievalcuisineanditsportrayalinmedievaleuropeanfantasy) by Annie Mills - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Kpop Demon Hunters (2025): The Politics of Murdering Demons](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#kpopdemonhunters2025thepoliticsofmurderingdemons) by Ani White --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2026, Issue #135) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Baby Blue](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/baby-blue/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by[Seán Padraic Birnie](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/authors/sean-padraic-birnie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Jackrabbit Crunch](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/jackrabbit-crunch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by[EC Dorgan](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/authors/ec-dorgan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The Long March of the Bones](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-long-march-of-the-bones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMalena Salazar Maciá - "[Portrait of a Woman in a Red Qipao](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/portrait-of-a-woman-in-a-red-qipao/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byTina S. Zhu --- ## [*Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Summer 2026, #39) Subscribe [here](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - **"**What The Lotus Said To The Water Lily" by Jahid Wilson Jr. - "The Great Proxima Agricultural Fair" by K.W. Onley - "The House" by Ann Michelle Harris - Pixels" by T’asia Driggs ### Poetry - "various —cides" by Clifton Gachagua - "Dispatch from Watchmakers" by Abu Bakr Sadiq - "Kwan" by Natasha McDonnell-Tanoh --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2026) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Milk" by Caitlin Devlin - "The Alien You Love" by Jonathan Huston - "iron & garlic & salt & blood" by Nico Martinez Nocito - "Eyeballs of My Eyes" by Abigail Guerrero - "Meatball" by S.L. Harris - "Pomegranates" by G.M. Mitchell ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: Meatsac Fiction](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/august-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial-meatsac-fiction) by Rebecca Halsey --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(August 2026) ### Fiction - "[Four Sparrows](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/08/01/four-sparrows/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Hsieh --- ## [*Interzone*](https://interzone.press/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 305) ### Fiction - "Scelerat" by E.G. Condé - "Cops and Robbers #2: Negative Space" BY Rachael Cupp - "A Perfectly Good Train: A Supermamadou Story" by Mame Bougouma Diene - "The Spider at the Heart of It" by Josh Pearce - "Unhomely" by Ben Tufnell - " Nowhere Town" by Corey Jae White - "Philoctetes" by Rebecca Zahabi ### Nonfiction by - Alexander Glass - Una McCormack - Val Nolan - Aliya Whiteley - Kelly Jennings - Paul Kincaid - Nick Mamatas - Paul McAuley - Val Nolan - Nick Lowe --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2026, Issue #195) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Legs" by A.M. Maris (8/6) - "Infinite Wishes" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (8/6) - "Fragments of the Whole" by Brooke Bolander (8/13) - "The Age of Cancer" by Vajra Chandrasekera (8/13) - "What Do You Mean the Nanobots Formed a Union??" by Joel W. D. Buxton (8/20) - "Of All Who Dream" by Adelehin Ijasan (8/20) - "Ladd’s Robot Repair" by David Anaxagoras (8/27) - "The Goddess of Not Enough" by Susan Palwick (8/27) ### Nonfiction - Editorial: August 2026by John Joseph Adams (8/6) - [Announcement: We’re Launching a New Kickstarter Soon. Sign up to be notified when it launches!](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/announcement-were-launching-a-new-kickstarter-soon-sign-up-to-be-notified-when-it-launches/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Joseph Adams - Author Spotlight: A.M. Marisby Robin Jeffrey (8/6) - Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolanderby A. Humphrey Lanham (8/13) - Book Review: *The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass* by Leslye Penelopeby Melissa A Watkins (8/13) - Author Spotlight: Joel W. D. Buxtonby Phoebe Barton (8/20) - Author Spotlight: Adelehin Ijasanby Delia Cullity (8/20) - Book Review: *Forged in FIYAH* by DaVaun Sanders, ed.by Arley Sorg (8/20) - Book Review: *All We Have Is Time* by Amy Tordoffby Chris Kluwe (8/27) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2026, Issue #167) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Dark Follows Me" by Quincy Lee (8/5) - "My Parts, Collected*"* by Melissa A Watkins (8/12) - "Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between" by Georgina Kamsika (8/19) - "Shapeshifting Recovery Staff" by Bogi Takács (8/26) ### Nonfiction - Editorial: August 2026 by Wendy N. Wagner (8/5) - Author Spotlight: Quincy Lee by Alex Puncekar (8/5) - The H Word: The Revolution Will Be Horrorized by Kurt Fawver (8/12) - Author Spotlight: Georgina Kamsika by Alex Puncekar (8/19) - Plumbing the Depths: Beasts in the City—Horror Meets the Gangster by Matthew Sorrento (8/26) --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2026, Issue #71) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "A Hundred Ways the Story Ends" by Tara Sim (8/4) - "The Cinema of Babel" by Sam J. Miller (8/4) - "Judar of the Island: A Story Told in Four Feasts" by Rida Altaf (8/4) - "enough johnnie blue" by E. A. Bourland (8/4) - "I called the swan down" by Laura Cranehill (8/4) ### Nonfiction - Interview: Rida Altaf by Caroline M. Yoachim (8/4) - Middle-Aged Love: Rereading in Your Forties and Beyond by Marissa Lingen (8/4) - This Is Not About AI by Hana Lee (8/4) --- As always, check back towards the end of the month for an updated list as new stories come out. ### Instruments of Empire URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-faith-of-beasts-captive-wars-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:00:58.000Z In their first post-*Expanse* project, James S.A. Corey released [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2024, the first installment of a new space opera series called *The Captive Wars*. They shed the near-future setting of our home solar system in favor of something a little bigger, and a little stranger. Humanity – or some fragment of it – settled on a planet called Anjiin, where they've established themselves alongside the planet's native biosphere. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-bd54aa30-d499-4189-ae3e-2dfd804f8a3f.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229-75d6615c-7db0-4b03-9e43-07453814a569.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) Everything changes when they detect a series of objects arriving from outside of their adoptive system, which turns out to be an invading force from an alien civilization known as the Carryx. The Anjiin's defenses are quickly overwhelmed: the Carryx eliminate an eighth of the population outright, and capture a sizable contingent of humanity's best and brightest, where they're tested alongside other captive species to see how useful they could be to the Carryx. Through that process, we're introduced to Dafyd Alkhor, a research assistant who finds himself in one of the scattered groups of humans and who's diligently working to try and pass the various tests that the Carryx are throwing their way. As they work, Dafyd learns that his group is splintering: there's a small contingent that's actively working to sabotage their efforts and to try and muster the strength to strike against the aliens and their allies. From their initial invasion to their casual elimination of one of their rivals, Dafyd recognizes that the Carryx are not to be trifled with: they have an overwhelming amount of power at their disposal, and should humanity prove to be too difficult, their entire civilization will be wiped off the map. He turns in that rebelling faction, justifying his actions in the name of the greater good: humanity can't strike back if they're extinct. For his efforts, Dafyd is elevated to be the singular point of contact between the upper echelons of the Carryx hierarchy and humanity, an uncomfortable position that singles him out as an unlikely leader for humanity, and a potential collaborator. [Interview: James S.A. Corey on The Faith of BeastsJames S.A. Corey on The Captives War, The Book of Daniel, and how the only way to survive an alien invasion might be appeasement![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-e18b9e0e-f6aa-4d8d-9630-2a7959492d67.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9656-ace9f5ef-f2e4-4a3d-abe1-70ae84661b17.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-expanse-captives-war-faith-of-beasts-scifi-book-interview/) If the first book is about making difficult decisions in the name of survival, the next installment of the trilogy, [*The Faith of Beasts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com), is following through on that impulse. It's a difficult task; it's one thing to say that you'd like to sow the seeds of revolution, but it's another thing entirely to begin the work to set up the connections and resources to make it happen, especially when you're under constant scrutiny from the people who've enslaved you or by the others around you who might realize that selling you out is a good way to ensure their own survival. Humanity is caught in an elaborate prisoner's dilemma, and Dafyd has found himself in a place where he has to figure out who to trust in this system. Dafyd finds himself in an uncomfortable position. As humanity's' voice, he's responsible for channeling their directives to his new subjects, and has been working to protect them from extinction, while also trying to assemble the backbone of a plan to strike back at them. His goal is to bring humanity to a place where they're important and indispensable, then strike. Throughout all of their books, Corey has explored the roles that power plays in these types of systems. In *The Expanse* series, humanity is fractured between various political systems with deep-seated interests and lingering grudges that results in enough friction to ignite conflicts between Earth, Mars, and the Outer Belt, and eventually, the establishment of the totalitarian Laconian Empire, which sought to use its technological advances to rule and guide humanity. In *The Captive Wars*, Corey has once again subjugated humanity. The Carryx are finding humanity useful as they put them to use evaluating recently-conquered worlds or damaged starships. Empires – real and fake – are bad. A conquering nation might bring scientific and technological advances to their subjects, but in exchange, those subjects become disposable. Humans are cannon fodder for the Carryx's wars and extra hands for doing the dangerous and dirty work that comes after, and as we learn more about the alien's war against their unknowable enemy, we realize that humanity might survive, but only as mere tools. We watch as Dafyd and his companions figure out how to develop systems for growing new people and figuring out and grappling with the challenges of raising a new generation that'll never know anything but rule by their new overlords. But there opportunities for resistance. Dafyd directs his allies to undertake a series of small tasks that he hopes will undermine the Carryx's rule: stories and songs that support a message of freedom and escape, burrowing a yearning and sense of independence that can motivate future generations. And humans aren't the only useful servants of the Carryx: he begins speaking with the [Soft Lothark](https://captives-war.fandom.com/wiki/Soft%5FLothark?ref=andrewliptak.com), another captive alien species, and finds that they could – slowly – potentially become partners against their subjugators. We'll have to see how these various threads resolve in the next (as of yet untitled) installment of the trilogy, but the seeds are planted for humanity's uprising: it'll be interesting to see what form that takes and how humanity copes with the transformations they've been forced to undergo. ### The future arrives in the teaser for Apple's Neuromancer series URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/neuromancer-william-gibson-apple-tv-teaser-trailer-watch-cyberpunk/ Last updated: 2026-07-28T01:17:45.000Z San Diego Comic Con has wrapped up and amidst the deluge of trailers and announcements came a first look at one of my more anticipated adaptations: AppleTV's take on William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel *Neuromancer*. The trailer shows off a dystopian future that Gibson depicted in the novel, and introduces us to a hacker named Case (Callum Turner) and Molly Millions (Briana Middleton), a cybernetic mercenary as the former is recruited for some sort of project. These first trailers are almost always there to telegraph the vibes of a film or television series, and I have to say, I'm really liking what I'm seeing. There's a tendency for cyberpunk to ape the look and feel of something like Ridley Scott's *Blade Runner* – grim, tinted, and dark and something that Gibson realized while writing his novel was pretty similar to the tone that he was going for – and this doesn't feel like that at all. The world looks bright and sterile, modern and retro at the same time, but with enough neon and crowded cityscapes to still feel like cyberpunk. The novel follows Case when he's hired for a data heist: he was a legendary console cowboy who had been caught and crippled after he tried to steal from a former employer, and he couldn't access The Matrix (this world's version of an immersive cyberspace system) as a result. He's hired by a mysterious officer named Armitage and his associate Molly, with an intriguing job offer: if he'll help them, he'll be fixed and allowed to get back into cyberspace. His initial task is to steal a data module, and as he gets deeper and deeper into the plot, Case finds out more about Armitage's past, and what his real intentions are. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. It's hard to overstate just how important *Neuromancer* is to the science fiction canon and pop culture at large: it's an enormously influential text, informing everything from *The Matrix* to the larger cyberpunk movement, and widely envisioned many of the things that we see in our online and hyper-capitalistic world that we live in today. It's fitting – and maybe a little ironic – that the novel's now getting an adaptation from one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Apple [announced the show back in 2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/): a ten-episode adaptation of the classic novel, created by Graham Roland (*Dark Winds, Jack Ryan*) and J.D. Dillard (*Devotion*). It's the first time the book is being adapted for the screen (there has been a video game, radio, and comic adaptation), with some attempts over the years from carious directors including Joseph Kahn, Vincenzo Natali, and Tim Miller. Hopefully, this adaptation will live up to the novel's legacy. The series will begin streaming on January 22nd, 2027\. ### The One Ring is forged in the teaser for The Rings of Power season 3 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-of-power-jrr-tolkien-prime-video-season-3-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2026-07-27T16:48:15.000Z If there was any doubt about what big moments the next season of *Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power* might bring, the first teaser trailer it dispelled them: we'll witness Sauron forging of the One Ring in Mount Doom, the titular macguffin that drives the main story of Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings*. It's a moment that's been a long time coming in the series. The first season (launched in 2022), introduced us to all of the principal characters in the Second Age of Middle-earth and Galadriel's quest to track down the last members of the Dark Lord Morgoth's armies, including his servant, Sauron, and in the second, we see the creation of the first three rings given to the Elves, the seven for the Dwarves, and the nine for men. The second season left the world off in a dark place: Sauron had been growing in power throughout as he forged the rings, and we see some of their corrosive power as they're used – the Dwarves in Khazad-dûm encounter a Balrog and it attacks them, while Sauron kills Celebrimbor and escapes with the Nine rings that he'll eventually distribute to the human lords. This upcoming season will [jump the action forward by five years](https://screenrant.com/lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power-season-3-time-jump-jd-payne/?ref=andrewliptak.com), putting us into the middle of the war between Sauron and the Elves, who're putting up a valiant – but difficult – fight as they work to keep Sauron away from their three rings. Series co-creator J.D. Payne [told *ScreenRant* that the goal was to](https://screenrant.com/lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power-season-3-time-jump-jd-payne/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "reset the table in a way that's really satisfying for audience members," and it looks like we'll be in for plenty of movement: Sauron's been mustering his forces – including the men that he's corrupted with the Nine: the Nazgûl, which *Empire Magazine* [notes](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/rings-of-power-season-3-ringwraiths-nazgnagol/?ref=andrewliptak.com) are still men who're serving Sauron. And of course, they've ripped the bandaid off for the big reveal of the season: the forging of the ring at Mount Doom. The series has had its ups and downs since it first debuted in 2022\. First announced back in 2017 at the height of the streaming wars, it was the latest in a series of big-budget adaptations and projects from various streaming services as they fought to get the attention of viewers and their subscription dollars. An original-ish *Lord of the Rings* adaptation was always somewhat controversial: Tolkien was famously dismissive of efforts to adapt his work, and his son, Christopher, wasn't a huge fan of Peter Jackson's adaptation. Amazon spent an exorbitant amount of money to just acquire the *rights* to adapt bits and pieces from the trilogy's appendixes, and from there, has plotted out a [five-season series](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/lord-of-the-rings-power-five-seasons-fully-planned-out-exclusive/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that will bring the action from the early days of the world's Second Age, presumably up to the events that we saw in the prologue for Jackson's trilogy. The series has been met with a bit of a mixed reaction: I've [generally liked it](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rings-of-power-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-amazon/), even if they've taken some liberties with characters and timelines (and there's some chunk of internet fandom that's mired in bad-faith arguments about culture war fodder that's best left ignored). While there was a lot of anticipation for the series, viewership for the second season was down quite a bit, and it wasn't until February 2025 – well after the second season finished – that Prime Video [announced its renewal](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-rings-of-power-third-season-renewed/) for a third season. But even as I've enjoyed the show, I've been a little wary of how the series at times feels like mere *content* to serve the interests of Amazon's bottom line and to further *The Lord of the Rings* name as a franchise, rather than a story that's being crafted for the sake of storytelling and entertainment – just look at Jackson's *LOTR* trilogy as a labor of love verses his *Hobbit* trilogy as an example. We're now well into the series as envisioned, and it'll be interesting to see how this serves as a new boost in the arm for it. Amazon seems to be fairly committed to seeing it through its five-season arc, and hopefully they'll make it to the finish line. Season 3 drops on Prime Video across three nights, starting with four episodes on November 11th, with the next two on November 18th, and teh final two on November 25th. ### Even more science fiction and fantasy novels to read July 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-brooks-jacobsen-wiswell-wong/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T20:00:01.000Z At the beginning of the summer, I went to start my lawn mower, only to find that it's overdue for a carburetor cleanout. I took it down to the local hardware store in May, and as of now, they *still* haven't gotten to it. I have a backup: a Husqvarna Reel mower – you know, the type with a spinning set of blades? I had picked it up years ago from another town over, and didn't have much luck with it, so it sat moldering away in the shed. With the regular mower out, I went back to it and figured out that I hadn't quite calibrated it enough. After sharpening the blades and figuring out what I had done wrong, I've been putting it to use every week, and I'm actually finding that it's a great little tool: a good way to get some exercise in, and I haven't had to spend any money on gas to keep it running. The real attraction for me here is that it's also a good 30-40 minutes where I can throw on an audiobook as I go back and forth across the lawn, and I've found that it's a good way to really focus on whatever it is I'm reading. I spent some time the other day listening to Annie Jacobsen's *Biological War: A Scenario*, and burned through some good chunks of various *Dungeon Crawler Carl* and *Ana and Din* installments. It feels like I'm spending more time listening to audiobooks these days, in part because I'm finding that it's those moments in the day – mowing the lawn, driving to and from work, riding my bike, and other things – where I can push aside the other things needing my attention and get some dedicated story time in. Here's my usual plug for your support: this newsletter is free to read, but it does cost time and resources to put together. I often hear from readers that they often find something of interest on these lists, and I'm always glad to hear that: I write these because I like sharing cool-looking books to my fellow readers. Here's the process that goes into these lists: - I start off the year with 12 shell posts, which I steadily add to as I get press releases, ARCs, see book announcements, cover reveals, articles, reviews, and recommendations. - Each month, I take stock of those lists, and I see what books speak to me. I'm not interested in the lists that that go for dozens and dozens of entries, because that's overwhelming for everyone. I whittle it down to a manageable number, generally around 15-18\. If it gets longer, I'll split it into two lists. - From there, I'll read over a chapter or two of the books that I've got in hand, and start writing up each entry. I don't use the publisher blurbs and I don't use AI. I've found this to be a useful process because that helps me figure out if it's **really* something I'm interested in. I'll add in any reviews and whatever additional context is useful, and add in links from Bookshop.org. - The last step is then the header photograph: I'll gather up whatever finished and advance copies I've been sent, then photograph them. I think this looks a lot better than slapping the covers into Canva, because these are actual, tangible objects that might go on your shelf. It's more real that way. - I'll give it a proof-read, add in the appropriate SEO, and send it! Then I go about notifying authors, publicists and social media about it. - And then it's time to start the next one. That's a lot of work, snatched from lunch breaks and later evening hours. If you want to help support that whole process, please consider signing up as a supporting member, by purchasing a copy through one of the links, or by [leaving a one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/support)! Thanks for your consideration: every little bit helps. In case you missed it, here's the [first list for July](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-asimov-moreno-garcia-niven-tingle/). You can also always find prior lists on the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). [13 new science fiction, fantasy, and horror books to check out in July 2026Vampires, undead, noirs, assassins, and more!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-06278eb5-6a56-4108-a570-1a6a80f051b4.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-Green-Modern-Travel-YouTube-Banner---1--59faf8d8-1f9f-44fc-96ab-bbb8308b9e70.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-asimov-moreno-garcia-niven-tingle/) Okay, here are 14 new books that you should check out for the rest of the month: ### [*Magic & Mystery*](https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/product?asin=B0H3TTX6QM&ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by John Joseph Adams (July 28th) John Joseph Adams is one of the better anthologists out there, and he's edited a bunch of neat, original fiction projects for Amazon's Original Stories initiative. He's got a new one, Magic & Mysteries, a series of fantastical mysteries from the likes of Travis Baldree, Robert Jackson Bennett (a new Ana and Din story!), Tananarive Due, Sarah Beth Durst, Heather Fawcett, Scott Lynch, and J.M. Miro. ### [*The Demon Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756420536?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jesse Aragon (July 28th) Mercenary named Ysira Naktis was designated for a sacrifice, one of thousands taken each year, but something went wrong: she survived. When her son is chosen to be the vessel for a demon, she's given a choice: she can let him take on this incredible power, or sacrifice millions to try and save him. She's aided in her mission by a former exorcist from the Church of the Black Sun named Brother Jacen Kheris, who's fallen to addiction and is trying to figure out a new purpose for his life. To save her son, the pair have to fight their way through satellites and rough terrain, all against aliens, cultists, and gods. *Publishers Weekly* [says that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756420536?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the rip-roaring pace is almost too fast, but fans of genre-bending suspense will wholeheartedly enjoy the gruesome detail, satisfying twists, and unflinching look at the price of revolution. Aragon is off to a promising start." ### [*Lunacy: T*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691281285?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*en False Promises of the New Space Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691281285?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ben Bramble (July 14th) This looks like an interesting examination of the state of the space industry in 2026: while tech billionaires have projected lofty goals for humanity's future in space ([ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tech-ceos-should-stop-using-science-fiction-as-a-blueprint-for-humanitys-future-in-space/)), philosopher Ben Bramble takes a hard look at some of those initiatives, like settling Mars as a backup planet to first contact with extraterrestrials, digging into the ideas behind them and what would actually benefit the future of humanity. ### [*World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War* (Deluxe Edition)](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217299355?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Max Brooks (July 21st) Max Brooks jumps on the special edition bandwagon just in time for the 20th anniversary of his debut novel *World War Z*. This is a trade paperback edition with a snazzy slipcase, and it comes with hundreds of annotations and a new introduction, as well as some full color illustrations inside. ### [*The Felicity Complex*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661177?ref=andrewliptak.com) by august clarke (July 28) During the Cold War, a group of billionaires constructed the Felicity Complex, a shielded and self-sustaining resort bunker that provided the wealthy with plenty of amenities in the event of an apocalypse. It's staffed by six women who were designed and created in a lab to cater to the complex's guests. When the guests start to arrive, Hallelujah and her sisters are waiting, and they have to put aside the secrets that those new arrivals might be hiding, and hide their own violent intentions from scrutiny. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645661177?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Hallelujah’s innocent perspective provides both humor and a sense of unease, and the other specimens, all with their own distinct roles to play, are just as well drawn. Together, they carry the novel’s sharp-toothed commentary about autonomy, gender, power, and ownership." ### [*Unpredictable Magic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217187621?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Faith Hunter (July 14th) In this urban fantasy, Angelina Everhart-Trueblood and her brother Evan are private investigators for Everhart Investigations, with a specialty in investigating paranormal crimes committed by supernatural beings. They pick up a new client who's looking for a missing friend, and things go downhill from their. This new client isn't who she says she is, and at the same time, Chattanooga comes under attack by demons, and it seems as though Angie's ex husband – a vampire – might be involved. As Angie and Evan continue their investigation, they have to team up with the city's police department and draw from their own magical reservoirs to save their city. ### [*Biological War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217046034?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annie Jacobsen (July 28th) A couple of years ago, Annie Jacobsen's novel (ish?) [*Nuclear War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476093?ref=andrewliptak.com)scared the pants off of me. It was a minute-by-minute thriller about how a nuclear war might play out after a nuclear bomb is detonated over Washington D.C. Jacobsen is back with another thriller in the same vein: what would the start of a biological war in 2026 look like? The answer? Pretty scary. An explosion at a secret biological weapons lab in Russia unleashes an altered strain of the plague – a disease that's been genetically engineered for a quick and deadly spread from person to person. Jacobsen interviewed dozens of experts from throughout the government and military, and traces this outbreak as it spreads around the world and looks at what would happen on global scale. I've been listening to the audiobook of this, and it's gripping and very, very scary at how this scenario plays out. [Book review: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie JacobsenA scary, flawed warning about the dangers posed by our nuclear arsenal![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-89.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8460-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/) ### [*The Side Questers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798887981949?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.J. Kochmanski (July 21st) An NPC named Anya Dazel is a bartender in the world's largest online RPG, *Eternity: The Endless Realm*, and is completely burned out. Her life follows the same, preprogramed routine, serving drinks and helping player characters, and she wishes for some sort of disruption. That comes in the form of a new update, and another NPC is added to Anya's pub, Cyrus Black. He's her direct opposite – a dour warrior and mysterious, tragic past. Everyone's fascinated by him and he slowly begins taking the attention away from Anya. When she's had enough and strikes him, they're accidentally booted from the pub and find themselves in the larger world of Eternity. Now, they have to figure out how to survive in the digital open world, overcoming their dislike for one another and learning what their roles in the game really are. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798887981949?ref=andrewliptak.com): "brimming with humor, opposites-attract banter, and cozy fantasy elements, this compact adventure offers plenty of fun. It will be a pleasure for video game aficionados." ### [*Star Wars: Legacy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593982662?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Madeleine Roux (July 28th) This latest *Star Wars* novel is set between the events of *The Last Jedi* and *Rise of Skywalker* and follows Rey as she works with Leia to complete her training as a Jedi and repair her lightsaber, while Leia is trying to figure out the way forward in an uncertain time. I’ve heard good things about this, and I’m interested in seeing what it brings to the larger sequel era story.[](https://www.reddit.com/submit/?source%5Fid=t3%5F1ux8xev&composer%5Fentry=crosspost%5Fprompt&ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781603297578?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586024?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Best of All Possible Planets*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798235558595?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Shvartsman (July 28th) Alex Shvartsman *just* [Kickstarted](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ufopublishing/the-best-of-all-possible-planets?ref=andrewliptak.com) his latest book, and bucking the trend, it's being delivered on time! In this science fiction comedy (he described it as "The book is a space opera 𝘊𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘦 written as a series of 𝘍𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘢 episodes), the last inhabitants of Earth are facing a problem: the protective shield surrounding the planet is breaking down, and a small group of heroes have to go find a new one. They travel from planet to planet and run into a whole host of problems as they not only try to procure a new shield, but also survive to make it home. ### [*Lemuria 7*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781515458517?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Allen M. Steele (July 14th) I'm a big fan of Allen M. Steele's science fiction novels. [*Coyote*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204031?ref=andrewliptak.com) remains one of my favorites, and he's published a number of novels and shorter stories in the years since that I've really enjoyed. His latest is a [fix-up](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-writing-serialization-fix-up-novels/) of three of the novellas he published in *Asimovs*: "Lemuria 7 is Missing", "The Hunt for Lemuria 7", and "The Recovery of Lemuria 7." [One of my favorite space operas is coming back to printLong out of print, Allen M. Steele’s Coyote series is getting a rerelease![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-498e811d-92f9-4b21-a903-a542cf6d246d.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/537228530_1328667295930502_4052706792273769253_n-1-0dc13d49-118c-4d84-bd63-f7582d714b0a.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/allen-steele-coyote-sci-fi-space-opera-reprint/) The Lemuria 7 lunar mission was funded by billionaire inventor Edison Smith – it was a tourist trip to the Moon, and there was a lot of speculation about it: wealthy excess, private research? When Smith, his wife, daughter, their future son-in-law, and the crew of the mission go missing, it's assumed that there was some sort of technical failure. The truth is a little more complicated. ### [*Erebus-13* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316569361?ref=andrewliptak.com)by David Wellington (July 14th) David Wellington follows up is novels [*Paradise-1*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316496742?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Revenant-X*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316569347?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a third, *Erebus-13*. In the first, we're introduced to Firewatch Inspector Alexandra Petrova as she's sent off to a distant colony, Paradise-1, is attacked while enroute, and discovers that the colony's inhabitants have been transformed into something ... not human. Now, she and her crew have managed to escape, but she's missing her companions, her past has been haunting her, and Erebus, an entity that had taken over the colony, has escaped and is headed for Earth. It's now up to the survivors to get back and find away to alert their home planet and all of its squabbling factions to head off this threat. ### [*The Dragon Has Some Complaints*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756420499?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Wiswell (July 14th) In this cozy-ish fantasy, Garrodigh is a dragon that once had four heads: he's now down three, and they're constantly bickering: Centerhead wants to burn everything to the ground, Bottomhead is something like a feral cat, and Upperhead thinks that he's human. After taking part in a battle that went badly, Garrodigh finds its way into a dragon rider academy as a way to get some free food and shelter, teaming up with a rider named Rania Charvátová, who is so desperate she's willing to overlook his stranger tendencies. With Rania's help, Garrodigh and its heads are finally aligned and have some sort of purpose, and they want to protect her from the invaders that took their fourth head. When the academy is attacked, it's up to the team to come together and save themselves and their new home. ### [*The First Stop*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217188444?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tao Wong (July 14th) Tao Wong continues his *A Thousand Li* in its new trad-publishing edition with *The First Stop*. He originally self-published this series back in 2019 (it now stretches 12 installments), and Ace Books has picked up the trade rights to it, starting with the first installment, [*The First Step*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217188420?ref=andrewliptak.com), back in March. The series follows Long Wu Ying, a farmer's son who jumped at the chance to become a cultivator, a person who can cultivate his magical abilities, was conscripted into the military and joined a magical academy. In this installment, his studies have been going well, and he has to make a choice about what his secondary occupation should be: alchemist or blacksmith, physician or martial specialist. As he works to figure it out, war is brewing elsewhere, and it's threatening to pull Wu Ying and his friends into it, testing everything they've learned so far. --- Thanks for reading. As always, let me know in the comments what caught your eye and what you've got on your TBR. ### Jeff VanderMeer sells horror / mystery series The Strange Architect to FSG URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/jeff-vandermeer-strange-architect-horror-mystery-novel-series/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T16:44:07.000Z Jeff VanderMeer has sold a new, four-part series to publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for seven figures, [according to *Variety*](https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/strange-architect-book-series-annihilation-author-jeff-vandermeer-1236818347/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The series is titles *The Strange Architect*, and it'll kick off in 2029 with its first installment, *How to Be Free*. It's [described](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbJtpXkkqqr/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) as a "horror and uncanny mystery," and he characterized them as his "most mind-blowing and most directly uncanny novels yet. The series will follow the story of a man named Arthur Bream, who had worked to build a utopian community. His plans are upended when his daughter goes missing after some sort of catastrophic incident, and he as he comes to believe that she's trapped in a spirit realm, he spends the rest of his life reckoning with his experiences and in doing so, begins constructing houses with a symbol on their stairs, hoping that he'll be able to bring her back to the real world. *Publishers Weekly* [has a couple of additional details](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/newsbrief/index.html?record=5965&ref=andrewliptak.com): > The horror-mystery novels “explore the legacy of the mythic Arthur Bream, a man whose dreams of building a utopian community are wrecked by cataclysmic loss,” per the publisher. “Bream’s pain leads him and others into a complex entanglement involving a mysterious symbol, unknown entities, madness, surveillance, and the dangerous discoveries that await in realms beyond what we can see.” FGS has published a number of VanderMeer's novels in the last decade: it released his *Southern Reach* series starting in 2014 with [*Annihilation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824042?ref=andrewliptak.com) (and followed it up the same year with [*Authority*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824059?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Acceptance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824066?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and published his novels [*Borne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374537654?ref=andrewliptak.com)(2017), [*Dead Astronauts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250758217?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2019), [*Hummingbird Salamander*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250829771?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2021). In 2024, he published a new installment of the *Southern Reach* series, [*Absolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374616595?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. This new series sounds enormously ambitious, and I'm keen to see what VanderMeer has in store for us. On Facebook, [he's noted](https://www.facebook.com/jeff.vandermeer/posts/pfbid0Ejx1zceVrcWZ7euUxP7Aj1PNZzcsZU8B5VL7AXhzrbqBPmZw6Da3k9rgdmqjYFcgl?%5F%5Fcft%5F%5F[0]=AZbgmFIctNXcj8kgXbgIAmlyx75tM4t-%5FCbd%5F3Eq2f3MOMSfSlolqlYTDEHQvHvNdNFD0ED-3H%5Fsrju%5FxQfG-QhY8GacwVyyBhl%5FCo0%5FXPngje2CsBcSwq2PV2jlePirOOdXsSMDSq0kQTT-KOrAVyflusq8%5FEE7Sewxb6pelmMKBDYPG3d76ZCvnlGesXvpjqw&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CO%2CP-R) that they'll be shorter novels (around 60,000 words each,) [that they'll take place](https://www.facebook.com/jeff.vandermeer/posts/pfbid0bzpeUXrGDfqpdKhh2qK2ewZuxBwo6kitEB8z8tDHj6JrEK2ncTd3gtffxD78EH12l?%5F%5Fcft%5F%5F[0]=AZa6QZ9%5FenpBkgBrG16d5mVEsboPcnYb9llnV4EJzMiumSptlt2Sv1rsWLibvoa3Zg9IxGfn865uGqEsZr0LHchf6crNKf327qt6zKaNvIavHrXm%5F6CnCAnPRXYuelMw9Y8QaI4sFB0ZnJ2dCKrOnftanzwtcJNN%5F22BF99uwj%5FvXg&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CO%2CP-R) in various buildings that Bream builds. I'm also interested in seeing how these books fit in with the rest of his recent work – not canonically, but thematically. With *Southern Reach*, he really leaned into the state of the environment, a theme that he plays with in *Borne* and certainly in *Hummingbird Salamander*. [Our vanishing worldLooking at the past and future of conservation with Michelle Nijhuis and Jeff VanderMeer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-e0f64cb4-0650-4289-81a0-776728dd248e.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3227-41ccce3b-67f3-45cb-b03c-5a6bf05361c8.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/beloved-beasts-hummingbird-salamander-michelle-nijhuis-jeff-vandermeer/) We'll have a couple of years before they arrive, but this feels a bit like the same sort of anticipation that *Southern Reach* had building ahead of it. --- That's not the only VanderMeer-related news, either. Buried in the *Variety* article is a note that Natalie Portman and Sophie Mas's production company MountainA is developing an adaptation of a story that he recently published with MIT Technology, "[Constellations](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/10/1135106/jeff-vandermeer-constellations-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" about the survivors of a crash on an distant planet. Portman, of course, was the star of Alex Garland's 2018 adaption of *Annihilation*, and it's cool to see that she's still attached to his work. I liked the film a great deal, and her work in it. VanderMeer [noted](https://bsky.app/profile/jeffvandermeer.bsky.social/post/3mrdjkwbfac2i?ref=andrewliptak.com) that there's still a long way to go before (and if) this is realized, but that he's *"*psyched at the prospect of her starring in it*."* It's not the only project that's been in development recently: in 2019, AMC [optioned](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jeff-vandermeer-borne-dead-astronauts-amc-optioned-tv/) *Borne, Dead Astronauts,* and a shorter story *Strange Birds* for a television series. *Variety* notes that it's still in development. ### Adrian Tchaikovski's Children of Time is turning into an RPG URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovski-children-of-time-rpg-kickstarter/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T23:43:54.000Z One of the best science fiction novels of the last decade or so is Adrian Tchaikovski's [*Children of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452502?ref=andrewliptak.com): a sprawling space opera about a civilization of uplifted spiders on a terraformed world, and the role that humanity finds itself playing when they begin to arrive at the planet. It's a fantastic book, even if spiders aren't quite your thing. After *Children of Time*, Tchaikovsky published [*Children of Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452533?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Children of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316466400?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and earlier this year*,* [*Children of Strife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316598965?ref=andrewliptak.com), steadily building out the world and exploring the nature of intelligence, sentience, memory, and cooperation in some interesting ways. [Spiders! In! Space! Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of TimeIn December, I put out a call for recommendations for standalone science fiction novels — in part to assemble a list for The Verge — but also because I was looking for something along those lines. I got a bunch of recommendations, but one that stood out was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-71.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time-science-fiction-book-review/) And now, there's a new way to experience the world: gaming developers Rowan, Rook, and Decard are adapting the book as a roleplaying game, and it [just launched on Kickstarter this week](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gshowitt/children-of-time-the-roleplaying-game?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's an interesting book to adapt: allowing players to recreate the story of the Gilgamesh and its arrival on Kern's World, or by constructing their own ark, planet, and uplifted civilization to manipulate. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Here's how they describe the gameplay: - Everyone at the table claims different roles to suit the story they're writing together: the Viewpoint main character, the Crowd of assembled locals, the Ship who speaks for the creaking ancient vessel itself, or even the Guide who facilitates the group's use of the game's rules. Whenever you start a scene, players pick up roles and characters as they wish – and put them down once they've served their purpose. - Gameplay flows from the writer's-room speculation on events and culture, to viewpoint action focusing on the personal drama of one or two characters, to the background schemes others got up to during that zoomed-in action. - Stories unfold over multiple chapters. Each chapter, a specific crisis hits your society: a fire or plague, war or mutiny, a rare opportunity or terrible omen, each with their own mechanics. A character's story might continue from chapter to chapter, but they'll always bear the marks of the events they've witnessed. - Action resolution focuses on the approach a character is taking to a problem, and the consequences their actions bring for them, this place, and their peers. Dice rolls are quick, but their consequences linger. It looks like a good amount of fun, and they've posted a [playtest version](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xOvklgSgxP2tEPqejML7aBxMc-pqbmOr?ref=andrewliptak.com) for interested gamers to check out. The project has already surpassed their initial $53,615 goal (it's currently just over $70k). Backers can get a PDF for £30 (about $41), the core set for £60 (about $81), and there are additional tiers with more perks and add-ons. Delivery is anticipated for September 2027\. ### Legendary magazine Starlog is being resurrected URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/starlog-annalee-newitz-scifi-magazine-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-07-09T14:00:40.000Z The classic science fiction magazine *Starlog* is returning, just in time for its 50th anniversary. *Starlog* was an enormously influential magazine devoted to science fiction media, covering news about the genre starting in 1976 before it eventually closed down in April 2009\. At the end of June, [word broke](https://bsky.app/profile/starlogmedia.bsky.social/post/3mozywt6dyc2z?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the storied magazine would be resurrected as a print publication and that it would have an impressive editorial roster behind it: Annalee Newitz (founder of *io9* and author of such books as [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228024?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com)) will serve as the magazine's Editor-in-Chief, with Meredith Borders as Senior Editor and Jason Kauzlarich as Senior Art Director. The first issue of the magazine is expected to be released this fall, and it'll go both to subscribers and be available on newsstands. Accompanying the magazine will be a podcast, which will be hosted and edited by Jordan Hoffman, with Dave Gonzales as Podcast Producer. That's already begun, with the [first](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/starlog-is-back-with-annalee-newitz/id1896781217?i=1000774025753&ref=andrewliptak.com) [couple of](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/002-id4-anniversary-and-disclosure-day-with-david-koepp/id1896781217?i=1000774997891&ref=andrewliptak.com) [episodes](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/science-storytelling-and-star-trek-with-dr-erin-macdonald/id1896781217?i=1000775944873&ref=andrewliptak.com) now available. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/Starlog-_May_1977.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/cover-022.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/images--1-.jpeg) Images: Starlog The 1970s were a transformational moment in the history of genre fandom: *Star Trek* had premiered a decade earlier and while short-lived, was proving to be enormously influential amongst science fiction fans new and old, while films like *2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes* (and sequels), *The Andromeda Strain, THX-1138*, *Silent Running, Soylent Green,* and many others were steadily demonstrating that science fiction could take well to cinemas. Print magazines and books were no longer the sole home for quality science fiction and fantasy content, and accordingly, fandom was changing: new fans, hooked on these films and television shows and eager for more, began looking for new places to nerd out on them. Enter *Starlog,* which was founded in 1976 by two fans, Kerry O'Quinn and David Houston. O'Quinn had gotten into the magazine industry a couple of years earlier, starting with *Daily TV Serials*, a publication dedicated to soap operas. As [he wrote on his website](https://web.archive.org/web/20120727003017/http://www.kerryoquinn.com/playpen.html), "after 4 years of success with soap opera activities, we could afford to launch a publication that would celebrate a realm I knew much better, a universe dear to my soul – the future, space exploration, other worlds, science fiction." In his book [*Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781846310034?ref=andrewliptak.com), Mike Ashley pointed out that there had been some media-focused genre magazines before, like Forrest J. Ackerman's *Monsters of Filmland* and Frederick S. Clarke's *Cinefantastique*, which paved the way for publications like *Starlog*. "It owed its initial success to its coverage of *Star Trek,"* Ashley wrote, "but it broadened its scope to covering not just new but also classic sf films and looking at the books and authors behind them. It also looked to further science fiction in all its forms and included features and interviews with writers and artists." O'Quinn noted that distributors told him that there wasn't much of a audience or market for such a publication – *Star Trek*, they pointed out, had been off the air for years at that point. But they went ahead anyway. "We started publishing *Starlog* quarterly. But the premiere issue sold better than anyone expected, and we quickly went bi-monthly. By the time *Star Wars* created a science fiction explosion on the cover of *Time* and *Starlog* (issue #7), we were monthly, and from that moment on, we were the voice of science fiction, for fans and professionals – before the Internet connected kindred spirits, and answered all our curiosities." It established itself by deeply embedding itself within science fiction culture, reporting news of new productions and projects, conducting interviews with the people working behind the scenes, like Harlan Ellison, George Lucas, and Gene Roddenberry, profiles of actors like Leonard Nimoy, commentary from figures like Isaac Asimov, and features that helped connect fans to one another, like reports about upcoming conventions and gatherings. Long before the internet provided all of this information at one's fingertips, *Starlog* was an indispensable resource. It was also at the forefront of the transformation of fandom. With the release of *Star Trek* in 1966 and *Star Wars* in 1977, science fiction fandom was no longer just confined to fans who were interested in SF literature. In my book *Cosplay: A History*, I noted that this period was one of balkanization as fans began carving out their own spaces, either devoted to single franchises, or to the SF content found in these growing mediums. *Starlog* helped with those changes by providing a space for those fans learn and think about these new stories. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- In addition to their novels and nonfiction books, Annalee Newitz is best known for founding *io9* in 2008\. The site carried with it many of the same sensibilities that guided *Starlog* ([and *Omni Magazine*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/omni-magazine-adidas-reboot/)), with a wide focus on science fiction, fantasy, film, television, comics, and everything in between. (I wrote for *io9* as a freelancer under Newitz between 2009 and 2016.) This new version of *Starlog*, Newitz told me in an email, is being planned "as an annual print magazine, with the first issue coming out this year on November 13." They explained that this new iteration of *Starlog* is being stood up by the folks behind the magazine [*Fangoria*](https://www.fangoria.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and that they took on the job after a couple of conversations that assured them that the magazine would be in good hands. "\[Abhi Goel, owner of both magazines\] reassured me that this operation was entirely independent, with no AI slop or corporate strings attached, and basically gave me carte blanche to shape the contents however I wanted." Newitz says that they're thrilled about joining the project, and that they feel particularly connected to the publication and the enormous footprint it left behind. "I couldn't be happier about stepping into a legacy that was always about centering the fans and bringing us together as a community." > *Starlog* never pretended to be anything other than a labor of love, created by and for people who actually care about sci-fi media and want to know more about how art gets made. One of its founding editors, Kerry O'Quinn, was openly queer at a time when there were not a lot of out gay *Star Trek* fans (or magazine editors), and I think that made him more open to celebrating the Vulcan ideal of "infinite diversity in infinite combination." As a queer nonbinary nerd, I feel very at home in the world that O'Quinn helped to create. As Editor-in-Chief, they have a lot planned: like its prior iterations, the magazine will cover books, comics, fantasy, games, movies, games, science fiction, television and more – through articles, interviews. They'll even "incorporate the legacy of the *Starlog* spinoff publication *Future Life*, which explored science and tech." The first crop of contributors is also an impressive bunch: Mahmud El Sayed ([*The Republic of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668207192?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Mike Chen ([*The Photonic Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083796?ref=andrewliptak.com)), [R.U. Sirius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.%5FU.%5FSirius?ref=andrewliptak.com), Charlie Jane Anders ([*Lessons in Magic and Desire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867322?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Mia Tsai ([*The Memory Hunters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645662082?ref=andrewliptak.com)), [Evan Narcisse](https://www.marvel.com/comics/creators/13233/evan%5Fnarcisse?ref=andrewliptak.com), Riley Black ([*The Last Days of the Dinosaurs*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250894861?ref=andrewliptak.com)), C.L. Polk ([*Even Though I Knew the End*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250375100?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and Josie Riesman ([*True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135730?ref=andrewliptak.com)). While known for their work online (and Newitz says that there'll be "a healthy dose of io9 vibes" in *Starlog*), they noted that there was a considerable appeal to tackling a print publication at this point in time, where the SF/F news and commentary landscape is dominated by sloppy clickbait and AI. "*Starlog* of yore was full of media news and information about fan events, which is now something people can find online," they say. "Today, what we really need in a print publication is deeply researched, beautifully illustrated essays and deep dives. That's what we have here." --- *Starlog* will return in November. You can subscribe, sign up for its newsletter, and follow the podcast [here](https://starlog.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm eager to see what's in store for readers. ### 13 new science fiction, fantasy, and horror books to check out in July 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-asimov-moreno-garcia-niven-tingle/ Last updated: 2026-07-08T15:37:27.000Z I recently picked up a fascinating little book: *The Maltese Falcon* by Dashiell Hammett. The story itself is one that I’ve wanted to read for years, but what attracted me to this [particular edition is that it’s from the notebook company Field Notes](https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/the-maltese-falcon?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it’s designed to emulate the Armed Services Editions that were handed out to soldiers during the Second World War. Where most books are in a portrait orientation, this one’s landscape, with each page featuring a pair of columns. These books were handed out in droves to soldiers, and it’s often referred to as one of the biggest literary boons in the 20th century: it introduced soldiers to the classics — and transformed some books into classics — and they were designed to fit into one’s pocket. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I got it, but it’s a small, palm-sized book that… fits into my pocket, and I’ve found that to be not only delightful, but super practical as well. I’ve been carrying it all over, and when I have a spare minute, where I’d usually be checking my phone, I’m trying to get a couple pages in here and there. It’s interesting to think about how form and availability really helped make reading popular, and it’s something that I wish was more prevalent in the publishing industry right now. [Stories for the massesThe Mass Market paperback format is ending with a whimper![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-6d38adc2-99f1-4b97-a99a-dd66a3ff031c.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8122-a962a21a-ae43-4822-bef1-4ed5773649d1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mass-market-paperback-novels-publishing-books/) Okay: onto the rest of this month's books: I’ve got 13 new SF/F/H books to check out this month. As always, you can find past installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). ### [*Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586024?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Isaac Asimov (July 14th) Blackstone publishing continues its re-release of Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series (it’s already published [*David Starr, Space Ranger*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585904?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585928?ref=andrewliptak.com)). The series follows David Staff as he heads off to Venus’s largest city, Aphrodite, hidden away under a vast ocean. The place is a remarkable engineering achievement, but something is now threatening the city — a psychic force that could destroy everything they’ve accomplished. ### [*The Sea Hides Its Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316588010?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Megan Bontrager (July 14th) A graduate student named Caro is trying to figure out a direction for her life when a path presents itself: a position as a research assistant on an expedition with her professor and partner, Edward Beck. She jumps at the opportunity and joins his team, which is studying the ancient Cult of the Leviathan, which once inhabited a series of caves near the sea. Things go awry when the entrance to the cave system collapses on them, leaving the team trapped. Even worse, they find that they’re part of an ancient trial that will test each one of them to face their past sins. ### [*Home Sick*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837867639?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rhiannon Grist (July 14th) After a tragedy strikes her workplace, Tamsin decides to take a break from everything she knows: she sets off for an isolate cottage deep in the woods, where she can start over again, maybe make some new friends, and figure out who she is. When she arrives at her new home, she finds that it’s not what she expected: it’s a semi-detached dwelling, with a strange woman living in the other residence. She’s uneasy and suspects that there’s something off as strange disturbances begin taking place. She soon learns that there are other strange stories about her home, and realizes that the past she tried to escape from might not be willing to let her go that easily. ### [*The Mulai*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781552455197?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Munir Hachemi and translated by Julia Sanches (July 14th) In this Spanish science fiction novel, an archeologist is sent off to a distant planet to learn about a community that inhabits it, descendants of a space mission that took place long ago. They live in climate-controlled dome settlements, worship a god called Dog, and keep repeating a strange phrase, mulai. The researcher is there to learn more about their language, their way of life, customs, and society, which have transformed drastically in the years since their predecessors left Earth. ### [*The Red Sacrament*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835410820?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sara Hinkley (July 2nd) Set in Paris in 1869, one of *the* places to be is the Théâtre Saint-Siméon, an exclusive theater that only a very select few are permitted inside to view its phenomenal performances, undertaken by an ageless cast that only performs at midnight. That cast is led by Arnault, the head of a clan of vampires who’ve set up a strict set of rules so that their supernatural nature won’t be detected. When they get a visit from a witch with a connection to Arnault named Béatrice, and a pair of foreign vampires, siblings Victor and Françoise de Rouvray, the peace and stability that they’ve come to enjoy is threatened. Writing in the *Ancillary Review of Books,* Jon Greenaway [says that it](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2026/07/02/blood-and-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) “represents the arrival of a major new voice in horror fiction and perhaps the most vital, politically engaged vampire novel of the last decade.” ### [*The Playful LEM: A Short Story Sampler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781603297578?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stanislaw Lem and edited by Michael Kandel (July 1st) Stanislaw Lem is one of the genre’s most fascinating writers, and a handful of his shorter, comedic short stories are gathered together into a new collection. The stories it contains features everything from knights fighting for the hand of a mechanical princess, a machine that can make anything you can think of — so long as it begins with the letter “n”, an astronaut who goes undercover on a planet populated by robots, and quite a few more. ### [*The Language of Knives: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781956522051?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Haralambi Markov (July 7th) Bulgarian author Haralambi Markov has earned a good amount of acclaim in recent years for his short fiction, which has appeared in places like *Reactor,* *Uncanny*, and anthologies like[*Genius Loci*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781947659445?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Upside Down*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009441?ref=andrewliptak.com). He’s now brought his short fiction together into his first collection, with stories about a legendary monster going on a podcast, a deadly mall, curses, haunted houses, and more. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781956522051?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying it’s “a collection that refuses to look away from darkness while still, against the odds, reaching for hope.” ### [*Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668065297?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by* Frank Miller (July 14th) Frank Miller is one of the comic industry’s greatest writers, responsible for such works as [*The Dark Knight Returns*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781401263119?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Batman: Year One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781401207526?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Daredevil: Born Again*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781302965983?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Sin City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781506722825?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, 300*, and a ton of others. His latest work isn’t quite as fantastical: it’s a memoir of his life, looking at his upbringing in Vermont to his arrival in New York City and his approach to writing comics. It looks like a fascinating insight into his craft and his remarkable influence on the comic book industry. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668065297?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it’s “gorgeously illustrated with panels from Miller’s work and written in elegantly two-fisted prose, this is a wildly entertaining account that his fans will savor.” ### [*The Intrigue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874356?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 14th) I’m a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels like [*Mexican Gothic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525620808?ref=andrewliptak.com)and last year’s [*The Bewitching*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874325?ref=andrewliptak.com), and her tendencies to jump from genre to genre effortlessly. Her latest is another leap into the noir and mystery scene. It’s about a con artist named Ulises, who’s made a living stealing from women by charming them with letters. But he’s aware of the passage of time and the toll it inflicts on people, and he’s looking for a new score. He thinks he finds it in the form of Perla, the owner of a Veracruz boardinghouse. When he makes the trek to meet her, he finds that she’s the guardian of her bright niece, Inés, who’s trying to make her own escape. When she learns of Ulises’s intentions, she offers to help. But Perla isn’t helpless, and has secrets of her own, and Ulises finds that he might have bitten off more than he can chew. *Library Journal* gave it a starred review, [saying that](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-intrigue--100009174?ref=andrewliptak.com) “from its expertly evoked settings to its flawlessly paced plot, everything about Moreno-Garcia’s latest exudes noir at its very best. [Book review: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The BewitchingA gripping, multi-generational tale of curses, power, and witches![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-c49aafda-cfaa-4d4c-9dda-983de694f85c.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6212-a00dd3d2-f2c0-4830-a4c3-bf4448d505c0.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/betwitching-silvia-moreno-garcia-witches-horror-book-review/) ### [*Ice Vegas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228329577?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes (July 14th) Longtime collaborators Larry Niven and Steven Barnes have teamed up for a new novel, *Ice Vegas,* about a security agent named Carver Reeves, who’s the head of security for a nuclear facility in Europe that also powers a spectacular, domed city called Ice Vegas. He’s about to retire when the facility is sabotaged by someone hoping to destroy both the city and facility. To save them, Carver turns to an assassin named Spider. Her job is to track down a member of the powerful Waldemer family who have been working towards their goal of controlling Earth for generations and save the place that’s become her home. ### [*Not With A Bang*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668203460?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Temi Oh (July 14th) After he loses his job, Marcus Minton goes a bit off the deep end, stocking up on canned food and building a bunker in their back yard. While this is happening, his daughters are having their own issues: Chantale has dreams of disasters, while one of Briar's classmates goes missing and her obsession over it has drawn her into a UFO cult, all while their mother is hiding an illness. When an apocalyptic disaster takes place and begins destroying the world, the family has to find a way to survive – and to come back together as a family. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/temi-oh/not-with-a-bang/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying “told in a confident, lyrical voice with a sharp focus on characters and society, this narrative reveals that no matter how alien the circumstances, we will always be human.” ### [*Brokeula* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781968043094?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Michael J. Seidlinger (July 7th) Michael J. Seidlinger takes on capitalism and vampires in *Brokeula.* James Sugre has been a vampire for centuries, and he’s had a hard time throughout: he’s broke and has experienced his share of bad luck in everything from poor investments to getting in too late in the game with crypto. He decides to try his hand at a new venture: video games. He sets up a studio alongside a self-described vampire fan named Lauren, and it seems like things might be looking up, with a new business of turning people into vampires for a fee, only to find that capitalism might be taking more from him than he expected. ### [*Fabulous Bodies*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250398567?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Tingle (July 7th) Chuck Tingle’s latest horror novel takes us to Palm Springs, where we meet Poppy Stringer, an aspiring influencer and grave robber. When her idol, rock star Eddie Michaels dies, she gets an unexpected call: retrieve his body from authorities. It’s a job with a huge payday that could get her out of the rut she’s in, and all seems to be going well until Eddie wakes up mid-retrieval, and she’s going to have to fight for her life on this unexpected road trip. --- As always, thanks for reading: let me know what catches your eye and what you've got on your TBR! ### Focus Features has optioned John Langan’s The Fisherman URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-langan-the-fisherman-david-lowery-horror-film-adaptation/ Last updated: 2026-07-07T19:59:29.000Z There’s a pattern when it comes to book adaptations in Hollywood: a book is in the pipeline where it attracts the attention of various producers, who, along with the publicity push ahead of its release, announce just before or alongside its release date. There’s a writer attached to it, a production house, maybe a director, and then it’s either fast-tracked into production or lingers in production hell until it switches hands, is eventually killed when it runs out of momentum, or sometimes gets made. It’s a little more rare to see a book land an adaptation deal come long after a book is published, and that seems to be the case with John Langan’s fantastic novel [*The Fisherman*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781939905215?ref=andrewliptak.com), which [*The Hollywood Reporter* revealed](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/the-fisherman-movie-michael-bay-1236638915/?ref=andrewliptak.com) has been picked up by Focus Features for a film adaptation. (h/t to Max Covill of [*It’s The Pictures*](https://www.itsthepictures.com/author/max/?ref=andrewliptak.com)in the *Transfer Orbit* Slack!) I’m really happy to see this piece of news: when I read it a couple of years ago, I was blown away by its slow burn story and the way that Langan fantastically brought out a creepy, unsettling feeling to the steep river valleys of New York‘s Catskills. The novel follows a grieving widower named Abe, who’s reeling from the death of his wife, Marie and turns to fishing as a distraction. When a former coworker, Dan, loses his entire family in a car accident, Abe invites him along and the pair find some measure of peace, if not an unconventional friendship. The pair come across a remote fishing spot called Dutchman’s Creek: Dan is evasive about how he learned about it, and when they stop at a local diner, they hear from the locals about the place’s history and why people are so uneasy about the place. When they arrive, they find more than just fish there. It’s a tremendous, gripping read. Here's my review: [Darkness in the waterJohn Langan’s The Fisherman is a masterclass of the modern Gothic![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-bb4d98d9-1f49-4be9-ac75-6b14be9e53e0.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/BA682AAE-FEDD-457E-A085-E3722FE4D2A4-622157ec-7415-461c-8fc0-6b2f2e5ce149.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-langan-the-fisherman-gothic-horror-book-review/) Focus tapped director David Lowery (*The Green Knight, Mother Mary*) to helm the film, which will be written by Alex Ross Perry. Platinum Dunes’ Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Alex Ginno (who worked on *A Quiet Place* and *Purge* franchises) are producing, along with Coin Operated’s Gary Dauberman and Mia Maniscalco (who worked on *It* and *Annabelle*). As with any adaptation, there’s still along way to go before this becomes a film — this is just a step in a long and challenging process. But it’s a cool thing to see, especially for a book that’s long been out on shelves. The book has a lot of potential as the basis for a film: there are a lot of great visuals and a great pacing here that would be amazing to see on the big screen. Hopefully, it’ll make it through the gauntlet. ### Destination: The Asteroid Belt URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/asteroid-belt-science-fiction-astronomy-history/ Last updated: 2026-08-03T20:25:40.000Z “You're not actually going into an asteroid field?” In 1980’s *Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back*, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, C-3P0, and R2-D2, are fleeing from the Galactic Empire’s forces aboard the *Millennium Falcon*, when they encounter a new problem: the Hoth system’s asteroid belt. Desperate, Han orders Chewie to a new heading, straight into the field. “They’d be crazy to follow, wouldn’t they?” The maneuver works: their immediate pursuers are destroyed when they collide with the flying rocks, giving the crew a needed respite to fix their ship and continue their escape. The asteroid scene is memorable and exciting. Pursued by Star Destroyers and TIE Fighters, the *Millennium Falcon* zips past the tumbling asteroids, narrowly escaping danger as the gaps narrow. But like most science fiction films, it’s a scene that bears little resemblance to the nature of the real asteroid belt that orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. But while George Lucas’s asteroids make for an exciting chase scene, our asteroids have an exciting story of their own, one that tells us much about the formation of our solar system. This essay was [originally published](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F10%5F19/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) in January 2026 in **Clarkesworld Magazine*. The star and planets that make up our home system formed from a nebula of gas around 4.6 billion years ago, with the sun hoovering up most of the region’s matter, and much of the rest forming the planets. The solar system’s early years were chaotic: the intense gravitational pull of the gas giants pushed around what matter remained in the solar system, and some of what remained began to coalesce and settle between the planets as much smaller objects: asteroids. While humans recognized that the planets were celestial objects that were different from stars, asteroids were too small to be directly observed, and their discovery came much later in human history. It was the development of the field of physics and planetary motion, as well as the creation of the optical telescope, which helped pave the way for their discovery. In 1766, German astronomer Johann Daniel Titus realized that the planets were spaced proportionally to one another and hypothesized that there could be a body orbiting the sun in the gap between Mars and Jupiter, as well as other bodies beyond Saturn (then the furthest known planet.) In 1781, German-British astronomer William Herschel discovered the solar system’s eighth planet, Uranus. Its location lined up with where Titus’s formula predicted a planet would be, prompting other European astronomers to begin looking for additional, previously-undiscovered planets. One of those astronomers was Baron Franz Xaver von Zach of Germany, who in 1798 began a systematic search for the planet that should be floating between Mars and Jupiter. He contacted twenty-four fellow astronomers, and dubbing themselves the “Celestial Police,” began to study sections of the night sky for signs of a new object. Despite their efforts, it was another astronomer who ended up spotting that object. On the night of January 2nd, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi of Italy spotted a bright light through his own telescope. “The light was a little faint, and of the colour of Jupiter,” he wrote, “but similar to many others which generally are reckoned of the eighth magnitude.” He went out on the nights that followed, and found that it couldn’t be a star. He initially thought it could be a comet, but after further observations, realized it was moving like a planet. Other astronomers would confirm Piazzi’s discovery: he had found a body, but one that was much smaller than the planets of the solar system. A year later, a member of the Celestial Police, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers of Germany sighted another, similar object in the same region of space, which he named Pallas. Like Ceres, it was also extremely small, and after some disagreement, Bode suggested to the Royal Astronomical Society that they call the objects “asteroids,” derived from the Greek word “asteroeidēs” (starlike). They had discovered an entirely new type of body orbiting the solar system, ones that were not only much smaller than the planets, but greater in number. Quickly, astronomers spotted two additional asteroids: Juno in 1804 and Vesta in 1807\. The scientific community was torn over how to describe these objects, and broadly, astronomers referred to these new bodies simply as planets. The next discovery came in 1845 when Karl Ludwig Hencke spotted Astraea, kicking off a new era of discovery for astronomers. In [*Is Pluto A Planet: A Historical Journey Through the Solar System*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691138466?ref=andrewliptak.com), David A. Weintraub notes that “with more powerful telescopes and better star charts then available, three more asteroids were discovered \[in 1847\], followed by one discovery in each of the next two years, making a total of six asteroids discovered in the 1840s. Subsequent decades saw 47 discovered in the 1850s, 52 in the 1860s, 102 in the 1870s, 76 in the 1880s, and 165 in the 1890s.” ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The discovery of this new class of objects and realization of an increasingly crowded solar system came at the same time artists and writers were planting the seeds that would eventually form science fiction. Writing in the second edition of [*The History of Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781137569592?ref=andrewliptak.com), Adam Roberts notes that by the early 19th century, “we can see a number of broad fascinations working their way through the SF writing: an increased interest in the mystical and theological component of interplanetary or interstellar romances \[and\] reflections in an imaginative literary form of 19th-century advances in science, technology, and industry.” With the discovery that multiple bodies orbited between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers began to find explanations for the nature of their existence: Olbers advanced a theory that the asteroids that he and his companions had discovered were once a single planet, but which had been destroyed by the gravitational pull from its neighbors, while others pointed out that the collective mass of the known asteroids would amount to an object much smaller than the planets. Science fiction authors jumped on the former idea: a titanic disaster had destroyed the former planet and left its fragments scattered across space. In his 1895 novel [*The Crack of Doom*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26563?ref=andrewliptak.com), Robert Cromie plays out a story that involves the first depiction of a nuclear explosion, which one character attributes to the destruction of the former fifth planet.: > *"The agent I will employ has cost me all life to discover. It will release the vast stores of etheric energy locked up in the huge atomic warehouse of this planet… Once before, in the history of our system, an effort similar to mine was made, unhappily without success. This time we shall not fail!"* > *A low murmur rose from the audience as the lecturer concluded, and a hushed whisper asked: "Where was that other effort made?"* > *Brande faced round momentarily, and said quietly but distinctly:* > *"On the planet which was where the Asteroids are now."* This supposed, dramatic event in the solar system was ripe fodder for the authors writing science fiction in the early 20th century: a small planet destroyed by some sort of cataclysm. In an entry on asteroids in *Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia,* Brian M. Stableford writes that “asteroids’ status as ruins of a Bode-sequence world was often confirmed in pulp science fiction,” and that they “were also used in that medium as ‘desert islands’ where castaways might wash up or be deliberately marooned.” One notable example comes from author Isaac Asimov, in his 1939 debut story, “Marooned off Vesta,” in which the crew of a damaged spacecraft end up in Vesta’s orbit: > “‘Funny place, Vesta," observed Mike Shea. ‘I was down there two-three times. What a dump! It's all covered with some stuff like snow, only it ain't snow. I forget what they call it.’ > ‘Frozen carbon dioxide?" prompted Moore. "Yeah, dry ice, that carbon stuff, that's it. They say that's what makes Vesta so shiny.’” Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel [*The Stars My Destination*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598531596?ref=andrewliptak.com), depicts a similar scene, as crewman Gully Foyle finds himself wrecked and taken in on an island-like refuge: > “Between Mars and Jupiter is spread the broad belt of the asteroids. Of the thousands, known and unknown, most unique to the Freak Century was the Sargasso Asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of natural rock and wreckage salvaged by its inhabitants in the course of two hundred years.” Asteroids also proved to be a useful setting for another type of story: that of the discovery of untold riches. Authors have often drawn inspiration for their stories from the history of real world exploration, substituting the long travel across Earth’s oceans for that of our solar system and interstellar space: travelers encountering faraway lands and peoples, hoping to encounter and extract new riches. Stableford draws a comparison of asteroids to the gold rushes of North America, in which “the representation of asteroids as a Klondykesque frontier where hard-working prospectors are harassed by all manner of outlaws as in Clifford D. Simak’s ‘The Asteroid of Gold’ (1932), Stanton Coblentz’s ‘The Golden Asteroid’ (1935),” and plenty of others." The notion of asteroid mining goes back to the late 19th century, in Garrett P. Serviss’s 1898 novel [*Edison’s Conquest of Mars*](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19141/19141-h/19141-h.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com), which found Earth’s adversaries mining the solar system for gold. > “For a moment we were startled beyond expression. The truth had flashed upon us. This must be a golden planet—this little asteroid. If it were not composed internally of gold it could never have made me weigh three times more than I ought to weigh.” > “For a moment we were startled beyond expression. The truth had flashed upon us. This must be a golden planet—this little asteroid. If it were not composed internally of gold it could never have made me weigh three times more than I ought to weigh.” The notion of mining asteroids would jump from fictional to theoretical as the US-USSR Space Race took off in the 1950s and 1960s, with NASA scientists posing the idea that once we’d visited the Moon and Mars, asteroids could be another destination, especially if they were home to valuable metals. In his 1977 book, [*The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781686872723?ref=andrewliptak.com), Gerald K. O’Neill pointed out that because it is relatively poor in hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, the Moon might not be a great candidate for mining operations. But, he notes, asteroids are abundant in usable elements. “Long before an appreciable fraction of the lunar surface has been mined,” he wrote, “it will become easiest to obtain all the materials for colony construction at the asteroids themselves.” Furthermore, he points out that mining operations could likely reach more of an asteroid’s total wealth: “we would have to disfigure the entire Earth to obtain only a hundredth of the material contained in now-useless, lifeless asteroids; and there are thousands of those minor planets.” Science fiction authors followed suit, in books and stories such as Donald Kingsbury’s 1978 story ‘To Bring In The Steel,” which imagined astronauts harnessing asteroids and bringing them closer to Earth’s orbit, to C.J. Cherryh’s 1991 novel [*Heavy Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780446362238?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* to more modern takes, such as James S.A. Corey’s [*The Expanse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316311298?ref=andrewliptak.com)series–which depicts humanity mining the asteroids for not only metals, but water to support a myriad of habitats and the terraforming of Mars–to Daniel Suarez’s [*Delta V*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524742416?ref=andrewliptak.com), which depicts tech billionaire standing up a covert mining mission to an asteroid. [Daniel Suarez’s Delta-VTake every bit of news and every promise that you’ve heard from the likes of SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos (and their fanboys), compile that into a novel, and you get Daniel Suarez’s novel Delta-V. A billionaire named Nathan Joyce recruits daredevil cave![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-13.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/741c5748-5961-4ed5-b08c-7dab177a3c7e_2048x1536.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-suarez-delta-v-book-review/) As the space race progressed and and as astronauts spent more time in space, theorists and scientists such as O’Neill speculated that we’d need to find new ways to live in space, ranging from habitats such as Skylab in 1973 to more theoretical structures like cylindrical or spoke-shaped stations that could rotate and simulate gravity. O’Neill noted in his book an inhabited asteroid belt in the long run becomes more economical, given the resources required to reach it from Earth. This too is something that genre authors had prefigured, as in Bester’snovel: “he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial passages within the scavenger asteroid. They were constructed of meteor metal, stone, and hull plates… the passages led to great halls, storerooms, apartments, and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid.” Other depictions were more sophisticated, such as in Greg Bear’s 1985 novel [*Eon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765380494?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* in which an asteroid appears in Earth’s orbit, hollowed out to enclose a massive habitat. “It could have been Los Angeles on a very clear day, or any other modern terrestrial city, except for the surreal exaggeration. It was bigger, more ambitious and ordered, more architecturally *mature.*” Other novelists, such as Kim Stanley Robinson in his 2012 novel [*2312*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316526982?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* feature lavish descriptions of asteroid habitats, while James S.A. Corey’s [*Leviathan Wakes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316129084?ref=andrewliptak.com) imagines an entire network of habitable asteroids in the belt, with major population centers located on Ceres and Eros. After Apollo 11’s successful landing on the lunar surface in July 1969, the American public’s appetite for further missions waned and NASA began to shift its priorities from crewed missions to robotic ones. In the 1960s, the space agency began work on an ambitious program to study the solar system’s outer planets, the “Grand Tour” which was eventually cancelled and replaced with other probes. The first were Pioneers 10 and 11, with a stated mission to study Jupiter and Saturn. They first had to pass through the asteroid belt in 1972 and 1974, and were specifically designed to make observations of some of the asteroids they encountered. It wouldn’t be until 1989 that NASA got an opportunity to take a look at an asteroid up close: it launched the Galileo space probe on October 18th 1989\. The probe was headed to Jupiter, but while passing through the asteroid belt, astronomers took the opportunity to take a look at two of the belt’s inhabitants: 951 Gaspra in 1991, and 243 Ida in 1993\. The probe took a number of detailed images of both asteroids’ surfaces before moving on. It was followed three years later by another probe on February 17th 1996: the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous–Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker) probe, the first specifically designed to study an asteroid: 433 Eros. Like Galileo, it took images of an asteroid while enroute, 253 Mathilde, taking nearly 500 images (nearly 60%) of the asteroid’s surface from a range of 1200 kilometers, before reaching Eros in February 2000\. There, it settled into its orbit and after nearly a year, mission controllers deorbited the satellite and eventually touched down on the surface on February 12th, 2001. Scientific interest in the asteroids has increased in recent years: realizing that asteroids provide a unique insight into the solar system’s earliest days, astronomers have begun closely examining their composition, not for the purposes of mining, but for attempting to locate complex molecules that might have delivered the life’s building blocks to Earth billions of years ago. In the last two decades, various space agencies have dispatched a number of additional probes to various asteroids: Hayabusa in 2010, which delivered samples back to Earth, as well as the Dawn spacecraft, which reached 4 Vesta and Ceres in 2011 and 2015, respectively. [Fractal stepsDante S. Lauretta’s memoir The Asteroid Hunter is a fascinating window for the challenges that a space mission brings![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-12.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3116-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dante-lauretta-osiris-rex-asteroid-hunter-book-review-space-astronomy/) Hayabusa2 arrived at 162173 Ryugu 2018 and returned samples to Earth in 2020, while NASA launched the OSIRIS-REX mission to 101955 Bennu in 2016, with samples coming back to Earth in 2023\. Both Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REX have had their missions extended and are headed to their new targets, 1998 KY26 and 99942 Apophis, where they’ll arrive in the coming years. Undoubtedly, their discoveries will find their way into science fiction stories yet to come. Asteroids have shown up in science fiction in one other major way: when they impact the planet. Arthur C. Clarke open his 1973 novel [*Rendezvous with Rama*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358380221?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a dramatic scene on September 11th, 2077 when an asteroid strikes the Earth: > “Moving at fifty kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of centuries. The cities of Pauda and Verona were wiped from the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.” Clarke’s impact was followed by a dedicated program, SPACEGUARD, to watch the skies for other potential impacts. Over the course of the 20th century, planetary astronomers began to recognize that what Clarke had imagined had happened more than once: asteroids had pummeled Earth for billions of years, often at a devastating cost to the planet’s ecosystem. While the scientific community had discussed the potential threats that asteroids posed, much of that was theoretical until the 1980s, with the publication of a paper by Luis and Walter Alvarez, which posited that it was a massive impact in Mexico that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In July 1994, astronomers had a chance to see what an impact event might look like. A comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 entered the solar system and in 1992, broke up into a number of smaller fragments while orbiting Jupiter. Astronomers quickly realized that the comet would collide with Jupiter, and starting on July 16th, they began to crash into the gas giant, leaving behind giant dark spots in its atmosphere. It’s a concept that dates back more than a century. One early example came in 1912 in the form of a serialized story by George Allen England, [*Darkness and Dawn*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7463?ref=andrewliptak.com), depicting a world devastated by an asteroid impact. Others would follow, such as Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in their 1977 novel [*Lucifer’s Hammer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780449208137?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which depicted the aftermath of a comet impacting the Earth, while in 1979, director Ronald Neame helmed a science fiction film called *Meteor*, about an asteroid impact. Clarke himself returned to the idea in 1993 with his novel [*The Hammer of God*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553568714?ref=andrewliptak.com). Impact events got their biggest pop culture boost just a couple of years later with the release of a television miniseries, 1997’s *Asteroid*, and two 1998 films, *Deep Impact* and *Armageddon*, both of which depicted overwhelming impact events by a comet and asteroid, respectively. The films introduced the threat of an asteroid impact to the general public, and coincided with the scientific community’s efforts to call attention to the issue through a new categorization system called the Torino Scale, which ranks the potential impact threat of a passing asteroid, with 0 meaning no threat and 10 representing a civilization-ending event. Asteroids represented a ready plot device for authors looking for new inspiration for post-apocalyptic fiction–or as a potential new threat as a weapon, as in Robert Heinlein’s [*Starship Troopers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441014101?ref=andrewliptak.com)or James S.A. Corey’s [*Nemesis Games*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316334716?ref=andrewliptak.com). While science fiction authors such as Clarke and directors such as Michael Bay have imagined ways to stop asteroids from striking the Earth, science fiction became reality in September 2022 with the success of a mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Launched in 2021, it was an effort to demonstrate that slamming an object into an asteroid’s surface could be enough to shift its orbit enough to move it off of a potentially hazardous orbit. The mission was a huge success: DART’s impactor hit Dimorphos, a moon orbiting 65803 Didymos, throwing up a massive trail of debris and noticeably shifting its orbit. Hopefully, it’ll be enough when the time does come to stave off an impact: this particular element of planetary science that nobody wants firsthand knowledge of for inspiration. While the solar system’s planets have long been the inspiration for muses across history, asteroids fit into a slightly different box when it comes to their use in science fiction. Their relatively recent discovery meant that they came with little mythology or prior history of storytelling to guide creatives, and as such, authors have put them to use in a variety of ways; as remote islands for stranded astronauts, as convenient locations for isolated communities, as the source for material, and as threats to humanity. They’ve proven to be an immense source of inspiration, even if the drama is turned up past reality at times. 🌔 You can read other installments of this series: \- [Mercury](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Venus](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [The Moon](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Mars](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mars-history-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Jupiter](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jupiter-history-nasa-science-fiction/) ### The Semisesquicentennial Man URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/bicentennial-man-isaac-asimov-science-fiction-robots-semisesquicentennial/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T21:04:25.000Z In January 1975, a science fiction fan named Naomi Gordon approached author Isaac Asimov with an idea: the United States Bicentennial was approaching, and to celebrate the occasion, she proposed an anthology that was built around the idea of “The Bicentennial Man”. It would be edited by well-known fan and editor Forrest J. Ackerman, and it would contain stories from a whole bunch of other well-known authors. Asimov agreed to contribute a story to the effort, and set about envisioning a story around that core phrase. “It seemed to me that to avoid the actual 1976 bicentennial,” he wrote in his memoir *It’s Been A Good Life*, “I would need another kind of bicentennial, and I chose to deal with a two-hundredth birthday. That would mean either a man with an elongated lifespan, or a robot.” He soon finished the story, but the project never materialized. “Naomi was beset by family and medical problems; some writers who promised stories didn’t deliver them; those who did deliver them did not turn out entirely satisfactory products,” he explained in *The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories*. He was eventually scolded by famed editor Judy-Lynn del Rey, who had once suggested an idea that was similar to what he ended up writing. “How is it that when you wrote a story for that anthology, yet when I ask you for one, you’re always too busy?” When Asimov learned that the anthology wasn’t going forward, he returned his advance and turned it over to del Rey, who eventually published it in *Stellar #2* in February 1976, just in time for the U.S. Bicentennial. Asimov later noted that he considered it one of his finest shorter works, and fans agreed. The following year, it earned him a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award for Best Novelette. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1250.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak “The Bicentennial Man” opens with Andrew Martin speaking with a robotic surgeon about an upcoming procedure, one that the robot points out will certainly kill the patient, something it’s unable to do because it’ll violate the the [Three Laws of Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three%5FLaws%5Fof%5FRobotics?ref=andrewliptak.com). That won’t be a problem, Andrew explains: while he looks human, he isn’t. From there, Asimov rewinds the clock two centuries: Andrew is an NDR robot purchased by the Martin family, who begins to display an unusual level of creativity and curiosity. They begin to think of him as part of the family, and they permit him to sell the carvings and woodworking that he begins to create. When the family goes to his manufacturer, United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., to find out why he has these particular abilities, they chalk it up to the complexities of the [Positronic](https://sfdictionary.com/view/92/positronic?ref=andrewliptak.com) brains that their robots are equipped with and offer to replace him with a less defective model. The family refuses, and eventually set the robot up with a bank account for the money he earns. From there, Asimov embarks on a moralistic thought experiment that pairs neatly with the ideals of the founding of the United States: what is the nature of freedom? When Andrew asks to buy his freedom from the family’s matriarch, he’s met with anger and frustration, but it kicks off a decades-long quest to understand the nature of liberty and autonomy. He slowly works through the problems that face him: he’s bound by the constraints of the Three Laws — forced to obey orders by those who give them, and faces the threat of being dismantled — noting that while people can be executed after due process, there’s no such protections for him. He changes his appearance, upgrading his parts to better emulate the humanity he aspires to. Ultimately, Asimov lands on the idea that life — at least life within the human society he envisions — is special because it ends, leading Andrew to take a final step: a last procedure that will sever his last connections to his robotic origins, at the cost of his life. On his 200th birthday, he’s legally recognized as a person — just before dying. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1252.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Asimov’s *Robot* stories are like little mental puzzles that seek to unwind a set of foundational constraints for his imagined future. He began tinkering with robotics starting in 1940 with his story “Robbie”, about a family robot that is owned by a family but eventually given up — only for it to be reunited with them when it saves the family’s young child from an accident. He enjoyed the story, and decided that he wanted to write more of them, and brought an idea about a telepathic robot to his editor at *Astounding Science Fiction*, John W. Campbell Jr. The cantankerous editor sat him down and explained that they’d need some constraints to make the story work: > “Look, Asimov, in working this out, you have to realize that there are three rules that robots have to follow. In the first place, they can’t do any harm to human beings; in the second place, they have to obey orders without doing harm; in the third, they have to protect themselves, without doing harm or proving disobedient.” That conversation proved to be the foundation of Asimov’s Three Laws, a logical set of safety constraints that would allow people to accept robots operating alongside them, and from the various exceptions and problems that arose from conflicts between those laws, Asimov pulled together a whole canon of short stories and novels that look at the nature of robotics and autonomy within society. With *The Bicentennial Man*, he tackled some of the biggest questions that faced his robots: just what was the purpose of robotics in society? What does freedom mean for a population designed and constructed to serve a specific role? And what happens when those individuals grow beyond those roles? Written in 2026, I imagine that an author tackling Asimov’s Three Laws and the nature of robotics in society would draw on some very different inspirations, just as in this semisesquicentennial, we have a much greater understanding of the nuances and pitfalls that make up the American experiment. Asimov’s robots never felt to me as though he thought to draw inspiration from America’s terrible history of slavery and the long shadow that it’s cast, nor does he ever really step into the discussion of the role of labor in a capitalist society. His robots just sort of … exist, as factory workers, laborers, and family servants alongside your idyllic, post-WWII American society. But there are glimmers of some deeper thinking in the novelette: Asimov portrays the United States Robotics and Mechanical Men corporation as a somewhat shady company that’s more interested in trying to protect their bottom line from the possibility of distrust and over the two centuries that Andrew is alive, actively works to change out their products to be less reliant on individual robots in favor of a company offering up enterprise products. Science fiction has continually evolved in the last 50 years, movements like the New Wave and Cyberpunk have added depth and nuance to those themes and ideas that Asimov never really considered. [Cyberpunk’s power came from global dystopian politicsIt might look like the 1980s, but we’re still living in it![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-bbcdb1ba-ccfb-4410-9369-d859ee2907b2.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/image-9-1-2a47a866-a8d4-484f-a474-c1603b59e845.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-power-came-from-global-dystopian-politics/) Written today, “The Bicentennial Man” would have looked very different, but gliding along the same rails: what is the price and nature of freedom? How is it granted with society? How do people — even those with good intention — end up providing friction and outright opposition to it? --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1249.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak “The Bicentennial Man” wasn’t the end for this particular story. Asimov had taken a long break from science fiction before being enticed back in the 1980s for a new novel. His editor at Doubleday, Betty Prashker, met with him and said that they would like to get one from him, a demand that he tried to push back on. That evening, he got a phone call from the publisher’s science fiction editor, Pat LoBrutto: “Listen Isaac, let me make it clear. When Betty said ‘a novel’ she means ‘a science fiction novel’; and a when we say ‘a science fiction novel,’ we mean ‘a *Foundation* novel.’” After demurring for a bit — and after getting an advance — he reread his Foundation trilogy and realized that he began working on what would become *Foundation’s Edge*, and after it became a bestseller when it was released in 1982, he continued the series, eventually uniting his *Foundation* and *Robot* stories together. “Isaac was getting old and not in the best of health,” Robert Silverberg explained to me in an email, “and Doubleday was nagging him to do more novels, since he had had a series of recent best-sellers.” Asimov had some other ideas that he wanted to work on, so editor Marty Greenberg proposed an idea that would help get more novels: take three of Asimov’s novellas and expand them into novels. Silverberg and Asimov had been friends for decades at that point. “Isaac and I were friends from the time we met at the 1955 Worldcon and we saw a great deal of each other between the time he moved from Boston to New York and I moved, years later, from New York to California.” > “He saw me as a sort of junior version of himself — bright Jewish kid from Brooklyn who went on to Columbia University and began selling stories at a very early age, same life and career paths fifteen years apart.” It was a natural pairing, and as Silverberg was going through a divorce, he needed some reliable income. “Isaac agreed, my agent sold the three books to Doubleday for a spectacular advance, and I paid off my divorce with the proceeds of my share.” From there, they got to work. “For the first book, *Nightfall*, I worked closely with Isaac, questioning him about various details of the cosmic setup that is the basis of the story,” Silverberg wrote. “Then I showed him my draft; he was very pleased with it. made just a few suggestions for revisions.” *Nightfall* came out in 1990, and they proceeded with the same process for the second project, *The Ugly Little Boy*: Silverberg questioned him and set about writing, shared his draft, and made corrections. By the time they embarked on the third book, Asimov was ill: he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983\. Over the years that followed, he his health began to decline, and it wasn’t until another surgery in 1990 that he was tested and diagnosed with the illness. In April 1992, he died, never seeing the expansion that Silverberg had been working on. “What makes it all the more poignant is that the story is about a robot who wants to prove that he’s human by dying,” Silverberg explained. The novel was eventually optioned for a feature film adaptation. Written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Christopher Columbus, the film starred Robin Williams as Andrew, and follows him across the centuries as he slowly becomes more and more human. Silverberg described it as “about half of the script was a faithful adaptation of my expansion of Isaac’s story,” with the rest taking some unfortunate liberties and divergences. It’s a fun, goofy film — one that feels ripe for a revisit, especially in an age of artificial intelligence. --- Rereading “The Bicentennial Man” this Independence Day weekend, I was struck at how Asimov conveyed a story that stretches across two centuries. He’s often played with vast stretches of time in his stories: “Nightfall” is all about an episode of destruction in a cyclical cycle, while *Foundation* is about the fast destruction of an Empire that takes place across centuries, and “The Bicentennial Man” is a quieter exploration of change: changes in attitudes, in culture, and desires, all underpinned by the unchanging idea that the pursuit of freedom never ends. It’s a fitting message at a chaotic time, when it feels as though we’ve lost our way in the world. Hopefully, it can serve as a reminder that we live in an unfinished state, and that the journey is what makes it worth accomplishing. ### Table of Contents, July 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-july-2026/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T16:18:43.000Z We're somehow over the halfway point of the year, and with it comes a new batch of short SF/F fiction. Something I didn't anticipate when I launched this column back in May 2025 was how dynamic it's been: I've steadily added a handful of magazines as I've come across them, and the list gets bigger and bigger each month. You can check out last month's (newly updated!) installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-june-2026/), and the prior installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). There's a wealth of short fiction out there, and if you find a story that you like, or a publication that calls to you: help them out. Subscribe, buy an issue, post about it on social media and encourage your friends and followers to check it out. Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Golden Keyboard Award](https://amazingstories.com/2026/07/the-golden-keyboard-award-by-patrick-gower-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Patrick Gower - "[Who Killed the Superhero Xuannu](https://amazingstories.com/2026/07/who-killed-the-superhero-xuannu-by-zhu-yixuan-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zhu Yixuan - "[Barratry](https://amazingstories.com/2026/07/barratry-by-timothy-quinn-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Timothy Quinn - "[Software Glitch](https://amazingstories.com/2026/07/software-glitch-by-mary-jo-rabe-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Jo Rabe --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2026 *Vol. XCVI No. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Red Ships" by Tom R. Pike - "Go Forth And Multiply" by Meg Elison - "Casual Brutality" by Michael T. Kuester - "Dead God’s Algorithm" by Auston Habershaw - "The Inheritance" by Alyssa Abigail Aquino - "Conversations With Callie, Or The Synthesis Of Disdain And Love" by Lettie Prell - "The Elegant Test" by David Horn - "Variables In The Drake Equation" by William Preston - "Sightseers" by Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt - "Disaster Relief" by Jennifer R. Povey - "And Her Bones Made The Hills" by Mel Hubahib Loja - "Falling" by Jen Downes - "The Eemian" by J.A. Schultz - "Churn" by Andrew Dana Hudson - "The End Of The Line" by William Paul Jones - "A Sky For The End Of The World" by Gregor Hartmann - "Along the Farthest Shore" by Robert Frazier - "Hope is an Illogical Concept" by Fiona Perry ### Nonfiction - When a Greenhouse Goes Wild by Kevin Walsh - Guest Editorial: As Above, So Below—and Closer Than They Appear by Howard V. Hendrix - Unknowns, a Slice of Pi by Alec Nevala-lee - Alternate View by John G. Cramer - In Times to Come - The Reference Library by Rosemary Claire Smith - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2026 *Vol. 50 Nos. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "A Flame in the Dark" by Sam W. Pisciotta - "Better the Devil You Know" by Allen M. Steele - "Roma Delenda Est" by Alan Smale - "Oliana’s Skull" by Robert Reed - "Gumchew" by Zack Be - "Last Train to Gertrude Stein" by Sandra McDonald - "Brother Adalbert’s Last Shift" by Karol Lagodzki - "Seeking" by Gregory Marlow - "The Translation of the Sirens" by Matthew De Abaitua - "The Hydrological Cycle of Souls" by Minister Faust - "The Cosmic Knot" by Geoffrey A. Landis - "Ghazal" by Joshua Gage - "The Mussel Shell" by Marianne Hoffard - "Someday We’ll Look Back on This and Laugh" by Marissa Lingen - "So This Is The Middle Kingdom" by Mary Soon Lee ### Nonfiction - Editorial: The 2026 Must Read Books Award by Emily Hockaday - Reflections: One Thing Happens by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Worldwide Editors by James Patrick Kelly - On Books by Paul Di Filippo --- ## [*Aurealis*](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, #191) Subscribe [here](https://aurealis.com.au/product-category/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The New Thirty](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thenewthirty)" by Anne Aulsebrook - "[Crow](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#crow)" by Kit Holmes - "[A Good Age to Go](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#agoodagetogo) by Adam Porkolab ### Nonfiction - From the Cloud by Dirk Strasser - [The Reciprocal Relationship between AI and Pop Culture in the 20th Century](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thereciprocalrelationshipbetweenaiandpopcultureinthe20thcentury) by Lynne Lumsden Green - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Interview with Travis Baldree](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#interviewwithtravisbaldree) by Trevor Howis - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Paying for Impossibility—the Trade-off in Science Fiction](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#payingforimpossibilitythetradeoffinsciencefiction) by Matthew Harrison --- ## [*Baffling Magazine*](https://www.bafflingmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) Support [here](https://www.patreon.com/neonhemlock?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Strike The Sun](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/strike-the-sun?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rhiannon Rasmussen - "[Download.exe](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/downloadexe?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christian M. Ivey - "[Origami Ex Machina](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/origami-ex-machina?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kel E Lyle - "[Coruscate’s Ironclad](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/coruscates-ironclad?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rem Wigmore - "[The Kaiju Grows Orchids Where It Bleeds](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/the-kaiju-grows-orchids-where-it-bleeds?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sabyasachi Roy - "[Limbic Blues](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/limbic-blues?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Conrad Loyer - "[The Reykjavik Disaster](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/the-reykjavik-disaster?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jay Kang Romanus - "[Pilgrim](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/pilgrim?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jason Schembri - "[Toccata and Fugue in Canis Minor](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/toccata-and-fugue-in-canis-minor?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeoi Gawain Lin ### Nonfiction - [Editorial](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-twenty-four/editorial?ref=andrewliptak.com) by D. A. Vorobyov --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issues #461 and #462) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[They Rob the Hybla Bees](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/they-rob-the-hybla-bees/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Morris - "[The Teahouse](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-teahouse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Prashanth Srivatsa - "[Boiled Bones and Black Eggs](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/boiled-bones-and-black-eggs/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nghi Vo - "[Dreams in Burnished Silver](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/dreams-in-burnished-silver/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christine Hanolsy - "[We Are All Strange Ones Here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/we-are-all-strange-ones-here/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sally Sultzman - "[The City of Tears](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-city-of-tears/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Molly Tanzer --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 2026, Issue #238) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K. J. Khan - "[Cliff's Girl](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fiona Moore - "[Focus](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hernandez%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carlos Hernandez - "[The Animator and the Glazer](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ju%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ju Chu, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu - "[Our Revels Now Are Ended](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha - "[This Is an Emergency Broadcast](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/garcia%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.S.A. Garcia - "[Nesting Behavior of Imported Species *Troglodytes aedon* on Planet Americearth](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/meza%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.L. Meza ### Nonfiction - [Donut Brains and Skin Dreams: Aliens on Earth](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/de%5Fwinter%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gunnar De Winter - [Art and Arcade Games: A Conversation with Tran Nguyen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/nguyen%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Horror And Absurdity: A Conversation with Meg Elison](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/elison%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: July Is for Survivors](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F07%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, 134) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Gas Leak at St. Gentian](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/gas-leak-at-st-gentian/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySara Omer - "[The House Mother](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-house-mother/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byKristi DeMeester - "[Please Turn on Your Magic Beam](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/please-turn-on-your-magic-beam/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byOrrin Grey - "[A Thousand Forbidden Weddings and a Song for Dead Darlings](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/a-thousand-forbidden-weddings-and-a-song-for-dead-darlings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAi Jiang --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Summer 2026, Issue #43) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Vessel, Skin, Daughter, Stranger](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-43/vessel-skin-daughter-stranger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - "Your Name Goes Here" by Rich Larson - "Inheritance" by Shobhita Narayan - "Antigone; or, Bath Oil Libations" by Maro Reus - "The Three Apocalypses of Kabir Vasudeva" by Amal Singh ### Poetry - "[Maybe](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-43/maybe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phodiso Modirwa - "Do You Believe There are People Who, Noticing an Insect on the Sidewalk, Step Out of Their Way to Crush It Under Their Feet?" by Andrew Kozma - "There are lonely things in the forest" by Rukman Ragas - "Stoneman Willie Looks Upon His Mummy" by Samuel A. Betiku ### Nonfiction - Dark Souls III and the Exhaustion of a Long Life by Kelsey Nichols - Ask a Necromancer by Amanda Downum --- ## [*Diabolical Plots*](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) Support [here](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Euthanasia Influx](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-137b-euthanasia-influx-by-rowan-hill/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rowan Hill - "[The Last Optician](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-137a-the-last-optician-by-ann-calandro/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ann Calandro --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue 154) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[End of the World](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#end-of-the-world)" by Nick Ekkizogloy - "[Seastrand Beyond](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#seastrand-beyond)" by Anna Clark - "[Fragments Recovered from the Wreck of the Seaglass](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#fragments-recovered-from-the-wreck-of-the-seaglass)" by E. M. Linden - "[A Perfect Light](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#a-perfect-light)" by Laura Duerr - "[Kingdom of Steve](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#kingdom-of-steve)" by Nick Badot ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: Deeper and Deeper](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial-deeper-and-deeper) by Rebecca Halsey --- ## [*Forever Magazine*](https://forever-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue #138) Subscribe [here](https://forever-magazine.com/subscribe.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - Proof of Concept” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller - “Mender of Sparrows” by Ray Nayler ## [*Fusion Fragment*](https://www.fusionfragment.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue #28) Support [here](https://www.patreon.com/cw/fusionfragment?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Birdguts” by Erin Strubbe - “Chutes, Slides, and Ladders” by Allison Wall - “Diet Tips for the Apocalypse” by Sophie Casarico - “Grave Bells” by Corey Farrenkopf - “In the Wake of Whales” by Claire Jia-Wen - “Iso E Super” by Francis Van Ganson - “(Non)deterministic Finite Automata” by Audrey Zhou - “u last saw hana in the mageverse” by Tuesday Pil --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) ### Fiction - "[Prompts for a Perfect Daughter](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/prompts-for-a-perfect-daughter-ai-jiang/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ai Jiang ### Nonfiction - "[From Gospel to Guide](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/parenting-prompts-ooi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yen Ooi --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Portishead Tunnel](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/07/01/the-portishead-tunnel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [J. D. Moyer](https://giganotosaurus.org/people/j-d-moyer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 47) Subscribe [here](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Of Beasts and Bindings" by Ken McEwen - "The Path to Kahinae" by R.R. Virdi - "Cold Comforts" by Matthew Ward - "A Hunter in Arin-Qin" by Daniel Abraham - "That When I Waked I Cried to Dream Again" by Ken Scholes - "Black Hearts and Bloody Murder" by Josh Roundtree - "Reconnaissance Notes Episode IV. Scarper" by Miles Cameron and Emma Burnett ### Nonfiction - The Pebble That Starts the Landslide: Richard Swan on The Infinite State. Interview by Adrian Collins - REVIEW: *Infinite State* by Richard Swan by Adrian Collins - REVIEW: *Killswitch* Protocol by M.J. Kuhn by Krystle Matar - The Art of the Framed Narrative by Z.B. Steele - REVIEW: *The Demon Star* by Jesse Aragon by Pete Barnable - The Art of Awe: Jeff Brown on Fantasy Covers, Dragons, and Epic Scale. Interview by William MccLelland - REVIEW: Dust of the Dead by Michael R. Fletcher by Z.B. Steele - Hope Is the Teeth: Daniel Abraham on Compromise, Power, and Dark Fiction. Interview by Beth Tabler - REVIEW: The Red Sacrament by Sara Hinkley by Fiona Denton --- ## [*Haven Spec Magazine*](https://havenspec.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue ) Subscribe [here](https://havenspec.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Pieces of Anna" by R.L. Meza - "In This Dimension, Do You Still Believe in God?" by Lora Gray - "If You Don’t Return, I Want You To Know" by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor - "Convergence" by Dan Peacock ### Poetry - "flowers, coffee, cinnamon and the long way home" by Arden Baker - "Here Come The Men In Black, or, Out Wrecks The Shroud, or, Kelly’s Black Boyfriend Is Actually The Eschaton???" by Christopher Leigh Silverberg - "The First Spider on the Moon" by H.V. Patterson - "Wintering Grounds" by Anna Madden ### Nonfiction - [Letter from the Editor, Ya Herd?](https://havenspec.com/non-fiction/letter-from-the-editor-ya-herd-july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leon Perniciaro - [Short Stories for a More Sympathetic Robot ](https://havenspec.com/non-fiction/short-stories-for-a-more-sympathetic-robot-july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jessica Peter - [Little Fiction Reviews ](https://havenspec.com/non-fiction/little-fiction-reviews-july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by The Editors of Haven Spec Magazine --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Summer 2026) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“A Song in a Minor Scale](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/a-song-in-a-minor-scale-by-gunnar-de-winter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gunnar De Winter - [“Warmer Welcomes”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/warmer-welcomes-by-mia-xuan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mia Xuan - [“The Bee Fairy”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/the-bee-fairy-by-e-b-sommer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by E.B. Sommer - [“Herschel Finds His Way Back to the Road”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/herschel-finds-his-way-back-to-the-road-by-alex-langer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Langer - [“A Family Forged”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/a-family-forged-by-aaron-emmel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aaron Emmel - [“Hark the Herald”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/hark-the-herald-by-louis-inglis-hall/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Louis Inglis Hall - [“Itsy Bitsy”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/itsy-bitsy-by-u-m-agoawike/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by U.M. Agoawike - [“Carina Sagittarius”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/carina-sagittarius-by-josh-pearce/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Pearce - [“Jurassic Perk”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/jurassic-perk-by-t-k-rex/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T.K. Rex - [“Uglifruit Two-Shoes”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/uglifruit-two-shoes-by-eliezra-schaffzin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eliezra Schaffzin - [“Rift”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/rift-by-uchechukwu-nwaka/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Uchechukwu Nwaka - [“Endless Thirst, Undying Desert”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/endless-thirst-undying-desert-by-alex-yuschik/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Yuschik ### Poetry - [“Enter Rumor, Painted Full of Tongues”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/enter-rumor-painted-full-of-tongues-by-jennifer-crow/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jennifer Crow - [“Apostrophe for the Monstrous”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/apostrophe-for-the-monstrous-by-jonathan-louis-duckworth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jonathan Duckworth - [“a minotaur encounters banshees at a summer concert”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/a-minotaur-encounters-banshees-at-a-summer-concert-by-keira-perkins/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Keira Perkins - [“The Moon Makers”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/the-moon-makers-by-elena-zhang/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elena Zhang - "[radon daughter”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/radon-daughter-by-a-j-dalton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A J Dalton - [“Murmurations”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/murmurations-by-ian-li/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ian Li - [“Whisper a Prayer Before a Walk in the Woods”](https://kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/whisper-a-prayer-before-a-walk-in-the-woods-by-shelagh-rowan-legg/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shelagh Rowan-Legg --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue 194) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[You, Me, Us](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/you-me-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (7/9) - "[Waru Waru](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/waru-waru/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ruth Joffre (7/9) - "[Down in the Dim Kingdoms](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/down-in-the-dim-kingdoms/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tobias S. Buckell (7/16) - "[The Assumption of Maria](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-assumption-of-maria/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Max Gladstone (7/16) - "[Hungry Like The](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/hungry-like-the/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by E. Catherine Tobler (7/16) - "[FETSPACE](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/fetspace/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rhiannon Rasmussen (7/23) - "[The Punishing Animal](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-punishing-animal/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by B. Pladek (7/23) - "[If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/if-a-discarded-god-can-change-so-can-i/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by V.M. Ayala (7/30) - "[Concerto For Wartime](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/concerto-for-wartime/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sean Williams (7/30) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: July 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (7/9) - [Author Spotlight: Ruth Joffre](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-ruth-joffre-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (7/9) - [Author Spotlight: Max Gladstone](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-max-gladstone/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (7/16) - [Book Review: *Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II* by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., eds](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-back-for-blood-never-whistle-at-night-part-ii-by-shane-hawk-and-theodore-c-van-alst-jr-eds/?ref=andrewliptak.com). by Arley Sorg (7/16) - [Author Spotlight: B. Pladek](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-b-pladek-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (7/23) - [Author Spotlight: V.M. Ayala](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-v-m-ayala-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Jeffrey (7/30) - [Book Review: *The Winter Folk* by Jen Julian](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-winter-folk-by-jen-julian/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Melissa A Watkins - [Book Review: *We Interrupt This Program* by Randee Dawn](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-we-interrupt-this-program-by-randee-dawn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (7/30)) --- ## [*Mythmaxis*](https://mythaxis.co.uk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(Summer 2026, Issue 46) Support [here](https://ko-fi.com/mythaxismagazine?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Rooted](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/rooted.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melanie Bell - "[Apex BestLives](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/apex-bestlives.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tim Borella - "[The Loneliest Dog on the Moon](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/the-loneliest-dog-on-the-moon.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alya Marchenko - "[Strip Mine](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/strip-mine.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aaron Emmel - "[Wait Till I Feel Cool](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/wait-till-i-feel-cool.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Julia Tilford - "[Rhea's Stone](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/rheas-stone.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gordon Graham ### Nonfiction - [The Twilight Pariah, by Jeffrey Ford](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/the-twilight-pariah-jeffrey-ford.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bill Ryan - [Short Reviews – February to June, 2026](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-46/short-reviews-february-to-june-2026.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Leon Hudson --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[RS-232 and other forms of grief](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01936-4?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by C. A. Russell - "[Those who forget](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01933-7?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Adam Robson - "[Relapse](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02133-z?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Baker - "[Eyes upturned towards infinity](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02256-3?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [M. E. Garber](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02256-3?ref=andrewliptak.com#author-0) - "[The past is an open can of worms: a stimulated-memory exhibition](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02254-5?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Priya Chand --- ## [*Neon Dystopia*](https://www.neondystopia.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) ### Fiction - "[Devastator](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043636&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeremy Morris - "[Election Day](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043648&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elim Geary --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue 166) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Plague Comes from Chinatown](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-plague-comes-from-chinatown/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen (7/8) - "[A Nebraskan Choir](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/a-nebraskan-choir/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Steve Toase (7/15) - "[Annette Funicello Is My Dream Mouse](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/annette-funicello-is-my-dream-mouse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S. L. Coney (7/22) - "[A Bargain Made in the Monster’s Shadow](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/a-bargain-made-in-the-monsters-shadow/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam W. Pisciotta (7/29) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: July 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial/editorial-july-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (7/8) - [Author Spotlight: Claire Jia-Wen](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-claire-jia-wen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Finch (7/8) - [The H Word: The Walls of the Box](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word/the-h-word-the-walls-of-the-box/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mary Berman (7/15) - [Author Spotlight: S. L. Coney](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-s-l-coney/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (7/22) - [Interview: Chloe Lauter](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/feature-interviews/interview-chloe-lauter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (7/29) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 2026) ### Fiction - "[In the Hours Preceding the Fall of Tau-Sants](https://reactormag.com/in-the-hours-preceding-the-fall-of-tau-sants-rich-larson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Rich Larson](https://reactormag.com/author/rich-larson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Alien Boy](https://reactormag.com/alien-boy-fawaz-al-matrouk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fawaz Al-Matrouk - "[Into Your Sun-Blessed Life](https://reactormag.com/into-your-sun-blessed-life-isabel-yap/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel Yap --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue #37) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Cleave](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-cleave/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Peter M. Ball - "[Pictures of My Dog](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/pictures-of-my-dog/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andy Dibble - "[Ms Anaria’s Classroom Rules for ~~Well-Behaved Kindergartners~~ When Alien Ambassadors Dock with the Wrong Ship](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/ms-anarias-classroom-rules-for/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Catherine Tavares - "[He Washes His Sins in the River](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/he-washes-his-sins-in-the-river/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elijah J. Mears - "[I am the Ocean’s Dreaming](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/i-am-the-oceans-dreaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jenna Hanchey - "[One of Us Carries the Flute](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/one-of-us-carries-the-flute/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jimmy Frohman - "[Visit the Last Gas Station in the World](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/visit-the-last-gas-station-in-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lesley Hart Gunn - "[Ashes and Buttercream](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/ashes-and-buttercream/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Malina Douglas --- ## [*Solarpunk Magazine*](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July / August 2026, Issue 28) Support [here](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/shop/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Ruminants” by T. Chiu-Chu - “Where the Water Carried Us” by Anuoluwa Ngozi - “The One Who Walked in From Omelas” by Jack Wolflink ### Poetry - “The Garden Does Not Forget” by Pravy Jha - “We Grew the City Back” by Khayelihle Benghu ### Essay - “Salah Al-Din Street in Gaza: A Road Through Time and Conflict” by Aya Al-Hattab --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Promises, Promises](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/promises-promises/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cara Masten DiGirolamo - "[Guillotine](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/guillotine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Max Franciscovich - "[Burning Hope on Auntie Regina’s Breast](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/burning-hope-on-auntie-reginas-breast/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Kuriata - "[Digital Black Lung](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/digital-black-lung/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Dolan ### Poetry - "[Hero Worship](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/hero-worship/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jessica Stritch - "[My Dog is a Fish](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/my-dog-is-a-fish/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elizabeth Lee Vines - "[Our Love Is A Fiction Demanding To Be Future](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/our-love-is-a-fiction-demanding-to-be-future/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jenna Hanchey - "[Communion: An Elegy](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/communion-an-elegy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sonia Sulaiman - "[Independence Day Event](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/independence-day-event/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tessa C. Berman - "[Art](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/art/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Poetry](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Bakotsu says his skin is our skin](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/bakotsu-says-his-skin-is-our-skin/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Betsy Aoki - [Becoming State Equipment](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/becoming-state-equipment/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hannan Khan ### Nonfiction - [Imprisoned Lightning: Trust and AI-Generated Submissions](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/imprisoned-lightning-trust-and-ai-generated-submissions/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Romie Stott ### Reviews - Monday: [*Angel Down* by Daniel Kraus](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/angel-down-by-daniel-kraus/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Abigail Nussbaum - Wednesday: [*The Wildcraft Drones* by T. K. Rex](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-wildcraft-drones-by-t-k-rex/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Friday: [*The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire* by India Holton](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-antiquarians-object-of-desire-by-india-holton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande - Monday: [*The Mulai* by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-mulai-by-munir-hachemi-translated-by-julia-sanches/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Macdonald - Wednesday: [*Olyoke* by Vincent Endwell](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/olyoke-by-vincent-endwell/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Lewis - Friday: [*Orca and Bird* by Anna Chilvers](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/orca-and-bird-by-anna-chilvers/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kate Macdonald - Monday: [*Man, Muse, Monster* by Naomi Gibson](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/man-muse-monster-by-naomi-gibson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hana Carolina - Wednesday: [*Midnight Timetable* by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/midnight-timetable-by-bora-chung-translated-by-anton-hur/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoenix Scholz - Friday: [*Anti-State* by Allen Stroud](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/anti-state-by-allen-stroud/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric Hendel --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026) ### Fiction - "[A Game of Three Generals](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/a-game-of-three-generals?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aliette de Bodard - "[The Seed of a New Dream](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-seed-of-a-new-dream?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen - "[Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/moby-dick-ecoterrorist?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James Morrow - "[Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/close-encounters-of-the-ethereal?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zoe Bellerive --- ## [*Three-Lobed Burning Eye*](https://www.3lobedmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2026, Issue 48) Support them [here](https://www.3lobedmag.com/support.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Lady Night’s Menagerie](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory1.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rachael K. Jones - "[Olden](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory2.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nisi Shawl - "[When You Sit By a Window, Look Out](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory3.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nick Mamatas - "[A House Eater Roaming the Divine Garden](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory4.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ai Jiang - "[Lemuria is for Lovers](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory5.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cody Goodfellow - "[Terminal Day](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue48/3lbe48%5Fstory6.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lavie Tidhar --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2026, Issue #71) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Leavetaking](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/leavetaking/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Tia Tashiro (7/7) - “[Learning the Loom](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/learning-the-loom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P. Djèlí Clark (7/7) - “[This Is Just Another Carnaval Love Story](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/this-is-just-another-carnaval-love-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jana Bianchi (7/7) - “[White Lines on a Green Field](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/white-lines-on-a-green-field/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Catherynne M. Valente (7/7) - “[Instructions for Becoming Fire](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/instructions-for-becoming-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Chisomaga Umenyi (7/7) - “[Six Views of a Speedster](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-views-of-a-speedster/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Gwendolyn Hicks (7/7) ### Nonfiction - “[The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-66/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Michael Damian Thomas - “[The Strange Worlds Among Us—of Turing, Trans People, and the Road to Laniakea](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-strange-worlds-among-us-of-turing-trans-people-and-the-road-to-laniakea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ryka Aoki (7/7) - “[*Doctor Who* in an Exciting Adventure with AI Slop 1969 AD](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/doctor-who-in-an-exciting-adventure-with-ai-slop-1969-ad/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Lizbeth Myles (7/7) - [Interview: P. Djèlí Clark](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-p-djeli-clark/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (7/7) --- As always, let me know in the comments what you end up reading, and what you'd recommend to your fellow readers! ### Even more exciting SF/F books to pick up in June 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-kraus-tremblay-tchaikovsky/ Last updated: 2026-06-27T19:01:45.000Z I've been finding that I need a dedicated place to read. The living room is often too crowded and distracting, and crawling in bed to read usually just results in me falling asleep. Over the last couple of weeks, we've had some great weather, so I've found that the perfect reading nook is my front porch. It's pretty small, and in the time we've lived there, it hasn't really been much of a place to sit, but I've been enjoying my time out there. I've got a small flock of chickadees, cardinals, woodpeckers, and sparrows that swoop in to the feeder from the lilac bushes that keep me company, and I ended up purchasing a small, foldable table that's the right height for tea and sugar. It's relaxing, and I'm looking forward to spending some more time this summer working my way through the never-ending pile of books. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, you can support it by signing up as well! Your membership will help with the next batch of work that I've got in the pipeline, nearly 30 pieces that I've got on the schedule, from more book lists to commentaries, reviews, and interviews. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) In case you missed it, here are the [books that I rounded up earlier this month](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-arden-asimov-kim-a/), and as always, you can find prior lists over on the [Book list tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). Okay, here are 16 new SF/F books to close out the month with: ### [*Breach of Containment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896372?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Bonesteel (June 30th) Earlier this month, I noted that Elizabeth Bonesteel reacquired the rights to her novels [*The Cold Between*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896303?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Remnants of Trust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896358?ref=andrewliptak.com), and has republished them under herself. The next installment in the series is *Breach of Containment* (She's since written a fourth installment, [*Condition of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737390985?ref=andrewliptak.com)). I'm a big fan of these books: they're really excellent space operas, and I'm excited to see that she's got full control over them. If you're looking for one of those "hidden gem" type of books, these are some good ones. [Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Central Corps trilogy is a refreshing space operaAn underrated SF trilogy![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/02/central-corps.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/elizabeth-bonesteel-central-corps-trilogy-review/) ### [*A City Dreaming*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250265166?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maurice Broaddus (June 30th) Maurice Broaddus completes his *Astra Black* trilogy (preceded by [*Sweep of Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250264947?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Breath of Oblivion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250265111?ref=andrewliptak.com)). This has been a sweeping afrofuturist space opera, set in the Munungano Empire, a pan-African federation that spread into the solar system in the 2050s. In the first novel, we followed a leader, soldiers, and a starship captain as they worked to figure out their place in this world, and in the second, Broaddus carried those threads forward as they faced a range of new threats – not only to themselves, but to their civilization. In this final installment, the Muunago faces its greatest threat: The Interstellar Alliance is bearing down on them and a war is brewing in our solar system and beyond. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250265166?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Broaddus is unafraid to tackle big questions, such as the nature of consciousness, but never sacrifices plot development for exposition. Few current authors can match the ambitious imagination of this powerful and thought-provoking trilogy." ### [*This is Where the Future Bleeds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835417614?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Brooks (June 30th) Mike Brooks is back with a new fantasy novel: Kitt Carver is a skilled diviner who caters to his world's rich and powerful, telling them their destinies. Things go sideways when one of her brokers is killed, almost taking her out at the same time. It seems that one of the destinies she came across isn't sitting well with some unpleasant people, and she gathers up a motley crew, including a childhood friend-turned duelist, and they set off to track down the person with the destiny to give them a heads up. What she doesn't know is that she has her own destiny, and it could spell everyone else's ruin. [Dark Run deserves to be 2016’s breakout space opera novelA quick glance at the cover and back cover might lead you to think you might know what Dark Run is about. You might think it is a book that you’ve read before: spaceship captain is hired to deliver mysterious cargo to Earth, and finds much more waiting for![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-4.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1338.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/scifi-dark-run-keiko-mike-brooks-space-opera-book-review/) ### [*The Ishtar Deception*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668073308?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James L. Cambias (June 2nd) James L. Cambias adds to his larger *Billion Worlds* series ([*The Godel Operation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982191887?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Scarab Mission*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193249?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Miranda Conspiracy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668072400?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with a new adventure: a spy named Sabbath Okada – an agent from Deimos – has been tasked with investigating the death of a fellow agent. He's accompanied by Daslakh, an AI that serves as his conscious. Their mission takes them to Ishtar, a city on Venus, where they find themselves scrambling for clues amongst the city's elite, to the unforgiving wilds of the planet, encountering corrupt cops, spies, and other enemies – including Meili Tewa, the only person Sabbath has ever loved. ### [*The Tinder Box*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316595490?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.R. Carey (June 23rd) A veteran named Mag Tresti has been recovering from the wounds he received while serving for his country, and ends up working for a reclusive widow named Jannae Mirchella. There's more to her than meets the eye: she has some powers and plans that she's kept well-hidden behind a more peaceful and unassuming front. Things change when a demon is killed, and the pair are forced to team up when they find a tinderbox on the demon's body: a powerful magical object that could grant Mag's wishes, but also change the direction of the world. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mr-carey/the-tinder-box/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "surprising and redemptive; Carey masters yet another subgenre of speculative fiction." ### [*Voyagers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063441217?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Meg Charlton (June 16th) When humanity detects a signal from the outer reaches of the solar system, it upends the world: there's disruption to satellites and plans, and humanity believes that they're on the cusp of first contact. For one – a lawyer named Alex, it's the reopening of an old wound – years ago, he and a girl named Ana vanished for 36 hours in what appeared to be an alien abduction, thrusting them into the spotlight. The experience brought them together, but the pressure eventually pushed them apart. With the entire world enraptured by the Signal, Alex goes to seek out Ana – now an advocate for abductees, and they're forced to confront their original experiences. *Kirkus Reviews* [says that](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/meg-charlton/voyagers-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "in lesser hands, this book might have been a schlocky story about chosen family or a hard-edged dystopian look at the way facing the unknown can bring out the worst in humans. But Charlton strikes just the right notes of smarts and warmth, and the result is an uncommonly confident debut novel." ### [*Foundling Fathers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964580?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Meg Ellison (June 23rd) In this satirical science fiction novel, a tech company has cloned America’s founding fathers in an experiment, and things go awry when Benjamin finds an iPhone when it’s supposed to be 1750\. He takes it to his brothers, Thomas, John, and George, and it upends their lives. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964580?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Elison has a lot of fun with historicity and her characters are all finely wrought, especially Himmel, whose care for the boys as their surrogate mother butts up against her involvement in the Antediluvian cause. It’s a clever mash-up of American history and modern politics that will have readers both laughing and squirming. ### [*Retro*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217091362?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jessica M. Goldstein (June 23rd) An actress named Ash has been looking for work and stumbles upon an interesting opportunity online: a job for a time travel company. She signs up as an agent, leading tours of wealthy travelers who make the trip back into the past to everything from the Gold Rush to prohibition, and everything in between. She finds that she loves her job, even if it's not what she expected to be doing. Just she starts to realize that things are blurring a bit: her real life and her memories and relationships, and she has to come to terms with the fact that slipping into the past isn't always the escape that it seems. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jessica-m-goldstein/retro-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "a nuanced, biting cautionary tale about how not staying present can erase our very selves." ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730118?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Sixth Nik*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668079478?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Kraus (June 23rd) Right on the heels of a [Pulitzer Prize win](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/daniel-kraus?ref=andrewliptak.com) and a [looming adaptation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67ho3OxCmmM&ref=andrewliptak.com) of his novel [*Whalefall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781665918183?ref=andrewliptak.com), Daniel Kraus's next book looks like a lot of fun. In the distant future and way out in the depths of space, a living starship called The Sickness is sailing through space. Onboard is a 9-year-old cultist named Sisilla, who's been enhanced by an arcane technology known as niks. She's boarded the ship to figure out a mystery: why a planet called Fém has gone rogue. She has to contend with the ship's strange crew of assassins, engineers, medics, and officers, all while The Sickness has been changing in strange ways. They eventually find that the situation involving Fém is more horrific, and to survive, Sisilla will have to put aside the plans for her life and make some drastic decisions. In the *Chicago Review of Books*, Philip Janowski [writes that](https://chireviewofbooks.com/2026/06/23/daniel-kraus-the-sixth-nik/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the novel teems with what makes for the very best science fiction: thought-provoking scientific ideas, strong characters, evocative scenery and descriptions, strange worlds, and the exploration of individual and societal morality." ### [*Songs of the Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668068144?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian (June 16th) This is the first book of a series called *The Strata Wars*, and it comes from an idea that Sanderson had a while ago. It follows a struggling musician in London, who is awakened after he’s killed in a new reality where light and music create magic in this new world he discovers that a revolution is brewing against the living, threatening the entire world. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/brandon-sanderson/songs-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a headbanging beginning to what could be a remarkable urban fantasy series—heavy metal playlist sadly not included." ### [*Star Wars: The Art of Andor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419775680?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phil Szostak (June 30th) This is one of my more anticipated reads of the year: finally, a behind-the-scenes look at my favorite *Star Wars* series, *Andor*. Szostak has written a whole bunch of these art books for the franchise, and I'm particularly interested in reading creator Tony Gilroy's foreword and writer Dan Gilroy's afterword. But most of all, I'm really excited to see how this series was conceived: what types of designs did they set out to bring to life? How did they play out the story? How did they adapt the second season into its unusual structure? I'm eagerly awaiting my preorder. ### [*Green City Wars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250290335?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 23rd) *Another* book from Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one is described as "Philip Marlowe meets *Redwall"* and it's set in a future where human life in leisure and genetically engineered animals called Little Helpers, serve humanity in the shadows. Skotch is a Raccoon and private investigator who's willing to take on almost any gig. When a mouse goes missing, and he's hired to try and track him down. In most cases, a mouse going missing wouldn't attract any attention, but this particular mouse has something that everyone seems to be after, even if Skotch can't quite get anyone to say what *it* is. ### [*Devils We Know*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781547615230?ref=andrewliptak.com) by L.T. Thompson (June 9th) In this sequel to last year's [*Devils Like Us*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781547615193?ref=andrewliptak.com), Cas, Remy, and Finn are friends who're on the run from a mysterious organization, the Order of Lazarus, which wants to use Cas's powers to capture Death and utilize its abilities for their own purposes. That would upend the laws of nature, and impact the trio themselves. The three of them take off onboard the *Mori*, where they can exist as their true selves, and in order to protect themselves, they set out to find Death themselves, and prevent the Order from their own nefarious plans. *Kirkus Reviews* [says that](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lt-thompson/devils-we-know-devils-like-us-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Thompson carefully interweaves the various plot strands, creating an impressively balanced narrative. The historical setting provides a striking backdrop for a marvelously modern queer-conscious space." ### [*Ring Shout on Saturn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798992483833?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sheree Renée Thomas (June 9th) Sheree Renée Thomas brings together a new collection of her shorter fiction (the second of three, following [*Mojorhythm*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798989908943?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which includes stories of salvaged spaceships, children breaking generational curses, aliens, spirits, and quite a bit more. ### [*Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063398467?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Tremblay (June 30th) Paul Tremblay is one of my favorite horror authors: he's written books like [*A Head Full of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062363244?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Disappearance at Devil's Rock*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063312470?ref=andrewliptak.com), which end up being some terrific character stories with a light touch of the supernatural or otherworldly. His next looks like it'll be a fascinating one: about a woman named Julia Flang, a former semi-professional gamer who's offered a job that she can't refuse: a tech company needs someone to help bring a man with an AI implanted in his brain from California to the East coast. It sounds like a chilling, prescient novel about the state of technology and the world we live in. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063398467?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the narrative culminates with a chilling treatise on unchecked AI and corporate greed that deserves applause for its boldness. This is sure to satisfy the author’s fans." [Pushing against nostalgiaPaul Tremblay on his next horror novel, The Pallbearer’s Club![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-498f146e-90a9-4bab-9430-2d31fdafd282.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2021-12-07-at-3.06.01-PM-4f9ebb18-1ca5-4a04-8d78-59c72b9a9626.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-pallbearers-club-horror/) ### [*From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262553865?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jules Verne (June 30th) MIT Press has issued a new edition of Jules Verne's classic novel *From the Earth to the Moon.* This edition features a whole bunch of essays to accompany the story by authors Samit Basu, Jordan Bimm, Erika Nesvold, Adam Oyebanji, Malka Older, Adam Roberts, and Asif Siddiqi. --- Let me know what catches your eye on this list, and what you've got on your TBR! ### Netflix is developing a series based on Alix Harrow's The Everlasting URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-netflix-fantasy-streaming-series/ Last updated: 2026-06-23T19:05:13.000Z One of my [favorite reads of 2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/) was Alix E. Harrow's novel [*The Everlasting*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799081?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a great fantasy about a historian named Owen Mallory who's tasked by the leader of the fascist-leaning Dominion, to write the definitive origin story for his nation. There's a bit of a twist: he's sent back in time to accompany the nation's heroine, Una Everlasting, to witness her exploits and contemporaneously write the legend. Things get a little complicated from there: he falls in love with Una, and begins to realize that there's more to his mission than he was told: by observing and documenting her story, he's changing and transforming it, often to suit the needs of the future that he came from – a future that's slipping more and more into totalitarianism. [Origin storiesAlix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting is a powerful book about a nation’s origin story and how such narratives can be manipulated![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-2ea208b5-e8bd-41fc-93ef-e3845c1fff04.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7948-ac2debc8-e8de-472b-b711-ea47a7981d12.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/) As I noted in my review, it's a book about how origin stories and history can be manipulated for political gain, and as we're approaching the semiquincentennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it's a book with a message that's worth reflecting on. And maybe soon, a streaming series. [*Variety* reports](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/the-everlasting-tv-show-netflix-1236787806/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Netflix is putting a series in development based on the novel. Screenwriter Daphne Ferraro (*Dark,* *Maxton Hall*) has been tapped to write and produce the project, with Harrow serving as Executive Producer. Over on Bluesky, Harrow [expressed her excitement](https://bsky.app/profile/alixeharrow.bsky.social/post/3moxtk46aec2d?ref=andrewliptak.com): "i keep trying to find a chill or ironic way to post this and there is simply nothing chill about it!!! ahhhhHHHhhhhhhhh!!!!!" ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. There's a long way to go before – or if – this ends up on Netflix's platform. Development is the first step in a long process that takes the story and begins the process of turning it into a show: there might be a writer's room to generate scripts or concept art, details and elements that will provide the streaming service with enough information about the show to get it to a point where it can be greenlit and put into production. But: it's a first step, and it's exciting an exciting development for the process. It's a fine novel, and I can see this playing out well as a series. Hopefully, it'll make its way through the gauntlet and onto screens without too many issues. ### Peacock has greenlit Dungeon Crawler Carl for a series URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dungeon-crawler-carl-series-peacock-matt-dinniman/ Last updated: 2026-06-19T14:59:08.000Z That was fast: a little over two months after [word broke](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dungeon-crawler-carl-matt-dinniman-tv-adaptation-peacock/) that Peacock was developing a live-action adaptation of Matt Dinniman's *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series, it's now official: Peacock has greenlit the project in a straight-to-series order. Dinniman revealed the news in a [social media post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZv5ZlrMQN2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that he and the team were excited about the project, and that he and writer Chris Yost will likely reveal some more details about it at this year's San Diego Comic Con. The series will be produced through Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door and Universal Global Television and written by Yost (*Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord*, and others). Dinniman will also be involved as a co-executive producer. If you've not come across the series: it's comprised of eight novels: [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820254?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*This Inevitable Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190041?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*A Parade of Horribles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190065?ref=andrewliptak.com), which are set after an apocalyptic alien invasion destroys Earth and converts what remains into a series of deadly dungeons that the few million human survivors are shepherded into and forced to compete in a sadistic galaxy-wide reality TV series called *Dungeon Crawler World*. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The novels follow Coast Guard veteran named Carl and his ex-girlfriend's tortoiseshell Persian show cat Grand Champion, Breed Winner Regional, National Winner Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk (Princess Donut) as they fight to survive each successive level, while also fighting against the system that they're trapped in. They're a good amount of fun: they're irreverent and goofy, but also pretty heart-felt – a little like the TV series *M\*A\*S\*H*, where there's a lot of humor mixed in between the darker and emotional moments. Dinniman initially self-published the novels in serial form before moving them over to Amazon and an impressive audiobook edition narrated by Jeff Hayes. In 2024, he signed a print-only deal with ACE books, and they've since shot up the bestseller lists, and their popularity doesn't seem to be waning anytime soon. Dinniman's steadily expanded the series title to a variety of other mediums this year: Vault Comics released a [graphic novel adaptation](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781638493655?ref=andrewliptak.com) in May, while Renegade Studios just [concluded a massive crowdfunding campaign](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/renegade-game-studios/dungeon-crawler-carl-rpg-unstoppable?ref=andrewliptak.com) that pulled in more than $13 million from 55,000 backers for an RPG edition. A television series adaptation is another big swing for Dinniman and the title: since its release, it's amassed an enormous fanbase around it. Expectations for any adaptation will be sky-high, not only because the books are big, loud, and full of weird creatures and locations, but also because readers and listeners have such a clear vision for the characters in their heads: it'll be interesting to see how they handle casting the various characters (in my view, if you want to do it right, just cast Jeff Hayes as Princess Donut, because his narration and voice for her is already perfect – no notes.) Straight-to-series means that the studio has a good amount of confidence in it and is ready to get it headed to production. That's not a guarantee that it'll happen – [recall the recent news about Amazon's *Stargate* revival](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-stargate-revival-cancelled-scifi-mgm-prime-video/) – but it's a good step along the way to seeing these characters jump from the book to live action. ### The A-Z of film URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/comprehensive-dictionary-of-cinema-film-television-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-07-13T21:46:35.000Z Is it weird to want to read an entire dictionary? That's the thought that went through my head as I paged through my copy of [*The Comprehensive Dictionary of Cinema*](https://cinematicalism.com/products/use-this?ref=andrewliptak.com), written by Kory Orban, Chrissy Mozylisky, Scooter Corkle, and a cohort of Cinematicalist, and it's a book that I wish existed when I was working as a writer and editor full time. I'm finding it to be an indispensable resource, and every time I crack it open, I find myself lingering on each page, taking in new terms – and realizing that there's more to learn about the terms that I've used frequently over the years. Launched as a [Kickstarter project last year](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cinematicalism/the-comprehensive-dictionary-of-cinema-a-to-z-of-film?ref=andrewliptak.com), the authors write in the book’s introduction that it was intended as a wide-ranging guide: “we built this book to be a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible collection of terminology that examines film and television through academic, fan-centric, technical, creative, and industry lenses. It’s an ambitious tome — and weighing in at 1,292 pages, it certainly falls into what I think of as a “Cat-Killer Class” book — that encompasses an enormous range of topics, spread out across film theory, taxonomy, screenwriting, the film business, the art of filmmaking, production, techniques, effects, promotion and awards, presentation, and how we discuss films. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and with a huge team of writers and editors, this feels very much like they’ve succeeded in their mission. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Talking about film is something I’ve done a lot over the course of my career as a writer: I’ve written everything from film reviews to news updates, deep-dives into Hollywood productions and franchises, and mused about the nature of the stories this industry produces. But I grew up in Vermont, thousands of miles away from where these stories are made — I don’t have a degree or training in film or television, and much of my experience has been as an outsider, learning on the go: reading good pieces of work, paying attention to how the industry works, taking part in press junkets, occasionally visiting sets and productions, and reading up on behind-the-scenes features and books to understand how Hollywood operates. I’ve learned a lot over the course of my career, but there’s something satisfying about having a tome that anchors the vast terminology of cinema in one place: a helpful reference for when I need to better understand what a “bottle episode” is (An episode of series television that takes place in a single location, often centering around character dynamics rather than story development. Bottle episodes are frequently produced to reduce costs, accommodate schedule constraints, or allow writers to focus on character, performance, and relationships in greater depth.) or what “greenlight” actually means (To formally approve a film or television project to proceed into production. In industry usage, a greenlight typically follows development and packaging and signifies that financial, scheduling, and key creative elements have been sufficiently approved to authorize spending and physical execution.) I know what these things mean because I’ve seen them used in context over the years. I know that a film’s “Gross” means how much money it took in, but now I know that it’s “the total theatrical box office revenue generated by a film before deductions such as exhibitor splits, distribution fees, or marketing costs.” Or that a television show’s syndication means that it’s sold for broadcast elsewhere. “The licensing of a completed television program to multiple broadcast or cable outlets for exhibition outside of its original commissioning network or platform.” But more than just a helpful reference, a book like this provides useful connective tissue and an agreed-upon foundation for writers and industrial professionals. Having a better vocabulary leads to better and more precise writing, and while I don’t feel that I’ve been a poor or sloppy writer when it comes to films, there’s always room to improve. In a world where film writing is being reduced to click-bait lists and sensationalized “articles”, writers having the tools to improve their craft and the way in which they can write about the industry has never been more important, especially as these sites cut their rates so low that most good writers can’t afford to exist in the field anymore. This book doesn’t solve those big, systemic problems, but in the week that I’ve been paging through it, I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful tool for myself, something that I can use to level up my own criticism and commentary, and a route through which I can think about and better understand the industry that I frequently cover. At its core, this is just a good practice as a writer. But while I do pull out a dictionary from time to time, I’ve never been particularly compelled to *read* it. That’s not the case with this volume: I find it compulsively readable, flipping it open to find a term only to find myself going down a daisy-chain of terms to find things that I’ve never known about, or to find out exactly what it is an “Executive Producer” does (“A senior creative or managerial role credited on a film and television project, encompassing a range of responsibilities that may include securing financing, overseeing development, supervising production, or providing high-level creative or strategic guidance.”). I’m looking forward to the things that I’ll learn from it. ### Subterranean Press is winding down its operations URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/subterranean-press-scifi-fantasy-genre-publishing/ Last updated: 2026-06-16T23:16:19.000Z Bill Schafer has revealed that he's planning on retiring from his role running specialty genre publisher [Subterranean Press](https://subterraneanpress.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and that he'll be winding down its operations in the coming years (via [*Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2026/06/subterranean-press-to-close/?ref=andrewliptak.com)). The plan is to close down in an orderly fashion, and to finish out their existing series and obligations, handing off some of their work to other presses. He notes that the press will likely finish out its work by the end of 2027. When I reached out to them, they provided me with the same statement they provided to *Locus*: > Tim and I plan to retire from SubPress, but we have a flexible, multi-year plan in place to accomplish this. We intend to publish a full schedule through the end of 2027, which may bleed into 2028 as we wrap things up. > > I can’t really say more because we want to handle this in a structured, orderly fashion, which will include communicating with a large number of writers, artists, as well as publishers we license rights from. > > I can tell you that one goal of our plan is that we either complete a number of ongoing series, or place them with other presses, to be continued in the same style as our volumes, so long-time customers will have a uniform set. Schafer founded Subterranean Press in 1995\. Over the decades, it's become known for its high-quality, collectible volumes of genre literature, publishing a range of limited editions, trade editions of hard-to-find shorter works, short fiction collections, standalone novellas, art books, and more. Over the last three decades, they've published hundreds of books, and have amassed a dedicated following amongst genre readers and writers. It's not clear why the business will close down entirely, or what other presses and organizations will take over some of those ongoing series. [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-a3ebbc5b-7474-45b8-be0c-ed45715e3776.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-ed95cc1d-2180-4ad1-b9d5-f08f0f7179a3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) The closure comes as the larger traditional publishers have begun to adopt some of the same tactics and features for their own releases that specialty publishers like Subterranean have been known for, such as sprayed edges, exclusive art, and other perks. But despite those efforts to bring these upgraded editions to consumers in a social media era, Subterranean's books often far exceed those [more readily available editions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/). The publisher's books that I've had the pleasure of owning over the years are not just handsome editions, but good stories from a press that has contributed enormously to the SF/F community. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/06/IMG_0647.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak I reached out to a handful of authors who've published with Subterranean over the years, and to a person, they not just praised the quality of the books they produce, but were quick to single out Schafer as a pillar of the SF/F community who took an exacting and detail-oriented approach and to the authors he published. Alix Harrow (who published *The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, Starling House,* and *Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended* with Subterreanean) described him as "one of the kindest, most generous people I've ever met. I kept wondering, early on, what I could possibly have done to earn that kind of consideration; it occurred to me eventually that he's just one of those people who gives it away for free." Jeff VanderMeer (*Absolution, Ambergris, Bliss, The Complete Borne, Dead Astronauts*, and *Hummingbird Salamander*) noted that "he's been absolutely above and beyond the usual as a publisher of limited editions," and recounted an instance when he was first transitioning to full-time writing and sold a story to Schafer on spec, *Borne:* > "At a certain point, I had to withdraw the piece, because I wasn't ready to write it; I knew it wasn't going to be a novella. He knew that I was still a full-time writer and he was just unbelievably gracious and how I was paying back the advance. He could have been upset about it. He understood entirely – he understands writers." He, and other authors I spoke with noted that Schafer has bene known to be extremely generous to authors in the community, often lending support or helping them out behind the scenes in ways that go far beyond the books he published. Everyone I spoke with also praised his approach to the books he published. "What a marvelous contribution to the field, what an outstanding crew, and what an incredible company," Cherie Priest (author of *Clementine, Dreadful Skin, Holy Terror, Jacaranda,* and *Those Who Went Remain There Still*) said. She also noted that she was conflicted: "on the one hand, I'm sad to see such a good thing come to a close. \[But\] on the other, what a run, eh?" John Scalzi (who published numerous collections and novellas with Subterranean over the years) recounted that he had an excellent experience working with them, and that it was a company willing to take risks on the stories they acquired. "They were happy to publish stuff from me that was outside my usual remit (*The God Engines*) and gave me a home for my essay compilations. SubPress understood its market and addressed it really well, and as a small publisher with a specific business model, I don't think anyone has been smarter." "He doesn't just do reprint, limited editions," VanderMeer said. "They publish some surprising books. They do a lot of collected fiction, sometimes without a trade edition (or they'll do the trade edition themselves). I think having the mix really helps." Paolo Bacigalupi ( *Alchemist*, *Drowned Cities*, *Shipbreaker*, *The Windup Girl,* and *Zombie Baseball Beatdown*) wrote in an email that "I think that Bill deserves praise for his work in turning novella-length works into marketable objects, and reinvigorating a type of storytelling that had fallen by the wayside...I don’t think you’d have Martha Wells *Murderbot* series from Tor if you didn’t have Subterranean Press breaking ground first, and proving that novella length stories had both merit and a market." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Over the years, I've picked up a handful of Subterranean's books, and I've been impressed with how there's a link between the quality of their books and the stories their physical volumes contain. While they do publish high-end limited editions of many of the genre's best books, they also publish the things that most trade publishers might not pick up, such as novellas like Cixin Liu's novella *The Cretaceous Past,* Arkady Martine's *Rose/House*, or Ted Chiang's *Lifecycle of Software Objects*. These are all good stories that not only found a home with the publisher, but which were also given a consideration and weight that goes beyond what you might find from the larger publishing industry. It's that focus on good storytelling and good packaging that established Subterranean as one of the best in the business: not just for their products, but because their products are art in and of themselves. While many of the regular trade publishers have begun to adopt the bells and whistles for special "deluxe" or "collector's" editions of hot titles, these efforts can sometimes feel like afterthoughts, tacked on to bump up the edition's list price. Subterranean's books never felt phoned in. Harrow praised the quality of their books: "seeing the care they put into every book and the range and depth of their list, was a treat and an education for a debut SFF author. In a publishing climate that feels increasingly fueled by trends and virality, subject to censorship and stockholders, disinterested in their own midlist – the loss of SubPress feels enormous." "He puts a lot into the books, VanderMeer explained, "Quite frankly, there's some special presses where you find a fair amount of typos or mistakes, and I've never found that to be true with Subterranean. They take a great deal of pride in their work." I'll be sad to see the company announce that it's closing its doors, but at the same time, I'm happy that this doesn't seem to be a situation where it's been forced to do so. Subterranean set a high bar for the SF/F community: not only demonstrating the value of quality and attention to detail, but in serving as a stellar citizen of the SF/F community. ***Update, June 16: added comments from Paolo Bacigalupi.*** ### Doctor's out URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/doctor-who-cancellation-bbc-television/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T14:48:46.000Z Earlier this week, the BBC [made a big announcement](https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features/an-update-on-the-future-of-doctor-who?ref=andrewliptak.com): *Doctor Who* showrunner Russell T. Davies and production company Bad Wolf are stepping away from the long-running science fiction television series, nearly a year after the show was on the air. The BBC [explains](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c621ln7vx7qo?ref=andrewliptak.com) that a [previously-greenlit Christmas special](https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/doctor-who-future-confirmed-new-christmas-special-2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) for 2026 has been cancelled, and that it would be putting the series "out to competitive tender this year" – inviting other production companies to take over the next iteration of the franchise. It's unclear when the Doctor and his companions will show up again on television screens. *Doctor Who* is the longest-running science fiction television series in the world – it first aired on November 23rd, 1963, envisioned as a series that could teach British children concepts of science and history. It follows a central character – The Doctor – a time travelling alien known as a Time Lord who visits Earth in a time travelling spaceship known as the TARDIS (which looks like a British Police box), and who bounces around throughout time and space, often with a human companion or two. Part of the show's longevity comes down to a central conceit: The Doctor periodically "regenerates", transforming into a new form – whenever the actor portraying him steps away and a replacement comes in. Over the show's long history, there have been 14 actors who've played the part, the most recent being Ncuti Gatwa, who portrayed the 15th Doctor. (David Tennant played the 10th and 12th iterations). The series has gone on and off the air throughout its 60+ year run: it ran more or less continuously between 1963 and 1989, after which point the BBC cancelled it. In 1996, it returned briefly with a television movie in the US, and in 2003, the broadcaster announced that it would be reviving the series, with Davies tapped as showrunner. The series officially returned in 2005 with a new Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), and a new companion, Rose (Billie Piper). The revival was a hit and kicked off a new era for the franchise, but Eccelston only lasted for a single season. In the following year, he was replaced by David Tennant. In the years that followed, there would be some additional departures: Davies left and was replaced by Stephen Moffat, while Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, Jodie Whittaker, and Gatwa all put their own spins on the character. The series brought several of those characters together for various anniversary episodes – Smith and companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) were joined by Tennant and Piper, along with John Hurt (who played a previously unseen version of the Doctor), while the 60th anniversary of the series was marked with a special episode marked the return of Tennant and Donna (Catherine Tate). The 50th anniversary also saw the release of *An Adventure in Space and Time, a* 90-minute drama about the show's creation and early years, which saw actor [David Bradley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%5FBradley%5F%28English%5Factor%29?ref=andrewliptak.com) portraying William Hartnell, who played the show's first Doctor (and which came with a gut-punch cameo from Tennant.) While the revivals have been popular, the series has been experiencing some difficulties and challenges in recent years. Whittaker starred as the franchise's first female Doctor (which attracted criticism from predictable corners of the internet and social media), while Gatwa was the first Black actor to portray the character. Ratings for the series have [consistently fallen](https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor-who-series-15-ratings-bad-104495.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com) since the show was relaunched in 2005, marked by changing viewer habits and a more polarized online fandom. On the production side, the series has encountered other troubles: [the BBC partnered with Disney+ in 2022](https://press.disneyplus.com/news/bbc-and-disney-branded-television-join-forces-on-doctor-who-disney-plus-new-global-home?ref=andrewliptak.com), which would help the BBC distribute the series to audiences around the world and bring it to new heights as it's done with its other franchises. But that partnership quickly fizzled: in 2025, [Disney left](https://deadline.com/2025/10/doctor-who-disney-plus-pulling-out-bbc-christmas-special-1236600026/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [with various people pointing to](https://deadline.com/2025/10/why-disney-ditched-doctor-bbc-1236601181/?ref=andrewliptak.com) low ratings, cultural issues, and a general lack of enthusiasm from the company as reasons. At the same time, Gatwa stepped away from the role, with the final episode ending on a moment where he regenerates into what appears to be Rose – Billie Piper's companion to the 9th Doctor. With the collapse of the show's ratings, Disney's departure, and the lack of a new Doctor, it seems that Davis, Bad Wolf, and the BBC just didn't have a plan for where to take the character and the franchise. All of those factors point to a need for the BBC to make some sort of change to the franchise, because it doesn't appear that it's resonating with viewers in the way that it did two decades ago. [In a new report](https://deadline.com/2026/06/doctor-who-off-air-for-years-creative-regeneration-1236953045/?ref=andrewliptak.com), *Deadline* spoke with a handful of British producers, who pointed out that there are a considerable number of challenges that anyone would face jumping into the franchise, ranging from said company not owning the rights, and funding. I've been an off-and-on fan of the series since it restarted back in 2005 – I've always thought that it had moments of greatness in between dull or tedious episodes, and eventually gave up watching because of how uneven I found it, and then found that it was just hard to jump back in. My general sense is that the BBC and whoever they partner with needs to step back and give the show an overhaul – not to change the core, iconic elements, but to really think through their approach, storytelling, and writing in a way that appeals to a broad audience that goes beyond the show's dedicated fanbase. I also get the sense that getting locked into an annual schedule just isn't a healthy approach for something like this – at what point do you begin to write episodes just to have episodes and new content to fill the schedule? History shows that this is an appealing concept – time travelling Doctor and companions leaves open plenty of possibilities, but at the same time, it's also possible for one's storytelling to drift to appeal to an increasingly specific audience, and I think that's what's happened here. I don't have any doubt that it'll be back: it's too enduring of a character and icon for television audience. But hopefully, a years-long break will be an opportunity for the franchise to recharge its creative batteries and room to breathe for audiences to rediscover. ### Even more awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-awards-ignyte-arthur-c-clarke-shirley-jackson-seiun/ Last updated: 2026-06-10T19:00:34.000Z The award season for the SF/F community is in full swing, and we've already seen the winners for the [Bram Stoker](https://www.andrewliptak.com/bram-stoker-award-stephen-graham-jones-buffalo-hunter-winners-horror/), [Locus](https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2026-harrow-okorafor-jones/), and [Nebula](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-winners-2026-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/) Awards, as well as the nominations for the [Hugos](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-finalists-2026-science-fiction-fantasy-books/). Also, as a bit of a programming note, I've added a new tag, "[Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/awards/)" that'll gather up the coverage here in one place. It's barebones at the moment, but I'll be going back into the archives to add the tag to prior posts soon. In the last week or so, conventions and organizations around the world have released their picks for the finalists for their respective awards. Here's a roundup of some of the bigger ones. First, earlier this spring, I did another one of these [awards roundups](https://www.andrewliptak.com/british-science-fiction-bram-stoker-la-times-awards-finalists/), and it's time for an update. I did a post for the Bram Stoker Awards (linked above) but the other two have issued their results: The British Science Fiction Association [announced their winners](https://bsfa.co.uk/Past-Winners?ref=andrewliptak.com) in April: - Best Novel: *When There Are Wolves Again* by E.J. Swift - Best Shorter Fiction: “[The Apologists](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson%5F11%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Tade Thompson - Best Short Fiction: “[Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike](https://podcastle.org/2025/07/29/podcastle-902-godzilla-as-a-young-man-named-mike/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by E.M Faulds - Best Collection: *Blood in the Bricks* by Neil Williamson - Best Fiction for Younger Readers: *Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution* by Una McCormack - Best Long Non-Fiction: *Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction* by Paul Kincaid - Best Short Non-Fiction: “[Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/spec-fic-and-the-politics-of-identity-finding-the-self-in-other/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugen Bacon - Best Translated Short Fiction: “[Liecraft](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/liecraft?srsltid=AfmBOorzsHaS2JiYuLkUApI3xp8sInqVJjKNvIXYOUiM88dYnMkgLQj4&ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anita Moskat, translated by Austin Wagner - Best Artwork: *Fractal Series* (12 book tessellated cover) by Nick Wells - Best Original Audio Fiction: *The Dex Legacy Series 3* by Emily Inkpen And [*The L.A. Times* selected](https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books/book-prizes?ref=andrewliptak.com#poetry) *Luminous* by Silvia Park for its winner for the Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction category. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Okay, here are the latest handful of finalists: --- ## Ignyte Awards First up, the Ignyte Awards announced their finalists for 2026\. This award was founded in 2020 alongside FIYAHCON, as an "attempt to correct representative gaps in traditional spec lit awards and have grown into a coveted and cherished addition to the awards landscape." These awards honor the "vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre." Here's a selection of this year's finalists: ### Outstanding Novel: Adult - *A Song of Legends Lost* by M.H. Ayinde - *Cursed Daughters* by Oyinkan Braithwaite - *Motheater* by Linda H. Codega - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Harmattan Season* by Tochi Onyebuchi ### Outstanding Novella - *The Iron Below Remembers* by Sharang Biswas - *Audition for the Fox* by Martin Cahill - *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar - *Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce - "[Descent](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/talabi%5F05%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wole Talabi ### Outstanding Novelette - “[Uncertain Sons](https://undertowpublications.com/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons) - “[We Begin Where Infinity Ends](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ihezue%5F02%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Somto Ihezue (*Clarkesworld* 2/25) - “[What I Saw Before the War](https://reactormag.com/what-i-saw-before-the-war-alaya-dawn-johnson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (*Reactor* 1/22/25) - “[Human Voices](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/human-voices/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Isabel J. Kim (*Lightspeed* 9/25) - “[Never Eaten Vegetables](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pak%5F01%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by H.H. Pak (*Clarkesworld* 1/25) ### Outstanding Short Story - “[Ichthyosis](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-99/ichthyosis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by M.L. Krishnan (*Fantasy* 1/2/25) - “Commensalism, Or the Labyrinth’s Vessels” by Albert Nkereuwem (*Will This Be a Problem?* Issue V) - “[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aimee Ogden (*Strange Horizons* 6/16/25) - “[Autogas Ferryman](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/autogas-ferryman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Champ Wongsatayanont (*Nightmare* 9/25) - “[The Octopus Dreams of Personhood](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-122b-the-octopus-dreams-of-personhood-by-hannah-yang/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Hannah Yang (*Diabolical Plots* 4/16/25) You can see the full list of finalists [here](https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/current-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Anyone can vote in these awards, and you can do that until August 16th [here](https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/vote/?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- ## Arthur C. Clarke Award Next up, the Arthur C. Clarke Award [announced its finalists](https://clarkeaward.substack.com/p/announcing-the-shortlist-for-the-1c1) for this year's award. This prize has been handed out annually since 1987, and it honors the best works of science fiction published in the past year, which are selected by a panel of jurors. The winner gets a trophy and cash prize (£2026.00; which started at 2001 and which has risen incrimentally since). Here are the finalists: - *Dungeon Crawler Carl* by Matt Dinniman - *The Dream Hotel* by Laila Lalami - *Luminous* by Silvia Park - *There Is No Antimemetics Division* by qntm - *When There Are Wolves Again* by E.J. Swift - *The Salt Oracle* by Lorraine Wilson The winner of this year's award will be announced on Wednesday 12th August 2026. --- ## Shirley Jackson Awards On the horror and dark fiction front, we have the Shirley Jackson Awards, which [announced their finalists](https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/2026/05/28/nominees-announced-for-the-2025-shirley-jackson-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for 2025\. **T**hese awards seek to recognize "the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing" by honoring "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic." The nominees are selected by a jury of writers, editors, critics and academics. ### Novel - *Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng* by Kylie Lee Baker - *How to Fake a Haunting* by Christa Carmen - *The Lamb* by Lucy Rose - *Moonflow* by Bitter Karella - *Old Soul* by Susan Barker - *Witchcraft for Wayward Girls* by Grady Hendrix ### Novella - *The Cold House* by A. G. Slatter - *The Death of Mountains* by Jordan Kurella - *DuMort* by Michelle Tang - *The Glass Garden* by Jessica Lévai - *Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce ### Novelette - *The Confirmed Bachelors* by Stephen Volk (Black Shuck Books) - “Emily” by Vanessa Santos (*Make a Home of Me*) - *Letter Slot* by Owen King (Amazon Original Stories) - “[The Millay Illusion](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny Magazine* Issue Sixty-Seven) - “The Severity of Things” by Mo Moshaty (*Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment*) ### Short Fiction - “Bitter Skin” by Kaaron Warren (*Night & Day*) - “Lapse” by Kirsty Logan (*Unquiet Guests*) - “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter” by Audrey Zhou (*Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora*) - “Room 24” by Caroline Kepnes (*The End of the World As We Know It*) - “Silver Boots” by Donna Lynch (*HOWL: An Anthology of Werewolves from Women-in-Horror*) The winners will be revealed on Saturday, July 11 at [Readercon 35](https://readercon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Burlington, Massachusetts. --- ## 2026 Finalists for the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award Next up, we have the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award, which is issued by The Center for the Study of Science Fiction at Kansas University. This prize has been handed out since 1987, and it honors the best short fiction in the prior year. Here are the [finalists](https://sfcenter.ku.edu/sturgeon-award?ref=andrewliptak.com): - “[Six People to Revise You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-people-to-revise-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” J.R. Dawson, *Uncanny Magazine* (January 2025) - “[The Nine Crashes of Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn](https://kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2025/the-nine-crashes-of-flight-lieutenant-hilla-quinn-by-louise-hughes/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Louise Hughes (*Kaleidotrope*, September 2025) - “[The Shadow on the Nest](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-shadow-on-the-nest/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Alaya Dawn Johnson (*Uncanny Magazine*, September 2025) - “[Wire Mother](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F10%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld*, September 2025) - “[The Sack of Burley Cottage](https://reactormag.com/the-sack-of-burley-cottage-rich-larson/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Rich Larson (*Reactor*, June 2025) - “[his love's ashes on his tongue](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-37/his-loves-ashes/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Monte Lin (*The Deadlands*, January 2025) - “[Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-123b-laser-eyes-aint-everything-by-effie-seiberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Effie Seiberg (*Diabolical Plots*, May 2025) - “[We, the Fleet](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singer%5F05%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Alex T. Singer (*Clarkesworld*, May 2025) - “[Missing Helen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F07%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Tia Tashiro (*Clarkesworld*, July 2025) - “[Woolly](https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Woolly-Carrie-Vaughn-w-STELLARIUM.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Carrie Vaughn, *Asimov's* (February 2025) The winner will be announced later in the summer, and will be honored as a guest of honor at the annual [Sturgeon Symposium](https://sfcenter.ku.edu/sturgeon-symposium?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will take place on October 15th and 16th. --- ## Dragon Awards Nominations for the annual Dragon Awards are now open. This year marks their 10th anniversary – they were [founded as the literary award for Atlanta, Georgia's DragonCon in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/13/12461038/dragon-awards-shortlist-dragoncon-science-fiction-fantasy?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). These awards recognize a broad range of science fiction, fantasy, horror, YA comics, games, literature, movies, and television shows. They're nominated and voted upon by attendees and the general public, and [voting has since opened](https://applyto.dragoncon.org/fan%5Fawards/dc%5Ffan%5Fawards%5Fnominations.php?ref=andrewliptak.com) for this year's award. (It'll be open through July 12th). The winners will be announced at this year's convention, which will be held between 3rd and 7th. --- ## Seiun Awards And finally: Japan's Hellcon has [announced the winners](https://www.sf-fan.gr.jp/awards/2026result.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) of this year's Seiun Awards. This award is the Japanese equivilent of the Hugos, and it's awarded every year to not only Japanese fiction, but also translated works. ### Best Translated Novel - *The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands* by Sarah Brooks and translated by Yasuko Kawano - ***Babel* by R.F. Kuang** **and translated by Yoshimichi Furusawa** - *The Book of Elsewhere* by China Miéville & Keanu Reeves and translated by Masayuki Uchida & Rei Yasuno - *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler and translated by Hiroshi Kaneko - ***Eversion* by Alastair Reynolds** **and translated by Naoya Nakahara** - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh and translated by Hiroshi Kaneko - *The Paradox Hotel* by Rob Hart and translated by Ken Mogi - *Shambling Towards Hiroshima* by James Morrow and translated by Masayuki Uchida ### Best Translated Short Story - **“After Zero” by Greg Egan and translated by Makoto Yamagishi (*Hayakawa SF* 2/25)** - “Hémisphères” by Tristan Garcia and translated by Kei Takahashi - “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachel K. Jones and translated by Chiori Sada (*The Silverfish Notebook* 8/25) - “Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker and translated by Izumi Ichida (*A Place That Once Existed Somewhere)* - “Security Check” by Han Song and translated by Tachihara Touya (*Hayakawa SF* 10/25) - “Blowout” by Wole Talabi and translated by Masato Naruniwa (*Hayakawa SF* 12/25) Here [are the rest of the winners and finalists](https://www.sf-fan.gr.jp/awards/2026result.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). The awards will be presented at this year's Hellcon, Japan SF Convention in Oita, Japan, which will be held in July. --- That's a lot: I'll probably do an update later in the summer for some of these. In the meantime, it's another good list of books and shorter stories to check out. ### Capturing space opera's moral high ground URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-ken-macleod-the-culture-science-fiction-space-opera-interview/ Last updated: 2026-06-09T16:18:00.000Z On this day in 2013, Scottish author Iain M. Banks passed away not long after announcing that he had cancer, and left behind an admirable body of literary and genre work. For science fiction fans, he's best known for his *Culture* series – 10 novels that he published between 1987 and 2012, but he was also acclaimed for works like *Against a Dark Background* and *The Algebraist.* When not writing science fiction, he published a number of literary novels (under the name Iain Banks), starting with 1984's *The Wasp Factory*, and ending posthumously with *The Quarry* in 2013\. His books have remained popular: he's earned some high-profile fans in the form of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos ([ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tech-ceos-should-stop-using-science-fiction-as-a-blueprint-for-humanitys-future-in-space/)), there's been a handful of special editions released in recent years, Orbit [has reissued his books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/), and Amazon Prime Video had [some plans to try and adapt the world](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-culture-iain-banks-consider-phlebas-adaptation-scifi/) for a streaming series. (We'll see if that actually happens.) [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-60434f3c-bc60-4ff6-9e22-eefe4b627e30.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0832-9d289044-8fbf-4e48-8ff2-8fd5c6b1e836.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) When he passed, I was writing a column about the history of science fiction for *Kirkus Reviews*, and [ended up writing an installment](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/iain-m-banks-culture-novels/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about his life and career in 2014\. As part of that work, I'd turn to a whole bunch of nonfiction sources, and in instances where I could, I'd interview the author – or in this case, someone who knew them: one of his friends, fellow author Ken MacLeod. When I was doing some cleanup on my old blog, I ended up re-reading our conversation and figured it was a good time to repost it. *(I've made some minor edits here and there.)* --- ### **When did you first meet Iain?** At Greenock High School around about 1969 or 1970\. He claimed we met when I approached him to write a story for the school magazine (a story the teachers who had the last word on what went in rejected as too sweary or too gory) but I have only the vaguest recollection of the incident. ### **Were the two of you close friends throughout High School?** Not exactly. I have to be a bit tedious and specific here. There are two towns adjacent to Greenock, which is a small town on the Firth of Clyde on the West coast of Scotland. Upriver is Port Glasgow, which is where most of the maritime industry used to be, and downriver is Gourock, which was originally a resort – back in the day when steamship excursions on the Clyde were the best holidays most people could afford. Over the years the towns basically merged at the edges. Anyway, Iain's family lived in Gourock, where his father worked for the Admiralty. Iain went to Gourock High School, which only catered for students up to their third year and the exams then known as O-levels. Anyone who wanted to do the next grade of exams, Highers, which were what you needed for university entrance, had to go to Greenock High School. So Iain arrived along with several other boys and girls in our fourth year. I was already part of a clique who thought they had deep thoughts and who were considered promising by our English teacher, Joan Woods. She encouraged us to form a creative writing group or something like that. Joan was a remarkable and much loved teacher who right from the start did innovative off-curriculum things like getting the first or second-year English class to analyse Simon and Garfunkel lyrics after listening to the album, and to study poems so new that they were literally only published as duplicated handbills. Years later I amused and surprised Brian McCabe by quoting a line or two one of his early poems from memory. Anyway – the meetings of the writers' circle began in some public room but soon became evening gatherings in Joan Woods' living-room, and they continued even after the students involved had gone on to university. Several of us remained friends with Joan for many years afterwards. At some point in his high school years Iain became part of that clique, and we became closer friends when we were both at university – he at Stirling, I at Glasgow. We had an interest in SF in common and we used to meet on Saturdays when we were both home for the weekend, go out for long walks with our pals or go round to see Joan, who put up with our antics and gave us coffee and biscuits. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### **Can you describe a bit about what he was like in person?** He was cheerful, affable and sociable, but enjoyed solitude – he sees to have done a lot of thinking while walking or driving. Very generous and loyal to his friends – he made a lot of new friends in the course of his career, but remained close to the friends he already had from his schooldays, and to his family. He had remarkable equanimity – in all the years I knew him I never saw him in a bad mood, or show more than a rare and momentary annoyance. He had a penchant for ordering and organising things: bookshelves and CDs and tools and so on, which I think went with how carefully he planned everything from his books to his schedule for the year. He had this focus and work ethic along with a capacity for recklessness, spontaneity and risk-taking – which, now I come to think of it, was quite measured and calculated as well: he took care to endanger only himself, and he could now and then get hilariously drunk in company but never drank alone. ### **To the best of your knowledge, how did he begin to write science fiction?** The best person to ask is David Haddock, editor of the fanzine *The Banksonian*, even though I was there at the time and he wasn't. He's done the research, asked Iain questions and correlated reminiscences from interviews and so on. > You can find his talk outline on Iain's pre-publication writing [here](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jwnjxs9cshyw2ul/AAC6JxrxPG7EdQ6pCUm%5F974ka/IMB-A%20Culture%20Chronology-Towards%20the%20Contemporary%20Context.20130918-1900.pdf?dl=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). However, as far as I know Iain's first extended work of fiction that was actually typed and not handwritten was 'TTR' \[*The Tashkent Rambler*\] - a huge sprawling work set that wasn't SF but was set in the (then) near future. (In the interviews with Andrew J Wilson cited below, he says that it was inspired by *Catch-22* and *Stand on Zanzibar*.) Then after a couple of abortive novels, one of which was SF, he wrote the first draft of 'Use of Weapons'. ### **Where did he discover science fiction, and what about genre stories attracted him to them?** Probably through TV series like *Thunderbirds*, *Dr. Who* and *Star Trek*, then SF books in the local libraries. Like every British SF writer of our generation, he'd mention seeking out the yellow-jacketed Gollancz SF books on library shelves. He read very widely in all kinds of fiction even in high school, and gravitated towards SF by I guess his mid-to-late teens - in his final year in high school he wrote a dissertation on SF, and it had sections on 'The Escapist Stuff', 'The Hard Core', and (though I can't swear to the title of this one) 'The New Wave'. He'd read all the standard Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein and then found the New Wave - Spinrad, Ballard, Keith Roberts, M. John Harrison - with Aldiss, I guess, as the bridging figure. The 'New Worlds Quarterly' paperback series was a big influence, both the stories and the criticism, mostly by Clute and Harrison. ### **His first book was *The Wasp Factory*, a non-genre story: it's not often that we see genre authors writing outside of the genre to the same regular schedule as he did: why do both?** He'd already written, sent in to publishers, and had serially rejected '*TTR*', *Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background*, *The State of the Art*, and *The Player of Games*. So he thought he'd try something mainstream and middle-of-the-road ... I remember him telling us he was writing a mainstream novel and sounding almost apologetic, as if we might think he was letting the side down. But I think he continued to write both literary fiction and SF because he could and also because the mainstream novels sold better. ### **I remember reading somewhere that he wrote science fiction simply because he loved it.** Yes, that seems about right. He would say he enjoyed it slightly more than writing non-genre fiction (which is a genre in itself, one he and I sometimes labelled 'LF', 'lit-fic', or 'lie-fi'). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/06/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### **Do you recall what his reaction was like when he finally sold *Consider Phlebas*? Was there a sense of relief?** Glee, I seem to recall. He was very pleased to have an SF novel published at last, but I don't think he ever doubted he eventually would. ### **What inspired his Culture novels and the world he built?** The way he explained it was that he wanted to write about a morally and psychologically flawed mercenary fighting on the side of a genuinely good society, and so proceeded to work out what kind of society he himself would most like to live in. When he told me about this society I told him it was communism, in the sense of the Marxian vision of a society of abundance without classes, the state, or money. He came to agree but I don't think that influenced anything that went into the Culture: he just worked it all out from first principles. I've written about this [here](http://kenmacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/use-of-calculators.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [here](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/10/iain-banks-ken-macleod-science-fiction?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### **I know there’s been a number of people who have pointed to his Ringworlds as being directly borrowed from Larry Niven’s novel *Ringworld*. Was there a sense of ‘let’s add in everything that’s cool’ to the Culture novels?** No – look at all the trad space opera cool stuff he left out! He may well have been inspired by *Ringworld*, but he arrived at Rings by his own route. As far as I can recall he worked out Orbitals first – he figured out how big a rotating structure would have to be to have centrifugal force of one gravity on the inner surface and a 24-hour day, quickly realised that no known material could sustain it, and handwaved in force-fields to hold it together. If you can do that you can do Rings, so he threw them into the background but I don't think there's a story specifically set on a Ring. ### **What did Banks hope to accomplish with the Culture: where there certain things he sought to cover and examine?** His running gag was that he'd sought to capture the moral high ground of space opera for the Left. He wanted to write big-scale colourful adventures that were well written and weren't Social Darwinism Within that he explored particular topics -the themes are pretty much worn on the sleeve: there's an ongoing debate over the morality of outside intervention, for instance, and responsibility in general. But I think the themes kind of emerged from the settings and stories. ### **What particular right-wing elements of space opera was he uncomfortable with?** Basically the unimaginative projection of present-day societies into the far future, and the not exactly hidden endorsement this gives to aspects of these societies, such as imperialism and militarism as well as capitalism. He was just as skeptical of Asimov's more liberal version of that, taking suburbia to the stars. I seem to remember him saying that *Dune* – which he enjoyed and admired, though he derided the ending (he said something like "'History will call us wives' – come on, Frank, is that the best you can do?") was somehow absurd in postulating an interstellar humanity that wasn't just imperial but feudal. I replied that it wasn't really compatible with the materialist conception of history, which made us both laugh at such a mild and obvious demurral. ### **Which of the *Culture* novels were his favorites?** He always said *Use of Weapons* was his favourite – I think partly because it's a very strong book, but also because it's full of the joy of inventing not only the Culture but also the other worlds where the action is set, a joy that's itself shot through with his own youthful vigour and sense of discovery, and of making use of all the knowledge and experience he'd had up to that point. Beyond that it's hard to say. Look to Windward was one he was fond of, partly because of the intensity of its moral seriousness. ### **He wrote several non-Culture SF novels. Why did he take the break in the 1990s?** The break wasn't quite as big as it seems. We have to bear in mind that the sequence of writing wasn't the sequence of publication. *Against a* *Dark Background* was the second SF novel he wrote, though it was published fourth. After *Consider Phlebas*, he revised his three already-written and oft-rejected space operas. It may be just a matter of chance that the non-Culture one was the last of these. By this point he wanted to 'write something I could cut loose on, something that wasn't the Culture ... I'll go back to that in the next science fiction novel.' ('Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill: Conversations with Iain Menzies Banks', Andrew J Wilson, Foundation Vol 42, No 116, Winter 2012/2013, 2014). It's interesting that the next Culture novel, Excession, is a departure from all the earlier works in that the attention is much more on the Minds, we see them and other machines more often as viewpoint characters, and the Culture is brought bang up to date with nanotechnology and virtual reality and much more intimate interfaces between humans and machines than we see in the earlier work. But all that is adumbrated in Feersum Enjinn, which I think is his first real 1990s, post-cyberpunk SF novel. ### **Did he have the same goals with those books as the Culture novels?** There was the same moral sentiment, and the same exuberance of creation, but without the constraint of having to think 'Now, how would a truly good and immensely powerful society respond to this appalling situation?' Though of course one of the non-Culture novels, Transition, has in that respect a Culture analogue in the Concern. ### **Why write outside of the series?** KM: He wanted to explore other possibilities – to set a novel with megastructures in it on Earth, in the case of *Feersum Enjinn*, or a universe full of aliens and empires in our own future, in *The Algebraist*. Also, quite simply, he came up with ideas that didn't fit the Culture universe and he didn't want to be locked into one series, however open-ended. ### **What was the first thing from him that you read?** A pun-filled parody spy-thriller-type adventure story hand-written in a school exercise book and illustrated with montages of pictures clipped from magazines, mostly Sunday colour supplements. (A technique inspired by Terry Gilliam's graphics from *Monty Python*, and possibly Private Eye covers and the alternative/underground press of the time.) ### **Can you tell me a little about the Scottish SF circle? I know that there's a solid knot of authors from there.** Well, it's more of a loose skein really - there are separate knots of fans and writers in Glasgow and in Edinburgh, and I don't know about any other local concentrations though they must exist. There's a very active fandom and writers' circle in Glasgow. In Edinburgh there is a loose circle around people who were members of the Edinburgh University SF/F society years ago, and the friends they've accumulated along the way, with Charles Stross and Andrew J Wilson as central figures. There's also an overlapping circle of writers who met through Andrew Greig, who used to live in South Queensferry and who I first met many years ago when he was writer in residence at Edinburgh University. I introduced him to Iain, and he introduced us to novelists and poets such as Ron Butlin, Regi Claire, Ian Rankin, the late Edwin Morgan, Brian McCabe, Lesley Glaister, all of whom became our friends too. ### **Is there something about Scotland that sets you guys apart from the rest of the genre field, either politically, environmentally or otherwise?** I think in most respects we're fairly typical of British SF writers. The famous Caledonian antisyzygy can be seen in my writing and in Iain's, but by and large you'd be hard put to distinguish Scottish SF from British SF as a whole. Besides - as I think it was Paul McAuley who said - there just aren't enough of us to be a statistically valid sample. ### **Did Banks have plans for other Culture novels beyond *Hydrogen Sonata*? What might it have covered?** He had an idea for a novel about a character who had stored some of his memories in ammunition, so every time he used his weapon he lost part of himself. He hoped to have left enough of an outline and notes for me to write something from if he didn't have enough time left to write it himself, but sadly his illness didn't even leave time for even an outline. It was a generous idea, and typical of Iain, in that he insisted he would like me to write the novel in my own way and not in a pastiche of his, but even so I think I would have found it almost impossible. ### **What was his writing process like, and how did he construct The Culture as a world?** He read widely, thought a lot, made page after page of notes of ideas, and then when the time came to write another book he would look through his notes, extract or otherwise come up with a story idea, write a detailed outline and then sit down for two or three months and bang the thing out at a rate of about five thousand words a day. He constructed the Culture initially with a lot of drawings of ships and orbitals, weapons and drones and so on, maps of locations, lists of names ... ship names and character names, which he had a real knack for inventing or finding. There's a minor character in *Against a Dark Background* called Elson Roa, the leader of gang of solipsist bandits, and after I'd read it in draft Iain showed me where he'd found it: a broken street sign for the street where he lived, Nelson Road. --- Thanks for reading. What is your favorite book by Banks? ### Here are the winners of the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/bram-stoker-award-stephen-graham-jones-buffalo-hunter-winners-horror/ Last updated: 2026-06-08T14:12:14.000Z Stephen Graham Jones had a good night over the weekend: not only did he earn the [Nebula Award for Best Novel for his novel *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-winners-2026-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/)*,* he earned the "Superior Achievement in a Novel" for the same. I don't read as much horror as I'd like, but the field is really brimming over with excellence, and to that end, the Horror Writers Association awarded its annual Bram Stoker Awards® over the weekend. Here are the finalists and winners (winners marked in **bold**). I've added links where I can find the online publication: ### Superior Achievement in an Anthology - *Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology* edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney - *The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand* edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene - ***Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora* edited by Kristy Park Kulski** - *This Way Lies Madness: Stories from the Edge of Darkness* edited by Lee Murray and Dave Jeffery - *HOWL: An Anthology of Werewolves from Women-in-Horror* edited by Lindy Ryan and Stephanie M. Wytovich ### Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection - *Acquired Taste* by Clay McLeod Chapman - *Little Horn: Stories* by Gemma Files - ***Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions* by John Langan** - *Teenage Girls Can Be Demons* by Hailey Piper - *Cyanide Constellations* by Sara Tantlinger ### Superior Achievement in a First Novel - *The Scald-Crow* by Grace Daly - *Moonflow* by Bitter Karella - *Her Wicked Roots* by Tanya Pell - *The Faceless Thing We Adore* by Hester Steel - *Molting* by Kathryn Tennison - *Listen to Your Sister* by Neena Viel - ***The October Film Haunt* by Michael Wehunt** ### Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel - *Jumpscare* by Cullen Bunn (writer) and Danny Luckert (artist) - *John Carpenter’s Tales for a HalloweeNight,* Volume 11 edited by Sandy King - *Athanasia* by Daniel Kraus (writer) and Dani (artist) - ***Bowling With Corpses and Other Tales from Lands Unknown* by Mike Mignola** - *Let This One Be a Devil* by James Tynion IV (writer), Steve Foxe (writer), and Piotr Kowalski (artist) ### Superior Achievement in Long Fiction - ***Cathedral of the Drowned* by Nathan Ballingrud** - "[Uncertain Sons](https://undertowpublications.com/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha - "[Squid Teeth](https://reactormag.com/squid-teeth-sarah-langan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Langan - *Pam Kowolski Is a Monster!* by Sarah Langan - **"**[**Wolf Moon, Antler Moon**](https://reactormag.com/wolf-moon-antler-moon-a-c-wise/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**" by A.C. Wise** ### Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction - *Global Indigenous Horror* edited by Naomi Simone Borwein - *The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters* edited by Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead - *America’s Most Gothic* by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes - *Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away* by Coltan Scrivner - ***Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction* edited by Becky Siegel Spratford** ### Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel - ***Ride or Die* by Delilah S. Dawson** - *The Girl in the Walls* by Meg Eden Kuyatt - *Broken Dolls* by Ally Malinenko - *The House Next Door* by Ellen Oh - *Mystery James Digs Her Own Grave* by Ally Russell ### Superior Achievement in a Novel - *Witchcraft for Wayward Girls* by Grady Hendrix - *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill - ***The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones** - *The Bewitching* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *Girl in the Creek* by Wendy N. Wagner ### Superior Achievement in Poetry (Collection and Long Form) - ***Everything Endless* by Linda D. Addison and Jamal Hodge** - *Songs of Enough: An Inferno All My Own* by Maxwell I. Gold - *The Uterus Is an Impossible Forest* by Shannon Kearns - *The Haunting* by Cate Peebles - *Allegories of Beauty & Violence: A collection of Gothic Romance Poems* by MarieAnn C. Raguso, PhD ### Superior Achievement in a Screenplay - ***Sinners* by Ryan Coogler** - *Weapons* by Zach Cregger - *28 Years Later* by Alex Garland - *Companion* by Drew Hancock - *Bring Her Back* by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman ### Superior Achievement in Short Fiction - *"*Stomata" by L.E. Daniels (*Darkness Most Fowl*) - ***"*Inheritance" by RJ Joseph (*Full Throttle: A Dark Dozen Anthology*)** - "[Saint Dymphna’s School for Borderland Girls](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/st-dymphnas-school-for-borderland-girls?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (*Weird Horror* #10) - "\[Ir\]reversible" by Anna Taborska (*Witches and Witchcraft: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Essays*) - "[Autogas Ferryman](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/autogas-ferryman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Champ Wongsatayanont (*Nightmare Magazine* #156) ### Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction - "[Deathwish Wolf Man: The Tragic Hero at the Heart of the Universal Monster](https://magazine.interstellarflightpress.com/deathwish-wolf-man-b4a91b9a20aa?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Patrick Barb (*Interstellar Flight Magazine*) - **"My Long Road to Horror" by Tananarive Due (*Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction*)** - "Why Horror" by Stephen Graham Jones (*Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction*) - "Haunted Thresholds: Liminal Horror and the Psychological Disintegration of Women from Post-Partum, Grief, Trauma and Religious Fanaticism" by Mo Moshaty (*Darkest Margins: 24 Essays on Liminality and Liminal Spaces in the Horror Genre*) - "My Mother Was Margaret White" by Cynthia Pelayo (*Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction*) ### Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel - ***Shiny Happy People* by Clay McLeod Chapman** - *Beautiful Brutal Bodies* by Linda Cheng - *We’re Not Safe Here* by Rin Chupeco - *The Silenced* by Diana Rodriguez Wallach - *A Girl Walks Into the Forest* by Madeleine Roux ## Specialty Awards - The Karen Lansdale Silver Hammer Award: Sarah Read - The Richard Laymon President’s Award: Marc L Abbott - Mentor of the Year Award: Eric Guignard - Specialty Press Award: Bad Hand Books --- Thanks for reading: what did you like from this list? ### Here are the winners of the 2026 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-winners-2026-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2026-06-08T16:56:31.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) held its annual Nebula Awards Conference this weekend in Chicago, and as part of the festivities, it's announced the winners of this year's Nebula Awards. The Nebulas are an annual award for excellence in the science fiction and fantasy genres published in the last year, voted on by members of the organization. As I noted [earlier this spring](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2026-nebula-award-finalists-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-awards/) in the initial finalists announcement, I thought that 2025 was a particularly strong year for SF/F books, and a bunch of the books [that I really liked](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/), like *Automatic Noodle, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Death of the Author,* and *Katabasis –* were on the finalist list, as well as a bunch of the TV shows and films. I was pretty happy to see that Stephen Graham Jones' *The Buffalo Hunter Hunters* ended up with Best novel – I think it was a spectacular, gripping read, and I'll have to check out the other winners when I get a free moment. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Here are the winners from [2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2025-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/), [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2021/). Here are this year's winners and finalists (winners are marked in **bold**) ### Best Novel - *When We Were Real* by Daryl Gregory - ***The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones** - *Katabasis* by R.F. Kuang - *Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor - *The Incandescent* by Emily Tesh - *Sour Cherry* by Natalia Theodoridou - *Wearing the Lion* by John Wiswell ### Best Novella - *Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle* by Renan Bernardo - ***The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar** - *The Death of Mountains* by Jordan Kurella - *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz - *But Not Too Bold* by Hache Pueyo - “[Descent](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/talabi%5F05%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Wole Talabi (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 5/25) ### Best Novelette - “[Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/our-echoes-drifting-through-the-marsh/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Marie Croke (*Beneath Ceaseless Skies* 1/9/25) - **“**[**Uncertain Sons**](https://undertowpublications.com/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Thomas Ha (*Uncertain Sons*)** - “[We Begin Where Infinity Ends](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ihezue%5F02%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Somto Ihezue (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 2/25) - [*The Name Ziya*](https://reactormag.com/the-name-ziya-wen-yi-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Wen-Yi Lee (Tor) - “[Never Eaten Vegetables](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pak%5F01%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by H.H. Pak (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 1/25) - “[The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-life-and-times-of-alavira-the-great-as-written-by-titos-pavlou-and-reviewed-by-two-lifelong-friends/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny Magazine* 3-4/25) ### Best Short Story - “[Through the Machine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/through-the-machine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P.A. Cornell (*Lightspeed Magazine,* 5/25) - “[Six People to Revise You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-people-to-revise-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by J.R. Dawson (*Uncanny Magazine,* 1-2/25) - “[In My Country](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F04%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 4/25) - “[The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead](https://podcastle.org/2025/02/18/podcastle-879-the-tawlish-island-songbook-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by E.M. Linden (*PodCastle* 2/18/25) - “[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aimee Ogden (*Strange Horizons* 6/16/25) - **“**[**Laser Eyes Ain't Everything**](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-123b-laser-eyes-aint-everything-by-effie-seiberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Effie Seiberg (*Diabolical Plots* 5/25)** ### Andre Norton Award for Best Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction - *The Tower* by David Anaxagoras - *Gemini Rising* by Jonathan Brazee - *Wishing Well, Wishing Well* by Jubilee Cho - *Sunrise on the Reaping* by Suzanne Collins - ***Into the Wild Magic* by Michelle Knudsen** - *Goblin Girl* by K.A. Mielke ### Best Game Writing - *Spire, Surge, and Sea*, Stewart C. Baker (Choice of Games) - ***Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,* Guillaume Broche & Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (Kepler Interactive), Developer: Sandfall Interactive, Sandfall S.A.S.** - *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, Ari Gibson & William Pelen (Team Cherry)\* - *Dispatch*, Ashley Jeffalone, Suzee Matson, Chris Rebbert, Chad Rhiness, & Pierre Shorette (AdHoc Studios) - *Hades II*, Greg Kasavin (Supergiant Games) - *Blue Prince*, Tonda Ros (Raw Fury, Developer: Dogubomb) \*Provisional nomination; awaiting acceptance and response on LLM-use. ### Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation - *KPop Demon Hunters*, Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang, & Hannah McMechan (Netflix) - *Sinners*, Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros Pictures) - *Severance,* "Chikhai Bardo", by Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman (Apple TV+) - *Pluribus*: Season One, Vince Gilligan (Apple TV+) - *Superman*, James Gunn (Warner Bros Pictures) - ***Murderbot*: Season One, Chris Weitz (Apple TV+)** ### Best Comic - *Second Shift* by Kit Anderson - *Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal* by Amy Chu - *Helen of Wyndhorn* by Tom King - *Fishflies* by Jeff Lemire - ***Mary Shelley's School for Monsters: The Killing Stone* by Jessica Maison** - *Strange Bedfellows* by Ariel Slamet Ries - *The Flip Side* by Jason Walz - *The Stoneshore Register* by G. Willow Wilson ### Best Poem - “Though You Always Are” by Linda D. Addison & Jamal Hodge (*Everything Endless*) - “[They Said Robots Are](https://www.penumbric.com/archives/June2k25/aimerRobots.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Casey Aimer (*Penumbric* 6/25) - **“**[**The World To Come**](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-world-to-come/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Jennifer Hudak (*Strange Horizons* 12/22/25)** - “[The Mourning Robot](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mourning-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (*Uncanny Magazine* 9-10/25) - “[Care for Lightning](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/care-for-lightning/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mari Ness (*Uncanny Magazine* 1-2/25) - “[To Be the Change](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/to-be-the-change/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Nico Martinez Nocito (*Strange Horizons* 3/10/25) --- What do you think about this year's slate of winners? ### Country roads to highways URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-tourism-infrastructure/ Last updated: 2026-06-06T14:16:20.000Z On September 20th, 1930, the residents of southern Vermont turned out for a grand celebration: the opening of a section of the Ethan Allen highway (now Route 7) between Pownal and Manchester. Thousands of people showed up to celebrate, and the festivities included an airplane flyover, a number of cars decked out in livery for the occasion, and costumed historical figures, including the highway’s namesake, Ethan Allen. The celebration was a sign of what was to come for Vermont’s changing relationship with the rest of the country and itself: a state that was increasingly shifting its dependence from agriculture to tourism. Three years earlier, Vermont endured the worst natural disaster in its history: the great flood of 1927, which destroyed bridges and roads and killed 85 people, including the state’s Lieutenant Governor. In Freedom & Unity: A History of Vermont, Michael Sherman, Gene Sessions, and P. Jeffrey Potash explain that the destruction prompted a massive rebuilding effort in which the state prioritized its roadways: “The concentration on road reconstruction while accepting the permanent loss of many miles of rail track hastened a decline in the state’s economic reliance on railroads and a shift to highways.” That new infrastructure arrived as Vermonters were contending with major shifts in their relationship with the rest of the country. In the later half of the 19th century, the state's dominant agricultural industry was in decline as residents left for elsewhere. Emigration forced state officials and commercial interests to begin a concerted advertising effort to boost the state’s appeal as a tourist destination, highlighting its scenery and rural nature. While visitors originally came via train and might stay for weeks at a time in a central resort or large hotel, Jan Albers writes in Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape that in the 1920s, the freedom of the automobile changed how visitors experienced the state. “Tourists were now apt to stay in one place for a night or two and then move on looking for another thrill. The great hotels quickly began to die off.” The improved infrastructure and advertising worked. “Vermont’s economy enjoyed a modest upswing at the end of the 1930s,” say Sherman, Sessions, and Potash, “boosted by an increase in tourism made possible by the growth in ownership of motor vehicles in the previous decade and expansion of the state’s hard-surfaced highways,” of which the Ethan Allen Highway was part. Not all of those projects panned out. The rise of traffic and tourism put a spotlight on the tension between preserving Vermont’s rural identity and the need for modern day infrastructure. In 1933, Colonel William J. Wilgus, a former chief engineer from the New York Central Roadway, proposed the Green Mountain Parkway, which would run through the state’s mountains. Much like the Blue Ridge Parkway, it would serve as both an easy route for visitors and a destination in and of itself. But the prospect of a road running up Vermont’s scenic mountains made Vermonters uneasy, and they brought significant opposition to both the state legislature and town meetings. The project came to an end in 1936\. When the Second World War came to an end in 1945, it brought with it significant changes to the country: a burgeoning middle class made up of returning veterans, which boosted interest in travel and recreation. President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act into law in 1956, launching a massive, nation-wide infrastructure project that would install modern roadways across the country. Workers began construction on the first section of I-91 in 1957, culminating in 320 miles of pavement by the time the final stretch was completed in 1982\. The interstate connected a majority of Vermonters and provided tourists unprecedented easy access to the state’s ski areas, villages, and forests. The tensions between developers looking to capitalize on tourism traffic and those wanting to retain Vermont’s rural characteristics remained. Albers notes that these tensions led to a range of restrictions and programs, ranging from the introduction of town zoning laws to the 1968 billboard ban, the introduction of Green Up Day in 1970, and the 1972 bottle bill, designed to disincentivize littering, all designed to preserve the state’s appealing scenery. According to the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, tourism remains a dominant industry for Vermont, logging 15.8 million visitors in 2023, who brought in $4 billion in revenue that supports nearly 10 percent of the state’s jobs. That major industry rests on the state’s efforts to develop its infrastructure, transforming networks of country roads into ribbons of asphalt, inviting visitors deep into its green mountains. 🏛️ This piece originally ran in the Summer 2025 edition of **History Connections*, the Vermont Historical Society's member magazine. To get it and support the organization, sign up as a member [here](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Amazon closed the iris on its Stargate revival URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-stargate-revival-cancelled-scifi-mgm-prime-video/ Last updated: 2026-06-03T11:39:36.000Z Well, this is a bummer: just a couple of months after [announcing that it had ordered a revival](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-stargate-sg1-franchise-revival-martin-gero-streaming/) of the long-running *Stargate* franchise, Amazon has decided to shut it down. The series had been in preproduction in London, and *Variety* [reported](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/stargate-tv-series-martin-gero-scrapped-amazon-1236765061/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that work on the series has been brought to a close. The reason? "Amazon execs were concerned that \[Martin\] Gero’s take on the series would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase." Former series showrunner Joseph Mallozzi [confirmed the news](https://x.com/barondestructo/status/2061929042350068034?s=46&t=dgwzFhBsGjOtdTQKdSOptg&ref=andrewliptak.com) on Twitter [and said](https://x.com/barondestructo/status/2061963285428330923?s=46&t=dgwzFhBsGjOtdTQKdSOptg&ref=andrewliptak.com) “My heart breaks. For the incredibly talented writers who worked tirelessly to bring this show to life. For Martin who maintained an unwavering positive outlook throughout despite the challenges, and who always strove to make a show that would honor the fans while welcoming a new audiences. And for the long-suffering *Stargate* fandom who waited so long and came so close to getting a show they truly would have loved.” Starting in 1997, the *Stargate SG-1* was a spinoff of Roland Emmerich's 1994 film, *Stargate*, in which archeologists discovered a mysterious gate that turned out to be a piece of alien technology that allowed for instantaneous travel throughout a vast gate network in the galaxy. In the series, the United States Air Force put together dedicated teams of explorers, soldiers, and scientists to explore the worlds that the gates led to, discover new civilizations, and tangle with various alien threats that they encountered. *SG-1* ran for ten seasons and led to a spinoff series, *Atlantis*, in which an expedition headed off to another galaxy for their own series of adventures, while in another series, *Universe*, an unlikely group of personnel escaped through a gate and found themselves across the galaxy on an ancient starship. With *Universe*'s cancelation in 2010, the franchise largely came to an end (there was a webseries called *Stargate Origins* that ran in 2018 with the launch of a dedicated [Stargate streaming service called Stargate Command](https://www.andrewliptak.com/stargate-centric-streaming-service-stargate-command-is-shutting-down/), as well as a short-lived animated series, *Stargate Infinity,* in the early 2000s), and with [Amazon's acquisition of MGM in 2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-mgm-stargate-sg1-atlantis-universe-scifi-franchise/), there was hope from various creatives and fans that the company would find a way to [bring the series back in some form](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-mgm-stargate-sg1-atlantis-universe-scifi-franchise/). [Reopening the StargateEarlier this week, word broke that Amazon was in discussions to purchase MGM. If that goes through, it could provide a return path for the Stargate franchise.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-517e08c7-627f-439d-906a-ac5c694975df.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2021-05-21-at-11.53.44-AM-1-9e7066c4-08cd-478f-b803-26b69b6abccb.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-mgm-stargate-sg1-atlantis-universe-scifi-franchise/) That had been the plan as of last year. The series was to be run by Gero, who had worked on prior iterations of the series, *Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis*, and *Stargate Universe*, and according to Mallozzi, [the series wouldn't have been a reboot of the show, but a continuation](https://josephmallozzi.com/2025/11/19/stargate-returns/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "it's not a reboot or a wholesale reimagining that will wipe the slate clean on 17 seasons and some 350 hours of Stargate history." Instead, it would have served as a new introduction to viewers, presumably remaining within the same continuity. That seems to be the sticking point, according to *Variety* and [*Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2026/06/stargate-series-canceled-dead-amazon-martin-gero-1236939321/?ref=andrewliptak.com). In her report on *Deadline*, Nellie Andreeva noted that the Amazon felt that the series didn't align with its "programming strategy" and that despite nearly two year's worth of work on the show, the company opted to kill it outright rather than try and salvage it. "The differences apparently ran so deep, they required an outright cancellation vs. retooling the existing version of the project by giving notes to Gero." Amazon's television has undergone some considerable changes in recent months: Peter Friedlander, the former Head of U.S and Canada Scripted Series at Netflix took over MGM back in September (and then greenlit this new *Stargate* series), and in January, he [reorganized the place](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/amazon-mgm-studios-tv-reorganization-1236485044/?ref=andrewliptak.com), putting into place Blair Fetter for the studio's genre and worldbuilding team. Fetter [in turn reorganized their genre efforts](https://deadline.com/2026/04/amazon-mgm-studios-blair-fetter-restructuring-matthew-king-1236772925/?ref=andrewliptak.com) back in April (and who appears to be responsible for axing it.) And, the streaming environment has changed quite a bit in recent years. [Wheel stopAmazon’s Prime Video has canceled its fantasy series The Wheel of Time after its third season wrapped up![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-26d2a147-e9fe-4cf0-8609-4f261955a99e.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/woft-s3-ut-240314-kitilz-00331-r2-3000-6a0c3221-b044-4c2e-a65a-43d30ba04595.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wheel-of-time-cancelled-prime-video-streaming/) That's a lot of change – something that James S.A. Corey [alluded to when asked about their own project at the studio](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-expanse-captives-war-faith-of-beasts-scifi-book-interview/). Personnel changes at studios are notoriously dangerous for in-development projects, with new executives often wiping the slate clean of projects that they weren't involved in creating. --- What's stands out for me about this cancellation is two things: Amazon's continued focus on programming and content that appeals to a "global" audience, and that there were apparently tensions over how closely this new series was tied to the original series. "Global" comes up a lot with Amazon's programming directives: the company wants its series to be viewable by a very wide audience, and it's worked to try and pull in stories with wide name recognition, like *Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time*, Jack Ryan, and *Stargate*. I'd argue that there's something globally appealing to *Stargate* in theory: the original series imagined its teams visiting all these civilizations that had some influence on Earth's ancient societies, but at the same time, it's a very American-centric story, something that later seasons often leaned into when interstellar problems threatened to spill over. The bigger issue at play comes down to the classic tension you have when approaching these legacy franchise: how do you ensure that you don't alienate the passionate fans who are rooting for a revival while also ensuring that you aren't just doing a carbon copy or alienating them by throwing it all out the window and starting anew (as Emmerich [had planned back in 2014](https://variety.com/2014/film/news/mgm-warner-bros-team-with-roland-emmerich-dean-devlin-on-stargate-reboot-1201196082/?ref=andrewliptak.com))? We've seen this done to varying degrees of success with Star Trek – with J.J. Abram's Kelvin films and the more recent Paramount+ slate of shows like *Star Trek Discovery* and *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds* and Disney's *Star Wars* films and shows. Those experiences have shown that you can revive and continue those worlds successfully and with general buy-in from fandom and viewers (as in the case with *Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, The Mandalorian* and *Andor*) and mess things up and rile up people (like with *Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka*, various seasons of *Star Trek: Picard*, and depending on who you talk to, *Star Trek Academy*.) Reading between the lines of these reports, it sounds like Amazon wasn't thrilled with a series that was tied close to those original shows and that "the series would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase." That *is* a real concern: if you're trying to revive this bigger piece of IP, you want to make sure that it goes beyond the core group of supporters and to your much larger viewing audience. *Stargate* collectively had enough episodes for MGM to try out its own streaming service (354 episodes!) with years and years of build-up stories, characters, mythologies, and tropes that any new approach would have a lot of work to adhere to, while also remaining accessible. That Amazon opted to just end it says that its executives didn't think that what they had was salvageable. That's a shame, because *Stargate* is a show with a simple concept: send a team of people through a gate to a new world and explore. It already spawned three series: jump it far enough in time, or move it over to another location, and you can start up again. In a tweet, Mallozzi [pushed back on](https://x.com/barondestructo/status/2061982258710614387?s=46&t=dgwzFhBsGjOtdTQKdSOptg&ref=andrewliptak.com) the idea that the project wasn't welcoming to newcomers: “We were ever mindful of creating a show that would have broad appeal.” This speaks to the general difficulty that you have with a legacy show's canon and fandom: fans want more of that same world and story, while that might not appeal to your general audience. *Stargate did* have issues when it tried to change things up: *Stargate Universe* was a take that was a little darker, a little more serialized, and a little more mature than the prior shows' "planet of the week" style, and ultimately the franchise saw dwindling audience numbers after nearly 15 years being on the air. --- I doubt that they'll give up on the franchise after this: there *is* a dedicated fan base out there after all. But I have to wonder if this is just the end of this particular world and if they'll just take the general concept and reboot it outright. I'd be sad about that, but *Stargate* has been off the air for a while, and seeing a new take on the concept could be interesting.\* So: we'll see. It's a shame to see 20 months worth of work dumped down the drain, and I'd be interested to have seen what they were working on and where they could have taken it. And when they do try again, hopefully it'll be as interesting and *fun* as the original was. \*If I had the chance, I'd pitch for a ten-episode season where they spend the entire time on one planet figuring out some weird archeological mystery or language or technology, and really have some fun with planets that aren't Vancouver dressed up a little, before jumping to another planet in the next season. ### Table of Contents, June 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-june-2026/ Last updated: 2026-07-10T17:20:56.000Z New month, new stories: here's a new crop of short fiction has begun dropping, and it's time for a new roundup for the month! You can check out last month's (newly updated!) installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-may-2026/), and the prior installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). --- ## [*Adventitious*](https://www.adventitious.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 3) Subscribe [here](https://www.adventitious.net/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Non Plus Ultra](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/non-plus-ultra-m-a-carrick/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.A. Carrick - "[All of My Tomorrows](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/all-of-my-tomorrows/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by L.D. Colter - "[alleles](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/alleles-amanda-helms/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amanda Helms - "[Hollows After Bones](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/hollows-after-bones-elis-montgomery/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elis Montgomery - "[Sunday on the grass](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/sunday-on-the-grass-john-saul/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Saul - "[Who Tells Your Story?](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/who-tells-your-story-clint-hannah-lopez/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Clint Hannah-Lopez - "[By The Wings Of An Albatross](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/by-the-wings-of-an-albatross-abigail-kemske/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Abigail Kemske - "[Lindy Bot](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/lindy-bot-anna-kahn/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anna Kahn - "[The God of the Leftmost Door](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/the-god-of-the-leftmost-door-m-r-robinson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.R. Robinson - "[The Laws of Thermodynamics as Applied to my Dead Mom](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/the-laws-of-thermodynamics-as-applied-to-my-dead-mom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christopher Blake - "[Kings\_Gambit.exe](https://www.adventitious.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com#:~:text=Kings%5FGambit.exe%20%E2%80%94%20By%20Yelena%20Crane)" y Yelena Crane ### Nonfiction - [For Sale: If You Can Catch It — A Rare Ambulatory Freehold Opportunity!](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/for-sale-if-you-can-catch-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) ### Fiction - "[Diaschisis](https://amazingstories.com/2026/06/diaschisis-by-t-r-brooks-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by T.R. Brooks - "[Headhunter](https://amazingstories.com/2026/06/headhunter-by-dennis-kohler-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dennis Kohler - "[Time Saves](https://amazingstories.com/2026/06/time-saves-by-femi-salami-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Femi Salami - "[They Are Vast](https://amazingstories.com/2026/06/they-are-vast-by-duff-mccourt-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Duff McCourt - "[The Hidden Parliament](https://amazingstories.com/2026/06/the-hidden-parliament-by-ian-brazee-cannon-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ian Brazee-Cannon --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 153, June/July 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Bathhouse for Long Life](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-bathhouse-for-long-life?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - "[Glass](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/glass?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Beth Dawkins - "[Ada the Last Daughter: On Blackhole Cosmology and Computation](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/apex-magazine/ada-the-last-daughter-on-blackhole-cosmology-and-computation?view=apex-magazine&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Campbell — 6/2 - "[My Suicides](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/apex-magazine/my-suicides?view=apex-magazine&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Debbie Urbanski — 6/9 - "[Seventeen Beats, the Chirping Stopped](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/apex-magazine/seventeen-beats-the-chirping-stopped?view=apex-magazine&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christian Ramirez Ramos — 6/23 - "[In Your Diminishing Tongue](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/in-your-diminishing-tongue?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Indigo Rue - "The Vigil of the Tenth Air" by Surya Ramkumar — 6/30 (*This story was taken down because it was suspected of being written with AI assistance.*) ### Nonfiction - [Musings from Maryland](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-issue-153?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - [Why it Matters When I Write About Space Janitors](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/why-it-matters-when-i-write-about-space-janitors?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marie Vibbert - [Weird Girl Fiction](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/apex-magazine/weird-girl-fiction?view=apex-magazine&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ivy Grimes — 6/4 - [Interview with Author Claire Jia-Wen](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-claire-jia-wen?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marissa van Uden - [Interview with Author Debbie Urbanski](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/apex-magazine/interview-with-author-debbie-urbanski?view=apex-magazine&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marissa van Uden — 6/16 --- ## [*Aurealis*](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 190) Subscribe [here](https://aurealis.com.au/product-category/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Faultless](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#faultless)" by Brendan Cottam - "[Unnatural Selection](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#unnaturalselection)" by [Donna Lee Austin](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[To Feel the Sun](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#tofeelthesun)by [Dominic Deveny-Borg](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Nonfiction - [From the Cloud](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial) - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[‘The Lonely’: The Twilight Zone Episode That Parallels the 2020s](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thelonelythetwilightzoneepisodethatparallelsthe2020s) by Joseph Sullivan - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[The Paradox of Nothing: The Anthromorphism of Aliens](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#theparadoxofnothingtheanthromorphismofaliens) by Todd Sullivan - [](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Ignorance Is Creative Bliss](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#ignoranceiscreativebliss) by Dr PH Court --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue #459 and #460) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Ecstasy of the White Sea](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-ecstasy-of-the-white-sea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by KJ Kabza - "[Waiting for The Yellow Ships](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/waiting-for-the-yellow-ships/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Edward Hodge - "[A Stranger Goes Ashore](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-stranger-goes-ashore/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adam R. Shannon - "[A Candle for Her Tireless Dead](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-candle-for-her-tireless-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Inglis Hall - "[Fletcher’s Flights](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/fletchers-flights/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jonathan Olfert - "[Let the Gods Drown With Us](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/let-the-gods-drown-with-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.K. Duncan --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 2026, Issue 237) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Up the Line to Death](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vaughn%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn - "[The Potential Side Effects of Roleplay Stimulation Therapy](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - "[The Floating Republic](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/campbell%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rebecca Campbell - "[Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pan%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pan Haitian, translated by Blake Stone-Banks - "[A Life Measured in Seconds](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wilkins%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Wilkins - "[Burning Day](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/murray%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samantha Murray - "[Ice, Rock, Empathy](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/neri%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Damián Neri ### Nonfiction - [ Finite Resources & Congestion Charges: What Will EV Technology of the Future Actually Look Like?](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tam%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kyle Tam - [When The Future Catches Up To You: A Conversation with Naomi Kritzer](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [To Know, and to Have a Choice: A Conversation with Isabel J. Kim](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: One for the Team](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F06%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*Cosmic Horror Monthly*](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025) Subscribe [here](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - "[There’s Something on Her Face](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/fiction/theres-something-on-her-face/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Magagna - "[How to Deal with Fallen Gods](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/fiction/how-to-deal-with-fallen-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew MacDonald - "[Only the Troll Wife Remains](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/fiction/only-the-troll-wife-remains/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Leonora Lewis - "[Jamieson](https://cosmichorrormonthly.com/fiction/jamieson-by-margaret-st-clair/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Margaret St. Clair --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, Issue 133) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - “[The Sunflowers](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-sunflowers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by JL George - “[The Beach House with Its Back to the Sea](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-beach-house-with-its-back-to-the-sea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Íde Hennessy (reprint) - “[Magpie Rhymes](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/magpie-rhymes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by R. K. Duncan - “[The Black Fox](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-black-fox/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by David Demchuk --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (Issue 53, June 2026) ### Fiction - "Beyond The Beaten Path" by Jenny Morelli - "Beyond The Breakers" by Chris Mcginley - "Gore" by Andrew Albritton - "Thunder Road" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "How Navigation Works" by Griffith Pound - "That Time Was The Place Where I Exist" by Robert Pettus - "The Gathering Of The Dragons" by Matias Travieso-diaz - "The Silver Front" by George P. Cross - "The World Beyond The Water" by Daniel Burnbridge - "Ghost Inquisitor" by Bill Walthall - "Child Of Centaurus" by R.A. Daunton - "Drains" by David Castlewitz - "Five Soft Fingers" by Sophia Krich-brinton - "Lisl" by Lisa Marie Miller - "Neural Crucible" by Ernesto Sanchez - "The Gromskin" by Mark Nuzzi - "The Missouri Man" by Lawrence Dagstine - "A Taste Of Truth" by Bill Diamond - Plunge" by Anuel Rodriguez --- ## [*Diabolical Plots*](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Support [here](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[The Sharp Cry of the Winterlarks](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-136a-the-sharp-cry-of-the-winterlarks-by-arden-baker/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Arden Baker - “[The Monster’s Wife](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-136b-the-monsters-wife-by-stewart-moore/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Stewart Moore --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) () Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Byzantium](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#byzantium)" by Robert Dawson - "[Last Rites](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#last-rites)" by Cailín Frankland - "[What Is Conjured Shall Vanish](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#what-is-conjured-shall-vanish)" by Akis Linardos - "[A Runaway Android’s Guide to the Oro-Ti Night Market](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#a-runaway-androids-guide-to-the-oro-ti-night-market)" by M.R. Robinson - "[Herself Anodyne](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#herself-anodyne)" by Emma Burnett - "[Your Guide to the Ever-Shrinking Solitude on Planet Earth](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#your-guide-to-the-ever-shrinking-solitude-on-planet-earth)" by Jo Miles - "[In the Book Grove](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#in-the-book-grove)" by Carol Scheina - "[The Girls of Channel 9](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#the-girls-of-channel-9)" by Jennifer Lesh Fleck - "[Restoration](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#restoration)" by Rich Larson - "[Starve You](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#starve-you)" by Bethany Bruno - "[I Am My Art](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#i-am-my-art)" by Ayida Shonibar - "[A Bag of Soldiers](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#a-bag-of-soldiers)" by Eric Fomley - "[To Face Ourselves](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#to-face-ourselves)" by Claudia Wair - "[Null Empathy](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#null-empathy)" by Myna Chang - "[In the Name of Those Optimist Iranian Fools](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#in-the-name-of-those-optimist-iranian-fools)" by Pegah Ouji - "[133rd Live Podcast of the Gourmando Resistance](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#133rd-live-podcast-of-the-gourmando-resistance)" by Beth Cato ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: The Heart of Resistance](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/resist-a-flash-fiction-online-anthology/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial-the-heart-of-resistance) by Jeanna Cammarano --- ## [*Flash Point SF*](https://flashpointsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, Issue 3) Subscribe [here](https://flashpointsf.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[How to Get a Head](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/06/30/issue-3-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#how-to-get-a-headby-marie-brennan)" by Marie Brennan - "[Don’t Touch the Clones](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/06/30/issue-3-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#Don't-Touch-the-Clones)" by Andrew Kozma - "[What To Expect When You’re Expectorating Bees on Hive Colony Delta](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/06/30/issue-3-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#What-To-Expect-When-You're-Expectorating-Bees-on-Hive-Colony-Delta)" by Addison Smith - "[Please Join Me on the Fourth Shift](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/06/30/issue-3-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#Please-Join-Me-on-the-Fourth-Shift)"by David M. Barry - "[Pythia](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/06/30/issue-3-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#pythia)" by Juniper White --- ## [*Forever Magazine*](https://forever-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, Issue 137) Subscribe [here](https://forever-magazine.com/subscribe.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Tool Use By the Humans of Danzhai County” by Derek Künsken - “Hello, Hello” by Seanan McGuire - “Rager in Space” by Charlie Jane Anders --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) ### Fiction - "[Mirror, Mirror](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/mirror-mirror-sofia-samatar/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sofia Samatar ### Nonfiction - [In the Blink of an Eye](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/game-design-vision-hellwarth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Will Hellwarth --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 2026) ### Fiction - "[How the Waters Returned to Apicuya](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/06/01/how-the-waters-returned-to-apicuya/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Nicholas Schorn](https://giganotosaurus.org/people/nicholas-schorn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Once Upon an Invasion](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/once-upon-an-invasion-by-amanda-cecelia-lang/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amanda Cecelia Lang - "[Outbreak](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/outbreak-by-michele-h-porter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michele H. Porter - "[Out to Sea](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/out-to-sea-by-dominic-d-borg/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dominic D. Borg - "[Ponyhenge](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/ponyhenge-by-faith-allington?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Faith Allington - "[The Tipping Point](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/the-tipping-point-by-s-m-french-byrne?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sean French-Byrne - "[Diamonds](https://kaleidotrope.net/sping-2026/diamonds-by-grant-stone?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Grant Stone - "[Astral Source](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/astral-source-by-k-l-neidecker/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K.L. Neidecker - "[A Life in the Day: with Chris Wheeler, CEO of Tricentennial](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/a-life-in-the-day-with-chris-wheeler-ceo-of-tricentennial-by-matt-hornsby?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matt Hornsby - "[Ma’anu Wei: What We Know Thus Far](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/maanu-wei-what-we-know-thus-far-by-eliezra-schaffzin/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eliezra Schaffzin - "[A Tree That Can’t Be Chopped](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/a-tree-that-cant-be-chopped-by-timothy-mudie?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Timothy Mudie - [Wolftongue](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/wolftongue-by-em-harriett?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Em Harriett - "[Rara Avis](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/rara-avis-by-meg-elison?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Meg Elison ### Poetry - "[Awakening](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/awakening-by-mari-ness?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mari Ness - "[Even in Our Sleep](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/even-in-our-sleep-by-mark-rich/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mark Rich - "[Bridge and Tunnel](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/bridge-and-tunnel-by-anne-perez/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Perez --- ## [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.khoreomag.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Post-History of a Planet](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-post-history-of-a-planet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samantha H. Chung - "[So You Want to Make a Killing](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/so-you-want-to-make-a-killing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Boon Carmen - "[Tender and Sweet](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/tender-and-sweet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lisobel Tang - "[Godweapon](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/godweapon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kel Coleman - "[Museum of the Other Moon](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/museum-of-the-other-moon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. Artemis Chen - "[A River Begins or Ends](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/a-river-begins-or-ends/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira ### Nonfiction - [Letter from the Editors](https://www.khoreomag.com/editor/letter-from-the-editors-volume-6-issue-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Zhui Ning Chang --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 193, June 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Ghost in the Tank](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ghost-in-the-tank/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.R. Robinson (6/4) - "[The Best of Intentions](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-best-of-intentions/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mari Ness (6/4) - "[Memeostasis](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/memeostasis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Rosenbaum (6/11) - "[An Oral History of the Schooner Key Invasion](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/an-oral-history-of-the-schooner-key-invasion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Irvine (6/11) - "[The Overview Initiative](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-overview-initiative/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Marino (6/18) - "[I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/i-cut-off-a-monsters-arm-aita/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Brennan (6/18) - "[The Sharing of Some Familiar Song](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-sharing-of-some-familiar-song/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adam-Troy Castro (6/25) - "[Ash-Shūrā; or, A Book, a Bowl, a Bag of Coins](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ash-shura-or-a-book-a-bowl-a-bag-of-coins/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Beesan Odeh (6/25) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: June 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-june-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (6/4) - [Author Spotlight: M.R. Robinson](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-m-r-robinson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (6/4) - [Author Spotlight: Alex Irvine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-alex-irvine-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (6/11)\\ - [Book Review: *My Dear You* by Rachel Khong](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-my-dear-you-by-rachel-khong/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (6/11) - [Author Spotlight: David Marino](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-david-marino-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (6/18) - [Book Review: *Goldenborn* by Ama Ofosua Lieb](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-goldenborn-by-ama-ofosua-lieb/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (6/18) - [Author Spotlight: Beesan Odeh](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-beesan-odeh-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (6/25) - [Book Review: Auntie Heroes by Rita Beeman, ed](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-auntie-heroes-by-rita-beeman-ed/?ref=andrewliptak.com). by Chris Kluwe (6/25) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (June 2026, Issue 066) Subscribe [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Fiction - "Backwash" by Rowan Tate - "Two Nights at the Doll House" by Maggie Slater - "Cat Steps" by River West - "As Per My Last Email" by Eleanor Rasor - "Track 19" by Lesley Hart Gunn - "Hazard Pay; Competence; Wyrms" by Catherine George - "Zig and Zag's Guide to Crash Landing" by Harklin Ashe - "The Dragons" by Ashleigh Rajala - "Time Surfing" by Isabel McKeough - "The Queen of Tish" by Lindsey Duncan - "Vestigial Speech" by Xavier George - "Tongue" by Denman Netherland - "The Last Birthday Cake" by KT Reed - "Spaghettification" by Lauren Ferebee - "The Grass is Pinker on the Other Side" by Kelley Tai ### Nonfiction - [The June issue has docked for the summer](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/blog/issue-066-launch/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jennifer Lyn Parsons --- ## [*MIT Technology Review*](https://www.technologyreview.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) ### Fiction - "[You Do Your Own Time](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/12/1138518/you-do-your-own-time-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elizabeth Bear --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Book of Cron Job](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01716-0?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jordan W. Suchow - "[Doubting Thomas](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01718-y?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Paul Renault - "[Wah-ult in the vault](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01719-x?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mark Arnold - "[Garbage collection](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01720-4?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aidan Lawson --- ## [*Neon Dystopia*](https://www.neondystopia.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Support [here](https://www.patreon.com/neondystopia?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Purpose of a Name](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043623&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ashley Y. Gao - "[Secondhand Parts](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043632&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Winchester --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, Issue 165) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[What Grows Back](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/what-grows-back/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aishatu Ado (6/3) - "[NoMouth](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/nomouth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marianne Kirby (6/10) - "[Patterns of Dentition in Transgender Adults](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/patterns-of-dentition-in-transgender-adults/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Izzy Wasserstein (6/17) - "[Good Morning, Wolf—](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/good-morning-wolf/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephanie M. Wytovich (6/24) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: June 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-june-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (6/3) - [Author Spotlight: Aishatu Ado](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-aishatu-ado/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (6/3) - [The H Word: Horror Is the Metal of Books](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-horror-is-the-metal-of-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Panatier (6/10) - [Author Spotlight: Izzy Wasserstein](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-izzy-wasserstein/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kevin Figueroa Quiñones (6/17) - [Media Reviews: June 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/media-reviews-june-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam-Troy Castro (6/24) ## [*Otherside*](https://othersidespec.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, Issue 2) Support [here](https://othersidespec.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/we-who-have-been-raised-by-tigers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P.V. Vamsidhar - "[Before She Knew About Magic](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/before-she-knew-about-magic/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joshua Geller Schwartz - "[Two People](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/two-people/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ben Francisco - "[This Is C(lone)-Pop](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/this-is-clone-pop/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lia Lao - "[Spider Kiss](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/spider-kiss/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bree Wernicke - "[Chī Kǔ](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/chi-ku/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.Y. Zhang - "[First to Rot](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/first-to-rot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.N. Howell - "[Crowns](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/crowns/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by cee-cee manrique - "[Remade, Reshaped, Remembered](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/remade-reshaped-remembered/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sydney Paige Guerrero #### Poetry - "[Masquerade.](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/masquerade/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chidera Offor - "[Ganymede](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/ganymede/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gospel Chinedu - "[obsolesce](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/obsolesce/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Macey Levington - "[girl, flogged by a false-named whip.](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/girl-flogged-by-a-false-named-whip/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amie SHen - "[Open Your Eyes Again](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/open-your-eyes-again/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Toby MacNutt - "[As seen through the hole of the hag stone:](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/as-seen-through-the-hole-of-the-hag-stone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sienna Tristen #### Nonfiction - [Letter from the Editors: Issue 2](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/letter-from-the-editors-issue-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ash Vale, M.R. Robinson, V.M. Ayala - [A Noose of Purple Silk](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/a-noose-of-purple-silk/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sidney Grady --- ## [*Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine*](https://www.penumbric.com/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026, vol x issue 1) ### Fiction - "[On the Space Station](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/greySpace.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Grey - "[A God in Binary](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/greySpace.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.D. Ross - "[Xenowicker](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/magahizXenowicker.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Richard Magahiz - "[A Post-Times Dispatch](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/donovanDispatch.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Doug Donovan - "[Over Time](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/gormanTime.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amelia Gorman - "[Elegy](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/fraknoiElegy.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Fraknoi - "[A Sweet Summer Melody Courtesy of Planet XR-23A](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/thomasMelody.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bailey Thomas - "[Time](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/vrubelTime.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by O. Vrubel - "[The Chaatbot](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/spiresChaatbot.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires - "[Yes Chef](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/engberChef.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Corinne Engber - "[The World Is Raining](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/singerRaining.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mira Singer - "[Questions for an Unnamed Member of the Undead](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/whalbringQuestions.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marcus Whalbring - "[The Veiled Prophet](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/hangmanProphet.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dave Hangman - "[For the Piercer and the Craftsman](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/leahyPiercer.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Leahy - "[Erd Hated](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/gardnerErd.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adele Gardner - "[The Line](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/vancalberghLine.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael VanCalbergh - "[Progress](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/hodgeProgress.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jamal Hodge --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 2026) ### Fiction - "[Trail Cam](https://reactormag.com/trail-cam-benjamin-percy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Percy - "[No Agency Without Identity! Stay In Character Always!](https://reactormag.com/no-agency-without-identity-james-patrick-kelly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James Patrick Kelly - "[Turn Right For Terror](https://reactormag.com/turn-right-for-terror-james-cooper/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James Cooper --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Laundry Lives](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/laundry-lives/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cara Masten DiGirolamo - "[we are all made of star-stuff](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/we-are-all-made-of-star-stuff/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ash Vale - [a junk email from god](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-junk-email-from-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Diya Tyagi - [Photographs I Have Been Trapped In](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/photographs-i-have-been-trapped-in/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Beth Goder - "[Your Cause and Your Effect](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/your-cause-and-your-effect/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ian Li - "[What Are We If I Stay](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/what-are-we-if-i-stay/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K. S. Walker - "[Familiar](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/familiar/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Courtney Floyd - "[Waiting to Become True](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/waiting-to-become-true/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samantha Murray - "[Magnus, Who Tore Down the Night](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/magnus-who-tore-down-the-night/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cameron Blue --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Throne of Men, Wilds of Sky](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/throne-of-men-wilds-of-sky/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Morgan Wodring - "[For a Handful of Salted Teeth](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/for-a-handful-of-salted-teeth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marisca Pichette - "[Dear Trilobites](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/dear-trilobites/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by RJ Taylor ### Poetry - "[look](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/look/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Eric Otto](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/eric-otto/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The Sound of Trying to Remember](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-sound-of-trying-to-remember/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Vinita Agrawal](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/vinita-agrawal/?ref=andrewliptak.com), art by Romie Stott - "[The Dream of Jeannie](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-dream-of-jeannie/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Brennan - "view advertisement source code" by Nico Martinez Nocito - "The Keyhole" by Natalia Theodoridou - "[How to Court a Siberian Tiger](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/how-to-court-a-siberian-tiger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Izzy Toy Rettke - "[Log 6324, earthdate unknown](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/log-6324-earthdate-unknown/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rose Mary Boehm - "[ἀγκυλοθάλασσος](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/%e1%bc%80%ce%b3%ce%ba%cf%85%ce%bb%ce%bf%ce%b8%ce%ac%ce%bb%ce%b1%cf%83%cf%83%ce%bf%cf%82/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sonya Taaffe - "[What the Machine Remembered](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/what-the-machine-remembered/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jack Fisher - "[The Glass Beach](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-glass-beach/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nestor Walters - "[Permafrost](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/permafrost/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. Frost ### Nonfiction - [The Many Metaphors of Lycanthropy](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-many-metaphors-of-lycanthropy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gwen Katz - [Against Worldbuilding](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/against-worldbuilding/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenna Hanchey ### Reviews - Monday: [The Climate Fiction Prize Shortlist 2026](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-climate-fiction-prize-shortlist-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Wednesday: [*The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet* by Yi-Ling Liu](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-wall-dancers-searching-for-freedom-and-connection-on-the-chinese-internet-by-yi-ling-liu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nataliia Sova - Friday: [*Hermits Die on Thursday: Stories of Appalachia and the Dark Ages* by Gregory Ariail](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/hermits-die-on-thursday-stories-of-appalachia-and-the-dark-ages-by-gregory-ariail/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Lockette - Sunday: [*Red Sword* by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/red-sword-by-bora-chung-translated-by-anton-hur/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akankshya Abismruta - Sunday: [*Fantasy: A Short History* by Adam Roberts](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/fantasy-a-short-history-by-adam-roberts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephanie Burt - Saturday: [*Nonesuch* by Francis Spufford](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/nonesuch-by-francis-spufford/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul March-Russell - Monday: [*Kill The Poet, Save The World!* by Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/kill-the-poet-save-the-world-by-abdulkareem-baba-aminu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akumbu Uche - Wednesday: [*Dead Boys in Space* by Sara Youngblood Gregory](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dead-boys-in-space-by-sara-youngblood-gregory/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw - Friday: [*House of Margins* by Tloto Tsamaase](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/house-of-margins-by-tloto-tsamaase/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sinclair Adams - Monday: [*Vigil* by George Saunders](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/vigil-by-george-saunders/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Soyka - Wednesday: [*The Young Die Old* by Nguyễn Bình Phương, translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-young-die-old-by-nguyen-binh-phuong-translated-by-khai-q-nguyen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Cordasco - Friday: [*River of Bones and Other Stories* by Rebecca Roanhorse](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/river-of-bones-and-other-stories-by-rebecca-roanhorse/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Kingsley --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2026) ### Fiction - "[Go No-Go No](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/go-no-go-no?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex London - "[Jill & Lily](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/jill-and-lily?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.R. Dawson - "[Word of Mouth](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/word-of-mouth?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrea Phillips - "[Always](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/always?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Karen Joy Fowler --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2026, Issue 70) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Immigrant Girl from the End of the World](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/immigrant-girl-from-the-end-of-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hannah Yang (available Jun 02, 2026) - "#[HumansOfMars](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/humansofmars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lavie Tidhar (available Jun 02, 2026) - "[Magical Girl Eater](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/magical-girl-eater/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu (available Jun 02, 2026) - "[Lincoln and the Harvester C-100](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/lincoln-and-the-harvester-c-100/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.S.A. Garcia (available Jun 02, 2026) ### Poetry - "[electric in the silver stormchain that burst behind my wings](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/electric-in-the-silver-stormchain-that-burst-behind-my-wings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S.R. Ekstein (available Jun 02, 2026) - "[Quorum](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/quorum/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ceridwen Hall (available Jun 02, 2026) ### Nonfiction - [Nature, Monsters, and the Responsibility of Larger Things](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/nature-monsters-and-the-responsibility-of-larger-things/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nilah Magruder (available Jun 02, 2026) - [An Absolute Crisis: DC’s Big 7 Have Been Stripped Down and Relaunched for the Present Age](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/an-absolute-crisis-dcs-big-7-have-been-stripped-down-and-relaunched-for-the-present-age/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Jennings (available Jun 02, 2026) - [Interview: Angela Liu](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-angela-liu-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (available Jun 02, 2026) --- That's it for now: check back later in the month when I update this list. As always, let me know what you read in the comments! ### 15 new SF/F books to read in June 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-arden-asimov-kim-a/ Last updated: 2026-06-01T17:56:56.000Z Here's a brief announcement: if you're in Vermont and don't have plans tonight (Monday, June 1st), I'll be interviewing Katherine Arden about her new novel *The Unicorn Hunters* (more details below) at Phoenix Books in Burlington at 7:00PM. I've been reading and enjoying the book, and I'll have a whole bunch of questions for her about it, her career, writing, and a bit more. I hope to see you there! It's one of a handful of books that I'm really excited to see come out this month: 15 of them! As usual, you can see the prior installments of this list [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/), and I'll have another one out with some additional titles later in the month. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, you can support it by signing up as well! Your membership will help with the next batch of work that I've got in the pipeline: more deep dives, interviews, reviews, book lists, and more. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### [*The Unicorn Hunters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128282?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Katherine Arden (June 2nd) I loved Arden's last novel, [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128275?ref=andrewliptak.com). Her latest is The Unicorn Hunters, a historical fantasy that follows Anne of Brittany, who finds her life upended when her realm is invaded and her father killed. She's ordered to marry the King of France, ultimately resulting in her country's annexation, something she promised her father would never happen. Secretly, she plans to short-circuit the French plans by marrying someone else: their greatest enemy, and in a world of magic, she has to go deep into a forest, far from the eyes of French diviners in search of a unicorn for a secret wedding. One appears, along with a legendary figure that might provide her with the means to save her home. Kirkus Reviews gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/katherine-arden/the-unicorn-hunters/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "fans of jousts, spells, dark magic, and brave women will find plenty of each here." [The memories that haunt the battlefieldsKatherine Arden’s novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of wartime trauma and memories, and of finding hope in darkness![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-291.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7838-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585928?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Isaac Asimov (June 9th) Blackstone is publishing one of Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction series, the *Lucky Starr* novels. The first installment, [*David Starr, Space Ranger*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585904?ref=andrewliptak.com) came out in May, with the rest to follow over the course of the year. Originally slated to be the basis of a never-produced TV series, the story is set thousands of years in the future in an inhabited solar system, with the Council of Science, keeping things under control. In this latest adventure, Lucky Starr takes on a pirate captain named Anton, planning to take revenge for the death of his parents. Under the guise of sending a ship to be captured and blown up in pirate hands, Starr hides onboard and plans to infiltrate their ranks. ### [*Kill All Wizards*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250908056?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jedediah Berry (June 16th) When a barbarian undertakes a long journey to consult with the Empire's wizards, he's met with a cold reception: he's bewitched, manipulated and stolen from. Enraged, he embarks on a quest to kill those who wronged him. To do so means infiltrating their society and blending in to gain their trust to get close enough to kill. It looks like this one will be a lot of fun. ### [*The Cold Between*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896303?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Remnants of Trust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896358?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Bonesteel (June 2nd and June 16th) Last year, [I wrote about Elizabeth Bonesteel](https://www.andrewliptak.com/publishing-linda-nagata-elizabeth-bonesteel-science-fiction-writing/) and some of her issues with the larger publishing industry and how she felt like there was a mismatch between how she saw her books and how they were marketed. She's recently gotten the rights to the novels back, and she's begun republishing them herself, starting with *The Cold Between* and *Remnants of Trust*. It'll be followed by another new edition of the third installment in the series, [*Breach of Containment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798994896372?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* as well as a fourth installment, [*Condition of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737390985?ref=andrewliptak.com), which came out last year. [Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Central Corps trilogy is a refreshing space operaAn underrated SF trilogy![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/central-corps-a33b714946a8210f70a601ceae4a823fe130a344a2b74691ddbf28e13eddcf09.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/elizabeth-bonesteel-central-corps-trilogy-review/) ### [*The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063460218?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lex Croucher (June 9th) It follows Briar Jones, who's dreamed of attending a prestigious institution called the Temple School of Thaumaturgy, which has produced many of the country's notable figures, and there are rumors that it's secret to success is magic. His friend Sebastian isn't swayed by the school's reputation, but he wants to stay with Briar. When Seb gets an acceptance letter and Briar doesn't, their friendship is shattered. Years later, Briar takes a temp job at the academy to sort through the school's attics, and reunites with his friend. However, he finds that he's completely changed: the quiet, sweet kid he loved is now an arrogant bully, while the secrets that the school hold might not be as magical as he imagined. ### [*The Traveler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250428554?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joseph Eckert (June 9th) A regular guy named Scott Treder is headed to work when suddenly, he finds that he's no longer in his car, and everyone is wondering where he went. It turns out that he lost an entire day, and that he had slipped forward in time. He begins experiencing more of these slips, every morning at 7:52 in ever-doubling intervals, while his wife is trying to figure out how to pick up and the pieces of their lives along with their son, Lyle. As his dad vanishes for longer and longer intervals, he decides to figure out what happened to his father by studying quantum physics. ### [*The Captain's Daughter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730118?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter F. Hamilton (June 9th) Peter F. Hamilton continues his Arkship Trilogy (preceded by [*A Hole in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730095?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with a new installment, *The Captain's Daughter*. In that first book, we're introduced to Hazel, a passenger on a generation ship that's 500 years into its journey, and on which life has devolved to an agricultural society, and where everyone over the age of 65 is recycled by the ship's AI. Hazel discovered a population of people who've escaped, and that the ship is in critical danger. The ship is now repaired, and Hazel how has to convince the rest of her passengers everything that she's learned about it – that humanity isn't alone on the ship: aliens known as the Yi have also made it their home. When their leaders don't listen to her, she ventures out into the ship once again to learn more about the Yi and their intentions – and find that there are more dangers lurking out there. ### [*Exodus: The Helium Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357699?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter F. Hamilton (June 16th) That's not the only sequel that Hamilton has coming out: back in 2024, he published [*Exodus: The Archimedes Engine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357668?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* a novel set in the same world as the (still forthcoming) video game. (It's now due out in 2027) In this story, humanity escaped from Earth tends of thousands of years ago for Centauri, traveling in generation ships, where they eventually settled, and society came to be ruled by five great houses, who are now dealing with new arrivals from Earth. In this book, Hamilton finishes off his story as the Crown Dominion is facing a crisis: an exiled faction of humanity that has been waiting for thousands of years to strike against them. Finn – who grew up under the control of the Celestials, it represents a new opportunity to overthrow his oppressors, and he and his allies have to track down and figure out how to use some ancient artifacts that could give them the edge in the coming fight. ### [*Sublimation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250376794?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Isabel J. Kim (June 2nd) Isabel J. Kim earned a considerable amount of acclaim for her short fiction, particularly for her 2024 *Clarkesworld* story, "[Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." Her debut novel is set in a world where immigrating to another country means that you're leaving a copy of yourself behind. Folks sometimes keep in touch with themselves, but one, Soyoung Rose Kang, never did, and never expected to return to Korea until her grandfather dies. It's only when she returns that she finds that the copy who remained behind is planning on taking her place and the life that she's built. I've been reading this for a couple of weeks and it's really fantastic. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250376794?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "the gorgeously rendered and deeply unsettling second-person narration enhances the intense and emotional reading experience. The result is a sharp, deeply felt first outing from a writer already at the top of her game." ### [*Obstetrix*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250423375?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Kritzer (June 9th) Liz is an OB/GYN who had just been tried and acquitted for performing an abortion in North Dakota when she's abducted by a fundamentalist cult that has realized that they need a doctor. She finds that she's their only one, and while she's treated well by her captors, she's wary of what happened to her predecessor. She has to figure out how to escape, and is determined to take the girls who are trapped on the compound with her. *Publishers Weekly* [says that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250423375?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Kritzer’s premise feels chillingly plausible." ### [*Smoke Season*](https://wordhorde.com/books/smoke-season/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie-Edmund Laben (March 31st) Justin Erasmus has found himself on a commune in Missoula, Montana after hooking up with Adrian – someone who can help him find his estranged sister Helen. The members of that commune are admirers and followers of her. He hasn't seen her in years, and only has the barest memories of her as a child when she was locked inside of a dog crate, and somehow went through the bars like they were nothing before she was sent away. Recently, he's been hearing a voice telling him that he needs to find her. As he deals with his relationship with Adrian and life on the commune, he finds that he's not the only person looking for Helen – a mysterious governmental organization that is trying to destroy Helen and everything she represents. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781956252125?ref=andrewliptak.com) "those drawn in by the thrilling premise and unexpected plot twists will be entertained." ### [*Charity and Sylvia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770468382?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tillie Walden (June 16th) Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were two women who lived in Vermont in the early 1800s who lived as married partners and who were generally accepted by their community in Weybridge. Their story has been well-documented, but I'm really excited to see this new take on it in graphic novel form. I’m a huge fan of Tillie Walden’s comics (particularly [*On a Sunbeam* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250178138?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Spinning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781626729407?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and I’m excited to see how she translates this story. The artwork is gorgeous. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tillie-walden/charity-and-sylvia/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "When Walden pushes against this format’s restrictions, her looser, almost ethereal imagery proves breathtaking. Walden also employs her particular gift for drawing simple faces that express innocence, excitement, devastation, and devotion in a few pen strokes—she brings Charity and Sylvia to life with tremendous tenderness and grace." ### [*The Martian* (Deluxe Edition)](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217300556?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andy Weir (May 26th) Andy Weir's now-classic science fiction novel *The Martian* is getting the deluxe edition book treatment: it looks like it's a step up above the regular trade edition, coming with sprayed edges with a cool design, new cover art, endpapers, and a nice, stamped case featuring a potato. I've been a little down on some of these deluxe editions, but this looks like a particularly snazzy one: the cover is shiny and looks very cool, and while the interior text hasn't changed, it should look really nice on a bookshelf. (If you want something a step up, The Folio Society also [has a nice edition](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-martian?srsltid=AfmBOopjyZhfX5zWp7Wkwer6MBJ833tNAYnG%5FJ2QiwyUBj4x2CGz6Uvl&ref=andrewliptak.com).) [The Martian is getting a Deluxe EditionBut are these special limited editions really just the new dust jacket refresh?![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Question-c72845007b5da39148ff6f062f63761f7f30e60da4e694bddf9255545548d034.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/) ### [*The Heart of the Nhaga*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063349896?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lee Young-do, translated by Anton Hur Originally published in 2003, Lee Young-do*'s The Bird that Drinks Tears* has been hailed as a classic of Korean fantasy literature, and it's been translated into English for the first time. The first installment is The Heart of the Nhaga, set in a world that's inhabited by four races: the fire-manipulating Tokkebi, the bird-like Rekon, the reptilian Nhaga (who gave up everything to chase immortality), and humans. For centuries, they were divided by the Line of Limit, but now, things are changing: a Nhaga representative has been dispatched to the North for the first time and is accompanied by representatives of each of the other races. They quest they find themselves on is anything but simple: the Tokkebi is a scholar, the Rekon hates water, and the human is a Nhaga hunter. When the Nhaga they were originally tasked with escorting was killed, its replacement is anything but the heartless creature its race is known for, and together, the four must find a way to overcome their differences to survive the journey ahead of them. --- Alrighty: what catches your eye, and what have you been reading? Let me know in the comments. ### ### Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-scifi-art-new-book-announcement/ Last updated: 2026-05-31T18:00:07.000Z For a long time now, I've been following Adam Rowe and his efforts to spread the word about science fiction artwork via his *70's Sci-Fi Art* [newsletter](https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and various [social media channels](https://linktr.ee/70sscifiart?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's been a great way to get away from the chatter and noise of social media, and I've been introduced to so many fantastic artists through it in that time. Back in 2023, he released his excellent book, [*Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and I'm pleased to reveal that he's got an even more ambitious book coming about science fiction art! He's still deciding on what to call it (*The Art of the Future* or *The Art of Science Fiction*) and it's due out in the fall of 2027 from UK-based published [Frances Lincoln](https://www.quarto.com/Frances-Lincoln?ref=andrewliptak.com). Where his first book really looked at a sliver of the art of the 20th century, this one will "cover the whole history of science fiction illustration," and will "include about 200 artists." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/Rick-Guidice---Torus-Cutaway.jpg) Rick Guidice, '70s NASA cutaway concept of a Toroidal Colony interior I spoke with him about his plans for the book and what he hopes to bring to readers. ### Your first book was *Worlds Beyond Time*: what will this new book do that you couldn't do with that one? There’s a great Leo Steinberg quote: “All art is infested by other art.” My first book took a really close look at one slice of science fiction illustration (mostly book covers, mostly 1960s-’80s), so this new one is pulling back to look at the web of influences that went into that era and emerged from it. I’m covering such a broad area that it’s going to be impossible to include everything, so I’m approaching it more like an art smorgasbord that jumps around between centuries and mediums. [Colorful futuresAn interview with Adam Rowe, the guy behind 70s Sci-Fi Art project and author of Worlds Beyond Time.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2541-e4afe3b31d5384aeb9a60bbd310aa569ce2ea8e5994c8175d8b07a8eecc4d8cb.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-worlds-beyond-time-70s-scifi-art-book-interview/) ### What are you most excited to explore with this book? I think the variety is the most exciting! One day I’m looking through woodcuts from hundreds of years ago, and the next I’m trying to find the single most representative concept for the 2002 animated movie *Treasure Planet*. But if we’re talking about the larger concepts, it’s also great to be able to explore what science fiction means and what it stands for. I love how the way we picture the future has evolved over the centuries. It’s a well-trod cliche to say that science fiction is about the present day, not the future, but it’s incredibly true. ### When you told me that you were writing this, I assumed the focus was on books and magazines, but film and television really expands your scope quite a bit: how did the world of art for print publications inform the motion picture world, and vise versa? The two industries swap artists and inspiration back and forth so much that it's hard to draw a big-picture takeaway from them - Ron Cobb, James Gurney, Ian McQue, many more. Plenty of matte artists or art directors have done book covers. Vincent Di Fate worked on the 60s *Spider-Man* cartoon. Films draw inspiration from well-known artists often, too, and have for a long time: He's not a science fiction artist, but Gustave Doré's work was [a big influence](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2019/02/12/inspiration-10/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on the original King Kong, which I find really fascinating. ### You had started off with art in the 1970s and you've branched out quite a bit over the years: from your vantage point, what are the bigger changes and trends that science fiction art has gone through? Just off the dome, I’d say it grew out of and blended with adventure and fantasy illustration prior to the 1910s and ’20s, when science fiction magazines began developing a lot of genre iconography. Then paperbacks took it in a more surreal direction in the ’50s and ’60s before pivoting to representational bright colors and sharp detail in the early ’70s for the genre’s more candy-coated era. That more or less lasted until the ’90s, when industry consolidation started reducing risks and digital art arrived. Many other mediums are on their own trajectories, but influence and are influenced by books and magazines: Film concepts and posters, album art, comic books, and video game concepts. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/Jean-Ignace-Isidore-G--rard---The-Bridge-of-Infinities.jpg) Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard - The Bridge of Infinities ### SF art goes beyond covers: lots of science fiction magazines and fanzines included illustrations by pros and fans. How are you tackling this part of the story? I’m planning to include some prozine and fanzine art, though not a ton – I have Cora Lee Healy and Alicia Austin on my list. And there’s also crossover from well-known pro artists, like Jack Gaughan, who won the first Hugo for Best Fan Art in 1967. I’m writing the book now, so there’s still time to add art. If anyone wants to suggest any lesser-known artist or artwork, leave a comment or follow my newsletter! ### Something I've always been fascinated by is how different countries market their books differently: the US and UK have very different styles. Why is that? Hm, I’m not sure I have an informed opinion there. I think that publishers tend to jump on the same market trends at the same times, so perhaps the trends just don’t make it all the way across the pond. I don’t think I could break down specific differences between the markets. For example, Chris Foss was the biggest name in paperback science fiction in the UK when John Berkey was the biggest name in the US, but I don’t think that indicates the US market was significantly more into Berkey-style impressionistic spaceships than the UK. Although I guess it was a little more into them! ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### Is there one country's style or taste that you find yourself gravitating to? Hm, if I had to highlight a specific country, France would be high on the list – Mœbius, Philippe Caza, Enki Bilal, and Roy Virgo all have their own unique ethereal vibes. But don’t ask me to choose! I love all my little artwork children equally! ### How have you seen technology impact the art that is produced? The biggest example that comes to mind are the ’90s Animorphs covers. At the time, David B. Mattingly was one of very few artists who both knew the only image-morphing software application that could start the process and could also paint the rest of the artwork. I’m hoping to cover all the other big shifts in art styles, too, from airbrushing in the ’70s to fully digital art in the 2000s. I’d also love to feature a [blacklight poster by Horace Mitchell](https://www.chron.com/culture/article/houston-blacklight-poster-company-22217866.php?ref=andrewliptak.com), although I suspect my publisher won’t spring for using actual fluorescent ink. ### How close to the modern day are you coming with this book? I'm curious how you'll approach the modern trend of typographic-driven covers. As close as I can! I even have my eye on one cover to a crowdfunded RPG zine that won’t come out until next year. There’s one typography-heavy cover that I’m hoping to include, and it should give me a way to talk about that trend briefly. To be honest, though, even that work still has more illustration than many of those types of covers! This may be an example of an area of science fiction art that won’t be strongly represented in the book, but will be one tidbit among many other flavors. Like I said, smorgasbord. ### What are you hoping readers will take away from it? I think art collections on broad topics like this one work best as primers. It's a big fast-paced collection of radically different artists. Hopefully it'll be a jumping-off point that allows a reader to suddenly realize they need to check out every Syd Mead art book in their local library system or pick up a copy of the Bilquis Evely-illustrated *Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow*. --- Thanks for reading. I'll be adding this book to my list of anticipated books for 2027\. ### Here are the winners of the 2026 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2026-harrow-okorafor-jones/ Last updated: 2026-05-31T14:19:19.000Z *Locus Magazine* held its annual conference this weekend and announced this year's [winners](https://locusmag.com/2026/05/2026-locus-awards-winners/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of its awards. This year's crop of finalists was a good one, and something that I found interesting amongst the winners of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels is how each deals to some extent with the idea of narrative: *Death of the Author* is about an author contending with fame, *The Everlasting* is about someone creating a national narrative, and *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* involves the discovery of a journal and the telling of its story. Here‘s the full list (winners marked in **bold**): ### Science fiction novels - *The Folded Sky* by Elizabeth Bear - *Picks & Shovels* by Cory Doctorow - *Notes from a Regicide* by Isaac Fellman - *When We Were Real* by Daryl Gregory - *All That We See or Seem* by Ken Liu - *Where the Axe Is Buried* by Ray Nayler - *Slow Gods* by Claire North - ***Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor** - *The Shattering Peace* by John Scalzi - *Shroud* by Adrian Tchaikovsky [Review: Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the AuthorDeath of the Author is a fantastic novel about remaining authentic in the face of the demands fame and success brings![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2890-3322b57168b2acec8461c44fc152803507f8c517b5b5472a006741ddb7f9bc33.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/) ### Fantasy novels - *The Devils* by Joe Abercrombie - *The Tomb of Dragons* by Katherine Addison - *Lessons in Magic and Disaster* by Charlie Jane Anders - *A Drop of Corruption* by Robert Jackson Bennett - ***The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow** - *The Raven Scholar* by Antonia Hodgson - *Hemlock & Silver* by T. Kingfisher - *Katabasis* by R.F. Kuang - *The Incandescent* by Emily Tesh - *Queen Demon* by Martha Wells [Origin storiesAlix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting is a powerful book about a nation’s origin story and how such narratives can be manipulated![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7948-ea1fda3e4fbbfb33c6aa2ad715803b4e84c4c29d7d4017b21a61f9f9c9082943.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/) ### Horror novels - *The Possession of Alba Díaz* by Isabel Cañas - *Spread Me* by Sarah Gailey - *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill - ***The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones** - *The Library at Hellebore* by Cassandra Khaw - *Never Flinch* by Stephen King - *The Bewitching* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *It Was Her House First* by Cherie Priest - *The Crimson Road* by A.G. Slatter - *The Staircase in the Woods* by Chuck Wendig ### Young Adult novels - *The Singular Life of Aria Patel* by Samira Ahmed - *Make Me a Monster* by Kalynn Bayron - *Costumes for Time Travelers* by A.R. Capetta - *The Executioners Three* by Susan Dennard - *The Underwood Tapes* by Amanda DeWitt - *Among Ghosts* by Rachel Hartman - *Sky on Fire* by E.K. Johnston - ***Starstrike* by Yoon Ha Lee** - *I Am Not Jessica Chen* by Ann Liang - *They Bloom at Night* by Trang Thanh Tran ### First novels - *A Song of Legends Lost* by M.H. 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Parker - *Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce - *Lives of Bitter Rain* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *A Mouthful of Dust* by Nghi Vo - *Murder by Memory* by Olivia Waite ### Novelettes - “[The Witch and the Wyrm](https://reactormag.com/the-witch-and-the-wyrm-elizabeth-bear/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elizabeth Bear (*Reactor* 2/26/25) - “[Barnacle](https://reactormag.com/barnacle-kate-elliott/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Elliott (*Reactor* 11/5/25) - “[Uncertain Sons](https://undertowpublications.com/shop/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons) - **“**[**We Begin Where Infinity Ends**](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ihezue%5F02%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**" by Somto Ihezue (*Clarkesworld* 2/25)** - “The Tin Man’s Ghost" by Ray Nayler (*Asimov’s* 5-6/25) - “[The Millay Illusion](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny* 11-12/25) - “[When He Calls Your Name](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-he-calls-your-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Catherynne M. 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Miller (*Nightmare* 10/25) - “[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden (*Strange Horizons* 6/16/25) - “[Landline](https://reactormag.com/landline-kelly-robson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelly Robson (*Reactor* 3/5/25) - “[Missing Helen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F07%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tia Tashiro (*Clarkesworld* 7/25) - “[Woolly](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=B0F9PHFYWX&tag=locusmag06-20&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn (*Asimov’s* 5-6/25) ### Anthology - *The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories* edited by andré m. carrington - *Night & Day* edited by Ellen Datlow - *Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology* edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney - *The End of the World As We Know It* edited by Christopher Golden & Brian Keene - ***We Will Rise Again* edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older** - *Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity* edited by Lee Mandelo - *The Best Weird Fiction of the Year: Volume 1*edited by Michael Kelly - *Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three* edited by Stephen Kotowych - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025* edited by Nnedi Okorafor and John Joseph Adams - *As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories* edited by Terese Mason Pierre ### Collection - *Call and Response* by Christopher Caldwell - *Moon Songs* by Carol Emshwiller - *Letters from an Imaginary Country* by Theodora Goss - ***Uncertain Sons and Other Stories* by Thomas Ha** - *Bright Dead Star* by Caitlín R. Kiernan - *The Essential Patricia A. McKillip* by Patricia A. McKillip - *One Message Remains* by Premee Mohamed - *The Revelation Space Collection Volumes 1 & 2* by Alastair Reynolds - *Crows and Silences* by Lucius Shepard - *A Catalog of Storms* by Fran Wilde ### Magazine - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - ***Clarkesworld*** - *F&SF* - *Fiyah* - *khōréō* - *Lightspeed* - *Reactor* - *Strange Horizons* - *Uncanny Magazine* ### Publisher - Angry Robot - DAW - Del Rey - Gollancz - Neon Hemlock - **Orbit** - Pan Macmillan/Tor UK - Saga - Solaris - Tachyon *Tor Publishing Group & Subterranean Press have recused themselves from this category. Tor UK is an imprint of Pan Macmillan, not TPG.* ### Editor - John Joseph Adams - Scott H. Andrews - **Neil Clarke** - Ellen Datlow - dave ring - Jonathan Strahan - Bogi Takács - Wendy N. Wagner - Fran Wilde & Julian Yap - Sheila Williams ### Artist - Brom - Rovina Cai - Galen Dara - Bob Eggleton - Kathleen Jennings - Alan Lee - **John Picacio** - Shaun Tan - Charles Vess - Michael Whelan ### Illustrated and Art books - *The Invisible Parade* by Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio - *Frank Frazetta: Fine Lines* edited by Sara Frazetta and Arnie Fenner, art by Frank Frazetta - *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow, art by Rovina Cai - *Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld* by Paul Kidby - *Carmilla* by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, art by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell - ***The Space Cat* by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford** - *Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Volumes 1-3* by adapted by Rebecca K. Reynolds, art by Justin Gerard - *Sunset at Zero Point* / *Swedish Machines* by Simon Stålenhag - *Faraway Dreaming* by Ulla Thynell - *Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection* edited by Amanda T. Zehnder and David M. Brinley ### Nonfiction - *The Outspoken and the Incendiary* by Terry Bisson - ***Enshittification* by Cory Doctorow** - *Colourfields* by Paul Kincaid - *Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling* by Henry Lien - *Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler* by Susana M. Morris - *Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World* by Tavia Nyong’o - *Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet*by Tochi Onyebuchi - *Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature*edited by Becky Siegel Spratford - *Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends*edited by Richard Wolinsky - *Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse* by Chi-ming Yang ### Unrealized glimmers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-mandalorian-and-grogu-film-review/ Last updated: 2026-05-29T17:01:04.000Z 10 years ago last December, *Star Wars* arrived at a curious transition point. J.J. Abrams' *The Force Awakens* debuted in theaters, ushering George Lucas's franchise into a brand new era and under new corporate ownership. Its arrival was the start of a flood of projects that dramatically expanded the Galaxy Far, Far, Away, not only by filling out the long-imagined final trilogy of trilogies, but with additional standalone films and a slate of animated and live-action television streaming shows. Now, the franchise has arrived at another pivotal moment: in January, Lucasfilm [announced](https://web.archive.org/web/20260117173705/https://www.starwars.com/news/lucasfilm-leadership) that President Kathleen Kennedy, who presided over the company following Lucas's departure, was stepping down and would be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, who would serve as President and Chief Creative Officer and Co-President, respectively. Capping off that era is a new film, *The Mandalorian & Grogu*, a spinoff from the franchise's first live-action series *The Mandalorian.* It debuted in theaters last week, and which not only feels like an encapsulation of this initial Disney era, but also for what the franchise could look like in the years to come. If it's anything to go by, there's cause for concern – but maybe there's some room for optimism. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image-4.png) I *The Mandalorian & Grogu* is a weird little film. Coming after three (ish) seasons of *The Mandalorian* series, it's not the type of super-sized episode that serves as a series finale, and it also doesn't really feel like it's a season that's been condensed down to shove into a movie theater (although there are some beats that feel like like they could be TV cliffhangers.) At times it's cinematic, but it doesn't have the gravitas one of its bigger cousins, and while it's a standalone, it feels very much like it's part of a bigger, ongoing narrative. At its worst, it's a film ordered from Disney's C-suite: "we need a film in theaters. Here's your super-popular characters, go have at it." But at its best (fleeting) moments, it captures the charm and delight that I saw in the original films when I first saw them as a kid decades ago. It's something new, not really good, but not awful. *Spoilers ahead for the film* It opens with a brief introduction that explains that the New Republic has been hunting down remnants of the Empire, before jumping to an unnamed Imperial warlord who's in the middle of extorting an assembled group of subjects for protection money. They're interrupted by the titular duo: Din Djarin storms the base, taking out Imperial snowtroopers in the base one by one before commandeering an AT-RT walker and taking out a trio of larger AT-ATs, and eventually, the bad guy. Since the events of the show's third season, Din and Grogu have been taking on those Imperial targets for the New Republic. When he returns to their base after this mission, he's given a new mission: an Imperial warlord who's kept a low enough profile that the New Republic doesn't even know what he looks like. They have a lead: a pair of Hutt crime lords called The Twins, who've had some dealings with him. They'll be willing to point the New Republic in the right direction, provided they get something in return: their nephew Rotta, who was apparently kidnapped by another crime boss named lord Janu. So, Din and Grogu rocket off to Shakari, where they find that Rotta's been pressed into service as a gladiator. After a couple of obligatory fight sequences, they free him and learn that Janu is the mysterious Imperial that they've been trying to track down. Another action sequence and they have him in hand, while Rotta convinces them to let him go, because his aunt and uncle really want him dead. Going back on their deal angers the Twins, who capture Din and Rotta, and try to kill them. They nearly succeed, but Din and Grogu escape and manage to turn the tables, save Rotta, take out the Hutts, and leave a little on the table for whatever's next for the characters. Let's get the big, bad part out of the way: *The Mandalorian & Grogu* is a mess from beginning to end, and I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking "how did someone watch this and think, 'ah yes, this came out great?'" while watching it. It's a film that confidently revels in the pulpy nature of the franchise, but writers Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor never really take the time or energy to understand what the film *was* before cameras started rolling. The film careens from set piece to set piece: a battle on an icy planet takes them to another action sequence on Shakari, which leads them to another handful of fights on Nal Hutta, each separated by interludes where the titular characters are told where to go and what to do. Those action set pieces *are* quite a bit of fun – watching Din and Grogu take out Imperial troopers, battle in a live Dejarik game, and fight against a horde of Hutt underlings provides plenty of good visuals and dynamic action, while Favreau and Filoni's tendency to do that "let's pull the action figures out and see what we can do" with various troopers and spaceships makes for plenty of deeper connections to the larger universe and for some good nostalgia trips. It's even worth catching on a bit screen to take in the spectacle and the moments where it's clear they loved a piece of concept art and had fun bringing it meticulously to life. It's everything in between when the action slows when the problems show up. From the opening (a monologue from the nameless and cardboard cutout Imperial warlord is just a pile of clichés, from his demands for more money and his casual execution of one of his subjects) to their instructions to head off to the Hutts to find their warlord (more monologuing) and off to a Chicago-esque crime world where they beat up a bunch of Lord Janu's henchmen in his bar (after which they're given more clichéd monologuing, along with Janu telling Din that he should consider taking part in one of his matches *three times* in the same scene). All of it feels like the types of lines you'd accompany with a reminder that it's all placeholders that need to be needs to be punched up for more pizazz. It's all delivered with heavily ADR'ed dialogue ([which I couldn’t help but spot, thanks to *Going Rogue*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-rogue/id1636196453?i=1000576767640&ref=andrewliptak.com)) and wooden performances from just about everyone involved. It's incredibly frustrating to watch, because it's so clear that it's these interstitial moments that should be driving the action scenes, rather than the other way around. It's where a good screenwriter can lift mountains to capture a film's soul – moments that drive home some central tenet that underpins the entire adventure, and where actors can come in to bring those little moments to life. And there are those moments, fleeting as they are: in the middle of the film, Grogu catches up to Din after his capture and escape, and tends to him in the middle of Nal Hutta's lush jungles. It's here that the film genuinely shines: the care and attention that the crew took filming these sequences capture so much of the magic that we go to the movies for. It set up the final act wonderfully and powers the film through to the end, where we're treated with another delightful stop-motion sequence where Din and Grogu take on a pair massive droids guarding the Hutts. These sequences show that there are the bones of a good, emotional story hidden somewhere in there. It's about fatherhood: recognizing that your kid is growing up and that they're becoming their own person, while the kid realizes that their father only ever has their best interests at heart, even if they're a little overprotective. Scenes like Din scolding Grogu for touching the buttons on his new ship could have been a bigger moment, but it's treated like joke: a juiced-up toddler getting to touch the colored blinky lights, rather than a moment of a father worried out of his mind about his kid's safety. Rotta's entire presence in the film is an embodiment of a troubled father/son relationship that runs parallel to the A storyline. Treated properly – or even recognized – that's a solid, emotion-driven plot: two characters who find themselves increasingly at odds with one another because of their actions, who're separated and forced to the realization that the other is valuable and worth going to enormous lengths to save. It's a dynamic and story that would have fit naturally into this story. But Favreau never takes the time to develop those character moments. If I had to guess, it's in part because Disney needed a franchise film in theaters ASAP and didn't have enough time to properly cook and a reluctance to really let the characters change in a meaningful way. The characters spend most of their time instead as blank slates, going from point to point because that's where they're supposed to go to move the action forward. I think there's an element of wanting to harken back to the Saturday morning adventure serial adventure that *Star Wars* was always supposed to be, but I think there's also an element of this where nobody is really sure where this fits in the larger picture of what the franchiseis, and it feels very much like it's designed to be a standalone adventure where nobody wanted to change anything for fear that audience members will be left behind. If that's the case, it's doing its story – and the larger franchise and world – a disservice. The films that really stand out lean into their story's emotional elements and push their characters to learn *something* from their experiences. Here's an example that came to mind: I recently rewatched Stephen Spielberg's *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, and thought back to how there are a whole bunch of bigger, dramatic moments that lead up to the finale, but how there's all these smaller moments that really build up those characters that get you to care about them and understand where they're coming from. You understand the depths of Roy's obsession not from the people who're telling him that he's crazy, but by seeing how much he changes from the father who was goofy and mischievous and playful with his kids. It's those smaller moments that add to a film's runtime, but which either gives a character a reason for their actions, or provides the audience with context for those actions, and thus gives those actions real weight, because they have consequences and a reason beyond "we were told to go to this planet." Maybe they didn't want to overthink things, and decided to keep it as a pulpy adventure, but that's not really a good excuse: pulpy adventure films can come with plenty of heart and soul! And *that's* what's really wrong with this movie: the characters don't really learn anything, they make any actions or decisions that aren't dictated by the plot in advance, and they aren't changed for their experiences. I can't tell if this is simply something that the filmmakers just didn't understand or fully realize during the film's production, if they did executed it poorly, or if it was chipped away because of notes from executives that didn't trust their audience to pick up on it. Either way you cut it, it takes a promising concept and makes it into a forgettable piece of content. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image-5.png) Image: Lucasfilm In a lot of ways, *The Mandalorian & Grogu* feels like it's part of a longstanding, systemic problem with the *Star Wars* franchise. Post-acquisition, it's never really felt like Lucasfilm and Disney knew what to do with it, other than that they knew that had to do *something*. For decades, it was easy to sum up what *Star Wars* was: the story of a Skywalker coming to terms with their special powers and place in the larger universe, so clearly, whatever you planned to do would include that core group of characters. And, in the post-*Return of the Jedi* era of the 1990s, Lucasfilm continued the story through a long-running, interconnected franchise of books, video games, and comics. Lucas had long alluded to the franchise as a nine-film saga, so a continuation from *Return of the Jedi* in the form of a new trilogy was a good guide, and *The Force Awakens* kicked off that new era of storytelling. But when it came to what the sequel trilogy would do, it seems that Lucasfilm never bothered to map out an overarching plan for the barest idea of what type of story it should tell, instead opting to leave that direction in the hands of the directors and screenwriters hired for each installment, and as a result, the sequel trilogy never felt like it had a bigger purpose or thing that it wanted to say. It lost its way as the story bounced around from film to film. Beyond the sequel trilogy, they threw a lot of ideas out there: would standalone films featuring major characters (like the origins of Han Solo and Chewie in *Solo*) or canonical moments (the capture of the Death Star plans and rise of the rebellion in *Rogue One* and *Andor*) work? Could they build off of the suite of characters from *The Clone Wars* and *Rebels* (as seen with *Clone Wars* season 7, *The Bad Batch, Ahsoka,* or *Maul: Shadow Lord*)? Should they jump to a new era entirely (*The Acolyte* and *The High Republic*) or should they lean into nostalgia for the movies and filmmaking of the 1980s (*The Mandalorian* and *Skeleton Crew*) or the sheer fandom for some characters (*Book of Boba Fett*)? All of those projects have varying levels of success, with some executed better (*Andor*) than others (*Book of Boba Fett*), and continued to expand the world in various ways. *The Mandalorian & Grogu* fits solidly into a couple of those categories, and as I [noted when the film was first announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/), it felt like an easy sell: you can't drop a radically-different take on the franchise into theaters after a seven year absence, you want something that feels like *Star Wars*. *The Mandalorian* did that well, the characters are super recognizable, and what we got doesn't require a ton of explanation: the characters go off on an action-packed adventure. I think that's fine: going into this expecting a saga-class film like *A New Hope* or *The Force Awakens* will set you up for disappointment. I think that there's space for *Star Wars* to be more than one thing. I also don't think that comparing this to something along the tone of *Andor* (the more serious, adult-oriented take on the galaxy) is worth doing: both have very different mindsets behind them and a pulpy action-adventure romp lines up with George Lucas's original intent pretty squarely. But for decades, seeing *Star Wars* affixed to a movie poster meant that you were in for an *event* at your movie theater, rather than content. To some extent, I think that scarcity is part of what forms that impression – having a film come every couple of years certainly makes them hit differently than when you can expect new Star Wars films or television shows on an annual basis. There's a line somewhere in there between artistic endeavor and content, and if Disney's era of films amounts to anything at this 10-year mark, it feels like it's drifted into the "endless stream of content" side of the equation. Some of that content is really good – the first couple of seasons of *The Mandalorian* or the final season of *The Clone Wars* hit that for me, while shows like *Andor* eclipse it by a wide margin. (And others, like *Ahsoka*, *The Book of Boba Fett* and *Obi-Wan Kenobi*, fall under the bad to "eh, it's fine" spectrum.) *The Mandalorian & Grogu*? I can see how it aligns with Lucas's original vision, it's at times fun, but it feels like it was designed as content when it could have been dialed up to something that could have been a lot better, and that's unfortunate. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image-6.png) Image: Lucasfilm If I could provide a note to the studio for this film, it would be simple: lean into that idea of fatherhood and trust that your audience will understand it. The action – the assault on the imperial fortress and the mission with the Hutts is the perfect hook to drive a wedge between them and get them frustrated with one another, and the perfect way to get them to realize that they still need one another. It's their actions that come out of that conflict that should be driving them from action sequence to action sequence, with Rotta's B-plot there to reinforce it as a cautionary tale. All of those elements are there, but they're never realized. I hate to keep beating the dead horse, but the one time that a *Star Wars* story really succeeded was when it had a clear mission and purpose: Tony Gilroy's *Andor*, and I wish that Lucasfilm had taken some cues from that process. I don't mean that *The Mandalorian & Grogu* should have been this type of hard-hitting, adult story – it's not that type of story, but I think it would have benefitted from someone taking a look and breaking it down to its simplest, core component, like what Gilroy had [found for *Rogue One*](https://www.reddit.com/r/andor/comments/1tkgeni/tony%5Fgilroy%5Fon%5Fhow%5Fhe%5Ftried%5Fto%5Ffix%5Frogue%5Fone%5Fmake/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and make a film that would have taken the risk to push its characters and story. [A familiar galaxy, far, far awayThe immediate future of Star Wars looks like one thing: comfortable![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/imago492708327-scaled-959ea127dcca561c82b35e6d61a23add1558d7d0e7699c9942588a59fbb348fc.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-familiar-galaxy-far-far-away/) This is a film that could have been better – a lot better. This isn't one of the big, backbone saga movies – it doesn't have to have consequences that ripple out to the galaxy – but simple and straight-forward doesn't mean skipping the basics to deliver something that feels like it's just going through the motions. It feels like they figured "good enough" was good enough. I don't know what this means for the future of Lucasfilm and *Star Wars* in theaters: it feels like it could go either way. I hope that this approach doesn't become the norm: but I'm heartened that there does appear to be this better film somewhere in there. I just hope that Lucasfilm and its creatives can figure out how to deliver that. That said, I suspect the real test will be 2027's *Star Wars: Starfighter*, and I'm eternally an optimist. You never know what's just around the corner. I spent a long time thinking that *The Mandalorian & Grogu* doesn't know what it is, but I've come to realize that it knows exactly what it is: a piece of content, served up to fill a slot in the box office and hold its place to remind the general public that *Star Wars* exists. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. I just wish it had core that would have moved me in either direction. ### FIYAH is going on indefinite hiatus URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/fiyah-black-speculative-science-fantasy-short-fiction-magazine-hiatus/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T13:37:49.000Z [*FIYAH*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), an award-winning speculative fiction magazine devoted to Black storytelling is going on "hiatus indefinitely," according to publisher DaVaun Sanders [in a post on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/davaun.bsky.social/post/3mmesx7sbyc2w?ref=andrewliptak.com). In his post, Sanders explained that the publication "cannot continue running at a loss and needs time to reassess operations from top to bottom if a viable path forward is to be created." In April, the magazine released its Spring 2026 issue, #38, and its last issue (for the moment) will be #40, which will presumably be released later this year. The publication is also set to release a 10-year retrospective anthology, [*Forged in FIYAH: Celebrating Ten Years of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250360847?ref=andrewliptak.com), in September. In a [followup post](https://bsky.app/profile/ldlewiswrites.blacksky.app/post/3mmex7n2dks2p?ref=andrewliptak.com), Lewis, an administrator for the Ignyte Awards, said that the magazine's hiatus "does not impact the operations of the Ignyte Awards (this year's shortlist is [slated to be unveiled in early June](https://bsky.app/profile/theignyteawards.bsky.social/post/3mmew3zlb7c2p?ref=andrewliptak.com)) or a future convention," but noted that they do share some expenses, which could impact their operations and needs down the line. --- Founded by Phenderson Djèlí Clark, Troy L Wiggins and Justina Ireland, it was inspired in part by an African American magazine published by Wallace Thurman in 1926 called *Fire!!*, as well as the findings from a series of reports from Fireside Magazine called the [BlackSpecFic Review](https://medium.com/fireside-fiction-company/fiction-we-have-a-problem-its-racism-f49c80b7cdbe?ref=andrewliptak.com#.ru6bfovza), which found that Black authors were widely underrepresented in the SF/F publishing world. The first issue of *FIYAH* launched in January 2017 as a quarterly publication [with a mission](https://fiyahlitmag.com/the-mission/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to highlight stories "to ask what it means to be Black and extraordinary." Along the way, it published such authors as Jennifer Marie Brissett, Maurice Broaddus, C. L. Clark, Nicky Drayden, T.L. Huchu, L.D. Lewis, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Zin E. Rocklyn, Wole Talabi, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tade Thompson, and many others. It also helped incubate a number of side projects, including FIYAH Con in 2020, the IGNYTE Awards, and a special online anthology, [*Breathe FIYAH*](https://reactormag.com/tag/breathe-fiyah/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Over the course of its run, *FIYAH* earned a special non-professional World Fantasy Award in 2018, and was nominated for a Hugo Award seven times (winning in 2021.) It also frequently saw its stories landing on Locus Magazine's annual recommended reading lists. Moreover, it served an important role in the SF/F publishing world by providing a space for Black speculative fiction authors to operate in, becoming an essential foothold for those working to break into the field. It was not only a space in which Black authors were invited; it was an outlet that specifically highlighted the lived experiences, concerns, and dreams from the community and larger diaspora. Given the state of the world we're currently living through, its closure feels particularly dire. --- While we're living at a time when genre magazines are plentiful (just look [at the Table of Contents listings](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/)), they are facing considerable challenges, chief amongst them funding. When I wrote about this back in 2024, money was one of the biggest concerns for those editors, thanks to changes in how Amazon sold periodicals, shortfalls in paying subscribers, and a splintering of attention between social media platforms. [Funding short fictionFunding short fiction has never been more important, and three major outlets have recently launched Kickstarters to keep the lights on in 2025![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/joshua-brown-73YJpOGgi4E-unsplash-1-33db1083d98aaf03ff3603376b8767cb3b91d2c92ab3bdc593ea490673bcfff7.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-science-fiction-fantasy-kickstarter/) [On its website](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com), *FIYAH* said that it cost around $7500 each year to operate, making some of its income through selling issues, from donations and from sponsors. I reached out to Sanders via his website about what a reassessment looks like for the publication, but haven't heard back by publication. I'll update if I hear from him. But one thing is clear to me: while the SF/F community places a high value on the short fiction that writers are producing, there isn't follow through to ensure that these stories are adequately funded. This is a difficult problem to solve: inflation, a scattered reading community, outlets that don't have a lot of professional fundraising or sales experience are all factors that figure into it. Hopefully, the team behind *FIYAH* will figure out how to streamline their operations. In the meantime, they still have two more issues set for release this year – each an excellent opportunity for readers to show their support. ### Even more sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this May URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-mcintyre-nayler/ Last updated: 2026-05-19T19:11:48.000Z Over the weekend, I headed over to [Bookstock](https://bookstockvt.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Woodstock, Vermont, where I interviewed fellow Vermont author Katherine Arden about her work and her upcoming novel *The Unicorn Hunters*! It was a really good event: I hadn't attended it before and I'd sort of gotten the vibe that it was a more highbrow, literary affair, and wasn't sure what the reception for folks well-versed in SF/F literature would be. As it turns out, it was a good crowd with some great questions! It should be a good time: Katherine actually interviewed me when I launched my own book back in 2022, and we had a good conversation about writing, genre, history, and quite a bit more. And: we'll be doing it again on June 1st, [when she launches the book at Phoenix Books in Burlington, Vermont](https://phoenixbooks.biz/event/2026-06-01/katherine-arden-unicorn-hunters-pre-release-celebration?ref=andrewliptak.com). You should come! This newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, please consider signing up as a supporting member. Your membership helps with all of this newsletter's coverage, and I've got a ton of pieces on the schedule in the weeks and months ahead. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay: onto the rest of this month's books: the flood continues with another 19 new SF/F books that caught my eye. If missed the first list for May, you can read that [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-dinniman-leckie-murderbot/). As always, you can find past installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). --- ### [*Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691255873?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Roland Betancourt (April 28th) I missed this when it came out back in April, but it looks like a fascinating story: a look at the engineering that underpins Disneyland's attractions, and how the company has put teams of designers to work making the park's attractions. They repurposed industrial and military technologies, utilized computers and implemented artificial intelligence over the years, finding new ways to make entertainment even more immersive for the park's millions of guests. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roland-betancourt/disneyland-and-the-rise-of-automation-Betancourt/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Betancourt’s text, supplemented by a plethora of archival photographs, charts, and other images, is sure to be an important contribution to future discussions of humans versus machines." ### [*All Hail Chaos*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316568746?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Rees Brennan (May 12th) Back in 2024, Sarah Rees Brennan released her debut adult novel, [*Long Live Evil*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316568715?ref=andrewliptak.com), about a woman named Rae who was experiencing some significant troubles in her life, and when she lies dying, she jumps at the opportunity for a second chance via a magical bargain: she's given the chance to live in her favorite fantasy world, and finds herself waking up in a castle and a kingdom on the brink of war, and has to figure out where she stands. She's turned to playing the role of the villainess, thinking that she might be able to change the plot of the story she's stuck in, only to find that things are far more dire than she expected. Her friends have fled, there's a revolution brewing, and threats from all corners. And, her favorite character – the story's all-powerful emperor, wants to wed her. ### [*Space Journal: Art, Science, and Cosmic Exploration*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780500028186?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dallas Campbell (May 12th) I'm a sucker for space art, and this new book collects centuries of artistic works that explore just how we've imagined space travel throughout history, going all the way back to Galileo to President John F. Kennedy's speeches, to the science fiction films that imagined what we'd find out there. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dallas-campbell/space-journal/?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "a treasure trove of space travel ephemera that illustrates the glorious feedback loop between story and science." ### [*Squad Kill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781638493488?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jack Campbell (May 5th) I love a good military science fiction romp, and it seems that Jack Campbell has taken a break from his various series for a new adventure, *Squad Kill*. It follows Navy officer Osiris "Oz" Aquino, who's tasked with commanding a squad of Marines dispatched to an alien planet. The group is a mismatch of troublemakers, the scientists and crew don't want to be around them, and they've been issued old and outdated gear. When they reach their destination, they find that there was some sort of inhabited life, with lots of ruined cities and skeletons. The only lifeforms are these cute aliens that the crew names Squonks. It seems like everything might go smoothly ... until it doesn't. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*The Tapestry of Fate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062963543?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shannon Chakraborty (May 19th) Shannon Chakraborty follows up 2023's *The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi* with a sequel, *The Tapestry of Fate.* In that first book, we're introduced to Amina Al-Sirafi, a retired pirate who had an exciting career. When a relative of a former crewmate comes seeking help, she's dragged back into that world to find her missing friend, only to discover that there's more to her disappearance than meets the eye. In this new adventure, Amina thinks that she's found a legendary treasure: she had been hunting down rare and arcane artifacts for the Council of Immortal Peris, taking in the occasional adventure whilst squeezing in some family time with her daughter. When Raksh, a spirit that she's wedded to bothers the council, she's given a nearly impossible task: steal a spindle that can rewrite fate from a sorceress on a remote and dangerous island. She sets off and immediately faces ill weather and enemies new and old, and finds that her mission is not what it seems. Writing for *Winter is Coming*, Ash Anjum [says](https://winteriscoming.net/book-review-shannon-chakraborty-the-tapestry-of-fate?ref=andrewliptak.com) "*The Tapestry of Fate* is a genuinely excellent sequel. The world is richer. The characters have grown in ways that feel true to who they are. The plot goes somewhere unexpected and leaves you desperate for the next book." ### [*The Dorians*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668079560?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Nick Cutter (May 19th) This latest horror novel from Nick Cutter is set on a remote island in Canada, where five senior volunteers are given a unique opportunity. They can have their age slowed or even reversed, utilizing an ancient biological agent harnessed by a new form of technology. The problem is that this entity has its own sociopathic tendencies that has helped it survive for eons. Writing for *Grimdark Magazine*, Robert Mammone [says](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-dorians-by-nick-cutter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "we live in an age of technological and scientific achievement. The boosters of these innovations tell you all about how wonderful their inventions will make your lives, while playing down the negative impact on you (cough AI cough) and your lifestyle. *The Dorians*, like its antecedents, is a striking reminder that the pursuit of science must be tempered by ethics and morality." ### [*The Redemption Center Is Closed on Sundays*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250807311?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrea Hairston (May 26th) Oona the St. Berdoodle and Zsuzsu, her owner, take a weekly walk through a local state park and head to a building called the Redemption Center – a place often mistaken for a haunted mansion. Oona isn't just a dog – she's a multiverse traveler, and when a when a local celebrity turns up murdered, she knows the identity of the killer. Teaming up with a local group of misfits, they have to figure out the mystery and avoid the killer from getting to them first. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250807311?ref=andrewliptak.com), and said "Hairston balances a phantasmagoria of mystical and interdimensional elements with a cast of sharply drawn characters, creating very real-feeling people moving through a delightfully irreal world. The result is a lively and lovely tale of community triumphing over evil." ### [*Ignore All Previous Instructions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964566?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ada Hoffman (May 12th) A woman named Kelly loves to create stories and works for a an AI company based on Callisto called Inspiration, translating, artificial intelligence outputs into scripts to be produced. She based her most popular character on her ex-boyfriend Rowan, who is now smuggling inappropriate stories to their home Callisto. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964566?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "It’s an exceptional balancing of action, interior turmoil, and chilling dystopia. Readers worried about the future of storytelling in the age of AI will gobble this up." ### [*The Rainshadow Orphans*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668206874?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Ishiguro (May 26th) In this first installment of a new fantasy trilogy inspired by Japanese folklore, the inhabitants of Rainshadow City have been terrorized by a gang called the Lucky Crows. Three of them, Toshiko, Jun and Mei Kawakami have been living as a family outside of the law and are working to exact revenge upon the Crows after their "aunt" Reiko was murdered by them. Meanwhile, Haru is the Emperor's son and will one day take over the Archipelago, but he'd rather be making friends with its magical spirits, and Theo has been conscripted into the ranks of the Lucky Crows. When Toshiko steals a precious item from the Crows, a dragon pearl, it sets into motion a chain of events that will bring each of them together, and will determine the future of Rainshadow City. [Writing in *The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/08/the-best-recent-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-review-roundup?ref=andrewliptak.com), Lisa Tuttle said: "various plot strands see characters discovering magical powers, a mother dragon desperate to save her baby’s life, and a strangely helpful cat. Trope-heavy, entertaining fun, with a cartoonish vibe." ### [*Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419776113?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joshua Kendall (May 26th) When I think of my favorite comic strips, my immediate answer is *Calvin & Hobbes* and *Bloom County,* but I've recently been gaining an appreciation for Garry Trudeau's long-running strip *Doonesbury*, and it's one that I'd like to start reading more of. There's a new biography of Trudeau that might prove to be a great motivator for that: it's an exhaustive exploration into Trudeau's life and his comic strip, with his biographer Joshua Kendall interviewing him, his colleagues, friends, journalists, friends, and politicians about its impact and politics. ### [*The Curve of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781619762800?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Vonda N. McIntyre (May 15th) Just before Vonda N. McIntyre passed away in 2019, she left behind a novel that she had completed, *The Curve of the World*. It's an alternate history about the Minoans, who constructed a vast trading network and follows a woman named Iakinthu, a former bull dancer who's found work as the nation's lead diplomat and trader, who brings her adopted son on a traditional journey to visit his mother in a distant land. [Writing in *Strange Horizons*](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-curve-of-the-world-by-vonda-n-mcintyre/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Kate Macdonald called it a "magnificent achievement," and "*The Curve of the World* begins as an intriguing and dramatic adventure and ends as a rather over-egged travelogue of wonders. It’s so sad that we won’t know any more about the Idaeans, or their extraordinary alternate world of cognate nations and civilisations." ### [*I Hear A New World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781635578881?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alan Moore (May 26th) Alan Moore adds a new installment to his *Long London* series (after [*The Great When*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781635578843?ref=andrewliptak.com)). He started off in that book in London in 1949 when an 18 year old named Dennis Knuckleyard stumbles into a used bookstore and discovers a book that shouldn't exist. It's an artifact from the Great When, a magical version of London where stories have come together in a reality-blurring world. He realized that this world needs to be protected and he has to find a way to return it without exposing it to his world. In this book, the action jumps to 1958\. Dennis Knuckleyard has put his adventures in the Great When behind him, and he's spent the years since trying to forget about that world. When he discovers a key that he brought with him, he's reminded of his adventures and when he gives the key to a friend, it reawakens and brings some of the creatures from that world into his own, causing chaos in Notting Hill. A crush of his, Grace Shilling, is pulled into the Great When to investigate both cities, and Dennis follows her into Long London, where the two have to figure out how to make things right once again in both worlds. ### [*Palaces of the Crow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374620752?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Nayler (May 19th) I'm a huge fan of Ray Nayler's debut novel [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/)), [*Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250393661?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)), and last year's [*Where the Axe is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com) (one of my [favorites of 2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/)!) and his next looks just as fascinating. It's about a young woman named Nerya who loves biology and befriends a flock of crows near her home, a Polish soldier named Czeslaw who deserts his post, a mute and abandoned boy named Innokentiy, and a Roma horse trader named Kezia, all of whom are facing the German invasion of Europe in June 1941. They're each forced to flee into the forests and come together to form a deep bond, helped by Nerya's crows – who warn them of danger and threats in the dangerous wilderness. This looks like a fascinating read. Nayler's written some of the best science fiction in recent years, with a deep understanding of European politics and history, and I think this'll be an engrossing and thoughtful read. [Learning the languageRay Nayler on his fascinating career, communicating with intelligent life, reading and writing unconstrained, and our relationship with the natural world![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2026/05/IMG_0115.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-mountain-in-the-sea-scifi-book-author-interview/) ### [*Ode to the Half-Broken*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419585?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suzanne Palmer (May 26th) Decades ago, there was a catastrophic war that destroyed the world, in which a robot named Be has been trying to make its way. It's settled into what remains of the New York Botanical Gardens, trying to forget the role that it played in the conflict. One day, it wakes up to find itself in a bathtub with its leg missing, and along with a vocal cybernetic dog and a traumatized human mechanic, it sets off to find its missing leg. They find that the world still has a long way to go before it recovers, and that someone has been trying to restart the fight. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419585?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Palmer’s vision for how society might reshape itself after massive conflict is inventive, but where the tale truly shines is its captivating characters and the ways in which they’re willing to work together." ### [*We Dance Upon Demons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668068595?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Vaishnavi Patel (May 12th) A woman named Nisha is trying to navigate a convoluted existence: she's a reproductive healthcare worker in Chicago, and has been dealing with a flood of abortion bans and angry protesters, as well as her own depression. To escape, she visits an Indian art exhibit, and finds herself suddenly bleeding and collapsed on the ground after she touched a statue. She soon finds that she has some strange powers, and those powers have begun attracting strange figures who want it for their own purposes. Now, she has to figure out how to exist in this new reality with ancient alliances and the nature of her powers. ### [*And Side by Side They Wander*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250382054?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Molly Tanzer (May 19th) It's been a hot minute since Molly Tanzer has released a new book, and I'm glad to see that 2026 brings a new one: *And Side by Side They Wander.* For centuries, the world's best artwork has been loaned to an alien museum, and when their loan comes to an end, the extraterrestrial curators aren't willing to return them to Earth. Humanity isn't willing to force the issue: they're way outside of our league, so some enterprising folks decide to try and steal them. They're led by Tarquin, who assembles a crew including an art historian named Fennel Tycho, an insectoid pilot named Tchik-tchik, an enhanced fighter named Misora, and a sensynth hacker named Jack. Together, they have to figure out how to work together to pull off the greatest heist the world has ever seen. This looks like a lot of fun, especially as someone who works at a museum with a lot of art. ### [*House of Margins*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661047?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tlotlo Tsamaase (May 26th) A writer named Anaya Sebeya has gone missing after being invited to a writer's residency at the Günter Huis, an aging colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil's Peak in South Africa. She was a rising star in the literary world, and was on her way to completing the next great work from Africa, only to go missing. In the aftermath, a serialized podcast about the Anaya debuts, purporting to tell the real story about what happened with her. Her sister Ranewa is angry about it, but as she listens, she begins to figure out an even more terrifying story of what happened at that house. ### [*Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063236936?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Natalie Zina Walschots (May 19th) Back in 2021, Natalie Zina Walschots published [*Hench*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062978585?ref=andrewliptak.com), a phenomenal read about a woman named Anna who was injured during a superhero fight and who ends up taking up work in the henchmen gig economy to exact her revenge, ultimately falling in with the world's worst villain, Leviathan. [Review: Natalie Zina Walschot’s excellent superhero novel HenchNatalie Zina Walschot’s novel Hench is an exhilarating, funny, and pointed look at the cost of superheroes.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0392-ff093ee0339f7b1e139e7a296a007cbcf2cdca69e2b29f5247f635bddc6613fa.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hench-natalie-zina-walschots-superheroes-realism-review/) Five years later, and Walschots is back with a sequel: *Villain*. Now known as the Auditor, Anna has risen through the ranks to help her employer out with a skillset that makes any superheroes think twice about crossing her. With her greatest enemy, Supercollider, now defeated, she's set her sights on a new target: The Draft, an organization that trains and oversees the world's superheroes. She recognizes the danger that they pose to the world. But there are problems: Leviathan's frustrations that she dispatched Supercollider has caused a rift in their relationship, a friend and unexpected ally, Quantum Entanglement has reappeared and has prompted her to question their own relationship and betrayals. On top of that, they face a new challenger: The Draft's chief marketing officer. *Kirkus Reviews* gave this one a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/natalie-zina-walschots/villain/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Walschots’ plotting dazzles and devastates, with rollicking, high-stakes action punctuating scenes of unflinching introspection and fraught interpersonal drama. Via Auditor’s snarky yet vulnerable first-person narration and keenly rendered characters, Walschots sensitively explores issues of agency, self-identity, morality, and grief while entertaining readers from the jump." ### [*The Gatepost*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798347021000?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Weed (May 26th) Twenty years ago, Esme Weatherhead's father vanished after publishing a book about how ancient Mesoamerican shaman used hallucinogens. She's convinced he's still alive, and when she comes across a cache of his notes that point to a hidden cave on their property in Vermont, she has a new direction in her search. She hires a geologist named Lucas St. Pierre to help locate a cave, and when she finds it, the discovers an artifact left behind that leads them to a portal to hidden underworld that's accessed via the psilocybin mushrooms he was researching. When they follow, they find glimpses of this other world, and her father. But someone else is also looking for the portal with plans for harnessing its power, and they won't let anyone stand in their way. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798347021000?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Weed does a nice job interposing the present mystery with Weatherhead’s research in both Vermont and Oaxaca, and balances esoteric mysticism with touching contemporary detail." --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know what's on your TBR, and what caught your eye this month! ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827005?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827005?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781552455180?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Learning the language URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-mountain-in-the-sea-scifi-book-author-interview/ Last updated: 2026-05-20T17:34:04.000Z A couple of years ago, I came across a fantastic novel: [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com), by Ray Nayler. It was a heady book about an emergent intelligence in a population of octopuses off the coast of Vietnam, and a mysterious tech corporation that has been trying to figure out the nature of extrahuman and artificial intelligence. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-0c62528a4f0a07a5beac1c2791edbd10313f3e57cefff1033686b0958cc17e14.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2079-2361e067d6a5b47f559aa7ebe5c06adc96c600c0ac5a11b0d1b4e7d4de448a51.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) He followed it up with a novella, [*The Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250393661?ref=andrewliptak.com)([here's my review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)), and last year's [*Where the Axe Is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250420015?ref=andrewliptak.com), another fantastic exploration of artificial intelligence and how it impacts the world. His next novel, [*Palaces of the Crow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374620752?ref=andrewliptak.com) is out this week, and it's one that I'm looking forward to checking out. After reading *The Mountain in the Sea*, in 2024, I spoke with Nayler about it, his fascinating background and everything from how we communicate with one another to writing, to genre constraints, and to our role in the natural world. For technical reasons, it took a little longer to get this interview transcribed, but I'm happy that I was able to figure it out. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *This interview has been edited for clarity and length.* --- ### To start off, tell me a little bit about your background and how did you come to write science fiction and fantasy. I started writing, I think as many of us did, when I was a little kid, producing little things. I was also roleplaying when I was younger, coming up with scenarios and writing some of them down, and that lead to writing a few stories about characters and things like that. I think I started taking writing seriously when I was about 16, when I got it in my head that I was going to be a writer. I started keeping a journal and writing poems and a short story and publishing a couple of things in my high school literary journal and then just kept at it. Back in the days of paper submissions, you know where you got this little piece of paper quite often cut from a larger piece for a rejection? I would just go down to the post office and I would submit to ten different places and then wait for six months quote often that it took or a year or whatever. I kept writing things and sending them out. Eventually I got published in several short stories small literary magazines and then I got a couple of short stories in *Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine*. I had started to write some crime fiction and what I could call noir in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2003, I joined the Peace Corps and I went to Turkmenistan, which caused a big break in my publishing, because I couldn't send anything through this complex paper process. There was no way to get a self-addressed stamped envelope and I didn't have an address in the United States. I only came back in 2022, and it wasn't until the rise of digital subscriptions that I was able to actually submit again. In 2014, I came up with an idea \[for a\] science fiction story. I thought it was pretty simple: if you lived forever, it wouldn't really make much of a difference, because none of us can remember much about what happened 50, 60, 80 years ago and it seems like human memory has a terminal state that's at some number of decades, maybe ten or twelve. So we would just be kind of drifting, but always be developing: we wouldn't have a thousand years of knowledge, we had a human lifetime or maybe a little more's \[worth\] of knowledge, and then there would be this horizon beyond which we couldn't remember. So, I wrote that story, called it "Mutability," and I sent it out to *Asimovs*, and I got just really lucky: Sheila Williams asked for a pretty minor rewrite of the ending, and then took it. Because I had been published in a science fiction magazine, I started thinking a little more about science fiction stories. That's it: I just started writing more science fiction and I kept writing. I continue to write mainstream things as well; poems and short stories (I'm writing a mainstream short story right now, I've published a few over the last few years) but science fiction just became more and more of a focus. I think it just happens naturally, because that just became the way you start to think: you feel less constrained by the way things are, and you start predicating on how things might be otherwise, which is just a core element of what speculative fiction writ large is. That's basically it. Then in 2019, just after my daughter was born, I decided to write a novel, *The Mountain in the Sea*. I finished it by about late 2020, so about 18 months from start to finish before I felt comfortable sending it off to agents, and then I ended up getting represented by Seth Fishman of the Gernert Company\* and published at Sean Mcdonald at MCD at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was kind of out of the blue. I wasn't expecting that because I thought the whole thing was going to be a lot harder. It's the first time in my life that's happened to me and I've been jokingly calling it the 30 years to overnight success story, because it's about what it took. *\*Disclaimer: I'm also represented by Seth Fishman.* ### When you were first setting off to college was your goal to become a writer? When I was going to university, I thought I was going to be a writer. I was then rejected from the creative writing program and went into the straight literature program. The process of trying to get published over the next 10 or 15 years, I think killed any idea that I was going to be able to be a writer as a profession. But that didn't affect my desire to continue to write and publish. So I just got up in the morning and then wrote, then went to to whatever job I had and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer, but I did stop thinking of it as a career. I also saw what writers did in general, that a great number of them taught at universities. I have no interest in doing that. That a lot of people have MFAs, which I had no interest in getting. That they treated writing as a group activity, which I had no interest in. You know, there were there was really very little attraction to the other things around writing that typically constitute what being a professional writer is. And so once I became a Foreign Service officer, I had a fascinating job that was really interesting to me, where I got to learn new things every couple of years. And, I was constantly moving from one place to another and learning a lot, and I felt that it was really also feeding my writing very well with new information and new ideas and, and so I thought "well, this is, good. I can continue to just be a Foreign Service officer and write on the side and publish in *Asimovs* and *Clarkesworld* and get some nice feedback from my work and talk about the things I'm interested in, but I don't have to worry about making money on it." And so that's been good. ### Can you talk about about your foreign experience? You joined the Peace Corps and went overseas at a pretty interesting time in the world's history. What was what was your motivation for joining? So, I went overseas for completely for personal reasons. Basically in 2003, I was in San Francisco after having spent some time in Toronto. I was feeling kind of directionless; I graduated from the university about five years before, but I hadn't any kind of success as a writer, was working whatever jobs I could get along the way. And it's not a lot with a B.A. in modern literature. So I was thinking that I just needed some big change in my life. And so I applied to the Peace Corps. You know, in the interview process they actually ask "Have you had a recent breakup?" And I had, and I lied and said no, because I was afraid they wouldn't they wouldn't take me if they thought I was like on the rebound or something. ### Is that something that usually happens? I think, yes. Yeah, they said that quite often people join the Peace Corps because someone broke up with them and they wanted to just do something drastic. That generally that doesn't work out well for them. But yeah, I was initially offered a spot in Chad, but I told them that I knew people in Chad, thinking that wasn't a big deal, and they said that that wouldn't work, because I shouldn't know people in the country I was going to. So I had to wait for another assignment, and they ended up giving me Turkmenistan. I almost turned it down, because I looked it up and it was just like there was just very little information about it, and what did exist was just about how it had this very severe dictatorship, it was a really closed country, deserts and all this kind of negative, stuff. I called the Peace Corps and asked them what would happen if I turned this down, and the woman very successfully basically was like, "oh, are you afraid of going to Turkmenistan? Does it intimidate you?" And that got me to be like, "No! I'm not afraid of Turkmenistan, I'm going!" So I took it, and while I was in Turkmenistan, I learned Turkman first, and then I got to my work place, which was at a university, \[where I taught\] English. And the English department was an extremely cosmopolitan group of people from all over the former Soviet Union. It was Azerbaijanis and Armenians and Russians and all of these different ethnicities and their common language was Russian, not Turkmen. They said "that's very cute that you speak Turkmen, but almost nobody, especially not in higher education, does. So we're going to teach you Russian." So I learned Russian and after two years in Turkmenistan, I decided I wanted to stay overseas. I had no desire to go back to the United States at all, and I got a job recruiting for a high school exchange program in Moscow. \[I was\] traveling all over Russia interviewing high school students, who were interested in spending a year in the United States. It was a program funded by the State Department, but I was working for a contracting organization. Then after that, I went back to D.C. for the same organization, decided that I indeed, as I had predicted, hated it here and wanted to be overseas. I took another job in Kazakhstan, then went to Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan for them, and then I went back to Moscow for a couple of years. Met my wife, we got married and moved to Tajikistan, where I took a job as the country director at the office of that company there. We were there for a couple of years and then joined the Foreign Service, actually kind of under duress. The U.S. ambassador, who I used to hike with on Sundays – Tajikistan is like 96%? mountains – so we, we were hiking one day when she said "I think she would make a really good Foreign Service officer, you should take the Foreign Service officer test. We're giving it at the embassy in about a month." I said, "no, thank you. I really am not impressed by the other Foreign Service officers that I know and it doesn't seem like a good job for me. I like what I'm doing." And then she said, "well, let me put it a different way. The United States ambassador has just asked you to take the Foreign Service officer test, so, I'd like to know when you sign up." I said "Yes, Madam Ambassador, I will take the test." And I did, and I surprising myself, I passed it. I got into the oral examination, which is the second or third stop, and I pass that too, and ended up in line for an orientation class. My first assignment was Ho Chi Minh City, because in all the wisdom of our system, I guess they decided, since I was a Russian speaker who had worked for so long in the former Soviet republics, learning Vietnamese would not kill me. So they sent me there. That's where I worked a lot on Côn Đảo and got a of the ideas for *The Mountain in the Sea*. ### **O**ne of the things I've been most curious about is how life experiences always feed into to writing. So how does work in the international relations arena influenced your writing? What types of things has that experience provided for your writing? I mean, I think that on the surface, \[for\] *The Mountain in the Sea*, a lot of it is about communication between species. It's like this take on the first contact novel, but underneath that, there's just a lot of experience with miscommunication. Cultural misunderstanding, learning a new language and messing it up, trying to to get through all of the things that can happen when you're trying to be understood in a foreign context when you're the foreigner, and when you're trying to be understood in someone else's context. So having 20 years of of that really, I think, informs my ideas about what communication is and how difficult it will be for it to be successful. A big part of *The Mountain in the Sea* for me just trying to treat first contact the way I thought it had never been treated, which was to demonstrate how actually difficult it would be to understand where another species was coming from, even if that species was from Earth, where we had a little bit of common contact. Just the embodiment of meaning, the difference in culture and environment, and perception. All of those things would just make it nearly impossible to get anywhere. I think that that's what you get when you spend 20 years trying to even communicate well with other human beings. That's a point that I've made talking in several podcasts that I've done: we have this idea that we could communicate with another species \[but\] we seem to have suppressed the fact that we're very, very poor at communicating with our own species. Quite often we can't even communicate well with people in our own families, much less people who are from societies that are different from our own. We have difficulty communicating sometimes across gender, across race, across ethnicity. There's so many ways in which human beings are bad at communication and so many ways in which we think we would be good at it if we were just talking to someone else, someone not human. Diplomacy, like everything, is fraught with misunderstanding and you have to be very, very careful in order to actually communicate successfully with anyone in order to get the word of diplomacy. There's a lot that needs to be done first in just understanding where the other person, because all of these relationships are fundamentally human relationships, is coming from. What's their framework? How do they view the world? How do they view you? There's a lot of ways in which things can go wrong before you even open your mouth. ### I attended Norwich University, a military school here in Vermont as a civilian during the early years of the Iraq War. I had classmates vanish for a semester at a time because they were called up and deployed, and some of them recounted that "yeah, we don't really understand anybody over there, and we try to communicate by just talking really loudly and really slowly." Which doesn't work! That just reminded me of how we're really not good at communicating or figuring out ways to do it. Well, we don't take into account how much is involved in communication. We think things like, for example, if I just have a translator, and I say words the translator says the identical word in their language, then the person who hears those words will understand what I mean. The example that I like to give is: if we're having this conversation, even if it's not a public conversation and I know it's going to be written down, I might say something as an American like, "well, I don't really get along very well with my mother." In the American context, that would be seen as like "oh, he's being vulnerable," right? This is something that we talk about as a culture: we sometimes don't get along with our parents, there's a lot of psychotherapy and others things devoted to our childhoods and stuff like that. That's a perfectly normal thing for someone to say, even if those two people don't know each other that well, to maybe talk about how they don't get along with their parents or they had a bad Thanksgiving or something like that. But if I say those words to Turkman person, what they hear is "this person is a bad person. They don't understand the basics of family loyalty. They don't understand how fundamentally, precious, the mother/son relationship is, and they cannot be trusted with even the most basic things that could ever speak to this person again." So you see, the fundamental problem here wasn't the words at all. You were just being unaware of the cultural context and what those words were going to mean to the person that was hearing them. That, I think, is what's missing from our knowledge of what communication is. We keep thinking and I don't think of a particularly military way of thinking – it's just common if I have a translator, right? If I have an automatic translator, then my word will be understood as what I meant them to be. And that's just fundamentally never the case. ### I was always intrigued when I spoke with people about the effort they would have to go through just to have a conversation, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. There's a lot of show – procedure isn't the right word. There's a lot of ceremony? – where you sit down and go through all the motions in order to start to talk about what you want to talk about. Obviously if you're there in a military context, you don't have a lot of time, and people get impatient and baffled at why they have to go through this, while on the other side, they're like "why are you rushing through this? This is how we do things." In many societies – and another thing that I've learned from and traveling a lot is that *we* are the strange ones, actually. Most human societies are more like one another than our society is. Like, we are very, very far removed from what it means to most people on planet Earth to be a human being. We have a completely different set of values from the vast majority of other people on this planet, and they quite often have a lot more in common with one another than we have with them. In most places, when you go into a conversation, you will say as an American. "Okay, Mr. So-and-so, thank you for agreeing to see me today, I would like to bring to your attention X." And the response will quite often be "would you like some tea? How is your family? Are you married? How many children do you have?" All of these things. And the reason is a perfectly reasonable reason: it isn't quite ceremony, it's because this person wants to understand who they are speaking to. They want to put you in context, because context is how you understand people, and they don't want to have a conversation that's out of context, where all you're talking about is transactional things. They want to know who they're speaking with so that they can determine how to respond to you. And we interpret it as being ceremonial, while in fact, it's often investigatory! There's a reason for this: you want to have a conversation with someone about their family first before you get down to business, because you want to see things like how quick to anger are they, right? How do they talk about people? Are they respectful? There's a lot that you can learn from that initial, round-about seeming conversation. I find that I quite often now in situations like this, I do exactly the same thing. Someone says "Okay, let's get down to business." And I say "tell me a little more about yourself." Right? Because it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, whereas I think we see ourselves as largely being interchangeable and that the conversation we're in as being a transactional conversation. For example: "okay, so you know that I work for the U.S. embassy," "I know that you're the deputy minister." And based on those roles that we're playing in society, we're going to have a conversation, and that conversation is going to be about the business between us. For the deputy minister, what he's thinking is, "who is this person? Not just their rank, but who are they? Are they married? Are they? You know, what are they interested in? Where do they come from? Where were they last?" And then he's going to learn some things about how to deal with you as a person. ### Has that trickled over to your writing and has it changed your mindset when it comes to developing characters or the situations they find themselves in? For me as a writer, what it did was slow me down and get me to think more about what writing and reading are, and think about the relationship that you have with the reader and what you can and can't expect a reader to bring to the table, and then sort of how you're going to go about having this conversation with them. Because it really is a conversation: every opening of a book is a collective act where a writer and a reader tell a story together. Part of that story is in that one reader's head, and the other part is what's written on the page. It taught me things like if I write a sentence this way and this person doesn't have the background that I have, they may not understand that, right? So maybe I need to be writing in this way. Or how is my how is my writing privileging a certain kind of worldview? What kind of assumptions am I making in my writing? When I present a character and I, do X, what I does that do for someone who's not an American or a European? I think I became a lot more careful about things. One of the things I think I became very careful about is I generally don't describe most of the characters in my book specifically, because I think that physical description carries with it a ton of cultural assumptions about – what characteristics are supposed to mean. It also invites the connection between physical appearance and mental state and I think that's a false idea, that we have of the way someone looks has something to do with the way they are. And it might, like in the example of *The Mountain in the Sea*, the way Altantsetseg looks has something to do with how she is. Right? The scarring that she has from the war and her past experiences is important and so she gets described, but most of the other characters don't. Little nuances like that, I think that's how it's gone into the writing, and just a wider sense of who a reader might be. ### Talking about *The Mountain in the Sea*, what was the origin point for that book? How did you settle on octopi – octopus? Octopi? What's the verdict? Octopuses? There are three different, possible plurals, but they're all incorrect in one or another way. Octopuses is probably the most correct. Octopi is also correct via being the most widely used. There's an argument for all of them and I don't really care about it. Choose one and move on. \[laughs\] ### We'll go with octopuses, then. I was always fascinated by octopuses. When I was a kid, I did a fifth grade report on octopuses. So it's been a life long affair. I can remember telling people about their cognitive abilities way back in university, just having conversations with friends about them and stuff. So that's kind of always been there, and I've always been fascinated by animal intelligence and other kinds of intelligence. Also by he variety of human intelligence, the different ways in which people can be smart, and conversely, the different ways in which people can be, you know, not smart, although they are very intelligent in other ways. That's always fascinated me, just the variety of minds out there in the world. Côn Đảo was a place that I worked a lot as an environment, science, technology and health officer when I was at the consulate in Ho Chi Min City, and I got really attached to the place, which was very threatened by overfishing, by poor enforcement of the national park, regulations, by corruption, by all of these other things. I was there for a long time working on projects with some of the youth of the islands and doing other stuff with the national parks and probably all in all I spent a couple of months out there at different times, but I got to know it well. It's a very small place, really. I got to know it so well that I could, when I was writing the book, I could literally turn my head and see what would be there, everywhere on the archipelago. And I dove there and at night, so it was a perfect place to use the setting for a book because I just knew it very well. I also loved the way that it resonates with other island narratives, right? *The Island of Dr. Moreau* and then you've got *The Tempest*, and you have all of these other books that have (and really many of them are genre books of one kind or another) that have been set on islands. So there was that to play with, and that was very suggestive. But I think I started thinking about the – I've sort of put those two together when I launched *Arrival*, and I remember really admiring the movie visually and being really impressed in many ways by it, but thinking precisely what I talked about earlier, that in fact this would be far harder. And it's not like the movie didn't do justice to the difficulty of communication, but I did feel like it just didn't do enough of it. I also thought, "well, what if I went at this in a hard science fiction way?" and really tried to address biology. Like, how would an octopus start using symbols. What would be the adaptations it would make? How would this affect all these other things? So I kind of put myself in this small box, and it was that constellation of having a good setting, having an animal that I had always been really interested in, and then having this first contact idea and being a little bit disappointed with how first contact is treated overall, and then having seen this really great movie that I thought did first contract quite differently, but also which could have a conversation with. All of those things came together. And then, how do you get that final idea for a novel, I think you just start writing and then it kind of writes itself. I think the completing moment of *The Mountain in the Sea*, the point at which I knew I had a book, was Dr. Ha Nguyen was on the island, she wakes up the next day after having this dream again, she goes down to Altantsetseg, and then walks out on the beach, and at this point, I had not determined who the third member of the research team would be. I really had no idea, so I was just writing blind, and then Evrim just sort of rose up on the beach, this AI. That completed for me, the book. I understood that I was going to be able to talk about lots of different ways of being intelligent and lots of different kinds of minds and that's what this book was going to end up being about. ### One of the things I liked about that is the ways that intelligence permeates the book in a whole bunch of different ways. Obviously there's the main question of these creatures being sentient and how you communicate with them, but also being able to communicate with Evrim, and Altantsetseg, and then even just how intelligence sort of emerges out of complex systems? How this big corporation that they're working with sort of seems to gain a mind of its own. The really interesting thing for me about life in general is that – what life fundamentally is, of the things that life does, maybe the most primary thing, is it changes how causality works in the world. So when you have nothing but non-living systems, rocks don't roll down hills because they want to be at the bottom, or because they envision a future in which they're at the bottom of the hill and that's good for them and will sustain them further, right? But in the moment biological life appears, life forms are always doing things in the service of a future state, right? Meaning, their primary function is survival, right? Even at a minimal level, survival means doing something so that in the future, you will be able to continue doing this thing, and that's a causality reversal that occurs only with life. But then the other fascinating thing is, once you get these really complex organisms like human beings, when they start forming systems, those systems evolve and imitate life in many ways, so that you get a way in which bureaucracies have the same kind of self-regulating, autopoietic, urge to sustain something for the benefit of a future state. Organizations, corporations, all of these things, acquire equalities of minds and life, because they've been created by living systems, and so they're kind of mirrors of those living systems, and then they start having an effect on the living system that created them. I mean, we're all affected by corporations, and I'm not going to go too deeply into that. \[laugh\] But I mean, clearly the structure of corporate activity has an effect on the way people live. And yet, the structure of corporate activity in many ways is life-like in a strange way. Corporations will fight for their own survival, even beyond the people, the individuals who make them up. So I think that's a fascinating thing. In *The Mountain In The Sea*, you see these ways in which these big systems imitate minds and life in sometimes really pernicious ways. You can see how environments do this – forests do the same kind of thing. They become larger organisms. Every environment essentially just becomes a larger organism combining the activities of all the organisms within that environment in order to create some kind of a state that has a balance to it. And there's nothing sort of hippie about that, that's really the way biology works! So yeah, for *The Mountain in the Sea,* I wanted to build this architecture in which I could ask a lot of cool questions about sentience and about symbols and linguistics and all these things. I'm not particularly interested in many ways in answering any of those questions, because I don't think we have answers yet. It was a really neat way to just ask them in more and more complex ways. And that's kind of what I see science fiction as: this tool that really allows us to ask these complicated what if questions. ### Yeah, it's a vehicle for understanding. It's always fun because of how we've imagined talking to one another. Did you ever read "First Contact" by Murray Leinster? It rings the bell. I'm sure I have, but can you jog my memory? ### It's about two spaceships coming across one another in a nebula and they realize that neither one of them can trust each other to turn around and go back home. Ah, right. ### It feels like this trope has gotten a lot more complicated as time has gone on, and we now have a more nuanced understanding for how languages and communication work. I think that's one of the fascinating things about a genre in general, the intertextual conversation that's always happening within it. The conversation over time, I think, like any conversation does, gets more and more sophisticated, and I think about how it's sort of like two people who barely know each other: they initially start talking about some topic and start at a pretty basic level, establishing the fundamentals of their beliefs. Then they move on to more and more complex things as they come to understand one another and the context that they're in. Once you've known someone for 20 years you can get engaged in all kinds of super complex conversations with that person. I feel like genre is kind of like that: all of the books in a genre are in conversation with the readers of those books and with the historical sort of positioning of those things and we have this wider context, which is also really fun to play with as a writer, because you can make reference to it and you can expect certain things from some readers. Although my cautionary part of me tells me that many people aren't aware of that tradition, they may not have read those things, and if you're relying too much on tropes, then you can be leaving some people really out in the cold, especially your non-Western reader who may not be as versed as someone who grew up with science fiction. So there's other ways to do this too, to tie up to other things. I'm always reluctant to see this as linear progression. But I do think there's this way in which science fiction becomes increasingly complex. And I think one of the reasons that this particular first contact narrative becomes increasingly complex is because it's pulling in and opening itself up to more voices, which are complicating and decolonizing that narrative of first contact and are seeing it from the many different perspectives that it's taking place in. I think that's what the really wonderful thing is: science fiction becomes increasingly complex, the more of humanity it's able to speak with as a genre and as its brain and the human frame widens, these these ideas also become more sophisticated in this really wonderful feedback loop. ### I appreciate you saying that you have to be sort of cognizant of not leaving people behind. I have this sort of love-hate relationship with fandom and genre in the idea of books being in conversation with one another, because that means in order to be fully engaged in that conversation, you need to be part of it from almost beginning, which is almost impossible to do. I wonder about these things. I think in general, and it's not about science fiction at all, but in a general sense, I don't think people should be fans of things so much. I think there's a distortion that occurs in the brain when you become a *fan* of a thing too much. And I'm very suspicious of this tendency, which I also find very American – peculiarly American – to become a fan of a thing, and then like an authority on that thing and a limiter of what that thing can be or look or sound like. It seems like a lot of fandoms just become a way of putting up barriers between very fertile fields. I'm trying to create definitions of things that are themselves kind of undefinable or defy those definitions and have arguments over where the boundaries of things are. And I think that's a really unhealthy thing. But I want to pause it in reverse, so you don't think that this is just something about fandom. I think it's wonderful to love a thing – to read a book and love it, tell other people about it, talk about it, be enthusiastic about it, and have a connection to it. I think that's a wonderful wonderful thing. But I would like to really see less of a world in which people say extraordinarily stupid things about genres that they don't themselves like. I've heard far too many science fiction fans, grouse about literary fiction and pretend that literary fiction is limited to only one or two basic topics when in fact it's a vast and wonderful field! And vice versa, there are so many great reviews of *The Mountain in the Sea* that I really love, where a perfectly intelligent person starts their review with the stupidest possible opening phrase – you probably know what it is: ### "It's good, but it's science fiction." Yeah, it's generally like, "I don't usually read science fiction...but," right? And of course, the thing that they're not realizing is the very fact that they have read a science fiction novel that they believe is of quality proves that they ought to be reading science fiction with a much more open mind. So they're already with something of value that they were missing out on by making this choice to judge things according to this compartment. And then, the converse thing is that a lot of the beating up on books comes from within fandom and they're beating up on their own people, they're beating up on the writers writing for them! ### In a lot of ways, I think that there's like fandom and then there's like *canon* fandom, where you're trying to put everything into neat boxes. One of the things that always drives me nuts is "how do we make sure that these stories are completely rectified and we know exactly how they fit together into neat a neat box." I think canon in a is itself a limiting thing for a creator. I agree, and I would say, "let's just come to a place where we can have a great love of things without limiting what other things can be." Like, we can love the things that we love about *Star Trek* without trying to define what can and can't be done in the future with that set of troops or getting angry or hurt when things are done in a way that isn't the way that we want. I think that's what's really strange about it: the feelings of betrayal and hurt that come with offended fandom. That just seems, it just seems odd to me and it seems so limiting. What I don't want have come out of this is to have it come out that I don't think it's good to love things or even be obsessed with them: I think that's great, and I think they're truly engaging with things like *Star Trek*. I mean, it's an endless and very fruitful world that they've come up with. It's fun to talk about, and it gives you a framework to discuss all kinds of really cool things, philosophical and political and all sorts of stuff. I don't know, I think the thing that bothers me is when anyone says "I don't like this entire category of thing." Because of because of my ignorance or stereotyping about that category of thing. Anyone who says that, if you question them about why, they will give you a straw man. "I don't like science fiction because of the science fiction straw man." It just fundamentally reduces science fiction to something it's not. ### And it's usually just an this outdated vision of what science fiction can do. If you look at the crop of books that are out there now there's some really extraordinary works of literature! And like literary fiction, thank God, the vast majority of it are not books about a professor having an affair with his students! That's the sort of stereotype – only maybe one in a thousand or fewer of mainstream novels is about this thing that I've seen come up about what mainstream fiction is about! ### I was literally about to crack that joke. Yeah, exactly! So we all have our completely outdated stereotypes. By the way, that novel is [*Stoner*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781590171998?ref=andrewliptak.com)\[by John Williams\], and if you don't like that, don't read that book! \[laughs\] I just think that anything that narrows someone's ability to experience the world is a bad thing, and I think that reading widely is wonderful for people and they should never put anything out of reach. For me, one of the things that's difficult for is knowing everything about science fiction is simply that it only constitutes maybe 5 to 10% of what I read. I read a lot of non-fiction. I read a lot of mainstream fiction. I read a *lot* of short stories in all genres. Read a lot of poetry. I read whatever I want, and whatever I'm interested in, and I've never felt constrained by genre, and I feel the same with writing. If I want to write a horror novel next, I will. ### What are you reading right now? Let's see. So right now I am rereading short stories by Amy Hempel, who is a really wonderful short story writer. I'm also reading a collection collection of short stories by Lydia Davis, who I also think is just a fantastic short story writer. Reading a really complicated book about applying systems theory to media (II forget what the title is because I've just just started it and it has one of those long academic titles.) I do read a lot of academic and theoretical stuff and I read a reasonable amount of philosophy because I need it for the underpinnings of my own work. But I ground my way through some of that stuff and some of it's very enjoyable, some of it's not. I'm also okay with this thing where you read 500 pages of something and it helps you to understand an idea better, but it's not, like, good or enjoyable. It just makes you smarter, and I'm okay with that kind of reading too. But I'm also okay with just – okay if you want a good recommendation that I can give everyone, I read this book [*Between Two Fires*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250439208?ref=andrewliptak.com)(by Christopher Buehlman)*.* It's a horror novel set in medieval France during the 100 Years War and it's fantastic. Like, just fantastic, just so well written, so brilliant. I loved it so much. I think a lot of people would dismiss it as being just a piece of entertainment, but I just thought it was so good. So you know, I read it all. ### Both *The Mountain in the Sea* and *Tusks of Extinction* deal with humanity's relationship with the natural world, and I'm curious, as someone who's traveled a lot overseas and you've seen some of this firsthand, I'm curious what was the sort of thing that radicalized you here? Not radicalized, but what got you interested in exploring our relationship to nature? I don't know if it's any one thing. I think it's been something that's built in me over a period of time, but maybe the thing that – if want to talk about something that *radicalized* me, I think that's actually a pretty good way of putting it in some ways. I think it was the birth of my daughter, and thinking, "why would it be acceptable for us to make a world that's worse for our children through our own like actions or inactions? Why would we think it was okay to use resources in such a way that the world is going to be crappier after we'd left it for the people that came afterwards? As a parent, the question I just keep asking myself "I'm going to die. My daughter will as well, and so will, if she has children, her children, and her children's children. Things from our generation will remain and the last few generations – and it's really just a few, right? – since like the 19th century, that has severe and lasting consequences. And the question that I keep asking myself is, "are we being good ancestors?" I think we're not, and I don't think that we're gonna be forgiven, and we shouldn't be. We're making bad choices as a species, very selfish choices. We're enjoying ourselves a lot at the expense of this planet. And it's not everyone. It's not all, seven billion of us, but some of us on the top, including both of us on this phone call, and everyone else who's probably capable of reading the interview that out of it are privileged enough to be pulling resources out of the planet at a greater rate than we're entitled to. That shouldn't make us feel bad: it should make us want to do something about it. I don't think that guilt is useful. I think what's useful is this basic idea of responsibility. The best way I can put it is: it would be great to lay the blame on previous generations, but in the 1950s, they still really didn't understand a lot about what chemicals and other things were doing to the environment and what the results of carbon pollution were going to be. And now we do, and that changes the ethics in a way that I think is pretty obvious. The best way I can put it is, let's say you're walking down the street, someone is in distress and is dying and you walk past them. Well, it's very different if that person is dying in a place that you cannot see and you're not aware of having walked past them. They're obstructed from your view, and you don't know that it happened. Then you walk by them and they die, and you're not ethically responsible for that death, because you didn't know. But we're not in that situation anymore. The person in the 1950s didn't understand what coal is going to do to the atmosphere. Now that person's dying. We see them. We know it's happening and we're walking past them, and now we are ethically responsible for our actions because we have knowledge. That's just the thing that bothers me: how can we continue to act in the same way that person acted, who walked past the thing they didn't know about, and pretend like that's okay. So that's really it. It was becoming a father that pushed me, to really start thinking about this more than I already was. ### One of the things I took away from books like *The Expanse* or from Kim Stanley Robinson was this idea of how our biology limits our viewpoint. That our brains are wired so that we can really only see what's right in front of us, and not the big picture. As we've become this globalized civilization and who knows, maybe an interplanetary one, the problems and complications that come from that are just so vast that we have trouble comprehending the problem itself, let alone solving it. That's a really good way to put it. Another way to think about it is that we are an experimental species. We are the first species that has become capable of symbolic communication on the level that we have it. The first one that's been able to write down everything from previous generations and past knowledge on in this incredibly elaborate and dense way, from one generation to another to attain this kind of mastery over a whole planet and its ecosystem. The jury is still out as to whether that kind of intelligence is good. And we have not proven that it is – yet. I hope we do. But the way things are going, it's not looking like this experiment has purely fantastic results. I mean, some of it's amazing. Every week, my daughter goes to a little Saturday school, and my wife and I go to the museum. The things that human beings have done are extraordinary. Art and literature and all those things are amazing. But then, the other things, you really start to wonder if nature just didn't go one step too far. And it's quite possible that nature will pull it back, that we will outdo ourselves in some way, and this planet will be reduced back to organisms that can't do the things that we did to it. ### Something will rise up and try and learn from our mistakes. Maybe the octopus, right? --- I've noted before that these types of in-depth conversations are what I really love to do with this newsletter: I feel like I learn so much from them. But they take a lot of work to put together. Interviews are tricky and there's a deceptive amount of work that goes into them: you have to first do your background research, read up on a subject's work, then figure out what to ask them. Once you've had the conversation, you have to take that text file and transcribe it so that it's presented to the reader in a readable format. Often, that's removing "ums" "you know"s "kind of"s, and those sorts of things, lightly fix sentences or clarify what someone's wording was, all while retaining their original intent and meaning. This interview took a long time because of technical issues: a file that was very low in volume, a transcription that didn't quite work, and a long conversation that was well over 12,000 words when all was said and done. So: if you like and appreciate these interviews: consider leaving a one-time tip (or [subscribe as as supporter](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)!) or by going to the bottom of this post to the SHARE button and by sharing it to your friends / family / followers. Thank you: every little bit helps. [Support Transfer Orbit with a tip! ](#/portal/support) Thanks for reading, and huge thanks to Ray for this chat (and his patience in getting it out to y'all.) Let me know what you think in the comments. ### Ancillary Interview URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ann-leckie-ancillary-justice-radch-science-fiction-book-interview/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T15:00:32.000Z Sometimes, a story arrives at just the right moment to take the place by a storm. That was the case in 2013 when Ann Leckie published her debut novel, [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565172?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's set in a distant future where the galaxy is ruled by the Radch Empire. It's headed by the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai, who maintains her consciousness across hundreds of cloned bodies, and who has developed various factions that have begun fighting against one another for control. Caught in this is the *Justice of Toren,* an artificial intelligence that is a warship, and who controls thousands of "ancillaries" – human bodies that it uses for its operations. When the ship is destroyed, it survives in a single ancillary, Breq, and sets off on a decades-long quest to extract some sort of vengeance, teaming up with a former officer named Seivarden. It's an engrossing read, and when I revisited it a couple of years ago, I was taken by her exploration of the nature of empires and their impact on their subjects, as well as her depiction of gendered language – the Radch don't recognize gender and default to the word "she". It was an interesting and pointed thought experiment, and while not the first, and it felt like it helped lead to plenty of other novels that were playing with similar ideas about depicting gender and oppression in science fiction in the decade since its publication. Leckie followed up *Ancillary Justice,* with [*Ancillary Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565196?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Ancillary Mercy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565189?ref=andrewliptak.com), and has added some additional, standalone novels set in the same world, 2017's [*Provenance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565202?ref=andrewliptak.com)and 2023's [*Translation State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290128?ref=andrewliptak.com). Her latest novel is [*Radiant Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290357?ref=andrewliptak.com), which came out earlier this week, and which follows some of the ramifications of the events in her trilogy. I had planned to write something in conjunction with *Ancillary Justice*'s tenth anniversary in 2023, and conducted this interview with Leckie in the late summer of 2023\. That piece never materialized for a variety of reasons, but the arrival of a new novel was a good excuse to get it transcribed and out to you. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *This interview has been edited for length and clarity.* --- ### When I reread *Ancillary Justice*, I had the feeling that history played a big influence on the story, and I was curious about your background and when you became interested in the field. It's not technically part of my academic background because I got my degree in music, but I have a sort of a hobbyist interest in history and anthropology. A lot of times if I'm stuck, I will go walk up and down the history of anthropology shelves at one of the local university libraries, pull books off the shelf that seem like they call to me, and find stuff that way. So it is an interest of mine, but it's not technically – I don't have a degree or a minor in anything. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/IMG_0106.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Was there any era of of history that you were casually interested in? What I'm getting at is when I was reading it, I felt like I was reading about Rome. I'm curious if it was an influence. I knew that was coming. It absolutely was. Because, well: Rome, for better or for worse, has been a model for galactic empires for decades, for longer than you or I been alive. But it's often a model in a very simplistic way, like it's the pop culture version of Rome. \[Isaac\] Asimov used Rome obviously for *Foundation* and he was just reading \[Edward\] Gibbon's *The Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire*. It's a classic for a reason, but it's a little bit like everything; it's bound by Gibbon's assumptions and worldview, and it's simply oversimplified a in number of ways, but it's really strongly influenced how we look at Rome. But I had been reading some super interesting, random stuff on Roman history, and I was really intrigued. Not specific things like the emperors, but what was really Roman religion. There's this fabulous book called [*Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691070544?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Frankfurter. Super readable book, super interesting; a period of Egyptian history that most people pay attention to, because we're all interested in the pyramids. So I wanted to use Rome, but obviously change the things I needed to change for my story, but also use it in a less certain type of way. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### I recently read [*The Bright Ages*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062980908?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, which takes a new look at the post-Roman era and refuting the idea that Rome collapsed and that it was more of a transformation. I mean, in some ways it was a collapse. But also (sorry, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine here) it's talked about like "there was the glorious Roman civilization, which then declined and then everybody was living in ponds full of shit until the Enlightenment came along, and then we're all better." For one thing, Rome falling was a horrible, traumatic thing and probably millions of people died. It was dreadful. But at the same time, people were people and there was a huge amount of technological advances being made by folks during this time that were supposedly the dark ages. My pet peeve is one of the things that often people don't see when they talk about that (and this probably comes from my background and maybe I have a chip on my shoulder: I'm not currently religious, but I grew up Catholic) that whole narrative is intensely anti-Catholic. ### Yeah**.** This book talks a lot about the art of the era, but also that people didn't fundamentally change: they were still creative, they were still inventing, were making art and stories and going to war. They might have lost some of the infrastructure and governance, but they were still doing what they were doing, which I found to be pretty fascinating. Yeah! The "nobody in the Middle Ages ever took a bath" is bullshit! People in the Middle Ages love taking baths: they were bathhouses all over the place! The intellectual and technological history of the Middle Ages and the "dark ages" is actually way more impressive than most people realize. But yeah, the thing that really sticks in my craw is that there was the decadence of the Roman Republic, then there's just Catholic superstition, until finally the Protestants came along and saved us all from it. That's essentially what the narrative is, and I think it's taught so commonly that people (I was taught that in my Catholic education) and people don't even see what that narrative is. But it's absolutely an inaccurate narrative. ### I read that you had started writing *Ancillary Justice* in 2002, well before the recent bubble of novels that explore this trope through a post-colonial lens. How were you thinking about this when you were initially writing it? The 2002 versions of the book are way less sophisticated than what I eventually came to do. But part of that was because I was not 100 percent happy with my early efforts, and also the more I was like, 'well, okay, Empire, Rome, everybody loves a galactic empire.' And then the more I thought about it, it became "why is everybody love a good galactic empire? Why is it that such a common trope?" Looking back, I read some things and was thinking about how a lot of science fiction (particularly the kind where you go to another planet and it's really) allegories might be too strong a word, but very often, the aliens or natives of the planet are standing in for the colonization on Earth. Even when it gets to a point where maybe the first person was thinking about that (we know H.G. Wells was thinking about that when he wrote *War Of The Worlds*) as people just keep using the tropes, they don't realize that they're echoing a plot that comes from a different time, and that they haven't thought fully about it. "Oh, these are cool toys." I was like "what is the implication of that?", "what are empires really like?", "if this were really happening, what would this be like, how would people deal with that?" I can't say that I've produced an exact portrait of a real empire, but I was thinking about those things and was listening to those conversations that were becoming more and more prominent at conventions. I was at WisCon and somebody brought up the phrase "the colonized mind." I hadn't finished *Ancillary Justice* yet, but I was like, "wow, that's a relevant phrase for me." ### Were you seeing this trope in other works at the time, or were you approaching it as something that you wanted to see in science fiction? It was something I was not seeing in science fiction, except I knew it was there. In some respects I probably hadn't seen it because I hadn't become aware that it was a thing, right? Because like I said, those conversations were happening, and I hesitate to say that no one else was doing it because somebody will come along and go, "there's 4 million things that pre-date you where they were doing it." But I was definitely sitting down saying, "I'm not seeing this particular approach, so I'm going to take this approach." ### It's been a decade since *Ancillary Justice* hit bookstores. How have you looked back on it and think about what's changed in the science fiction community and world since then? So in some ways, looking back at the way I was handling gender, particularly in the early chapters of the first book, I can definitely see how much I've learned over about the ways that other people think about gender. I still stand by the choices that I made, but it's very clear in the early chapters that I'm thinking about gender as an absolute binary, and I wouldn't think of it that way now. But my choice to use all "she", I would definitely still do it no matter what people – even people who I know and sympathize with my decisions had criticisms to make about that. I did think about those and decided in the end that they absolutely have a point, but I would still have done what I did. I guess that's kind of how I feel about the book as a whole. There are maybe some things I would have changed, but probably not. I still stand by it. I think it was good work. I am still astonished at how many people seem to agree with me that it was good work, because, you're writing all by yourself and there's never any guarantee that everybody will like it. Nine times out of ten, you do your best with writing and then it sinks back into the ocean. And so that whole thing is just deeply weird to me. ### How did you come to to address gender the way you did? I started out thinking that it would be fun (and this is why it took me so long to write the book) that it would be fun and easy to write a culture where gender was genuinely not an issue, where nobody cared. Like it was the equivalent of "the person has dark hair. It doesn't make a difference." I then had trouble writing that, and I figured it was because I was assigning supposedly random binary genders to my characters, because I didn't feel like I could do anything else given the way English is structured. But I was still putting folks in stereotypical positions, character-wise, based on the gender that they were assigned. I didn't like it and I was like, "well, how do I avoid that?" If the reader doesn't know that's what I'm doing, it doesn't have the effect. So I was like, "Well, what can I do?" I can use "they" and there's nothing wrong with singular "they". However, in this context in the book, a number of characters have multiple bodies, so that really throws the plural singular ambiguity into relief in a way that I wasn't sure I could make work. I knew about some neopronouns and I was like, "well, I could use a new pronoun." But I didn't feel comfortable with it. And I thought, "well, Ursula K. Le Guin used all 'he' in a situation." And in fact, I wrote a short story in that universe and used "he" for everything, and it just read like a Golden Age science fiction story, not like a world where gender doesn't matter. I was like, well, "Le Guin did that in *Left Hand of Darkness*," (which I hadn't read at this point, but I knew I was going to have to at some point and I did when I was writing *Ancillary Justice*) and she later very famously said, "I could have used 'she', \[but\] I didn't think I could have used 'she' at the time." Ages ago, I also read *Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand* where \[Samuel R.\] Delaney is using 'she' as a default pronoun, although in a different way than I was doing it. I don't know if you've read that, but... ### I haven't. The main character's language calls everyone 'she' unless one finds the other person sexually attractive, in which case they become 'he'. It's really interesting and I remember it weirding me out when I was in college. I said, "well, what if I use 'she'? These two writers have done this. Le Guin specifically did this in a situation, that's sort of similar to my situation, so let me try it." I started out doing it and it was really weird, but the more I did it, the more I liked it. And so that's how that came about. It was just me trying to write complete, absolute irrelevance of gender into a culture in a way that would come across on the page as my doing that. Of course, I didn't actually manage to do that, but I did something else that I thought was really interesting. ### What was that? It really highlighted the fact that English has a masculine default, and that default is not transparent. People will tell you the masculine embraces the feminine right? You don't use he/she, you don't use singular, it just means everybody, just like "mankind" means "everyone", men, women, any other gender. And so they treat it like that's just how grammar is and everyone understands it. But what it really does is insist that the whole world is masculine and that anyone who isn't is an exception or not part of the story. So when you throw "she" into that position instead of "he", it makes it *really* obvious that the pronoun affects the way the reader envisions the characters. *That* was the thing that I found super interesting was that I had started out the draft assigning binary genders to the characters. When I went and used "she," my internal picture of the characters who had previously been called, "he" actually shifted. That's how powerful those those pronouns are. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### I remember when I came to the part where Breq discovers Seivarden, and I didn't realize that the character was male until later. When it became more apparent, the image flipped in my head. It's really weird! When I assigned her "she" for all of her pronouns, my view of her changed just a little bit more; she became a slightly different person. I'm not a believer in strong words, where words dictate how you think, but that's how powerful words can be. I think it highlighted that and said, "hey, how come 'he' is the default and what does that mean if 'he' is the default?" I think that's what using 'she' did: it did not portray a society where gender didn't matter. It wasn't quite the naturalistic way I was hoping for, but it did get the point across more or less, and I felt it provided some other interesting things to think about. ### It's interesting to see how other authors have begun experimenting with this. I've found that it adds more to one's craft and upends reader expectations a little bit. Yeah. Well also, it's science fiction, and science fiction and fantasy should be no holds barred. You can do whatever weird thought experiments, imagine a world. I still think it's important to push in all of those directions, and I hope (I can't claim this is the case) but I really hope that the success of *Ancillary Justice* has made a little more space for publishers to go, "Oh, buy find this thing that's using new pronouns or does this interesting stuff with gender." ### Tropes are something I've been thinking about a lot. They can be useful for readers, but can also be a trap if you're not careful – there have been a couple of books I've read recently where they don't really *do* anything with them. I generally think that if you're using these elements, you should be examining them or at least play with them in a meaningful way rather than just having a set dressing. I mostly agree, although I'm hesitant to say that people *should* write science fiction in one way or another. I can see the attraction of just having a beautiful backdrop and then exploring, but I guess it's hard for me to have the beautiful backdrop and not think about the ways that the characters in the foreground are showing up against the backdrop. ### Or how how the influence of the evil/malevolent/uninterested empire trickles down to the to the average person. Right, because you know it does. It does it absolutely has to. It always does. Every now and then somebody will ask how I make it so that there are great big stakes with little stakes and they all feel like they're tied together. And I'm like, "well, they're all tied together." Like in the real world, they're all tied together, you know? But I can totally see if I just want to sit down and have popcorn, I actually don't mind chomping the popcorn while watching the two galactic empires fighting each other, and nobody cares about the empires, okay, that's fine. But science fiction is a genre that can do more, and I'm really happy to see that people are pushing in those directions. ### What's an example that you'd point to for things being tied together? In the real world? I mean, there's tons of them, but it's it's goofy stuff like no toilet paper at Costco because of the plague, right? The way we think about a huge epidemic, there's these stories of people dying in the streets with blood pouring out of their eyeballs and civilization collapsing. But what actually happens is that people get sick in one part of the world, it moves across the world and all of a sudden, your supply chain collapses. Maybe there was a time when you could be in a village and you were making your own toilet paper. It wasn't, you know what I mean, but I don't think anybody was ever quite *that* isolated. If you're not getting instant news onto the Internet, there's going to be these domino effects that come through and cause you problems where you are from these great big world events happening. A volcano explodes in the Aegean and civilizations collapse. There is stuff in the air, crops fail and that comes down to one family trying to feed their kids. ### That's a good way to look at it. Thinking back to the *Bright Ages,* something the authors kept hammering home was that these were not isolated people. There was a cross-border transference of knowledge, of DNA, of everything. Even though we think about this period as a dark time, they were not these isolated villages that didn't have any contact with each other. There may not have been the level of import and export that there was when the empire or I should say, when the Western empire was running (because the Eastern empire continued for another thousand years.) But there were still people – some housewife in England could get up and go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There were Vikings leaving graffiti in the Hagia Sophia. And so when they tell you in grade school that a villager would live and die in their village and nobody traveled and they never took a bath, when you actually look, that's not what's going on. And even if it were, you still have plagues rushing across Europe. Just a couple of traders and you have the Black Plague. But it wasn't just a couple of traders, it was all of European trade trading with the Near East. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/05/image-2.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### I want to jump over to *Translation State*: can you set up how this came about? So while I was writing the original trilogy, I was also thinking about the Presger, because obviously they play a larger role ultimately in the trilogy. The Presger translators were just kind of fun, but I already had an idea of how they worked. The whole complex of ideas involved in this universe were ones that I'd been slowly playing with, so I had a few characters from back when I was thinking about the translators that I had never used. I was sitting around during lockdown and reading *Murderbot* and the *Goblin Emperor* over and over again and playing *Minecraft* and *Stardew Valley*. I was like, "Oh maybe I'm about to lose my mind. Maybe there's a story I could write with those characters." I sat down and started to work on it and there was a story here. ### I'm particularly interested in just the idea of translation, how one communicates with other intelligences and how one recognizes other intelligences. I'm curious what your thinking is when it comes to this world. So translation isn't isn't something that I know a whole lot about, but once again, I'm aware of different conversations \[about it\]. I also like (on a very low, hobbyist-level) linguistic stuff. Those were things that I was interested in going in. Whatever you're starting with, when you translate it, you're making a new thing. But at the same time, it's recognizably a version of the previous thing, but it's not the same thing because you can't get the same effects. You can use language to actually make things happen in someone's mind, and it's very dependent on them having the same linguistic context that you have. When you're translating something, you don't have access to the things that the original writer was doing to the minds of their readers in the original language, and the person whose work is being translated isn't actually producing the effects in the readers of the translation because the translator has to figure out how to produce those effects. It's really weird! I guess in some ways, the Presger translators are meant to be a translation of something that the Presger think humans are, and in some ways they're sort of something of what humans think the Presger are. But the Presger are their own thing, even if they're standing in the middle there. ### What was something you were able to to accomplish with *Translation State* that you weren't able able to do for *Ancillary Justice*? That's my roundabout way of asking what you've learned in the last decade? I've always been the kind of person who, when asked "what have you learned in school?" answers "I didn't learn anything in school" which is bullshit because obviously I learned things in school! Once I learned them, they were part of my stock of things and I didn't really remember not knowing them. But I think actually *Translation State* is the first novel that has more than one point of view that I've written. Everything else has only had one POV. I intended *Provenance* to have three and I was like, "No, that's not right for this book." And so this time I was like, "I'm going to have ten points of view!" I only ended up with three in this book. So that was new, handling multiple points of view. It sounds like a weirdly technical thing, but I think the technical things you can and can't do really influence what you're doing, right? They dictate what form you choose and what kinds of strategic choices you make. So that was a big one that I hadn't done before. I was feeling – because I started writing it before anybody knew I was writing it, there was no deadline, there was no contractual requirements, that it be a certain kind of thing. So I was like "I'm just going to fill this full of stuff that I think is cool and fun, because these past two years have not been full and fun." I feel like back in the day, I would have been kind of afraid to do that, because I would have felt the stakes were higher for me as a writer. I would have been really worried about who's going to buy this, even though ultimately I decided nobody was going to buy *Ancillary Justice* but I decided to continue anyway. In this case, I was like "people buy it or they won't buy it." That in and of itself is an interesting place to be. It felt very different writing this book. Other than that, I know that my skill has increased in a number of different things, and I have no idea how to articulate what those are because I don't really see them. It's like you see your kids every day and somebody who hasn't seen your kid for few years is like "oh, they're ten feet tall!" Then you see a picture of them when they were a little kid and you're like "Oh, my gosh, they changed!" ### Do you notice this with your books at all, looking back? I sort of noticed – I've semi-recently gone back and looked at short fiction. There's definitely a change. I'm definitely a lot more assured putting stuff down, like openings in particular, where a writer or whoever does a sort of throat clearing of like "I'm getting to the story, okay, here's the story." I can see that I have a lot less trouble just going "okay, here's the story" and sounding more assured and authoritative. Boy, the increase in my ability to handle exposition is really noticeable. Some of that is my just being less afraid of infodumps, because when I first started out, my first couple of science fiction stories are almost incomprehensible because I didn't want to just tell the reader stuff, because of course we fetishize "[the door dilated](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DilatingDoor?ref=andrewliptak.com)" and that's all the exposition I'm going to do. I'm going to hint at everything and the reader is going to magically pick it up, which is a *great* technique. I was trying to do everything that way, and I think I had better at that, but I also think I'm less worried about, "Oh no, I'm going to take a paragraph and tell the reader something, I failed as a writer." I don't worry about that anymore. And I just I feel like I've gotten a lot better at getting information across onto the page. So, I mean, practice, right? ### I sort of wonder if things like that are a product of where fandom was – the community was so much smaller and you could conceivably read *everything* that was being published, whereas now SF/F fandom is so balkanized – it was easier to make those assumptions. I feel like those sorts of things go in and out of style. We don't talk about them as if they're fashion, but they absolutely are. We talk about it like this is just how you write well. It's not! I feel like the extreme "The door dilated" is helped that it's a Heinlein quote. Of course, Heinlein's worshipped by a lot of people and he left a lot of influence on the field. That *is* a really cool technique. It's a great sentence, and they were probably reacting to a time when, particularly in short fiction (but probably also in longer fiction) – in order to make a living writing fiction, you had to write tons of it very quickly, and when you're writing very quickly, you don't go back and make things more elegant and more beautiful. You type and type and type and then you hand it in. That's going to lead to a lot of three paragraphs on the history of Omicron 7, and that can can be really dull. But I think a number of folks, especially in the sort of workshopping communities that grew up in the sixties and seventies, look back at that and go, "Oh, well, that's just wrong, because when people do it, it's boring." Except when Jack Vance does that, it is not boring in the least! It's not a question of "that technique is bad." It's a question of "it's easy to handle that technique badly." I think actually that's a a weakness of writing pedagogy techniques generally, not just in science fiction and fantasy, which is where you tell newbie writers to not do things because it's easy to do them wrong instead of showing them how to do them right. You just reduce the number of tools in their toolkit and send them out into the world. I don't think that does anybody any good. Maybe some people don't need those extra tools, but if you're training fiction writers to make a career, they *do* need those extra tools, whether or not they ever actually use them or use them as intended. But I think fashion is a lot of it. There's a weird thing that I noticed: watching people react to work that I had produced. It's been a really interesting experience. One of the things I noticed is that people who liked *Ancillary Justice* would say, "oh my gosh, she does it with no infodumps at all," which is not true! There are definitely infodumps in that book. People who didn't like the book would say "oh my God, it is crammed with infodumps, this is terrible writing." That's really interesting to me, which is that it's called an infodump it's bad, it's called an infodump if you don't like it. But people still talk about infodumps as though you shouldn't do them: they're just default bad. I just found that *super* interesting the way that that prohibition just becomes sort of a justification for why someone doesn't like a piece. ### People will really hang on to very thin justifications when they don't want to admit certain feelings about a story, and it's interesting to see how some criticisms like "the writing was terrible," are spread verbatim to become almost memes. They didn't want to say why they didn't like it! They didn't like a book because they were homophobic, right? "But it was badly written" is like ... yeah. I find that super interesting. And they might have found it badly written, right? That's another thing when people talk about good writing or bad writing. This is going to sound really snobby, but I don't think most casual readers know the difference between really good writing and not very good writing. That's not necessarily a bad thing! The numbers of people who love *The Da Vinci Code* (which I have more problems with then the writing) – my mother-in-law enjoyed *The Da Vinci Code* and she thought it was quite well written. It's not well-written, but I am also coming at that from a different – I'm like the chef talking about whether or not food is being prepared well. I'm trying to rescue myself from sounding like a snob. But nine times out of ten, when somebody says "this was badly written," what they mean is either "I had trouble reading it" or "I didn't like it." --- Thanks for reading: I'm glad that I've finally finished transcribing this and gotten it out of drafts to you. I'm looking forward to reading *Radiant Star* (it's high on my TBR), and I'm excited for what it'll bring. Let me know in the comments what you think about the series. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider signing up as a supporting member. Members help power this newsletter, not sponsors. There's a lot of work that goes into interviews such as this: I not only re-read Leckie's **Ancillary Justice*, but I looked over other interviews and reviews to prepare for the interview and held the conversation. After that was the transcription, fixing the transcription, editing out my "you knows" and "mmhmms", and cleaning up the conversation so that it's readable. I really enjoyed this interview, and it's members and readers like yourself who helped make it happen! [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### Neverending stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/thomas-elrod-franchise-science-fiction-storytelling-author-interview/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T13:28:39.000Z If there's something of a central mission to this newsletter, it's my way of examining and exploring the various ways we tell stories. Sometimes, that's through a [roundup of the latest books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/), how [the military sometimes uses science fiction as a tool](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/), the [power of oral histories](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/), or how you [sometimes find a gem of a story in an established franchise](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/). As such, I'm endlessly fascinated by stories that grapple with the idea of storytelling and incorporate in an interesting, meta way. John Scalzi's [*Redshirts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com) explores what happens when [its characters realize they're trapped](https://www.andrewliptak.com/meta-stories-redshirts-scalzi-rick-morty/) in a crappy TV show, Carrie Vaughn's [*Questland*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358346289?ref=andrewliptak.com) [imagines a fantasy theme park taken to its extremes](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carrie-vaughn-questland-author-interview-fantasy-lotr-immersion/), while in Hazelight's *Split Fiction* follows a pair of authors who are [dropped into their own stories](https://www.andrewliptak.com/split-fiction-video-game-sci-fi-review-hazelight/) during a technology demonstration. When done right, it's an interesting way to explore the ways we create stories, and sometimes, comment on the larger contexts that have birthed them. That's why I've been excited to check out Thomas Elrod's debut novel, [*The Franchise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250406583?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's about a media franchise that emerged out of an epic fantasy novel published in the 1960s, *The Malicarn*. It goes on to become a major hit and spawns a media franchise that includes films and additional novels. Its corporate owners aren't content with those successes, and launch a new initiative: they've built the world and utilize some new technologies to mess with the memories of the actors embedded there so that they *believe* that the fantasy world is real and that they're part of it. Things go astray from there. It's a fascinating read, and got to chat with Elrod about the novel and the themes it's exploring. We did just that: talking about creativity, the nature of endless franchises, and a bit too much about the state of the *Star Wars* franchise. *This interview has been edited for clarity and length.* --- ### To start off, can you tell me just a bit about yourself? I've been writing all my life, but I haven't published a lot of fiction, \[just\] some criticism and stuff. But I’ve worked in publishing in various capacities, mostly academic publishing. This is my first novel, and I've been working on it for a couple years now and I’m excited for it to finally come out. ### What work do you do in the publishing industry? I currently work for an academic publisher, where I acquire math books. ### What got you started in that field? My background academically is not math or sciences at all, actually. I used to work managing math journals, in very much a project management kind of role, and so I just was in the math research space there for a while, and am still and learning a lot about how mathematicians think and work and approach things. ### So when you went to go publish a speculative fiction novel, how different did you find the world of commercial fiction as opposed to mathematics books? Well, I mean, it's different because the audiences are obviously much different. You're working with academic communities that are focused on the research and the output and what's coming out of it. They’ll do books and stuff, but they just have different goals for what the purpose of the book is and what the expectations are of it are, whereas, commercial publishing is much broader— ### A little more a little more chaotic? — a little more chaotic. Longer timelines, really. In academic publishing, you're always pushing to get the research out as fast as you can because you want it \[to be\] accessible to people. Fiction publishing especially operates on a much longer time scale. It’s a very diverse industry and I think people don't always see that if you're on the outside of it. ### Can a you tell me a little bit about how you got interested in science fiction and fantasy? Do you prefer one over the other? I don't think I have a strong preference. I've been reading and watching both my entire life and that's always been a big interest of mine. I read broadly and don't only read science fiction and fantasy, but in my writing, it's those genres that I've been the most interested in. I grew up watching *Star Trek* or reading classic golden age science fiction, like Isaac Asimov and things like that, and as I grew up, it just continued to always be kind of my genre of 1st choice I think that's just because they have so much room to explore ideas and themes and that you can kind of do anything, but they can also be literary. They can also be fun. ### Were there any authors that you gravitated to or still hold some nostalgia for? I mean, as I've gotten older, a lot of science fiction writers, New Age science fiction writers from the 60s and 70s, whether it's \[Ursula K.\] Le Guin or Philip K. Dick, \[Samuel R.\] Delaney, or Gene Wolfe, there's that group of writers who are still exploring and who're still finding interesting combinations of classic science fictional ideas and concepts with real literary chops. It's something that I aspire to myself, and so they've been very important. In terms of nostalgia, I was really into \[J.R.R.\] Tolkien as a kid and I still appreciate \[him\] lot, but like, I wouldn't say I go back and reread Asimov or something. It doesn't do it for me in the same way anymore. It was very important at a very certain time of my life, but I can see the limitations of some of that now, but I think that the stuff that still works from those early science fiction writers – I read a lot of H.G. Wells and that kind of stuff as a kid and that still is very interesting. So I think – I try to be careful with nostalgia. This gets into the book a bit, but something that maybe was really important when I was 10 is important for all the various reasons I could list, but I try not to make any one author or property or kind of writing or anything too central to what I want to do going forward. I don't want to feel like I'm trapped within the confines of what I liked when I was a child and maybe sometimes investigate why the things that spoke to me at a certain age, continue or not continue to be important. But you can also let them go at a certain point if you need to, or acknowledge what they can't do at a certain point. ### Yeah, they say that the age of science fiction is 12. Yeah. ### One of the things that I've been fascinated by is that we're living at a time when speculative fiction properties have been really growing in prominence and importance to popular culture, and it's interesting to see what authors and stories were established in the 50s/60s/70s and how some are still resonating with audiences today. With that in mind, can you tell me a bit about how this book came about? How did you conceive of the story? It ended up being a book that's very told very nonlinearly, but I didn't approach it that way initially. It really started with just feeling – I think we all feel – how is some of these intellectual properties that are producing content continuously – what's the endgame with them? I mean there's always been sequels and series and stuff. It used to be that you make 7 or 8 sequels to Police Academy or something, but eventually you stop making those movies because they stop making money. But it feels like there's no way that Disney is going to stop making Marvel movies, even if they continue to be not very good. They have to continue making *Star Wars* movies. Their business is too tied to that, right? They have to continue doing it. There's not a way that it ends organically. You can't stop making *these* movies, and I think we're all kind of exhausted by it. So it started with that idea and then take it to a ridiculous extreme, which is, that the studio creates a world of its own that perpetuates itself forever, kind of like *The Truman Show,* where it's all being filmed and the people in it don't know it. It's just more endless content. And so then it becomes a thought experiment and a story and all these other things that you can do in a novel, but yeah, just really starting with the idea that the story can't end; not because the author dies or because they're done writing it, or they just can't sell it anymore, but it can't end because economically it's never feasible for it to end – what happens to storytelling after that? ### I've found *Dune* to be one a fascinating property. After Frank Herbert kicked off the series in the 1960s, he continued it because his publishers were willing to throw gobs of money at him, and then his son continued to publish installment after installment to continue it. ### It's not so much creative continuation but pressure from fandom or readers and audience members that are making the demand for these products. What is it about people that wants to continue to immerse themselves in these worlds – and I say this as someone who's a big *Star Wars* fan. It's tough. I think there is a innate, probably very old need from people to revisit the stories that they like and feel immersed in them. It goes back a long way and has probably always been there to some extent. And people, you know, kids love to hear the same story over and over again. I think adults do too. I think it's just that there's something about the way stories work and how we respond to them. I don't know if it's some innate psychological thing, but that is part of it, and I think that that can be encouraged in productive or non-productive ways. That's not new. ### Sure, look at Shakespeare or the *Odyssey*. Yeah, people return to things over and over again, or even people's relationship to stories and how they really identify with them. There are famous stories of people waiting on the docks in New York for latest Charles Dickens story to come in because they want to know what happens to, those characters. This is not a new thing, and I think that it can be used well if stories are being used to generate community and help people process the world and all of these things and you can, you can return to the same story over and over again in different ways to do things with it. I think that there are obviously ways that turns sour. We see that in all sorts of ways, whether it's online fandoms that are very hostile, the way that then it can be monopolized and turned into just content and product that does tap into fans' energies and passions and whatnot, but can use that passion as an engine for revenue and not actually trying to do something interesting necessarily with that passion. ### 'Content' is such a horrible word, isn't it? It is. Right? Ew. It doesn't sound good, and it's everything from AI slop to emails that you get from Old Navy to books and movies and because it encompasses anything, it really means nothing and it sounds gross. ### I'm a big *Star Wars* fan – I grew up with the Special Editions and Prequels, and I've found Disney's acquisition of it has been fascinating because they're bringing in people who're very talented and passionate creators for this world, but also because of the amount of *stuff* they've put out has been so varied. You have everything from *Rise of Skywalker*, which was – Bad. ### Yeah, it wasn't great. But then you have things like *Andor*, which is at the other end of the spectrum. I think those two examples are good because the reason – obviously, *Rise of Skywalker* wasn't the first bad *Star Wars* movie, right? I'm not really of the generation that has this reappreciation for the prequels, but say what you will about them, they are the movies George Lucas wanted to make, and he made them according to his creative vision. I think the thing with *The Rise of Skywalker* is that it's just feels so cynical. It feels just – ### It feels very constructed. Yeah, it feels so constructed and that it has a lot of notes from corporate. And you know, it was made very quickly and they rewrite it all, and the stuff that happened to it. It just – you can say things don't work in a movie and that's fine, but it's different when it just feels like it isn't even an exercise in trying to tell a story that didn't work. It's just like, whatever. Whereas *Andor,* we have a vision for how to – we have something we want to say and something we want to do with this property. ### It doesn't exist just to exist. It does not exist just to exist. It's also not about itself, which is another thing – and it's not just a *Star Wars* problem. I think this is what's going happening the Marvel cinematic universe and other things right now is that at a certain point the movies that are coming out are just about the franchise. And that's maybe a little bit fun. But if you're not a hardcore fan, it gets less fun. *Rise of Skywalker* doesn't really have anything to say about anything other than Star Wars or Easter eggs. Whereas *Andor* is in the world, but it's saying something about something else. I think that's the thing – when a story is just about its own existence, it loses something. ### Yeah, you have to be good about using that type of storytelling. I mean, it can be. The Force Awakens is also a movie about *Star Wars* and it has its flaws, but it was very entertaining. I had a great time when it came out. I think you can criticize various things about it, but it's not cynical in the same way. They did what they wanted to do with it. We're not going to stop with revisiting stories and building out story worlds and all of this stuff – I think those are things people like to do. And they like to do that for everything from not just science fiction properties, but you know, fandoms of sitcoms and fandoms of all sorts of things. That's gonna continue to happen. It's just – are we just going to be stuck with these large, cynical versions of them as opposed to something else? ### And I don't mean to talk all about *Star Wars* for this. It's just a very handy horse to beat. I think it's a good \[example\] because everyone knows it and everyone sort of understands. ### I'm going to get back to your book in a second, but I'm curious how you look back on the last couple of decades, given that nerd culture has been so ascendant with things like *Harry Potter* and *Lord of the Rings* and *Game of Thrones* and all those big franchises? How do you see that rise of cultural acceptance? Yeah, I mean, it's a double edged sword, right? On the other hand, it's exciting that you could give a director like Denis Villeneuve the option to to make these big-budget Dune movies that takes them seriously and people go to see them and that's cool. On the other hand, you get a culture of fandom that isn't healthy – not specifically about Dune, nerd / gaming culture – where we've seen it weaponized through things like GamerGate that are that kind of hostile, misogynistic side of things, weaponized in the culture in a way that's not good. There are definitely people in the government at the moment that seem like they came up in this kind of internet sludge and that's not good. I don't want to necessarily equate these two things, but I think there's a lot of complicated reasons for how the internet plays a big role in just making things more accessible to people. That's largely good, in the sense that people can find communities and things that they otherwise wouldn't have found. It was very difficult at one point if you wanted to listen to a certain band that hasn't broken through yet to find their album and now it's much easier to do that. But the trade-off is then also that it's very easy to get encased in cult – in fan communities that maybe aren't super healthy for a variety of rhetorical reasons, But in terms of being in a culture where science fiction and fantasy movies and books are largely accepted and people don't instantly scoff at them – I think that's good. I don't think that means that other genres should be hurting from that, but it's fun to see, and I just hope that we have a more healthy critical community around these things. ### So with all of that in mind, I want to come back to *The Franchise*: how did this environment shape this story – or is my is my assumption correct that it fed into it? Yeah. I was thinking a lot about the kind of cultural milieu that we exist in and like I said, how these things develop and at what point is it going to change to something different? Because it doesn't feel like it changes as much, we're stuck with the same sorts of things that remain popular for a very long time and it's very difficult for other things to break through. The fact that I guess Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are in the next Avengers film this fall – great? I guess I like to see them and that they're getting paid, but those first *X-Men* movies came out 26 years ago, and we're just going to continue to feed on that until they're no longer with us. There are corporate, capitalist reasons for these things being produced a certain way, and but there's also an inability to aerate or make anything new – just what happens to the culture you do have? I think we're seeing a lot of that, and the book is thinking through that in a very science fictional conceit – that they have set up this island full of people who's memories have been changed to think that they're part of the show, and they live out their lives thinking they're a part of it. They can't change or escape from that because the story can't change, so they're stuck in this world. That's what's behind this whole thing. What interested me is that at some point, something has to change, but not everyone wants that to happen. So what do you do when you discover that what you thought was the world isn't really the world and you don't want it to change (and vice versa). For the people making this stuff, how do they feel about that, is it really what they want to be doing as artists? What excuses are they making for themselves? ### Something I've long been frustrated by in the SF/F world is that we have this imaginative genre, only for people to be completely unimaginative in trying to find new things. I guess it's a tendency we have. Yeah, it's a tendency, but it's really exacerbated by how things are produced and distributed. I don't know how it ends, honestly. ### Hah, I was about to ask if have any thoughts on how to fix that. I will say this, and it has to do with AI. There's a lot of doom and gloom about AI, but I think if there's a silver lining, it's that people – at least in my experience – don't seem to have much appetite for AI art as some sort of replacement for human art. There are people here or there who seem to think this, but for the most part, if you see a photo or a video of a funny dog doing something and you find out it's AI, the response is like "oh. That's not funny now. That was a funny dog, and now it's not funny anymore." With art, I just don't get the impression that people want that. They're going continue to cram it down our throats, but if there's something that comes out of this era, it'll be an appreciation for the humans who make incredible things and we should support that impulse and we should seek out people who are using their talent and creativity to do new things. I think that might be an impulse that grows stronger as time goes on and maybe lead to interesting new things, because if there's something we can do it's something people have done before and that's not fun. I don't think anyone wants to live in a world that's like that forever and always. Maybe that'll spur something. I try and remain hopeful about that. ### What do you hope that readers will take away from this type of narrative? I hope they have fun with it. The way the story is told is it jumps through time and through multiple points of view and some people – there's a lot of dramatic irony built in and I hope people enjoy that. In terms of coming away with something, I hope they think about our own world and how we can move forward – there's a larger thing here beyond science fiction and fantasy properties – it feels like we're very stuck in a certain way of being as a society that isn't very healthy. Is it possible to build something different out of that? I don't know what the answer is to that, but I do hope it's a question people ask. --- *The Franchise* is now available in bookstores. ### Bag check: Spring 2026 edition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/whats-in-your-bag-spring-2026-lochby-uniqlo/ Last updated: 2026-05-06T20:00:41.000Z There was a cool feature that I worked on at one point as a journalist, where I interviewed a bunch of creative people to see what they carry around day-to-day and to glean some insights into their creative process. (I'm particularly thrilled with the ones I did with [Adam Savage](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/7/17826798/adam-savage-whats-in-your-bag-edc-one?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Simon Stålenhag](https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/16/17959372/simon-stalenhag-whats-in-your-bag-sci-fi-art?ref=andrewliptak.com).) It's a neat concept, and I've thought about doing a version of it here with various people, but I haven't had a chance to really do anything with that. (Let me know if it's something you'd want to read!) I did my own version back in [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/whats-in-my-bag-2020-edition/) and [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/whats-in-your-bag-reviews-for-ancestral-night-magic-for-liars-and-more/), and I realized the other week that I changed a lot of what I carry, but there are also a bunch of things that haven't changed. So: time for an update. ### The Bag ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9529.jpeg) The Multi-Pocket Shoulder Bag. Image: Andrew Liptak For a couple of years now, my main day-to-day bag has been the EDC-One from Savage Industries. It still gets my wholehearted endorsement: it’s something that I still frequently use. But it holds a lot of stuff, and earlier this winter, I decided that I wanted something that was a bit more compact and which would force me to carry less around. Around the same time, I came across a Japanese brand called Uniqlo and its Multi-Pocket Shoulder Bag. It was super, suspiciously cheap, and I decided to check it out. The worst that could happen is that it would fall apart. But in the last couple of months, I’ve really loved it: the main compartment is big enough to hold a book, my calendar, notebook, pens, iPad/keyboard, and the side pockets have been good for the odd pen, keys, or water bottle. There's also a couple of small pockets in the interior for loose items. The front has a pair of zippered pockets, which turned out to be the perfect size for my to-do notepad, phone, wallet, and a charger, and a pair of pockets on either side, which is good for a water bottle or random pens. In the last couple of months of using this day to day, it's really outdone itself. It's made of nylon and it's water-repellent enough for quick trips to and from the car. It's held up wonderfully – no rips, tears, or other issues with the body or strap. And it does what I need it to do: carry the right amount of stuff: less contingency things and just the essentials, which is a habit that I need to work on. And it just looks nice. The design is great: no weird flap that you usually see on messenger bags, and the front / side pockets are great for easy access to stuff, freeing stuff from my pockets and whatnot. ### The Stuff Part of this process has been taking stock of what I need day-to-day, which generally breaks down to: things to write with, things to keep myself organized, and things to keep me entertained. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9534.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak On the organizational front, something I've carried for years is a Lochby Tool Roll. I've had this for several years, and it's a great alternative to a pouch, because I don't need to root around for something: everything has its own slot. I’ve presently loaded it up with a variety of pens — felt-tip, ballpoint, and fountain — a Blackwing pencil, pencil sharpener, and an Apple Pencil (Which I don’t really use that much, but it comes in handy sometimes.) I’ve also got a spoon and a small ruler, and a cheap box cutter. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9533.jpeg) Field journal, w/ notepads and Rhodia spiralbound notebook. Image: Andrew Liptak For writing, I've got a couple of notepads in a Lochby Field Journal, another item that I've been using for years now. It's incredibly useful for taking notes throughout the day, either at work, board meetings, or when I have a story or random idea that I need to jot down. It's a little chaotic: I really should dedicated one of these booklets to fiction and another to stories, but I haven't gotten there yet (although I have since filled one up and another most of the way. One notebook is a Rhodia spiral-bound that was a birthday gift for my uncle a couple of years ago. I've really liked this one, and it fits perfectly in there. Also on the writing front, I‘ve had this iPad Pro for a long time, and while age has taken its toll (It could use a new battery), it’s still chugging along. I've been using this for various writing tasks when I'm away from my home computer, and it serves as a good streaming device for when I’m cooking or doing some repetitive task. The newest upgrade for it is one of Apple's Magic Keyboards. Both my keyboard for my regular desktop and the folio for the iPad were giving me issues, and I found that this keyboard works well for both, so I've been carrying it with me. I need to get a case for it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9532.jpeg) Day planner, tool roll, iPad, keyboard, Field Journal, Choir of Hatred by Yudhajaya Wijeratne. Image: Andrew Liptak Back on organizational front, the other mainstay is my day planner. I picked this one up from Paper Source (which supplies Barnes & Noble), and it's pretty generic. It's been useful to get into the habit of physically writing things down, rather than just keeping it all on my phone. One of the biggest changes that this bag has forced on me has been to limit myself to carrying one book to read. Carrying a book is a given – I never know when I'll be stuck somewhere, and I've always got a couple going. But carrying one helps with decision paralysis. (If I need more than one book, I’ll stick it/them in a tote bag.) I took these pictures earlier this spring, when I was reading *Choir of Hatred*, but I currently have *The Faith of Beasts* in there now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9535.jpeg) Keys, Lochby Sidekick, Rhodia dotpad, Apple Airpod Max. Image: Andrew Liptak The other things that I typically have on me: a KeySmart, which is like a pocketknife but for keys, along with an AirTag because I keep misplacing them. The Rhodia dotpad is what I've been using for my daily to-do list, and it slots nicely into one of the front pockets. My wallet is a Lochby Sidekick (which I wrote about [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lochby-sidekick-wallet-pen-edc-review/)), and my AirPod Max headphones, which go everywhere with me. After 5ish years of use, their battery life and reliability have gone down a bit: I’ll still get a good couple of hours out of them (and I’m generally near a plug). ### May 2026 brings a flood of new sci-fi and fantasy books URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2026-new-scifi-fantasy-books-dinniman-leckie-murderbot/ Last updated: 2026-05-05T15:53:07.000Z Buckle up: May is bringing a proverbial flood of new books to a shelf near you. There are some continuations of some beloved series, a whole bunch of exciting-looking debut novels, and a ton of others that explore the human condition and our place in the universe. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, you can support it by signing up as well! Your membership will help with the next batch of work that I've got in the pipeline, nearly 30 pieces that I've got on the schedule, from more book lists to commentaries, reviews, and interviews. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) As always, you can find prior book roundup over on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. Okay, here are 18 books that caught my eye for the first half of the month: ### [*2084: A Novel of Future War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593489895?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis (May 12th) Back in 2021, veteran author Elliot Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis released [*2034*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984881274?ref=andrewliptak.com), a future war novel that was set just far enough in the future to make some interesting extrapolations, in which a conflict erupts between the US and China in the South China Sea, and over the Strait of Hormuz when a Marine aviator encounters a cyberattack in his F-35\. In [*2054*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593489888?ref=andrewliptak.com), they jumped forward two decades, in which an American president is facing considerable discontent at home, fueled by an AI crisis. When he mysteriously dies, the country descended into a new Civil War, with global ramifications. And now, they've jumped forward thirty years beyond that story with a new novel, *2084*. Because of their internal conflicts and policies, US and China have been superseded on the world stage, and have formed the Consortium, an alliance that's deeply opposed by another consortium of equatorial nations, the Reparationists, who're trying to extract reparations from the two countries for their role in the changes to the climate that have been causing problems for everyone. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593489895?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Ackerman and Stavridis stage a harrowing global conflict that pits military might against an appetite for justice. As always, the authors spin geopolitical anxiety into exciting, discomfiting genre fiction." ### [*David Starr, Space Ranger*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585904?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Isaac Asimov (May 12th) Blackstone is reprinting one of Isaac Asimov's classic series: the Lucky Starr novels, starting with *David Starr, Space Ranger.* Originally published under a pseudonym in 1952 and aimed at a younger audience, the series was originally intended to be the foundation of a television series that ultimately never materialized. Set thousands of years in the future, humanity has colonized the solar system and has begun spreading elsewhere, ruled by the Solar System is the Council of Science, which uses its agents and science to keep everything in order. We're introduced to Hector Conway, a Council member who was dispatched to take care of a fleet of space pirates, only to discover a lifeboat floating between Earth and Venus, with a 4-year-old child aboard: David. The other installments in the series, [*Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228585928?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586024?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586086?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586147?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228586161?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* are also getting the re-release treatment, and will be coming out in the coming months. ### [*The Girl with a Thousand Faces*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250810212?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sunyi Dean (May 5th) After a woman named Mercy Chan found herself on the shores of Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, without any memory of who she is, she's worked to rebuild some sort of life by hiring herself out as a ghost talker to deal with the densely-populated city's angry spirits. But while she can't remember her past, her past remembers her, and when a powerful ghost makes its way into the city, it claims to know her and the secrets that she can't remember. As she works to protect her neighbors from this new threat, she finds that there's more to the story, and that she might be responsible for the spirit that she's now fighting. *Publishers Weekly* says that "in the midst of the entertaining drama, serious meditation on the nature of revenge and its effect on its seeker makes a heartfelt argument for the power of forgiveness." ### [*A Parade of Horribles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190065?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (May 12th) The best description I've heard of Matt Dinniman's *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series is that it's something that a hyperactive six-year-old hyped up on sugar would come up with. Earth is destroyed by aliens looking to mine the place, and the survivors are shepherded into sadistic dungeons for a galactic reality show called *Dungeon Crawler World*, where they face ever-more horrifying threats. Carl is a Coast Guard veteran who teams up with his ex-girlfriend's tortoiseshell Persian show cat, Princess Donut (who also gets the ability to shoot lasers out of her eyes.) It sounds silly, but somehow, it *works*. I've been hooked on these books, and they've been rocketing upwards in popularity since Ace Books picked up the series ([*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820254?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*This Inevitable Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190041?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and now, we're about to get the next and eighth installment, *A Parade of Horribles*. [Dungeon Crawler Carl is headed to Peacock for a seriesDammit, Donut!![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2026/04/648357727_1513310764128918_2391673897369307327_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dungeon-crawler-carl-matt-dinniman-tv-adaptation-peacock/) *This Inevitable Ruin* dealt with the Faction Wars, with Carl and Donut finding themselves on the tenth level of the dungeon, where they find that the theme this time around is all about racing. They have to get a vehicle and continually upgrade it so that they don't come in last. But they're finding that there are strange (stranger than what's normal) things happening in the game, and they begin to hear about something that the game's AI is calling a Parade of Horribles, and nobody knows what it means. Presumably, nothing good. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Homebound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668201732?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Portia Elan *(*May 5th) In 1983, a teenager named Becks is struggling: she's trying to escape from Cincinnati, her uncle – the only person who really understood her – has died, and she has to finish work on a video game about an astronaut that they were working on together. That game will have a profound impact in the future, influencing a scientist, a robot, and a sea captain in unexpected ways, all of whom are linked in a desire to find a connection, and by a traveler flying through space. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/portia-elan/homebound-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying it's "an ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time." ### [*The Franchise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250406583?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Thomas Elrod(May 12th) Regular readers of *Transfer Orbit* know that a big topic here is the nature of storytelling, and that I'm particularly fascinated with some of the bigger story franchises and how they're utilized by studios and entertainment companies to dole out to fans, for better or worse. Thomas Elrod's debut novel looks like it was tailor made for me and this newsletter. Jumping around through time, it's about how a classic epic fantasy novel called The Malicarn was first published in the 1960s, and how it became this big, mega film hit. In this nearish future, the studio has set up a Malicarn world, where its actors have become part of the world, and begin to realize that there's more to their existence than they might remember. When a popular actor has been cast in the series, he finds that freeing his fellow inhabitants might not be as easy as he thought. I've started reading this one and I'm really enjoying it so far. Stay tuned for more in the nearish future. ### [*The Republic of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668207192?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mahmud El Sayed (May 5th) Here's another book that's been on my highly-anticipated list for the year: Mahmud El Sayed's *The Republic of Memory*. It's inspired in part by the Arab Spring, and it follows the crew of a generation ship called *The Safina*, which is halfway through its 400 year journey to a distant colony world. Generations of the crew work to maintain the ship and its cargo of humans frozen in stasis, only to encounter a blackout that will threaten the mission as the crew revolts and a long-simmering conspiracy comes to a head. This is another one that I've recently started reading and have been enjoying it. Stay tuned. ### [*Make Me Better*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250851758?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Gailey (May 12th) In Sarah Gailey's latest novel, Celia is tired of being alone: she wants more than anything to belong to a family, and when she heads out to Kindred Cove for the annual Salt Festival, she's hoping to find some sort of connection that the reclusive community that lives there promises. Out on a remote island, they make some enormous promises: there's no suffering or grief, and you can transform yourself. But such promises come with a cost. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250851758?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Gailey does impressive work making life on the island seem pleasant enough—and Celia disconsolate enough—that it’s understandable how warning signs get overlooked or deliberately ignored." ### [*Ash Land*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781923382312?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Harry (May 4th) A couple of years ago, a lab in France experienced a leak, and a sample of flesh-eating microbots escaped into the wild. The results were devastating: 20 percent of humanity was killed in the first month, and those who survived had to seal themselves inside, accessing the outer world only through drones or hazmat suits. One survivor, a former cop named Kai Braddock, has been working to track down bounties via drone and spending time with his two sons in their tiny LA apartment. When his partner is murdered on a job, he's forced to go back outside for the first time in years. ### [*Absence*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781641297585?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Andrew Dana Hudson (May 5th) Humanity faces a new phenomenon: Spontaneous Human Absence (also known as "popping") in which people vanish into thin air. It's had a profound effect on the state of the world, and a government worked named Harvey Ellis, working for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, is part of the effort to understand and contain the problem. He's tasked with investigating disappearances, and once they're verified as an "Absence", the government will pay out a stipend. He's dealing with his own losses, but he's coping until a strange situation presents itself: a woman reappears in her hometown, with a story of going to the other side. Harvey begins his investigation with a partner to try and figure out if she's telling the truth, or if she's just an elaborate scam artist. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrew-dana-hudson/absence/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a haunted story about unfinished lives, the persistence of hope, and the consequences of grief without end." ### [*Radiant Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290357?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ann Leckie (May 12th) Ann Leckie is one of the genre's best writers, having written such books as [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565172?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Ancillary Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565196?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Ancillary Mercy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565189?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Provenance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565202?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Translation State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290128?ref=andrewliptak.com). This new book is set in the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star, something that's been both inspiring and conflicting for the Ooioiaa people. The Radch has deemed it an irrelevant religious site that they'll soon absorb, but they've been forced to reckon with the reality of the situation and allow one final man to become a "living saint." That decision will have a huge impact on the rest of the civilization, exacerbating other issues that have been turning up the temperature. I loved Leckie's last installment in the world, *Translation State*, and I've got high hopes for this one. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ann-leckie/radiant-star/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "A skillfully rendered, thoughtful offshoot of the original story." ### [*The Last Contract of Isako*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316568654?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Fonda Lee (May 5th) In Fonda Lee's latest novel, we're introduced to Isako, a legendary swordswomen who's preparing for the end. Her long-standing client has died, and she's planning on walking out into her planet's frozen wastelands to die in a customary ritual, only to be offered one last contract involving her last dismal apprentice, Martim. Taking the gig, she finds herself immersed in a world of corporate espionage and a looming conspiracy that could change humanity's entire existence in the universe. I do like these sorts of "Samurai's last job" type stories, and it looks like a fun adventure of a story set in a fascinating and immersive world. Library Journal included it in its pick of the month selection and awarded it a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/the-last-contract-of-isako-by-fonda-lee-sff-pick-of-the-month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Lee’s latest stand-alone is an homage to those lost in the fallout of nefarious capitalist schemes." ### [*The Coffin of Honey*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781552455180?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Geoffrey D. Morrison (May 12th) In the distant future, a politician is making a speech when an object arrives and briefly whisks him away to another planet, where he experiences a sense of eustacy. Upon his return, he has trouble processing what happened to him, and as others are given the same opportunity, various countries around the world are trying to figure out what these abductees are experiencing, even as the individuals try and figure out what happened to them and how they relate to one another. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781552455180?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Morrison peppers his nuanced narrative with song lyrics, typewritten manifestos, and excerpts from mysteriously mobile notebooks, and it can be challenging to keep track of the connections between the large cast and their individual dreams. Still, readers who stick with it will be rewarded with much food for thought. ### [*Moon Over Brendle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730309?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeff Noon (May 12th) In the summer of 1968, Joe Sutter is about to head off to secondary school. He's from an alternate world , which is much like ours, but with a phenomenon known as Greot, a vast rainbow of dust. Joe's one of the few who can see it, but nobody really knows what it is. Joe would rather spend his time drawing up comics and listening to music, and when he meets a pulp science fiction author, the encounter changes the direction of his life. He becomes a well-known novelist and as he writes, he teases out the story of the Greot and how he came to understand it. ### [*Accumulation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217047628?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aimee Pokwatka (May 5th) Tennessee Cherish is a former documentary filmmaker who's become a stay-at-home mother. When she family move into the dream house her husband bought, everything seems to be looking up. But he's becoming increasingly absent, and her two children are beginning to act out. She feels isolated. As she gets acclimated, she doesn't notice at first that strange things are happening in her new home, from creepy dolls that begin showing up to a strange human tooth they find in the floor. As these strange things begin to pile up, they find themselves caught in loops and habits that come with dangerous effects, and Tenn needs to figure out what's behind the haunting before it kills them all. ### [*Terrible Worlds: Destinations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837867288?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (May 5th) Adrian Tchaikovsky brings together three of his novellas into a single volume, which take readers to the edge of the solar system (*Walking to Aldebaran*), to the edges of time at the end of a catastrophic war (*One Day All This Will Be Yours*), and to a fantastical world that a failing TV presenter's famous grandmother dreamed up – or did she? (*And Put Away Childish Things*.) ### [*Platform Decay*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827005?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (May 5th) Martha Wells adds a new novel to her growing *Murderbot Diaries* series ([*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229854?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Fugitive Telemetry*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765376?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com)), *Platform Decay*. If you haven't dipped into the series, it's about an anxious android that hacked its governor module and freed itself, and it's decided that it would rather watch television than hang out with people. Unfortunately, it keeps doing the right thing, and ends up helping out the people it's encountered. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/04/IMG_0255.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) In this new novel, Murderbot has volunteered to help with a rescue mission, only to discover that it'll have to spend a good amount of time dealing with a whole new group of people – including human children, something it's not thrilled about. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/platform-decay-100008781?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "readers who love a good, snarky internal monologue will be glad to know that Murderbot is back in fine fettle after their self-doubt in the previous book, *System Collapse*." ### [*Seek Immediate Shelter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250410122?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Vincent Yu (May 5th) One morning, the residents of Beckitt, Massachusetts receive a frightening message: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." The message throws the town into a panic, and their various actions reveal their true selves: there are selfless actions, regrettable last words and text messages, and family members who abandon one another. When a second message comes through revealing that it was a false alarm, everyone needs to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their decisions and the consequences. *Kirkus Reviews* [called it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vincent-yu/seek-immediate-shelter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "a quietly profound debut that asks what we would really do if we believed we would die within the next few seconds." --- Alrighty, that's it for the first half of the month: I've got another batch for you coming up in the second half of the month – stay tuned. Andrew ### Table of Contents, May 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-may-2026/ Last updated: 2026-06-01T19:55:48.000Z The year is trucking right along: the spring flashed right by, and already there's a daunting list of short stories to read. May brings a whole new crop, and I'm looking forward to checking some of these out in the coming weeks. You can check out last month's (newly updated!) installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-april-2026/), and past installments [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month. Check back later in the month for a fully updated list! --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) ### Fiction - "[Dactyl](https://amazingstories.com/2026/05/dactyl-by-humphrey-price-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Humphrey Price - "[Marco Swims on Titan](https://amazingstories.com/2026/05/marco-swims-on-titan-by-jeff-gaba-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeff Gaba - "[Sword of Guilt](https://amazingstories.com/2026/05/sword-of-guilt-by-robert-marcus-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Robert Marcus - "[Planet Leave KL-28](https://amazingstories.com/2026/05/planet-leave-kl-28-by-alex-gurevich-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Gurevich --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2026) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Imprint](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zach Poulter - "Carpenter" by Jay Werkheiser - "Some Plates Get Eaten" by Thoraiya Dyer - "In The Overlap" by Eric Del Carlo - "The Cold Embrace" by C. Stuart Hardwick - "Camino Mundo" by Brian Hugenbruch - "The Enshittification Of Dogs" by Tom R. Pike - "Amel And The Bride" by Julie Duffy - "Awkward Incident Transpiring While Exploring The Neighborhood" by Timons Esaias - "A Lesson In Orbital Mechanics" by Michael Johnston - "Children Of A Sunnier Star" by Gregory Feeley - "The Two Thousand And Seventieth Time Sara Deletes Her Family" by J.R. Dewitt - "Whispers Of Twilight" by Ken Miura - "An Arm For Every Tooth" by Colin Alexander - "My Next Duchess" by Anna Kahn - "Nirvana and Mr. Sparks" by Kevin J.E. Walsh - "Telling The Bees" by Eóin Dooley - "Hetero Sapiens" by Sarina Dorie - "Fossil Record" by Rick Hollon - "[Schismogenesis](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by E.G. Condé - "[For Sojourner](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adegboyega Kayowa ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: The Editor’s Page](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Trevor Quachri, Emily Hockaday & Kevin Wheeler - [The Reference Library](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-reference-library/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Sean CW Korsgaard - The Doctor Will Scan You Now by Douglas F. Dluzen - The V-2 In Astounding by Edward M. Wysocki, Jr. - In Times To Come - Unknowns Edited by Alec Nevala-lee - Interplanetary Hive by Patrick Berry - Guest Alternate View by Howard V. Hendrix - Alternate View by John G. Cramer --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2026 *Vol. 50 Nos. 5 & 6*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Hot](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cecelia Holland - "Failed Attempts at Predation" by A.M. Dellamonica - "The Girl Who Stole Life" by Zhou Wen (Translated by Xueting C. Ni) - "The Sky Above the Earth Below" by Steve Rasnic Tem - "The Language of Machines" by Betsy Aoki - "A Penrose Dirge" by Chris Campbell - "Sophie Simpson’s Whizz-Bang Day at World War I" by Dale Bailey - "Half Inside the Spirit Box" by Stephanie Feldman - "Unspeakable Knowns" by Donald McCarthy - "[Alpha Gal](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Greg Egan ### Poetry - "Love Letter to Nuclear Fusion by Connor Yeck - "Jukebox for the Interplanetary Traveler by Brian U. Garrison - "Your Regular College-Town Climate Elegy by Ursula Whitcher - "Image as a Stone on the Water by Ruth Berman ### Nonfiction - [Guest Editorial: A Reader’s Perspective](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Piet Nel - [Reflections: The End of an Era](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/reflections/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Silverberg - [On the Net: Tomorrow’s Bots](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/on-the-net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James Patrick Kelly - Thought Experiment: Iterations in and of Planet of the Apes by Kelly Lagor - [On Books](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/on-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Jennings --- ## *The Atlantic* (May 2026) ### Fiction - "[Dinah's Hat](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/stephen-king-dinahs-hat/686930/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen King --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue # 457 and #458) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Slayer of Dreams](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/slayer-of-dreams/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Auston Habershaw - "[Through the Corpse Door](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/through-the-corpse-door/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.I. Sutton - "[The City of Tears](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-city-of-tears/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Molly Tanzer - "[The Voice and Her Knife](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-voice-and-her-knife/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by AnaMaria Curtis - "[Boxwood](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/boxwood/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.E. Bronstein --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(Issue 236, May 2026) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Profitable Sentience of Household Goods](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hall%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Inglis Hall - "[Archaeological Evidence for the Time Traveler](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tia Tashiro - "[Conquerors](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wolven%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nick Wolven - "[Paper Airplane Poet](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singerling%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sheri Singerling - "[Aly](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chan%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Grace Chan - "[Decimation Circles](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/alvi%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Raahem Alvi - "[The Scent of Memory](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/zhao%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zhao Haihong, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu ### Nonfiction - [Three Curious Animal Strategies for Immortality](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dewinter%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gunnar De Winter - [Torn From Context: A Conversation with Ray Nayler](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/nayler%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Immortal Trauma: A Conversation with Martha Wells](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wells%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: The Stars in Our Sky](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F05%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 132, May 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Chicken Finger](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/chicken-finger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byNM Whitley - "[Obedient Son](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/obedient-son/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byKelsea Yu - "[Mercy](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/mercy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byNelson Stanley - "[Red God Waiting](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/red-god-waiting/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAi Jiang --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (May 2026, No. 52) ### Fiction - "A Child Without Sin" by Diana Ionita - "A Minor Revolution" by Lee Clark Zumpe - "A Night At The Castle" by Lee Clark Zumpe - Vorpal" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Dark Timber" by Lee Clark Zumpe - "Among The Dead 101" by Dennis Kohler - "Psychosomatic" by Terry Sanville - "Way Station" by Michael Fontana - "The Trade" by Bradley J. Collins - "A Rulebook For Ghosts" by Ausiàs Tsel - "Circle Of Stones" by Joe Prosit - "Drains" by David Castlewitz - "Hell Hath No Fury" by James Callan - "Lost In The Stacks" by Peter Emmett Naughton - "Pyrrhic Proof" by Mark J. Schultis - "Releasing The Chesapeake Bay" by Griffith Pound - "Ekkle-rog And Menk" by Taylor Layne - "Plunge" by Anuel Rodriguez --- ## [*Diabolical Plots*](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Support [here](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“Afterimage”](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-135b-afterimage-by-anna-zumbro/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anna Zumbro - “[Dourglamis](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-135a-dourglamis-by-derek-wagner/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Derek Wagner --- ## [*Fabulist Magazine*](https://fabulistmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Subscribe [here](https://fabulistmagazine.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[What a Wonderful World](https://fabulistmagazine.com/what-a-wonderful-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Esther Lee Deitch](https://fabulistmagazine.com/author/esther-lee-deitch/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Wigs](https://fabulistmagazine.com/wigs/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Kelly Dignan](https://fabulistmagazine.com/author/kelly-dignan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[A New Day](https://fabulistmagazine.com/a-new-day/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Amanda Anderson](https://fabulistmagazine.com/author/amanda-anderson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Spring Flight](https://fabulistmagazine.com/spring-flight/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Kevlin Henney](https://fabulistmagazine.com/author/kevlin-henney/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[A Tyranny of Desire](https://fabulistmagazine.com/a-tyranny-of-desire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [LeeAnn Perry](https://fabulistmagazine.com/author/leeann-perry/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[After Enlightenment, the Sewage](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#after-enlightenment-the-sewage)" by Joelle Killian - "[Citizens!](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#citizens)" by Sasha Brown - "[This Is Your Village](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#this-is-your-village)" by Charlie Kieft - "[The Screaming Garden](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#the-screaming-garden)" by Em Starr - "[She Said Yes and a City Died](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#she-said-yes-and-a-city-died)" by Liz Levin - "[Soon It Would See Eyelessly, Turn Corners on Its Own](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#soon-it-would-see-eyelessly-turn-corners-on-its-own)" by John K. Peck ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: The Myth of Civilization](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial-the-myth-of-civilization) by Rebecca Halsey --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) ### Fiction - "[Golden Rule](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-golden-rule-monica-byrne/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Monica Byrne ### Nonfiction - [The Purpose of Punishment](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/criminal-punishment-mcdonald/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Randy McDonald --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(May 2026) ### Fiction - "[Year of the Tangram](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/05/01/year-of-the-tangram/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ichabod Cassius Kilroy --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026, Issue 192) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Knacker Man](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-knacker-man/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Scott Dalrymple (5/7) - "[Sarah’s Laugh](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/sarahs-laugh/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melissa A Watkins (5/7) - "[The Star Where We Meet](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-star-where-we-meet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam W. Pisciotta (5/14) - "[The Aerialist](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-aerialist/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Yoon Ha Lee (5/14) - "[The Stars Look Away From This Vessel](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-stars-look-away-from-this-vessel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by dave ring (5/21) - "[Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ten-unsent-letters-to-the-dark-lord/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ada Hoffmann (5/21) - "[The Test of Time](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-test-of-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (5/28) - "[The Last Season of Your Life](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-last-season-of-your-life/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christopher Barzak (5/28) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: May 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams - [Author Spotlight: Melissa A Watkins](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-melissa-a-watkins-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (5/7) - [Author Spotlight: Sam W. Pisciotta](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-sam-w-pisciotta/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Jeffrey (5/14) - [Book Review: *The Quarter Queen* by Kayla Hardy](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-quarter-queen-by-kayla-hardy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (5/14) - [Author Spotlight: Ada Hoffman](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-ada-hoffman-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (5/21) - [Book Review: *The Republic of Memory* by Mahmud El Sayed](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-republic-of-memory-by-mahmud-el-sayed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (5/21) - [Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-kristine-kathryn-rusch-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Jeffrey (5/28) - [Book Review: *The Dorians* by Nick Cutter](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-dorians-by-nick-cutter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (5/28) --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The imperfect legacy](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01075-w?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fei Qi - "[Origin story](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01077-8?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Shvartsman - "[Matter of taste](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01079-6?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mari Harrison - "[The futile beauty of flightless birds](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01081-y?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wendy Nikel - "[Serebral](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01083-w?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kevin Power - "[The CAPTCHA protocol](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01085-8?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shiao Wang - "[Neuroflix](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01087-6?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John McLaughlin - "[Scraping](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01089-4?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Laura O’Meara - "[Sarcophagus](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01091-w?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dan Peacock --- ## [*Neon Dystopia*](https://www.neondystopia.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Support [here](https://www.patreon.com/neondystopia?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Idol](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043579&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joshua Mannix - "[Hunger](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043587&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Scum - "[Gen. Ed](https://www.neondystopia.com/?p=100043614&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elle Burnett --- ## [*New Edge Sword & Sorcery*](https://newedgeswordandsorcery.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issues 6 and 7) Buy [here](https://newedgeswordandsorcery.com/product-category/new-edge-sword-sorcery/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Issue 6 authors: - Melissa Burlock - Andrew Whalen - June Orchid Parker - Sarah Macklin - Sara Century - Steve Hugh Westenra - Oliver Brackenbury - Alec Worley - Eric Williams - Bryn Hammond - Robin Marx ### Issue 7 authors: - Dariel R. A. Quiogue - James Enge - Prashanth Srivatsa - Kirk A. Johnson - Larissa Glasser - Jay Wolf - Cora Buhlert - Anthony Perconti --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026, Issue 164) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Hollow Cast](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/hollow-cast/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Grey (5/6) - "[A Magic Kingdom](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/a-magic-kingdom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bruce McAllister (5/23) - "[consumed](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/podcast/consumed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ash Vale (5/27) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: May 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-may-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (5/6) - [Author Spotlight: Sarah Grey](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-sarah-grey/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Finch (5/6) - [The H Word: An Intimate Gaze at Headless Horror](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-an-intimate-gaze-at-headless-horror/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eugen Bacon (5/13) - [Art the Clown attends the Jane Hirschfield poetry reading at the Anchorage Museum](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/creative-nonfiction/art-the-clown-attends-the-jane-hirschfield-poetry-reading-at-the-anchorage-museum/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Audrey Coble - [Author Spotlight: Audrey Coble](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-audrey-coble/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kevin Figueroa Quiñones (5/20) - [Plumbing the Depths: The Origins and Omissions of Apocalyptic Horror](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/plumbing-the-depths-the-origins-and-omissions-of-apocalyptic-horror/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lizzie Wade (5/27) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(May 2026) ### Fiction - "[This Fleshy Side of the Bone](https://reactormag.com/this-fleshy-side-of-the-bone-john-langan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Langan - "[This Is Not My Timeline](https://reactormag.com/this-is-not-my-timeline-j-r-dawson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.R. Dawson - "[The Perpetual Post](https://reactormag.com/the-perpetual-post-isabel-j-kim/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May2026, Issue 35) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Trevor is Hungry](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/trevor-is-hungry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sasha Brown - "[A Fine Powder](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-fine-powder/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alicia Maskley - "[Windows to the Soul](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/windows-to-the-soul/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gerri Leen - "[Clowder](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/clowder/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kila Greene - "[A moment on the lips](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-moment-on-the-lips/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brian Hugenbruch - "[Charley Coavins](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/charley-coavins/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gretchen Tessmer - "[The Arborist](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-arborist/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sara Omer - "[When Death Comes, Look to The Tower](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/when-death-comes-look-to-the-tower/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ali Trotta - "[1,001 Best Hikes on Mars: The Peterson Historic Trail (“Peterson’s Folly”)](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/1001-best-hikes-on-mars-the-peterson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ron Fein --- ## [*Solarpunk Magazine*](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May / June 2026, Issue 27) Support [here](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/shop/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Radio Free Luna, Signing Off” by Sylvie Althoff - “Between Mortar and Magic” by Alex Vossler - “What the Sea Remembers” by Dennis Mombauer ### Poetry - “Pulsar, Phlox” by Devan Barlow - “The Prayer Shrub” by Zoleikha Baloch ### Nonfiction - “Occupation of Palestine” by Aya Al-Hattab - Repair is Not a Gadget: A Review of *The Wildcraft Drones* by T.K. Rex by Justine Norton-Kertson --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Senescence](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/senescence/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by aegor ray - "[Coming Home](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/coming-home/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dhiyanah Hassan - "[Hymn To Scylla](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/hymn-to-scylla/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elena Goh ### Poetry - "[The Dragon](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-dragon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Janairo - "[Beetles](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/beetles/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ewan Downie - "[Gone](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/gone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Greg Fewer - "[The Mermaid Speaks of Social Justice from the Bathtub](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-mermaid-speaks-of-social-justice-from-the-bathtub/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nico Martinez Nocito - "[My Grandmother Turned Dead Souls into Sugar](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/my-grandmother-turned-dead-souls-into-sugar/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Salas Robles - "[Death of the Emperor’s Nightingale](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/death-of-the-emperors-nightingale/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shantell Powell - "[How to Get Around It](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/how-to-get-around-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Holly Hunt - "[So This Is A Week](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/so-this-is-a-week/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Soon Lee ### Nonfiction - [Tempered And Spiced: A Recipe for Mythic Fiction](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/tempered-and-spiced-a-recipe-for-mythic-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shveta Thakrar ### Reviews - Monday: [*The Illuminated Man* by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-illuminated-man-by-christopher-priest-and-nina-allan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martin Petto - Wednesday: [*Rabbit Test and Other Stories* by Samantha Mills](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/rabbit-test-and-other-stories-by-samantha-mills/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw - Friday: [*Planet of Ghosts and Other Stories* by Wesley R. Bishop](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/planet-of-ghosts-and-other-stories-by-wesley-r-bishop/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Lockette - Monday: [*The Curve of the World* by Vonda N. McIntyre](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-curve-of-the-world-by-vonda-n-mcintyre/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kate Macdonald - Wednesday: [*The Apple and the Pearl* by Rym Kechacha](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-apple-and-the-pearl-by-rym-kechacha/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande - Friday: [*Zoi* by Jane Mondrup](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/zoi-by-jane-mondrup/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. Bristow-Smith - Monday: [*Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf* by C. L. Clark](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/ambessa-chosen-of-the-wolf-by-c-l-clark/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Catherine Baker - Wednesday: [*Loss Protocol* by Paul McAuley](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/loss-protocol-by-paul-mcauley/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Duncan Lawie - Friday: [*The Midnight Shift* by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-midnight-shift-by-cheon-seon-ran-translated-by-gene-png/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sneha Pathak - Monday: [*Radiant Star* by Ann Leckie](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/radiant-star-by-ann-leckie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Miguel - Wednesday: [*The Coffin of Honey* by Geoffrey D. Morrison](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-coffin-of-honey-by-geoffrey-d-morrison/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Macdonald - Friday: [*The Witch* by Marie Ndiaye](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-witch-by-marie-ndiaye/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akankshya Abismruta --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Moon Carver](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-moon-carver?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ken Liu - "[Alpha and Omega](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/alpha-and-omega?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by LaShawn M. Wanak - "[The Only Thing Older, The Only Thing Wiser](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-only-thing-older-the-only-thing?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Scott Edelman - "[Now is a Kind of Forever](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/now-is-a-kind-of-forever?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelly Robson --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2026, Issue 70) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[The Snatchers](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-snatchers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (5/5) - “[The Glass City](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-glass-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by AnaMaria Curtis (5/5) - “[Extracted from an unravelled braid](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/extracted-from-an-unravelled-braid/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga (5/5) ### Poetry - “[A Mermaid Looks at 40](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-mermaid-looks-at-40/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Fran Wilde (5/5) - “[Empty Music](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/empty-music/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Prosper Ìféányí (5/5) ### Nonfiction - “[The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-65/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Michael Damian Thomas - “[The End of This Day’s Business—Or, My Life as Repetitive Epic](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-end-of-this-days-business-or-my-life-as-repetitive-epic/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Una McCormack (5/5) - “[The Mopey Ghost Nightmare Girl: The Character of Hari in Three Filmed Versions of Stanisław Lem’s *Solaris*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mopey-ghost-nightmare-girl-the-character-of-hari-in-three-filmed-versions-of-stansilaw-lems-solaris/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Alex Bledsoe (5/5) - [Interview: AnaMaria Curtis](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-anamaria-curtis-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (5/5) --- As always, drop what you've read and would recommend in the comments! ### A long out-of-print Octavia Butler novel is coming back URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-survivor-patternist-scifi-reprint/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T13:00:29.000Z For years, Octavia E. Butler prevented one of her novels from being republished, [*Survivor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538766170?ref=andrewliptak.com). According to [*The L.A. Times*](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2026-04-23/octavia-butler-survivor-new-edition-reprint?ref=andrewliptak.com), Hachette's Grand Central Publishing will release a new edition of the novel this September, featuring a foreword by Dr. Alyssa Collins, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Cal State Northridge and [the first Octavia E. Butler Fellow](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-fellowship-huntington-alyssa-collins/) from the Huntington Library. This edition will also include Butler's short story "A Necessary Being," which she originally wrote for [Harlan Ellison's anthology *The Last Dangerous Visions*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/at-last-dangerous-visions-harlan-ellison/), and which was never published in her lifetime. *Survivor* is part of Butler's five-book *Patternist* series, which she began publishing in 1976 with [*Patternmaster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538751466?ref=andrewliptak.com). That novel was set in the distant future, about telepath who's fighting for a position of power in his society. Published in 1978, *Survivor* is set centuries before *Patternmaster* (and after [*Wild Seed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538751480?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Clay's Ark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538751503?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Mind of My Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538751497?ref=andrewliptak.com))*,* following a woman named Alanna, a colonist who leaves a damaged Earth and arrives on a planet inhabited by the Kohn, where she finds herself swept up in their internal conflicts. [Principled prophetSusana M. Morris’s Positive Obsession is an intimate and tragic look at the life of Octavia E. Butler![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2025/10/IMG_6998.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/positive-obsession-octavia-butler-biography-book-review/) Writing in her (excellent) biography [*Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com), Susana M. Morris notes that the series "explore the dualistic nature of humankind: our adaptability and our penchant for hierarchy," and that it reflected her "deep-seated concerns about what America's imperialistic designs both on Earth and in space symbolized for the future of humanity and what lessons marginalized groups – such as Black people in the United States – have learned from their oppressors." Morris notes that Butler "singularly loathed" *Survivor*, explaining that she essentially wrote it because she received a decent advance for it at a time when she was fighting to make a living as a full time writer, figuring that she'd take the money and work on her next book, *Kindred*. "Octavia would regret this compromise for the rest of her career," Morris writes. "She felt that the novel was rushed and did not substantively add to the *Patternist* saga." In an [interview with Amazon.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20000418224230/https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/11664/) in 2000, she explained why she disliked it: > When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always *less* in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like "the natives" in a very bad, old movie. And I thought, "No way. Apart from all these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage." People ask me why I don't like Survivor, my third novel. And it's because it feels a little bit like that. Some humans go up to another world, and immediately begin mating with the aliens and having children with them. I think of it as my Star Trek novel. The book was only in print for a short while: Butler prevented it from being reprinted after its initial run and encouraged people not to read it. In his book [*Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780252082160?ref=andrewliptak.com), Gerry Canavan wrote that "*Survivor*'s story is not nearly as bad as Butler felt it was, though perhaps some would still agree it is one of her lesser works." While the story wasn't to her liking – mainly a central conceit, "beings who evolved on different planets would be able to have children together, was embarrassingly naive," he felt that it was due "for reprinting and a reconsideration." --- Republishing *Survivor* is sure to be a controversial move, given Butler's attitude towards it. Speaking with *The LA Times*, Collins said that she was apprehensive about being involved with this new edition, but also felt that she understood where Butler was coming from: "On the one hand, I knew that Butler wasn’t a huge fan of \[‘*Survivor*’\] and just let it lapse. On the other hand, I knew she was incredibly critical of her own work.” Grand Central Publishing's VP and publisher, Nana K. Twumasi, says that while Butler has been increasingly rediscovered in recent years, reprinting it is "far more about wanting to have a piece of this person that we all respect and want to get her due.” The article notes that in her introduction, Collins explains that the book is a useful way to look at Butler's development as a writer; it holds clues for her thinking ahead of the novels that followed: "a reader can see the initial shapes of long connective themes and arguments that Butler develops across her works around humanity, alienness, hybridity and the potential futures that arise when we cede its imagining to Black women." I'm of two minds here. On one hand, a new edition of the novel would do what Collins says: provide a critical window into Butler's body of work to a much wider audience. On the other, Butler pretty equivocally said that she didn't like the book and asked people not to read it. She strikes me as the type of person who's well aware of the issues with the book and doesn't want it represented in her body of work. This isn't a new phenomenon: there are plenty of examples of an author's estate publishing a novel after one's death, sometimes without clear guidance or by ignoring said author's wishes. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have continued Frank Herbert's *Dune* series with numerous installments, while J.R.R. Tolkien's *Silmarillion* was left unfinished after his death, which his son Christopher completed and published in 1977\. The question of authorial intention and consent is sticky when it comes to unfinished works: should a work that wasn't finished be put before an audience? But: whether or not Butler loathed *Survivor*, I don't think there's any equivocation here: she *did* publish it, whether or not she was happy with the final product. It might have been underbaked, but she did take her advance to spend it on research for *Kindred*, and she worked through her edits with her editor and saw it to publication. Once you put a book out into the public for consumption, it's out there. You can still find copies floating around out there, provided you're willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for one, or find one in a library collection. Hell, you can [read a copy over on the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/survivor-octavia-e.-butler). While Butler wasn't proud of the book and she had plenty of pressing issues around the time she published it, she wasn't without agency here and ultimately, this is something that you can't really have both ways: taking it back when you realize you've published something that's not your best work. I think that's a useful lesson as Butler's star has risen: for all the talk about how prophetic her view of the future was, she's human like the rest of us. We can't all write bangers and bat a perfect game. Sometimes, you publish something you aren't terribly proud of. That said, let's be realistic about this. For all the "\[wanting\] to get her due": this publication feels opportunistic as hell. While it appears that Collins will use her introduction to place a lot of context around this book and where it sits alongside Butler's other novels, that's an academic exercise and Grand Central Publishing is a mass market press. People are going to buy this because they read *Parable of the Sower* and the novelty of *Survivor* being the first "new" Butler book in nearly half a century is just too enticing to pass up. ### 13 more sci-fi and fantasy books to check out in April 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2026-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-roundup-neuvel-chen-trees/ Last updated: 2026-04-25T01:03:02.000Z Before we get started, here's a quick announcement: I'll be at the [Vermont Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Expo](https://www.vtgatherings.com/vermont-sci-fi-fantasy-expo.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) this weekend! I've got two things that I'll be doing on both Saturday and Sunday: - 11:00AM, The History of Cosplay, Room B - 1:00PM, A Babylon 5 Mini-Reunion, Upstairs Room A I'm very excited about the *Babylon 5* panel: actors Bruce Boxleitner and Claudia Christian are attending, and I'll be asking them about their experiences on the show and since. I'm a [big fan of the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-antifascism-j-michael-straczynski/), so this'll be a cool chat. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, you can support it by signing up as well! Your membership will help with the next batch of work that I've got in the pipeline, nearly 30 pieces that I've got on the schedule, from more book lists to commentaries, reviews, and interviews. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) As always, you can find prior book roundup over on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag, and you can read the first list for April [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2026-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-roundup-brett-corey/). Here are 13 more science fiction and fantasy to check out this month: ### [*The Story of Birds: A New History, from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063349711?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Steven Brusette (April 28th) One of my favorite popular science authors of recent years has been Steven Brusette, author of [*The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781432869106?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062951557?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which provide a neatly accessible overview of the story of how the dinosaurs and mammals evolved and took over the world. I'd been wondering what he'd tackle next, and it's the perfect subject: birds. Over the course of my lifetime, it's become clear that birds share a link to the dinosaurs (and judging from the way that our rooster, Hermes, decided to attack my legs this morning, they're still living amongst us), and in this book, Brusette turns his attention to how the birds that surround us have evolved and changed with time: how they survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, how they've proliferated across the world, and how they've adapted and play a vital role in the world around us. ### [*The Photonic Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083796?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Chen (April 21st) In Mike Chen's latest, the crew of a starship survived a galactic civil war. Stuck together for a decade on their ship, they've just arrived home, only to find that the place they left behind isn't something they recognize. The Cluster, a coalition of peaceful planets, has been torn apart by the war. When an attack on a mining station kills thousands, Captain Demora King's efforts to keep her crew safe are out the window, and they're sent off to the front lines, where they have to figure out how to navigate the crisis. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668083796?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "Chen takes impressive care presenting nonhuman characters, showcasing their often baffled perspectives on humanity." ### [*Sanctuary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217188918?ref=andrewliptak.com)by James Cleary (April 28) The world faces some intense threats, thanks to climate change. Realizing that there would be significant disruptions, a billionaire named John Brandt set up the Sanctuary, a secure bunker buried under Nebraska, and he hopes that he and his security team can ride out the unrest in relative comfort. However, there's a group of raiders who're aware of the facility and are prepared to stop at nothing to get in to try and survive. ### [*Your Behavior Will Be Monitored*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964542?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Justin Feinstein (April 7th) A major tech company called UniView has been establishing its reputation as a trusted name in the world of artificial intelligence, and they've been readying a new product that will hopefully change the world. The company hires a copywriter who's been down on his luck and when the company's digital head of HR selects him for a job at the company, he seems like an unlikely choice. He's to train an AI bot named Quinn, which works with personal advertising, and it's Noah's job to teach the bot the finer points of advertising. When the company accelerates its plans to release Quinn, it decides to drop its safety guard rails, threatening to unleash some chaos for the company. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964542?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Steeped in satire, this chaotic corporate unraveling is made all the more zany by its epistolary construction, piecing together emails, data readouts, chats, and transcripts. This inventive structure succinctly captures the precariousness of digital-age communications while hammering out a timely warning about generative AI." ### [*Stimulus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781506753928?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Freedman, illustrated by Robert Sammelin and Stefano Realdini (April 28th) In this graphic novel, Daniel Freedman, Robert Sammelin, and Stefano Realdini bring together 12 science fiction stories, all connected by a supernatural plant known as "SeaFarer", including everything from vampires, soldiers, crystalline women, aliens, AIs, and quite a bit more. It looks like a lot of fun. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Skies of Fire and Smoke*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781966848257?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian D. Hinson (April 24th) World War I takes on a slightly different look in this alternate history: Germania fights against dragons that have ruled Europe, and pilot Lt. Johann Fischer is pressed into battle in his Fokker airplane. The dragons, allied with the Papal States are a formidable enemy, and but Fischer is fighting for his family and people. Meanwhile, a Citadel guard named Kendensei has been dispatched to Germania as a spy, infiltrating Fischer's household as a maid. At the same time, the war proves to be an opportune moment for politicking, and as the Pope works to try and convince Germania's Kaiser to back down, he faces threats from within, in the form of a rival who hopes to take the throne for himself. ### [*The Language of Liars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250405333?ref=andrewliptak.com)by S.L. Huang (April 21st) In S.L. Huang's latest novella, we're introduced to an alien called Ro, who was trained as a spy. He's tasked with making the jump into the mind of a Star Eater, and he's been training for his whole life to understand the species, which are vital for space travel. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250405333?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Huang manages to make completely alien ways of understanding and complex ideas about language, culture, and hegemony easy to follow while providing a fascinating linguistic puzzle that will entice hard sci-fi fans and literary scholars alike." ### [*A River From the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803369525?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang (April 28th) Ai Jiang brings out a followup to last year's [*A Palace Near the Wind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803369389?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* in which Liu Lengeng is the oldest princess of the Feng royalty, and is slated to be the next bride to the human king. Along with her sisters, she's from the Palace and reaches Gear, where she encounters rebels, and learns more about the experiments Zinc has inflicted upon her people. ### [*When the Trees Came Back: The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/when-the-trees-came-back-the-great-battle-to-save-vermont-s-forests/M7R6EFIZCHTJCVA5BB3KDC7C?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robert A. Mello (April 21st) This is a book that I've been deeply involved with, but were I not a VHS employee, I'd be still pushing this as much as possible. While Vermont is covered with rich forests, this wasn't always the case: when European settlers arrived in the 1700s, they quickly began cutting the region's ancient forests down for crops, livestock, and industry, eventually reaching upwards of 75% of the land deforested. In his new book, Mello takes a look at the actions that Vermonters took to restore those forests: it was the work of regular citizens, reformers, politicians, and environmentalists, who fought to reforest the state's hillsides, and reverse deforestation that took place. I've read most of it through my duties here, but I've been sitting down to read it through, and I'm really loving it. [Interview: Robert Mello, author of When the Trees Came BackAn interview with Robert A. Mello, author of When the Trees Came Back![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2026/04/IMG_4796.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-when-the-trees-came-back-robert-mello-interview/) ### [*Rabbit Test and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964511?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Samantha Mills (April 21st) Samantha Mills earned a good amount of acclaim for her story "[Rabbit Test](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" back in 2023, when it earned the the Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. (She's [since disavowed](https://samtasticbooks.com/2024/02/17/rabbit-test-unwins-the-hugo/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the Hugo). After publishing her debut novel, *The Wings Upon Her Back*, in 2024, she's back with a collection of her short stories. In addition to the title story, it's got stories about witches, floating libraries, musicians, aliens, and quite a few more, as well as an introduction by author Meg Elison. Gary K. Wolfe reviewed the book for *Locus Magazine*, [saying](https://locusmag.com/review/rabbit-test-and-other-stories-by-samantha-mills-review-by-gary-k-wolfe/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "I’m not sure that *Rabbit Test and Other Stories*, Mills’s first collection, offers any easy answers, but then the whole notion of easy answers consistently comes under question in her stories." ### [*The Many*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837866892?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sylvain Neuvel (April 21st) In Sylvain Neuvel's latest, an advertising executive named Carole Veilleux causes a stir in her Michigan city when she loses her temper and bites Booker on the arm. It's only after that that things get strange: they find their minds are beginning to merge, and soon, others are beginning to find their way into the collective as well, including Carole's husband and a local doctor. As they become one, they find that it's the beginning of something very, very strange as the entire world begins to be overtaken. *Kirkus Reviews* says [that](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sylvain-neuvel/the-many/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the speculation surrounding the planet’s organisms (humans, animals, plants, etc.) being part of a massive hive mind is intriguing, particularly as it deals with issues like racism, sexism, and systemic discrimination." ### [*The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/illuminated-man-9781399417495/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan (April 23rd) When Christopher Priest died in 2024, he left behind one unfinished project: a biography of acclaimed author J.G. Ballard, known for books like *High-Rise* and *The Drowned World*, and *Empire of the Sun*. Priest was heavily influenced by Ballard's work, and he began writing about his life and how he transcended genre and should be considered one of the 20th century's best writers. After his death, his wife and fellow author Nina Allen took over to complete the project. *The Guardian* [notes that](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/20/the-illuminated-man-by-christopher-priest-and-nina-allan-review-an-unconventional-portrait-of-jg-ballard?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Priest was well equipped to assess Ballard’s oeuvre. He advances some interesting ideas" and that "his is a reliable and authoritative guide to Ballard’s work, in so far as it goes." ### [*On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517917333?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew I Thompson (April 14th) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744324396?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964511?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083796?ref=andrewliptak.com) This looks like a particularly interesting read: Matthew I. Thompson takes a look at the science fiction films of the 1970s, and how the environmental movement found its way into those stories, from concerns about overcrowding playing big role in films like *Soylent Green* to the destruction of the world's biosphere in *Silent Running*. --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments what you have on your TBR and what you're looking forward to on this list! ### The Expanse is getting another batch of deluxe editions URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-james-sa-corey-deluxe-editions-cibola-nemesis-babylon-books/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T13:00:49.000Z Back in 2021, Orbit decided to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first installment of James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, *Leviathan Wakes*, with a [deluxe edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316333429?ref=andrewliptak.com), following up a couple of years later with special editions of the next two installments, [*Caliban's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Abaddon's Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com). Now, the next three installments of the series are getting the glow up treatment: the publisher [announced](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/orbit-books/cover-launch-cibola-burn-nemesis-games-and-babylons-ashes/?lens=orbit&ref=andrewliptak.com) that [*Cibola Burn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316610094?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Nemesis Games*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316610100?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Babylon's Ashes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316610131?ref=andrewliptak.com)will get re-releases with new covers in December. Each will retail for $40, and come with a new, minimalist cover design by Lauren Panepinto, endpaper maps by Jay Clark, sprayed edges, and reversable dust jackets featuring the original Daniel Dociu artwork sans text on the interior. Like the first three, they each retain the same color scheme. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image-5.png) Image: Andrew Liptak I picked up all three deluxe editions when they came out to get a full complement of hardcovers for the series. I think they look really nice: Orbit has clearly been taking cues from the types things that BookTok has made popular: fans will pay a bit more for a snazzy edition, and if you can spray the edges and slap a new cover on, you'll get a bit more per copy. (The regular hardcover edition retails for $32, these ones go for $40.) [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/09/IMG_9655.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) Like a bunch of the other releases we've seen of big SF/F books, what you're getting is essentially just the bells and whistles: when Penguin Random House released a [special edition of Pierce Brown's *Red Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871522?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [announced a special edition of Andy Weir's *The Martian*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/), I noted that these aren't books that are being redesigned from the ground up like say, a book from Subterranean Press or The Folio Society: you're getting the same type, layout, paper, etc. That said, *The Expanse* has gotten this sort of treatment: Subterranean Press released its editions of the series over the years, and good luck adding any of them to your collection: individual copies of the series will run you in the hundreds if you can find them. These deluxe editions are the most readily-available editions for someone who just wants something that stands out a little for their shelves. I might spring for these when they come out. I'm loathe to part with my original paperbacks of the first three novels because of nostalgia and sentimental value, but I'm not quite as attached to regular editions that came later in the series, and they might make for a good addition to the shelves. ### Forest coverage URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/when-the-trees-came-back-vermont-history-forestry-conservation-book-cover/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T13:00:17.000Z Earlier this week, we at the Vermont Historical Society published our latest book: [*When the Trees Came Back*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/when-the-trees-came-back-the-great-battle-to-save-vermont-s-forests/M7R6EFIZCHTJCVA5BB3KDC7C?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert A. Mello, a history of deforestation in Vermont, which I've been really excited for. Of all the books that we've published, this is the one that I like the most, and I think it's a really important story that we're telling. Since I arrived at VHS, I've been heavily involved in the selling and marketing process, and looking back at that process has become something of a series here: I've written a handful of posts that look back on the work that goes into designing each of the covers, and how it's changed from book to book. 🌳 Prior covers: **\-* [**Ira Allen: A Biography* by J. Kevin Graffagnino](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-biography-publishing-cover/) **\-* [**Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19* in Vermont by Garrett M. Graff](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-historical-society-covid-19-garrett-graff-book-cover/) **\-* [**Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont* by Jeffrey L. Amestoy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-cover-design-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-vermont-history/) --- Last summer, one of our board members on the publications committee let me know that they were considering a new book from one of the authors who had written for us before: Robert Mello, a retired Superior Court judge. His prior book was [*Moses Robinson and the Founding of Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/moses-robinson-and-the-founding-of-vermont/554?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category%5Fid=3&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* an in-depth biography of one of Vermont's formative founding fathers, and before that, he published [*Last Stand of the Red Spruce*](https://islandpress.org/books/last-stand-red-spruce?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* He also authored a paper for VHS's academic journal, *Vermont History*: [Summit Preserve: The University of Vermont’s Unprecedented 1859 Purchase of the Summit of Mount Mansfield](https://vermonthistory.org/journal/91/VH%5F91%5F02%5FSummitPreserve.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com). Our board member noted that the book was about the history of deforestation in Vermont, and that the title was tentatively *When the Trees Came Back.* I was excited about this: I've written a lot about environmentalism and the fragile nature of our world's ecosystem before, and this was a period of history that I was particularly interested in: how Vermont's forests were almost completely cut down, a far cry from the forests that now cover the hills and mountains now. With that bit of information to go on, I had one idea that came to mind right away: an overhead shot of a forest that's been restored. I found [a pair](https://unsplash.com/photos/green-trees-on-green-grass-field-during-daytime-I3jSS2YfmcU?ref=andrewliptak.com) [of images](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-green-and-white-landscape-C8wacmYrUbQ?ref=andrewliptak.com) from [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and put together a couple of covers with some of the same design language that I'd used for concepts in the last couple of covers: big centered title. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--1--1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--2--2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover-1.png) The results were... fine? It would work for a more modern, popular science book and this is about Vermont's history. This needed something that telegraphed history a bit more, and it would be good to find an image of Vermont's deforested hills rather. The images that I had quickly grabbed images probably aren't of Vermont in any case: if we had gone down that route, we would have sourced an image of our own. I turned my attention to *Winters' Time* for the time being, but when I learned that we were moving forward with this book later in the fall of 2025, I went back and started playing around with another couple of ideas. After doing some searching in our archives, I came across one fascinating and horrifying image: a log drive in Sharon that was taken sometime in the early 20th century. It featured a river full to the banks with felled logs, and I realized that this was a good candidate. Better yet: it was an image in our collection. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Log-river-drive-at-Sharon.jpg) Log drive in Sharon, Vermont, early 1900s. Image: Vermont Historical Society I tossed the image into the mix, and changed up the font a bit. Because this was a longer title than *Winters' Time* – and because I wanted to change things up a bit from what we did with *Life Became Very Blurry*, I ended up changing the position of the title into some different variations. Nothing really worked until I adjusted the title with everything off to the right side of the cover. That clicked: with the title, subtitle, and author all along the right, it allowed me to really show off the image, and it felt *historical* in a way that I can't quite put my finger on: it reminded me a bit of some of the covers of books that my parents had that I'd look at while growing up. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Trees-prototype-cover--1-.png) We made some further adjustments along the way. moved the image over so that the people were in the center (which helped show the scale of the image), gave the title a little bit of a shadow and after some discussion, we updated the subtitle to "*The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests*", which had been the manuscript's working title. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/09/Trees-prototype-cover--4-.png) From there, it didn't really change too much! Bob suggested that we throw some color into the title, and after a couple of attempts, we realized that the only color that really worked with this particular image was a golden yellow. From there, we reached out to a handful of Vermonters who're currently in the environmental/conservation/forestry scene, and activist Bill McKibben provided us with a really great one: One of the few hopeful stories on a planet that's turned mostly brown." Ethan Tapper (author of *How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World* – [which I'm a big fan of](https://www.andrewliptak.com/forests-trees-nature-writing-christopher-brown-ethan-tapper-book-review/)) and Michael Snyder, (the former commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, and author of *Wood Whys: An Exploration of Forests and Forestry*) also provided some excellent quotes, which made it onto the back cover. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/When-the-Trees-Came-Back-Cover.jpg) Of all the covers that I've worked on, this is the one that's come together the quickest. Some of these, like *Winters' Time* were a pretty long process as we worked to narrow in on the right look and feel, but I think we nailed the right tone and appearance for this one early on. Bob was a fan of it from the start, saying that the image was a striking one, and the rest of the staff did as well. Once the cover was in place, we did the usual marketing stuff, putting together some graphics for our website and catalog, and let the usual folks in the media and bookstores know about it. What's different about this book is that its subject lent itself to quite a few more other people that we could tell about it: not only are there a lot of environmental and conservation-minded people here in Vermont, but there are a whole bunch of organizations who were very interested in it when we let them know about it. Hopefully, curious readers will find it just as compelling, and learn something about the state in which we live. [*When the Trees Came Back: The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/when-the-trees-came-back-the-great-battle-to-save-vermont-s-forests/M7R6EFIZCHTJCVA5BB3KDC7C?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Mello is now available from VHS. If you like and appreciate the work that we do, you can sign up as a member of VHS [here](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 Hugo Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-finalists-2026-science-fiction-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2026-04-23T14:57:39.000Z Earlier this week, the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention (LAcon V) announced the finalists for this year's Hugo Awards! These awards are held up as the pinnacle of achievement within SF/F circles, and are a good representation for what the genre community is enjoying. My initial impression is that it's an interesting list: there's the usual handful of books that I enjoyed that didn't make the cut, but the ones that have made it on there are ones that I've heard lots of good things about – particularly Antonia Hodgson's *The Raven Scholar* and Emily Tesh's *The Incandescent.* I'm also currently reading Robert Jackson Bennett's *The Tainted Cup* (which earned last year's Best Novel), and if that's anything like this one, I think it'll be a strong contender. Here are the nominees. I've added links to reviews or related articles that I've published for additional context. ### Best Novel - *A Drop of Corruption* by Robert Jackson Bennett - *Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/)) - *Shroud* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/)) - *The Incandescent* by Emily Tesh - *The Raven Scholar* by Antonia Hodgson ### Best Novella - *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/)) - *Cinder House* by Freya Marske - *Murder by Memory* by Olivia Waite - *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar - *The Summer War* by Naomi Novik - *What Stalks the Deep* by T. Kingfisher ### Best Novelette - “[Kaiju Agonistes](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/kaiju-agonistes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Scott Lynch (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 62) - “[Never Eaten Vegetables](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pak%5F01%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by H.H. Pak (*Clarkesworld*, Issue 220) - “[Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy](https://reactormag.com/rapport-martha-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Martha Wells (*Reactor*, July 10, 2025) - “[The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For](https://reactormag.com/the-girl-that-my-mother-is-leaving-me-for-cameron-reed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Cameron Reed (*Reactor*, April 2, 2025) - “[The Millay Illusion](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 67) - “[When He Calls Your Name](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-he-calls-your-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Catherynne M. Valente (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 65) ### Best Short Story - “[10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/10-visions-of-the-future-or-self-care-for-the-end-of-days/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Samantha Mills (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 63) - “[In My Country](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F04%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld*, Issue 223) - “[Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-123b-laser-eyes-aint-everything-by-effie-seiberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Effie Seiberg (*Diabolical Plots*, May 16, 2025) - “[Missing Helen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F07%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Tia Tashiro (*Clarkesworld*, Issue 226) - “[Six People to Revise You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-people-to-revise-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by J.R. Dawson (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 62) - “[Wire Mother](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F10%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld*, Issue 229) ### Best Series - *Emily Wilde* by Heather Fawcett - *October Daye* by Seanan McGuire - *Old Man’s War* by John Scalzi ([Feature](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/)) - *The Chronicles of Osreth* by Katherine Addison - *The Craft Wars* by Max Gladstone - *White Space* by Elizabeth Bear ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon*, written by Kelly Thompson, art by Hayden Sherman and Mattia de Iulis, coloring by Jordie Bellaire, lettering by Becca Carey - [*A Girl and Her Fed*](http://www.agirlandherfed.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), written by KB Spangler, art by Ale Presser - *A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel*, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted and art by Fred Fordham - *The Invisible Parade* by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio - *The Power Fantasy Volume 1*: The Superpowers, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard, lettering by Clayton Cowles - *The Space Cat*, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford ### Best Related Work - *Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction* by Paul Kincaid - *Inventing the Renaissance* by Ada Palmer - *Last War in Albion*: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)” by Elizabeth Sandifer - *Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butle*r by Susana M. Morris ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/positive-obsession-octavia-butler-biography-book-review/)) - “[Ragnarök vs the Long Night](https://www.historyofwesteros.com/ragnarok-vs-the-long-night/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ashaya and Aziz - [*The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom*](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tsn95-1Wq24JMPEOyUf%5FL87FTXunOarXv5QzrOewHNA/edit?ref=andrewliptak.com), maintained by Renay ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Andor (Season 2)*, written by Tom Bissell, Dan Gilroy, Tony Gilroy, and Beau Willimon, directed by Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz, Alonso Ruizpalacios, - *Frankenstein*, screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, directed by Guillermo del Toro - *KPop Demon Hunters*, screenplay by Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans - *Mickey 17*, screenplay by Bong Joon Ho, directed by Bong Joon Ho - *Sinners*, screenplay by Ryan Coogler, directed by Ryan Coogler - *Superman*, screenplay by James Gunn, directed by James Gunn ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Doctor Who*: “The Story & the Engine”, written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson - *Murderbot*: “All Systems Red”, written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells - *Murderbot*: “The Perimeter”, written Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells - *Pluribus*: “We Is Us”, written and directed by Vince Gilligan, directed by Vince Gilligan - *Severance*: “Cold Harbor”, written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller - *The Wheel of Time*: “The Road to the Spear”, written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper, based on the book The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan ### Best Game or Interactive Work - *Blue Prince*, developed by Dogubomb, published by Raw Fury - *Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector*, developed by Jump Over the Age, published by Fellow Traveller - *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33*, developed by Sandfall Interactive, published by Kepler Interactive - *Dispatch*, developed and published AdHoc Studio - *Hades II*, developed and published by Supergiant Games - *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, developed and published by Team Cherry ### Best Editor Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - Jennifer Brozek - Neil Clarke - Lee Harris - Michael Damian Thomas - Sheila Williams ### Best Editor Long Form - Carl Engle-Laird - Jaymee Goh - Lee Harris - Jenni Hill - Joe Monti - Diana M. Pho ### Best Professional Artist - Lulu Chen - Kelly Chong - Dave Kellett - Tran Nguyen - John Picacio - Tom Roberts ### Best Semiprozine - [*Escape Pod*](https://escapepod.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes, assistant editors Kevin Wabaunsee and Phoebe Barton, hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart, producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht, and the entire Escape Pod team - [*khōréō magazine*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by team khōréō (publisher Aleksandra Hill; editor-in-chief Zhui Ning Chang; editors Kanika Agrawal, Isabella Kestermann, Danai Christopoulou; audio Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Grayson Norman, Aaron Kling, E.B.; marketing M.L. Krishnan, Ashley Thompson; art Ambi Sun; copyeditors Jeané Ridges, Eleanor Glewwe, Derek Yen, Ariya Bandy; proofreader Cyrus Chin; first readers Adialyz Del Valle Berríos, Sanjna Bhartiya, Kelsey Costa, Merulai Femi, A.R. Frederiksen, Yuvashri Harish, Zohar Jacobs, Lynn D. Jung, Phoebe Low, Katie McIvor, Adil Mian, Katarzyna Nowacka, A.W. Prihandita, Helena Ramsaroop, Jin Hui Saw, Aditya Sundararajan, Sophia Uy, Madeleine Vigneron, Aaron Voigt, K.S. Walker, Akilah White, MJ Woods, Kelsea Yu, Lilia Zhang, Tina Zhu) - [*On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic*](https://onspec.ca/?ref=andrewliptak.com), published by the Copper Pig Writers’ Society; managing editor/art director Diane L. Walton; poetry editors Colleen Anderson and Bob Stallworthy; fiction editors Barb Galler-Smith, Ann Marston, Virginia O’Dine, Constantine Kaoukakis, Susan MacGregor, Alyssa Kulchisky, Amanda Wells, Ashley Alton, Lorina Stephens, Lareina Abbott, Matthew Stobie Jackman, Cheryl Merkel, Dan Gyoba, Ethan Zou, Jade Mah-Vierling, Jessica Zdril, Kathleen Phul, Krystle McGrath, Thomas Schwarz, and William Thompson; interviewers Roberta Laurie and Cat McDonald; proofreaders Ashlin McCartney, Isaac Calon, and Mya Colwell - [*Strange Horizons*](https://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective - [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher Sean Markey, editor in chief E. Catherine Tobler, poetry editor Nicasio Andres Reed, nonfiction editor David Gilmore, necromancer Amanda Downum, art director Cory Skerry, copy editors Laura Blackwell and Annika Barranti Klein, proofreader Josephine Stewart, designer Christine M. Scott, and social media skeleton Felicia Martínez - [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher and editor-in-chief: Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; poetry editor Betsy Aoki, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky ### Best Fanzine - [*Ancillary Review of Books*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Jake Casella Brookins, Misha Grifka Wander, Bianca Skrinyár, Zachary Gillan, Cynthia Zhang, Lyz Bush-Peel - [*An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog*](https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk - [*Galactic Journey*](https://galacticjourney.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), founder Gideon Marcus, editor Janice L. Newman, staff David Levinson, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Tam Phan, Andi Dukleth - [*Intergalactic Mixtape*](https://buttondown.com/intergalacticmixtape?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Renay - [*Journey Planet*](https://www.journeyplanet.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Allison Hartman Adams, Jean Martin, Steven H Silver, Christopher J. Garcia, James Bacon - [*nerds of a feather, flock together*](http://www.nerds-feather.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla ### Best Fancast - [*A Meal of Thorns*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/amealofthorns/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jake Casella Brookins - [*Eating the Fantastic*](https://www.scottedelman.com/tag/eating-the-fantastic/?ref=andrewliptak.com), hosted by Scott Edelman - [*Hugo, Girl!*](https://www.hugogirlpodcast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson - [*Octothorpe*](https://octothorpe.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty - [*The Coode Street Podcast*](https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe - [*Worldbuilding for Masochists*](https://worldbuildingformasochists.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris, and Natania Barron ### Best Fan Writer - Jay Brantner for “Tar Vol” - Alex Brown - James Davis Nicoll - Roseanna Pendlebury - Jason Sanford - Örjan Westin ### Best Fan Artist - Terri Ash - Geneva Bowers - Sara Felix - Richard Man - España Sheriff - Yuumei ### Best Poem - “[Care for Lightning](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/care-for-lightning/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mari Ness (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 62) - “[Hex Supply Customer Support Log](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/hex-supply-customer-support-log/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elis Montgomery (*Strange Horizons*, Issue 25 August 2025) - “[How to Become a Sea Witch](https://theorangebee.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-sea-witch)” by Theodora Goss (*The Orange & Bee*, Issue 5) - “Landing: Seattle” by Brandon O’Brien (Seattle Worldcon 2025 Opening Ceremony) - “[The Mourning Robot](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mourning-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 66) - “[The World to Come](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-world-to-come/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Hudak (*Strange Horizons*, Issue 22 December 2025) ### Lodestar Award for Best YA Book - *Among Ghosts* by Rachel Hartman - *Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe* by C.B. Lee - *Holy Terrors* by Margaret Owen - *Oathbound* by Tracy Deonn - *Sunrise on the Reaping* by Suzanne Collins - They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran ### *Astounding* Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines) - Sophie Burnham (2nd year of eligibility) - Kamilah Cole (2nd year of eligibility) - Antonia Hodgson (1st year of eligibility) - Molly O’Neill (1st year of eligibility) - H.H. Pak (2nd year of eligibility) - Jared Pechaček (2nd year of eligibility) ### Disqualifications and Withdrawals The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but were found to be ineligible: **Best Series:** - *Lady Astronaut*, by Mary Robinette Kowal (fewer than 240,000 new words since last appearance on the ballot) - *The Singing Hills Cycle*, by Nghi Vo (fewer than 240,000 words in total) **Astounding Award:** - Silvia Park (had qualifying publication prior to 2024) - Barbara Truelove (had qualifying publication prior to 2024) The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but declined nominations: - Best Editor, Long Form: Lindsey Hall - Best Semiprozine: Beneath Ceaseless Skies The following nominee received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but was withdrawn by the showrunners to abide by the limitation on number of episodes of the same show allowed in the category. - Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: *Murderbot*: “Free Commerce” --- The awards will be presented at this year’s [LAcon V](https://www.lacon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Anaheim, California, USA, August 30, 2026 What catches your eye and what are you rooting for? ### Bringing back the trees URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-when-the-trees-came-back-robert-mello-interview/ Last updated: 2026-04-20T16:00:53.000Z Part of my work at the Vermont Historical Society involves our publications: I run the bookstore and promote our books to readers and stores. This month, we're publishing a book that I've been excited about for months. It's called [*When the Trees Came Back: The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/when-the-trees-came-back-the-great-battle-to-save-vermont-s-forests/M7R6EFIZCHTJCVA5BB3KDC7C?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), by Robert A. Mello. The name "Vermont" means "Green Mountains" and if you've heard anything about it, it's likely that it's a beautiful place, with lots of forests covering the mountains and hills. It's true – we're home to some incredible forests, but a little over a century ago, the state was almost completely deforested, at great ecological cost. When European settlers arrived, they began to cut down the state's ancient forests were cut down for everything from timber to potash, and to make way for herds of sheep, cows, and other livestock. Mello's book is about the efforts that citizens, lawmakers, landowners, and conservationists took to transform our severely-denuded hillsides and bring the trees back. It's a tremendous history, one that I'm personally inclined toward. The book is coming out on Tuesday (April 21st) and when I had him stop by to sign preorders, we sat down to talk about his research and how he came to write this particular story. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/IMG_9686.jpeg) Bob Mello. Image: Andrew Liptak *This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.* ### To start: can you tell me what got you interested in forestry and how this book came about? So I've been interested in forests and forest protection for a very long time. I've loved hiking since I was a kid, and although my career has been in the law – I was a trial lawyer for 38 years and a judge for 12 more – I've always been concerned about our forests. In 1987, almost 40 years ago, I wrote my first book, *Last Stand of the Red Spruce*, and it was about why Red Spruce trees were dying in large numbers on Camel's Hump, my favorite mountain. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) paid to publish the book. They flew me down to Washington to give a talk in the Mansfield room of the US Senate, and they used that book, as part of their big push that year to persuade Congress to amend the Clean Air Act, to regulate acid rain. And they were successful: Congress amended the Clean Air Act, the EPA issued regulations to address acid rain. Acid rain levels in the northeast dropped dramatically and the trees recovered. So I've been interested and concerned about forests forever, but my job as a judge was very demanding. This book, *When the Trees Came Back*, has been percolating for a long time, but I really didn't have the time to sit down and actually begin to write it until I retired three years ago. ### How did you decide to write about this specific segment of history? Well, the history of the forest itself, you can't understand the history of the forest, unless you understand what happened to it, and what happened to it was the state was 75% deforested over a period of time, and fortunately today, thanks to the efforts of wildlife, and forest reformers, the opposite is the case: we are now 75% forested and the forests are doing much better than they were 100 years ago. So I think it's an important story, and it's never been told, and I figure that I was probably one of the people in the best positions to tell the story. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image-4.png) Image: Vermont Historical Society ### What did you do to research this book? So I went to the libraries that have, the information that might be relevant, starting with the Vermont Historical Society, the University of Vermont's Special Collections, the Middlebury College Special Collections, and the Bennington Museum, has some material as well. I read everything I could get my hands on. I also interviewed people knowledgeable about Vermont's forests, particularly today's condition, including the state forester, and the former commissioner of Forest Parks and Recreation and others. ### This wasn't a case of just letting the trees grow back, right? No, it was, a lot of civic work that went into this. There was a period of 35 years when the first generation of forest reformers in Vermont were battling with the paper monopolies and the timber barons, to try to get control over the forests, and they had successes, they had failures, but there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from what they did, and over the past hundred years, reformers have followed their lead and taken heed from the lessons they taught us. It's because of those efforts that our forests have done so well. They would not be in the great shape they're in today, comparatively, if it hadn't been for the forest reformers. ### There's been a concerted effort in the last couple of decades years for preserving forests, where landowners are putting their forests into the public's hands or having the state take stewardship of it. What are your thoughts there? That's a very important part of why the forests are doing so much better today. Government ownership of forests is important and government ownership of our most sensitive forests is critically important. By most sensitive, I mean, ecologically important and significant. In addition, nature conservancies are buying conservation trusts on hundreds of thousands of acres of forests. That's another way to preserve them in their natural state. But 80% of our forests in Vermont are owned privately by people like you and me, you know, relatively small patches of 30, 50, 100 acres. Vermont has created this program, which we call the [Current Use Program](https://tax.vermont.gov/property/current-use?ref=andrewliptak.com), under which homeowners get a very substantial tax break if they agree to manage their woodlands sustainably. Two million acres are enrolled in that program, being conserved and following sustainable lumbering practices. So all these things were part of the lessons we've learned from the efforts of our forest conservationists, going back 135 years. [Speaking for the treesTwo books examine our place — and responsibility in a changing world![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2025/08/IMG_7690.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/forests-trees-nature-writing-christopher-brown-ethan-tapper-book-review/) ### What do you hope readers will take away from this book? I think it's important to understand that if left unregulated and uncontrolled, loggers will help themselves to the forests and put short term profits ahead of the long term interests and condition of the forest. That happened in Vermont, and the efforts to reform the problem were resisted – powerful forces resisted it. And yet, a handful of our earliest reformers made great breakthroughs, established the laws that are still in force today, which have helped us to restore the forests. It has taken a tremendous effort to bring our forest back to where they are today, much better condition than they were 100 years ago. But the risk of backsliding is ever present. We can't let that happen. The institutions that we've put in place, we have to support them. We have to provide them with the funding they need to do the job to continue protecting in the future, because the forests are still facing serious headwinds that we need to help them with. ### You noted you own a bit of forested land – can you tell me about it? I don't have a large wood lot, but I have a small forest. It's only about five acres, and we garden another five acres. We're mostly gardeners. ### What's the makeup of it, tree-wise? Hardwood mostly. We have maple, and we used to have butternut, but our ancient butternut died from [butternut canker disease](https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/butternut-canker/?ref=andrewliptak.com). We have oaks, we have some spruce and pine where we live. ### Do have a favorite tree? Yes: Red spruce. ### Why is that? My first book was about the Red Spruce. It's an amazing conifer. It lives at the highest elevations, from the Smokies all the way up into Canada, all along the Appalachians. That's the only place where it lives on Earth. It lives at the highest elevations, where only very few other trees can survive, where the soils are rocky and infertile. The growing season is short, the climate is really hard, and these trees are amazingly hardy. ### Power imbalance URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-expanse-captives-war-faith-of-beasts-scifi-book-interview/ Last updated: 2026-04-22T14:30:20.000Z When James S.A. Corey finished their long-running space opera series *The Expanse*, they had another project lined up: *The Captives War*, a new space opera set in a far-flung corner of the galaxy that finds humanity quickly taken over, subjugated, and integrated into a brutal empire. In [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525596?ref=andrewliptak.com), we're introduced to Dafyd Alkhor, a research assistant who finds himself playing an integral role in ensuring humanity's survival, and who's forced to make some incredibly difficult decisions to do so. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/08/IMG_9229.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) The next book in the series is [*The Faith of Beasts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com), which picks up the story and follows the remnants of humanity now that they're part of the Carryx's empire. They have to continue to prove useful to their conquerors, and Dafyd finds himself caught between the two forces: his overseers, and the people he's trying to protect. He's aided by one of the Carryx's enemies – The Swarm, which is trying to find a way to take down the Carryx from within. I've been reading and enjoying it, and had the chance to chat with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck about the series, what to expect, and a couple of other things. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.* ### Can you talk to me a little bit about what the original kernel of an idea was for *The Captive Wars*, and how you built from that idea to the books that we have now? Ty Franck: Well, we were wrapping up *The Expanse* and Daniel kept saying "what do we want to do next?" I had pitched him an idea a couple of years before that of doing the, the biblical book of Daniel as a sci-fi story, the guy who basically gets kidnapped by a gigantic empire and carried off to their capital city and forced to become a bureaucrat there. I always found that a really interesting idea that this empire that annihilated your culture and your home carries you off and says "oh, by the way, you work for us now. We're putting you in the bureaucracy. Do a good job or we'll kill you and your friends." That was pretty unique to Babylon at the time that they did that, that forced integration of cultures through this program. And, I always was interested in it as a sort of a sci-fi idea. Daniel: And then once you have that kind of base idea, a whole bunch of other stuff just kind of stuck to it. So, Ty was talking to someone who we saw a presentation by who had done this program on soft robots – like cloth robots with contractile fibers in them that could become their own shape depending on what they needed to be. And that turned into a bunch of the stuff in [*Livesuit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316575348?ref=andrewliptak.com). There was a Radio Lab episode that I listened to years ago and kind of half forgot that I wound up unconsciously lifting a bunch of the philosophy and questions of anthropomorphizing aliens and anthropomorphizing other animals and that wound up in there. So there's a – Ty's idea was absolutely the base of the whole thing, but then a whole bunch of other things sort of stuck to it like Christmas ornaments. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image-3.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### One of the things that I was struck the most while reading *The Mercy of Gods* was – I'm sorry, I'm going to try not to do too many *Expanse* comparisons – but you set *The Expanse* in an advanced but fairly recognizable world. Here, you've got a much bigger, more complicated world. Was that a challenging thing or was that a freeing for you? Daniel: Well, *The Expanse* was really intended to be in conversation with a bunch of the stuff we were reading when we were growing up, like, Larry Niven, and \[Alfred\] Bester, and \[Robert\] Heinlein books. One of the things that was important to us kind of from a career management thing was not to – to see how much latitude we have as James S.A. Corey for people to follow. So the idea was to to still do space opera, but to, instead of being in conversation with Larry Niven, to be in conversation with Frank Herbert; instead of being in conversation with *The Stars My Destination*, rub up against *The Left Hand of Darkness* and just explore those different parts of the genre. [When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion?Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s alien invasion novel is a time capsule from the Cold War, and a reminder that the threat of nuclear annihilation isn’t ancient history![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2026/02/Footfall.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/footfall-larry-niven-jerry-pournelle-alien-invasion-sci-fi-book-review/) ### It's funny that you you mention Larry Niven – I picked up [*Footfall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345323446?ref=andrewliptak.com)by him and Jerry Pournelle earlier this spring, and it felt a bit like *The Mercy of Gods* in some ways – you've got the alien invasion, but also some of the digging into the details of the Fithp's civilization and whatnot. They felt a bit congruent. Daniel: *The Expanse* was more like *The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton* stuff, for me anyway, I mean, that's, the detective vibe, right? Ty: I mean, any alien invasion story in prose is gonna kind of feel like every other alien invasion story in prose. I don't know that we were aping *Footfall*, at least consciously in any way. It's been a long time since I've read that book. I just remember that the aliens were like elephants, right? ### Yes! It's a weird book. Ty: Yeah. But also now that I'm remembering it, *Footfall* does the thing that we were specifically responding to and sort of avoiding doing in *The Captive's War*. *Footfall* does the thing where the scrappy humans find a way to fight back with guns. ### Yeah. Ty: Which is exactly the trope we were trying to avoid. When the superpowered aliens show up and conquer you, you're not going to beat them with F-18s. The point of the whole thing is – and this is true for the Book of Daniel too. The Israelites of the time, at least as described in the biblical book of Daniel, were nowhere *near* the power of Babylon. Babylon wiped them out in without even really thinking about it. Babylon was the most powerful empire in the world. They had enormous technological advantages that the largely agrarian Israelites just couldn't match. So we really wanted to have that, where the humans – while our instincts might be to fight back to grab guns and knives and go after the aliens that way, make it very clear that that is instantly a failing strategy, whereas in *Footfall*, they build the big spaceship and they take off and go attack the alien spaceship and somehow win. We're trying very hard not to do that. ### Space opera and science fiction has a lot to say about that sort of imbalance of power – looking at the impact of empire and how characters contend with this sort of unstoppable force that they're facing. How have you guys been thinking about this? Daniel: I think it's in the water right now. I think it's – Ty always talks about the idea that any book is about the time in which it is written. That's true for these too. I don't think you can be part of our culture right now and not be thinking about things like how do you survive when you're at the whim of a huge bureaucracy that you don't have a voice in. Ty: I mean, it's also a little Kafka, right? The giant bureaucracy is operating by rules you don't understand but you're expected to abide by. Your life is constantly at threat by this gigantic machine that is incomprehensible to you. That's also part of it and I think people feel like that, because our society is so large, so complex, and so tied to various technologies that we – most people don't understand those technologies. We use them every day, but we don't understand them. It does start to feel like you're inside a giant machine that you barely comprehend, but you're expected to live by a bunch of rules that the machine imposes upon you. Which I, which I think is what Daniel was kind of talking about. Daniel: That's well said. ### I'm reading a book about the history of UFO culture and the general progression of how it evolved. One of the most interesting things is about it is how in the past decades, gotten better around wrapping our brains around how small we are and what our existence might look like should we encounter other civilizations. Daniel: There's also a lot of that experience locally. I mean, I'm in New Mexico, living on traditional Pueblo land. My city was founded by Spanish conquistadors. Where the new wave or new empire comes in and just wrecks your shit, that's been going on for a long time *here,* without the need for the space opera metaphor. It works really *well* in the space opera metaphor. Lots of people have have engaged with this one way and another, but it's speaking to a scenario that doesn't actually require any of that. Now, how we play it out involves a bunch of science stuff because it's a field we like playing in; the astrobiology, the xenobiology, the evolutionary speculation, that's cool. But the power imbalance thing at the heart of it, that's a human experience. Ty: Yeah, absolutely right. And if you, if you study history (which is kind of my thing), the imbalance that comes from even relatively minor technological advances is enormous. But if you think about it from an alien perspective, like the level of imbalance that could exist – when a guy had a spear and the other guy had a gun, the guy with the gun had an enormous advantage, but the guy with the spear could still come stab you. So it wasn't an impossible-to-overcome advantage. Then you advance up to the modern age. If you're on the ground with a spear and the other guy has a fighter plane, you are literally incapable of harming that guy. He just wins, right? And then you advance again, say you're down on the ground with a spear and the other guy has a fleet of spaceships, the level of power imbalance is something that we humans have never really had to overcome. It's something can only imagine, but it is many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than the guy who has the gun and the other guy has the spear. That's part of what we're talking about too: what do you when when you have a spear and the other guy has world-ending energetic forces that are incomprehensible to you? Daniel: It's not really an accident that we are leaning back toward titles that talk about gods and faith and almost religious level scales of disparity. If you're facing some kind of seraphim, yeah, you're outclassed, there's nothing you can do. Ty: Yeah, at the point where you're facing literal gods, at least in mythological terms, the only thing you could do is propitiation, right? The only thing you could do was appease them in some way. So we're trying to put our characters in the position where the antagonists so outclass them in power that the natural inclination is "let's find a way to appease them, so they don't hurt us." ### You've set up my next question: when you left off in The Mercy of Gods, Dafyd had reported the resistance faction and was elevated to becoming the spokesperson or conduit between the Carryx and the rest of humanity. Where are you taking him in *The Faith of Beasts?* Daniel: Well, this one also very much pulls from that idea that Ty brought in at the beginning. As you make yourself important within the empire, how do you protect yourself and your people by becoming part of this empire, and at the same time, maintaining your faith, yourself, and who and what you were before. It's rough! It's gonna suck: this is not a romantic comedy. So that tension is fundamental to the story that we're telling. ### Yeah. I've always found the idea of encountering something and being changed by it fascinating – not just in combat or warfare, just anytime you encounter something that's vastly different. It's interesting to see how humanity is being forced to adapt here. Daniel: One of the things that comes up in this new book is the generational change that comes, when you have the people who remember how it was before the conquest, who remember what that life and society was, and then have to plan to raise children and new generations who don't have that context. Ty: I mean that's certainly a well that we've dipped in before. I think both Daniel and I are fascinated by the generational change thing. I mean, I used to work for a Chinese company. Half the people I worked with were first generation immigrants, and the other half were people who were children of first generation immigrants. And the differences in the way they saw the world, between the people who were born in Taiwan and then emigrated and the people who were born in America, they almost couldn't talk to each other. They almost couldn't understand each other. So that idea of the children who are born in captivity, captivity is the only thing that they've ever known, it's not going to feel weird to them. ### How far have you plotted ahead for this series: I know you've got the three books planned, so what does the general future look like? Daniel: We write and turn in the third one? I mean, we told you what the end of the story was in the prologue of the first book. There's not a lot of big, structural changes that aren't already right in there. But we spent a month last year doing a really detailed outline of the third book, and we just need to finish writing it down. ### How's that going? Daniel: I could be going faster. \[laughs\] I'm a little late on this one right now. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2025/07/IMG_3157.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) ### This is coming right after *The Expanse* series – 9 novels plus the short stories. What were some of the things that you learned from that experience that you've incorporated into this one? Ty: Yeah, the number one thing we learned is nine books is too many. That's why we're only doing three. Daniel: \[laughs\] Good answer. No, I think Ty's right, actually. I mean, that's glib, but 9 books was a huge project and it did sort of kick the shit out of me. So doing something that's a little more contained is a pleasure. But I think we got really good at outlining. I mean, the thing that the writer's room was really good at and the thing that we got a lot of practice on before was kind of, figuring out the structure and the scenes and the moments and finding places for them before we started finding it on the page, as opposed to, for example, the one we're doing on Patreon, where we're we're just figuring it out as we go. I feel like that process and this one are different in the amount of fundamental work we did before we started putting things to page. ### Speaking of the [Patreon project](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-writing-patreon/), how has that been going? Daniel: We're right at the end of that one. We've got a big climactic fight and then some falling action and then just so much rewriting. Oh my gosh. It'll be great. ### What's your ultimate goal with this project? Is that something you're going to publish as a regular novel or is it just something that you'll keep online there for the community? Daniel: The point of the Patreon project is showing the whole process. So yeah, we'll pop it out. We'll see if anybody wants it. If anybody does want it, we'll show folks what it's like to get editorial notes, how to address editorial notes. We'll show them what the copy editing looks like. We'll show them what the page proofing looks like. As far as we can take that from, first principles to a published novel, that's kind of what that project is. And the idea is that once we're done with that, and we have the novel out, and we've gone through the whole process, and folks have seen it, we'll take the Patreon down and be done. It is undignified, man. There was a lot of us sitting around going, "fuck, what were we doing? What key is it in? Shit!" ### I feel like that's almost even more important because if you're just interacting with writers online, you're only seeing the high points, but not necessarily the day-to-day stuff. For an aspiring novelist, I can see that being pretty useful. Have you had anybody who's said that it's been helpful there? Ty: Uh, we haven't we haven't had anybody who's told us they sold a story because they watched it. Daniel: We've had some folks who are enjoying the process. I don't know how helpful we actually are and how much we're just a dancing bear, but we're doing what we do. ### Now that *The Captives War* has been out for about two years now, do you have *Expanse* fans or do you have James S.A. Corey fans? Daniel: We have more James S.A. Corey fans than I was worried about. It seems like there are a fair number of folks who have followed us into the new project. That's great! It gives me some hope that we might be able to keep this going without getting day jobs. ### When *The Mercy of Gods* came out, there was the [announcement](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-streaming-adaptation/) that it was being developed for TV. Are there any updates about that? Ty: We never do announcements. We forward other people's announcements. So. Daniel: When there is anything to say, we will send you a link, but we're not going to say anything first. Ty: I will say one thing that's happening right now is there's been a massive shakeup in management at both of the big streamers, at Netflix and Amazon. So we'll see if anything survives that process. ### Did you have a project on Netflix? Ty: No, but we but some of the people who were at Netflix are now at Amazon. ### Oh, I gotcha. Ty: So, obviously those new people are going to be taking those jobs at Netflix now, and who knows what their tastes are going to be. So yeah, I think the next couple years we're gonna see what Amazon and Netflix look like as streamers with the new managements in place. ### I have to have to ask, is there any any updates about the future of *The Expanse* as a TV show. Daniel: As soon as we have it, you will get the link, honest to God. ### I had to ask, I had several people demand it. Daniel: The Owlcat game is kinda cool. ### The [visuals look great](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-osiris-reborn-owlcat-james-sa-corey/). That's something I've been excited to see: this story spilling out into all of these other mediums. It's cool to see it continuing to persist. Daniel: I really like seeing other people's take on it. I like the stuff that I'm not doing. I mean, we finished up our thing and other people – Ty: We've sort of walled off our little garden, but if if other people want to grow tomatoes next door, they're allowed to. ### You mean, as in, like, official, like, tie-in projects as opposed to more – Ty: Yeah, there will never be a book 10 of *The Expanse*. But if people want to make video games, (licensed, obviously) but if there's an interest in making video games and RPGs and comic books and tie-in things like that it's cool to see other people doing stuff. --- Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of the series so far. ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2026-locus-awards-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-books-finalists/ Last updated: 2026-04-14T15:33:17.000Z *Locus Magazine*, the industry publication for the speculative fiction literary community has issued its finalists lists for 2026\. Each year, it issues a poll for its subscribers and fans, which it tabulates for its award, which is held up alongside the Hugo and Nebula Awards in significance. I've found that it's a good survey of the past year's storytelling. Here are [last year's winners](https://locusmag.com/2025/06/2025-locus-awards-winners/?ref=andrewliptak.com). As in years past, it's an excellent roundup: there are a whole bunch of books that I read and really enjoyed, and I'm eager to see which ones end up winning. This year's awards are being held in partnership with the [Bay Area Book Festival](https://www.baybookfest.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is themed “Writing the Future.” This year's awards will be announced during this year's Locus Awards Ceremony, which will be held on May 30, during this year's Locus Awards Ceremony, which will be held at Hotel Shattuck in Berkeley Hall California. You can get tickets for the event [here](https://locusmag.com/2026-locus-awards-weekend/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here's the full list of nominees: ### Science fiction novels - *The Folded Sky* by Elizabeth Bear - *Picks & Shovels* by Cory Doctorow - *Notes from a Regicide* by Isaac Fellman - *When We Were Real* by Daryl Gregory - *All That We See or Seem* by Ken Liu - *Where the Axe Is Buried* by Ray Nayler - *Slow Gods* by Claire North - *Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor - *The Shattering Peace* by John Scalzi - *Shroud* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ### Fantasy novels - *The Devils* by Joe Abercrombie - *The Tomb of Dragons* by Katherine Addison - *Lessons in Magic and Disaster* by Charlie Jane Anders - *A Drop of Corruption* by Robert Jackson Bennett - *The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow - *The Raven Scholar* by Antonia Hodgson - *Hemlock & Silver* by T. Kingfisher - *Katabasis* by R.F. Kuang - *The Incandescent* by Emily Tesh - *Queen Demon* by Martha Wells ### Horror novels - *The Possession of Alba Díaz* by Isabel Cañas - *Spread Me* by Sarah Gailey - *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones - *The Library at Hellebore* by Cassandra Khaw - *Never Flinch* by Stephen King - *The Bewitching* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *It Was Her House First* by Cherie Priest - *The Crimson Road* by A.G. Slatter - *The Staircase in the Woods* by Chuck Wendig ### Young Adult novels - *The Singular Life of Aria Patel* by Samira Ahmed - *Make Me a Monster* by Kalynn Bayron - *Costumes for Time Travelers* by A.R. Capetta - *The Executioners Three* by Susan Dennard - *The Underwood Tapes* by Amanda DeWitt - *Among Ghosts* by Rachel Hartman - *Sky on Fire* by E.K. Johnston - *Starstrike* by Yoon Ha Lee - *I Am Not Jessica Chen* by Ann Liang - *They Bloom at Night* by Trang Thanh Tran ### First novels - *A Song of Legends Lost* by M.H. Ayinde - *Red Rabbit Ghost* by Jen Julian - *When Devils Sing* by Xan Kaur - *Awake in the Floating City* by Susanna Kwan - *Luminous* by Silvia Park - *Archive of Unknown Universes* by Ruben Reyes Jr. - *North Sun, Or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther* by Ethan Rutherford - *Blob* by Maggie Su - *Song of Spores* by Bogi Takács - *Sour Cherry* by Natalia Theodoridou ### Translated novel - *On the Calculation of Volume III* by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell - *The Unworthy* by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses - *The Midnight Shift* by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png - *Red Sword* by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur - *The Midnight Timetable* by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur - *Ice* by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips - *Blood for the Undying Throne* by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur - *Vanishing World* by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori - *Dengue Boy* by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery - *The Wax Child* by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken ### Novellas - *The Orb of Cairado* by Katherine Addison - *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar - *What Stalks the Deep* by T. Kingfisher - *Cinder House* by Freya Marske - *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz - *Making History* by K.J. Parker - *Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce - *Lives of Bitter Rain* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *A Mouthful of Dust* by Nghi Vo - *Murder by Memory* by Olivia Waite ### Novelettes - “[The Witch and the Wyrm](https://reactormag.com/the-witch-and-the-wyrm-elizabeth-bear/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elizabeth Bear (*Reactor* 2/26/25) - “[Barnacle](https://reactormag.com/barnacle-kate-elliott/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Elliott (*Reactor* 11/5/25) - “[Uncertain Sons](https://undertowpublications.com/shop/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons) - “[We Begin Where Infinity Ends](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ihezue%5F02%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Somto Ihezue (*Clarkesworld* 2/25) - “The Tin Man’s Ghost" by Ray Nayler (*Asimov’s* 5-6/25) - “[The Millay Illusion](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny* 11-12/25) - “[When He Calls Your Name](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-he-calls-your-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Catherynne M. Valente (*Uncanny* 7-8/25) - “[The Twenty-One Second God](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-twenty-one-second-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Peter Watts (*Lightspeed* 6/25) - “[Wolf Moon, Antler Moon](https://reactormag.com/wolf-moon-antler-moon-a-c-wise/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.C. Wise (*Reactor* 1/13/25) - “[Phantom View](https://reactormag.com/phantom-view-john-wiswell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Wiswell (*Reactor* 10/22/25) ### Short Stories - “[Secret Night](https://bookshop.org/a/18487/9781668080009?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nathan Ballingrud (Night & Day) - “[In the Halls of the Makeshift King](https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/In-the-Halls-of-the-Makeshift-King-Tobias-S-Buckell.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tobias S. Buckell (*Asimov’s* 7-8/25) - “[In My Country](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F04%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld* 4/25) - “[Wire Mother](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F10%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld* 10/25) - “[The Shape of Stones](https://reactormag.com/the-shape-of-stones-hildur-knutsdottir/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hildur Knútsdóttir (*Reactor* 3/12/25) - “[Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/courtney-lovecrafts-book-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam J. Miller (*Nightmare* 10/25) - “[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden (*Strange Horizons* 6/16/25) - “[Landline](https://reactormag.com/landline-kelly-robson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelly Robson (*Reactor* 3/5/25) - “[Missing Helen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F07%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tia Tashiro (*Clarkesworld* 7/25) - “[Woolly](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=B0F9PHFYWX&tag=locusmag06-20&ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn (*Asimov’s* 5-6/25) ### Anthology - *The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories* edited by andré m. carrington - *Night & Day* edited by Ellen Datlow - *Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology* edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney - *The End of the World As We Know It* edited by Christopher Golden & Brian Keene - *We Will Rise Again* edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older - *Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity* edited by Lee Mandelo - *The Best Weird Fiction of the Year: Volume 1* edited by Michael Kelly - *Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three* edited by Stephen Kotowych - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025* edited by Nnedi Okorafor and John Joseph Adams - *As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories* edited by Terese Mason Pierre ### Collection - *Call and Response* by Christopher Caldwell - *Moon Songs* by Carol Emshwiller - *Letters from an Imaginary Country* by Theodora Goss - *Uncertain Sons and Other Stories* by Thomas Ha - *Bright Dead Star* by Caitlín R. Kiernan - *The Essential Patricia A. McKillip* by Patricia A. McKillip - *One Message Remains* by Premee Mohamed - *The Revelation Space Collection Volumes 1 & 2* by Alastair Reynolds - *Crows and Silences* by Lucius Shepard - *A Catalog of Storms* by Fran Wilde ### Magazine - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - *Clarkesworld* - *F&SF* - *Fiyah* - *khōréō* - *Lightspeed* - *Reactor* - *Strange Horizons* - *Uncanny Magazine* ### Publisher - Angry Robot - DAW - Del Rey - Gollancz - Neon Hemlock - Orbit - Pan Macmillan/Tor UK - Saga - Solaris - Tachyon *Tor Publishing Group & Subterranean Press have recused themselves from this category. Tor UK is an imprint of Pan Macmillan, not TPG.* ### Editor - John Joseph Adams - Scott H. Andrews - Neil Clarke - Ellen Datlow - dave ring - Jonathan Strahan - Bogi Takács - Wendy N. Wagner - Fran Wilde & Julian Yap - Sheila Williams ### Artist - Brom - Rovina Cai - Galen Dara - Bob Eggleton - Kathleen Jennings - Alan Lee - John Picacio - Shaun Tan - Charles Vess - Michael Whelan ### Illustrated and Art books - *The Invisible Parade* by Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio - *Frank Frazetta: Fine Lines* edited by Sara Frazetta and Arnie Fenner, art by Frank Frazetta - *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow, art by Rovina Cai - *Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld* by Paul Kidby - *Carmilla* by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, art by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell - *The Space Cat* by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford - *Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Volumes 1-3* by adapted by Rebecca K. Reynolds, art by Justin Gerard - *Sunset at Zero Point* / *Swedish Machines* by Simon Stålenhag - *Faraway Dreaming* by Ulla Thynell - *Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection* edited by Amanda T. Zehnder and David M. Brinley ### Nonfiction - *The Outspoken and the Incendiary* by Terry Bisson - *Enshittification* by Cory Doctorow - *Colourfields* by Paul Kincaid - *Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling* by Henry Lien - *Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler* by Susana M. Morris - *Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World* by Tavia Nyong’o - *Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet* by Tochi Onyebuchi - *Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature* edited by Becky Siegel Spratford - *Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends* edited by Richard Wolinsky - *Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse* by Chi-ming Yang --- ### Netflix's animated Redwall series appears to be dead URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/netflix-redwall-series-brian-jacques-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2026-04-10T17:49:39.000Z Five years after [it was announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/redwall-brian-jacques-netflix-animated-series/), it appears that Netflix has abandoned work on an animated adaptation of Brian Jacques' fantasy series, *Redwall*. *Broadcast Now* [revealed the news](https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/netflix/netflix-closes-book-on-redwall-projects/5215506.article?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the series was no longer developing the project, which [*What's On Netflix*](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/redwall-tv-and-movie-adaptations-scrapped-at-netflix/?ref=andrewliptak.com) conveyed. The streaming service optioned the series from Penguin Random House back in 2021, with plans for an animated film and television series, tapping Patrick McHale (*Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall,* Guillermo del Toro’s *Pinocchio*) to pen the screenplay. It was a notable deal at the time, and it appeared that the company had ambitious plans for Jacques' world. It had the rights to the entire series, which would have given it a wealth of material for multiple projects to bolster their catalog with. However, just a year later, McHale [revealed](https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/netflix-redwall-patrick-mchale-update?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "I wrote a script for the movie and did a lot of beautiful development art with different artists," and that while he thought the story was moving forward in other places, he was no longer working on the project. According to [*What's On Netflix*](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/redwall-tv-and-movie-adaptations-scrapped-at-netflix/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the project was still in the works as of 2025, but the project came to an end when Netflix opted to let the rights lapse. I've reached out to Netflix, Penguin Random House, and the Jacques estate, and will update if I hear anything further. First published in 1986, *Redwall* is a YA series set in a fantastical fantasy world populated by talking animals, centered around Redwall Abbey in Mossflower Woods. *Redwall* followed the adventures of a mouse named Matthias, a monk in the Abbey, where he dreamed of following in the footsteps of the Abbey's founder, Martin the Warrior. When his home is threatened, Martin sets out to find Martin's sword to protect his friends. Many of Jacques' stories follow a similar formula: a heroic character sets off on an adventure to protect their home, often fighting against the land's antagonists (usually rats, wild cats, snakes, and other predators), consuming well-detailed feasts, and calling back on the legends and stories of past heroes to inspire them. The series includes 22 novels in all, the last of which was published in 2011, after Jacques passed away. I'm rather bummed to see this didn't come to fruition: it felt like the basis for a really strong franchise, one that could introduce a whole new generation to the novels. I was an enormous fan of the series when I was first introduced to them, and picked up a huge pile of them at a library sale a couple of years ago with the intent of reading them to my kids at some point. Time to put that plan into action. ### Here are 9 new sci-fi and fantasy books to pick up this April URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2026-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-roundup-brett-corey/ Last updated: 2026-04-07T13:23:47.000Z How can I be expected to do anything while four people are currently zipping around the Moon? I’ve been watching the Artemis II mission since it launched on April 1st, and it definitely feels different than any of the shuttle launches or live space walks that I’ve seen over the years. This is the most ambitious mission NASA has mounted in half a century, and as I noted the other day, hopefully it'll be the start to a new age of space exploration. Watching the astronauts hurtle towards the Moon made me think of two books about our closest celestial neighbor. The first is [*In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780803229792?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Francis French and Colin Burgess. It's the second installment of a much longer (and growing) series from the University of Nebraska Press, [*Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight*](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/search-results-grid/?series=une147-outward-odyssey-a-peoples-history-of-spaceflight&ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It's a detailed, exhaustive, and absorbing exploration of how we took the steps to get to the Moon across the Gemini and Apollo programs. The second is Oliver Morton's [*The Moon: A History for the Future*](https://www.amazon.com/Moon-History-Future-Economist-Books/dp/1541774329?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is less of a technical history of space exploration than it is an exploration of humanity's relationship to it. It's a beautiful, well-written portrait that's well worth picking up. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. April is primed to kick off a flood of books: first with a trickle, and then with a ton. I’ll have a second list later in the month, and then we're in to May, where we'll get absolutely slammed. It’s time to get ready: you're going to need to weed out your TBR and bookshelves to make space. Okay, here are 9 books to start off April with: ### [*The Demon King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984817143?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter V. Brett (April 7th) Peter V. Brett brings his *Nightfall Saga* to an end, picking up after the events of [*The Desert Prince*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984817105?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Hidden Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984817136?ref=andrewliptak.com). Alagai Ka is the Demon King, and while humanity has long waged and been triumphant in their war against the demons, Alagai has escaped and has begun looking for a new queen to start a new dark hive. The bad news is that he thinks he's found one. The good news is that two of humanity's heroes, Olive Paper and Darin Bales are after him, and they have followed him to the distant shores of a new land to bring the war to an end. What they discover is a world completely unexpected: one where humans and demon not only live alongside one another, but one where humans have found a way to rule over the demons. Together, they have to find a way to convince this civilization of the danger that the Demon King represents, before it's too late. ### [*Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black* *Fantastic Imagination*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781531513337?ref=andrewliptak.com)by andré carrington (April 7th) andré carrington brings out a new, fascinating-looking history: the story of African American creators who turned to radio for their creative outlets. He examines the audio dramas and radio programs that brought Black speculative fiction to life for audiences, surveying the scripts, recordings, files, and lives of the authors to look at how these storytellers changed pop culture. Writing for the *Ancillary Review of Books*, Sullivan Summer [says](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2026/04/02/tuned-in/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "This is more than simply a comparison between two modes of storytelling. It is, rather, a multiplication of sorts, of the ways in which to “read” the authors, their texts and, by extension, the Black experience. In carrington’s hands, the whole is more than the sum of its parts." ### [*The Subtle Art of Folding Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250425409?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Chu (April 7th) John Chu has earned a considerable amount of acclaim for stories like "[The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWater%5FThat%5FFalls%5Fon%5FYou%5Ffrom%5FNowhere?ref=andrewliptak.com)" and "[If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/if-you-find-yourself-speaking-to-god-address-god-with-the-informal-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)", and now has his debut novel coming out: *The Subtle Art of Folding Space*. This is one of my more [anticipated books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-2026-murderbot-corey-leckie-anticipated/) of the year: it follows a woman named Ellie whose universe is coming apart at the seams, along with her family. Her mother is in a coma, her sister is undermining her (while also dodging assassination attempts), and a group of engineers are trying to take over the skunkworks, the engine that is keeping the universes working like they should. When her cousin discovers a device in the skunkworks: it's keeping her mother alive while also injecting bugs into the fabric of the universe, and Ellie is forced to confront her family's past while also trying to preserve the skunkworks. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/the-subtle-art-of-folding-space-by-john-chu-sff-debut-of-the-month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Chu finds a delightful and poignant intersection between the multiverse, family dysfunction, and dim sum in his debut novel." ### [*The Faith of Beasts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey (April 14th) James S.A. Corey is the author of [one of my favorite book series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/): [*The Expanse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316311298?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and I was pretty sad to see it come to an end a couple of years ago. But they delivered a really excellent first installment to follow it up with: the 2024 novel [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525596?ref=andrewliptak.com), which introduced readers to a new world and new conflict. A human-inhabited world called Anjiin is attacked by an alien civilization called the Carryx, who roll in and quickly take over and take thousands of people from their homes to evaluate whether or not they're worth adding to their larger collective as they work to take over the galaxy. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-201.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229-5.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) One of the books that I've been looking forward to the most is the next installment, *The Faith of Beasts*, which looks to amp up the stakes. The humans who were collected managed to pass their initial tests to gauge whether they were worthy or not, led by Dafyd Alkhor, who was forced to make some extremely difficult decisions to ensure humanity's survival, and he's dedicated himself to ensuring that humanity won't be wiped out, even as the costs become apparent. At the same time, one of their number has been taken over by The Swarm, an alien symbiote whose mission is to find a way to take down the Carryx from within, only to find that the longer it remains hidden within the humans, it's beginning to forget its primary purpose: its a weapon. As humanity is spread out amongst the Carryx Empire, they begin to fully comprehend the terrible power that has subjugated them, and the lengths that they'll go to destroy them. I've been reading this and I've been loving sinking back into this world. In the meantime, *Publishers Weekly* has given it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The authors continue to expertly balance character and plot development, setting the stage effectively for the series’ denouement. This wows." ### [*The Killing Spell*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668053287?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shay Kauwe (April 14th) Shay Kauwe sets her debut fantasy novel almost two centuries in the future, when the Hawaiian islands were submerged in an incident that unleashed magic upon the world. She follows a young Hawaiian woman named Kea Petrova is the youngest of the island's five clan leaders living in Los Angeles. In the aftermath, the clans came together and created a treaty with the city to form a new homeland, and that treaty is about to run out. As the clans struggle to make ends meet, Kea works odd jobs and crafts her own spells, only to find her life thrown into chaos when a prominent activist named Angelo Reyes is murdered with a death spell, something that could have only come from the refugee community. Kea finds herself the prime suspect, and to clear her name, she has to figure out who really killed him. *Publishers Weekly* awarded this a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668053287?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Fascinating linguistic-turned-magical theory, electrifying moments of intimacy, and a thrilling whodunit set this apart from the pack." ### [*Year of the Mer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668060957?ref=andrewliptak.com)by L.D. Lewis (April 7th) Lewis reimagines the legend of The Little Mermaid. In it, Arielle's granddaughter Yemi is having a difficult time after her father was assassinated, and her mother is being slowly poisoned. She had been raised and prepared to protect their kingdom and ascend to the thrown, but she can't comprehend how the Ixia have treated her family after all they've sacrificed. As discontent within the kingdom has reached an all-time high and a coup erupts, Yemi has to turn to one person she'd never imagine going to before: a sea witch named Ursula. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668060957?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Lewis’s worldbuilding impresses, seamlessly blending magic and mythology with burgeoning technology." ### [The Hive](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803365671?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ronald Malfi (April 14th) After a storm sweeps across the coast and scatters all sorts of random objects across a neighborhood, the inhabitants are overcome with an obsession of tracking down something that speaks to them: these items are calling out to people, and when they find their objects, they become obsessed with it, and will do anything to protect them. Over on *Grimdark Magazine*, Ed Crocker [says](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-hive-by-ronald-malfi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "*The Hive* is a puzzle box, slowburn nightmare of a community gone weird whose endless disquieting horror keeps you in a frozen state of lingering unease all the way to its apocalyptic finale." ### [*Blindside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063433793?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Mammay (March 24th) Michael Mammay adds a new installment to his *Planetside* series ([*Planetside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062694676?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Spaceside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062694683?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Colonyside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062980977?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Darkside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320130?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which finds Colonel Carl Butler returning to his homeworld, hoping to finally enjoy some time off. But when two people connected to his recent mission on Taug, he realizes that he's also a target. Meanwhile, his fellow soldier Mac gets into trouble when a friend's daughter goes missing, and he jumps in to help, only to begin to wonder if this disappearance is connected to Butler's troubles. The two begin to see connections to an older enemy, and decide to head off across the galaxy to confront them. ### [*What We Are Seeking*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250364739?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Cameron Reed(April 7th) 30 years ago, Cameron Reed published her debut novel [*The Fortunate Fall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250326690?ref=andrewliptak.com)and followed up with a short story a couple of years later before vanishing from the SF/F publishing scene for decades. Now, she's back with a new novel, *What We Are Seeking*, set on a dangerous planet called Scythia. A doctor named John Maraintha has been left on the planet, along with his friend and translator, Sudharma. They find a world with very different cultural norms. Where a sort of polyamory (known as visiting) is common on his planet, John finds that the two societies, the Ischnurans and Zandaheans have very different attitudes and practices, and they're at odds with one another, all while Earth watches from afar. Writing for *The New Yorker*, Stephanie Burt [says](https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-sci-fi-novelist-who-disappeared-for-decades?ref=andrewliptak.com) that"it’s a cracking, fast-moving adventure story, with a wilderness-survival plot, love stories, coming-out stories, and a whodunnit. It’s about desert botany and zoology, and reproductive freedom, and new tech, and religious faith. And it asks us to sleuth out—in its world, and our own—connections among all those things." --- That's all for now: thanks for reading. As always, let me know what's on your to-read list and what you're excited to check out. ### This year's BSFA and Philip K. Dick Award winners URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/bsfa-philip-k-dick-award-winners-science-fiction-books/ Last updated: 2026-04-06T17:43:14.000Z This weekend saw a couple of conventions taking place in the UK and North America: EasterCon and Norwescon 48\. Both cons held awards ceremonies for two big SF awards: the British Science Fiction Association and the Philip K. Dick Awards! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image-2.png) First up: the Philip K. Dick Award, [which saw a great slate of novels on the ballot](https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-k-dick-award-2025-samatar-tchaikovsky/): this year's winner was *Outlaw Planet* by M. R. Carey, with Thomas Ha's collection *Uncertain Sons and Other Stories* earning a special citation. The BSFA announced its winners of its annual award on Sunday. Here's the full list (winners are marked in **bold**) ### Best Novel - *A Granite Silence*, Nina Allan (Riverrun) - *Project Hanuman*, Stewart Hotston (Angry Robot) - ***When There Are Wolves Again*, E.J. Swift (Arcadia)** - *Edge of Oblivion*, Kirk Weddell (Troubador) - *The Salt Oracle*, Lorraine Wilson (Solaris) ### Best Shorter Fiction (for novelettes and novellas) - *Cities Are Forests Waiting to Happen*, Cécile Cristofari (Newcon) - *The River Has Roots*, Amal El-Mohtar (Arcadia) - “The Art of Time Travel”, Teika Marija Smits (One Million Times) - “Descent”, Wole Talabi (*Clarkesworld* 5/25) - **“The Apologists”, Tade Thompson (*Clarkesworld* 11/25)** ### Best Short Fiction - “25 Peppercorns”, Emma Burnett (*Mythaxis* Fall ’25) - “One Step at a Time”, Rick Danforth (Vivid Worlds) - **“Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike”, E.M. Faulds (*PodCastle* 7/29/25)** - “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny* 3-4/25) - “Of Seagrass Fins and Slippery Fingers”, A.J. Van Belle (*Augur* 8.2) ### Best Collection (for collections and anthologies) - *The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories*, André M. Carrington, ed. (Luna Press Publishing) - *Uncertain Sons and Other Stories*, Thomas Ha (Undertow) - *Black Friday*, Cheryl S. Ntumy (Flame Tree) - *Who Will You Save?*, Gareth L. Powell (Titan) - *Creative Futures: Beyond and Within*, Allen Stroud, ed. (Flame Tree) - ***Blood in the Bricks*, Neil Williamson (NewCon)** ### Best Fiction for Younger Readers - *Sunrise on the Reaping*, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic) - “The Ghost Merchant”, Rick Danforth *(The Colored Lens* Spring ’25) - *The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel*, J. Dianne Dotson (Android) - *Doctor Who: Lux*, James Goss (Penguin) - *Secrets of the First School*, T.L. Huchu (Tor) - ***Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution*, Una McCormack (Target)** ### Best Non-Fiction (Long) - *Writing the Magic: Essays on Crafting Fantasy Fiction*, Dan Coxon & Richard Hirst (Dead Ink) - *Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914*, Kate Holterhoff (Ohio University Press) - ***Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction* by Paul Kincaid (Briardene)** - *That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American With Film,* Payton McCarty-Simas (Luna Press Publishing) - *Fantasy: A Short History*, Adam Roberts (Bloomsbury Academic) - *Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre*, Joy Sanchez-Taylor (Ohio State University Press) ### Best Non-Fiction (Short) - **“Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other”, Eugen Bacon (*Strange Horizons* 3/24/25)** - “The Legacy of Discworld”, Rick Danforth (The British Fantasy Society) - “When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident”, Grigory Lukin (self-published) - Review of When There Are Wolves Again, Paul March Russell (*Strange Horizons* 10/6/25) - “Comparing colonialisms in Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror and its AMC Adaptation”, Fiona Moore (*Foundation* 4/1/25) ### Best Translated Short Fiction - “Pollen”, Anna Burdenko, tr. Alex Shvartsman (*Clarkesworld* 3/25) - “Elasticity”, Andrés González Galante, tr. Lucy Corrie-Tannen (*Samovar* 10/27/25) - **“Liecraft“, Anita Moskat, tr. Austin Wagner (*Apex* 10/7/25)** - “Still Water”, Zhang Ran, tr. Andy Dudak (*Clarkesworld* 4/25) - “Zephyr”, Sofia Rhei, tr. Marian Womack (*Samovar* 4/28/25) - “Bodyhoppers”, Rocio Vega, tr. Sue Burke (*Clarkesworld* 2/25) - “Beyond Everything“, Wang Yanzhong, tr. Stella Jiayue-Zhu (*Clarkesworld* 1/25) ### Best Artwork - Jenni Coutts for the cover art of Dark Crescent by Lyndsey Croal (Luna Press Publishing) - Jenni Coutts for “Mushroom Fairy” (self-published) - Spencer Fuller for the cover art of The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Arcadia) - Sam Gretton for the cover art of The Salt Oracle (Solaris) - **Nick Wells for the tesselated cover art of *The Fractal* Series (Flame Tree)** - Tziano Zhou for “Highway Above the Clouds” (self-published) ### Best Audio Fiction - *Just Let Me Help*, Tara Campbell (Space Cowboy) - *Five Finger Stories*, Rick Danforth (Tall Tale TV) - *Unicorn Spotting*, Rick Danforth (The Tiny Bookcase) - ***Wasteland: A Dex Legacy Story*, Emily Inkpen (Alternative Stories)** - *The Dex Legacy Series 3*, Emily Inkpen (Alternative Stories) Congratulations to the finalists! ### Dungeon Crawler Carl is headed to Peacock for a series URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dungeon-crawler-carl-matt-dinniman-tv-adaptation-peacock/ Last updated: 2026-06-19T14:30:18.000Z Peacock [has picked up the adaptation](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/dungeon-crawler-carl-tv-series-peacock-seth-macfarlane-1236705436/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for Matt Dinniman's blockbuster LitRPG series *Dungeon Crawler Carl*, in which Coast Guard veteran Carl and his ex-girlfriend's show cat, Princess Donut are forced to compete in the brutal reality series after Earth is transformed into a series of horrifying and violent levels for the entertainment of the galactic populace. The series has a basic, Douglas Adams-like conceit: When Carl's ex-girlfriend's prize show cat escapes from his apartment, he goes out in his boxer shorts to try and get her back inside, when everything smashes down to the ground: buildings, trees, cars, everything. Anyone who was inside has been killed, and anyone who was outside are drawn to a series of doors that have opened up into the ground. It's then that they're informed of what's happening: Earth has been targeted for destruction and strip mining by a larger galactic civilization, and those survivors are going to compete in a fairly horrific competition called *Dungeon Crawler World*, a galactic reality show where the unwitting contestants have to fight their way through a series of increasingly-difficult levels. In the first novel, Carl and Donut hack their way through the level, gaining skill points and gear and slowly make names for themselves as they contend with the game AI's oversight of the competition, preen for the galactic audience that becomes their fanbase, and as they battle groups of monsters, dungeon bosses, and the occasional fellow crawlers in order to descend further into the game and hopefully someday escape. The series is comprised of seven novels: [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820254?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*This Inevitable Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190041?ref=andrewliptak.com). An eighth installment, [*A Parade of Horribles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190065?ref=andrewliptak.com), arrives in stores on May 12th. Dinniman has said that he's planning on around ten installments in all. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak I picked up and blew through the first book earlier this year, and really enjoyed it. It's not what I'd put on the shelf of "genre classic" – it's in the broad crowd pleaser category that I'd stick books like Ernest Cline's [*Ready Player One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307887443?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which feels very much like a forerunner to this series) and Andy Weir's [*The Martian* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553418026?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Project Hail Mary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135228?ref=andrewliptak.com), in that they're irreverent and fun to read and feed into an audience's love of pop culture and role playing games. But where it's light and fun, it also does come with a more serious edge, especially when as Carl contemplates the horror that he and Donut have been dropped into. Dinniman has been writing for the better part of two decades, publishing a handful of novels and short stories over the years, according to a [profile in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/books/review/dungeon-crawler-carl-matt-dinniman.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), which noted that he held a variety of jobs before turning to graphic design and art — particularly artwork featuring cats. He found his work in demand, particularly on the cat show circuit, and he ended up quitting his day job to focus on that, eventually earning upwards of six figures. It was in 2019 that he began writing *Dungeon Crawler Carl*, initially serializing it on the web fiction platform Royal Road. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in early 2020 and the in-person shows that supported his livelihood closed down, so he shifted his focus to his fiction, self-publishing the first installment on Amazon, through Patreon, and eventually, through Audible. In *Times* profile, publishers began to inquire about the series before too long: he had sold “several hundred thousand copies on his own” and he was making more money than publishers were offering.” But Ace made an enticing offer: they offered to only publish the books as hardcovers and trade paperbacks, rather than the ebooks or audiobooks (of which he’s sold more than 3 million copies), and in August, they started rolling out the new editions, which came with a bonus, serialized novella. “The partnership has been lucrative for Ace which… has sold more than a million hardcover copies.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak With a huge publishing deal, it’s little wonder that Hollywood has been interested. Shortly before Ace launched its editions in the summer of 2024, Universal International Studios and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions [began developing a potential adaptation of the series](https://deadline.com/2024/08/dungeon-crawler-carl-seth-macfarlane-universal-chris-yost-series-1236045866/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Like any such deal, these things take time, but the wait seems to be working nicely in Dinniman's favor: a quick peek at Google Trends shows that searches for the book has grown considerably since they were re-released in August 2024\. Notably, the books didn't instantly land on *The New York Times* Bestseller list: *Dungeon Crawler Carl* only showed up on the list earlier this year, but it's remained on the list for 12 weeks (it's currently at #7 on the *NYT's* Combined Print & E-Book Fictionlist), which says to me that there's a lot of sustained word of mouth from readers and booksellers that are propelling it and his other novels along. Dinniman [spoke with *Variety*](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/dungeon-crawler-carl-tv-show-book-8-operation-bounce-house-1236674799/?ref=andrewliptak.com)back in February around the time that his non-*Dungeon Crawler Carl* novel, *Operation Bounce House* was hitting stores, and provided an update on the series: we’re at the point where Chris Yost, who’s writing the show, has written a few episodes” > “And I don’t think it’s public yet, the streaming service that has picked it up, but we’re getting pretty close to the point where a decision needs to be made, like contracts needs to be made, whether or not they’re going to go ahead and go with. And that whole process involves the scripts, involves CGI testing, and budgetary stuff, and lots of stuff that’s above my pay grade.” That interview provided some other interesting behind-the-scenes details about the project's route to the small screen: an inquiry arrived in 2023 asking about the rights, prompting Dinniman to consult with a lawyer, who put him in touch with agents for the literary and TV rights at WME, who then began pitching the series in earnest. Dinniman noted that his main criteria were to "only work with someone who’s read it and enjoyed it and doesn’t want to just snatch up," ultimately landing with Fuzzy Door Productions. Now, we know where that project landed: Peacock, which had previously hosted MacFarlane's series *Ted*, a prequel series to his two films that recently came to an end after two seasons. MacFarlane feels like a good choice for this sort of project: *Dungeon Crawler Carl* is very funny book, one that's also steeped in topical pop culture, which falls right in line with shows like *Family Guy, Ted,* and *The Orville,* and it feels like it could sit alongside films like *Ready Player One* or *Free Guy*. There's still a good distance left to cross before this could begin streaming. Development means a lot of trying out ideas with scripts and design, kicking the tires to see if what they've come up with will work as a series. Should that play out as planned and Peacock orders the show to a series, we'll then see them run the gauntlet that is production. Hopefully, they'll be able to translate what's appealed to such a big audience for television, and if they do it right, it should be quite the ride. ### Fly me to the moon URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nasa-artemis-2-lunar-mission-history/ Last updated: 2026-04-01T20:00:00.000Z There's a reason why we haven't landed people on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972: it's hard. Later tonight, the Artemis II mission will lift off, carrying Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen on a ten day journey to the Moon, where they'll test out the hardware, conduct some experiments, and hopefully take some incredible pictures of the lunar surface. If all goes to plan, the mission will be the start to a new and lasting foothold for the United States in space. The mission's launch window starts at 6:45PM eastern time, and it'll be an exciting moment in the history of space exploration – the first time we've been do the Moon in more than half a century! But programs like this don't happen overnight, and their longevity comes down to a lot of complicated factors, ranging from the political to the technological. With the countdown underway, it's worth looking at how and why this has been a moment long in the making, and what's to come. --- During the heights of the space race, scientists and space enthusiasts believed that the Apollo program was the beginning of a new era of humanity's future in space. NASA had plotted out the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions early on, and had constructed the hardware for them when the program was cancelled in January 1970\. Others involved in the space program had sketched out ideas for reaching Mars and for permanent space stations in Earth's orbit. It wasn't to be: the landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969 effectively stopped the momentum for the space program, and with dwindling public support and other costly government programs competing for taxpayer dollars, NASA changed its focus from exploration of the solar system's other bodies to reusable platforms and research closer to home. In the years that followed, successive presidential administrations made plenty of promises that they never followed through on: returning to the Moon (or landing someone on Mars) was always a goal that would come safely after a president had left office. There were further setbacks: Following the destruction of the Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003, President George W. Bush announced the following year that NASA would end the shuttle program once the International Space Station was completed. The shuttle's last mission in July 2011 brought that era of space travel to a close when Atlantis touched down, leaving the US without a means to reach orbit. To anticipate that, the US began developed a successor in 2004, Constellation, which would serve as a platform that could help the US reach the ISS, then the Moon, and eventually, to Mars (with the stated goal of reaching the planet by 2020). However, a review committee found in 2009 that for the program to succeed, it would need a substantial increase in funding. In the wake of the 2008 housing crisis, that was a nonstarter, and President Barack Obama ended up canceling the program in 2010\. In the subsequent years, an entire industry has grown up to fill the void: SpaceX pioneered access to orbit with its reusable rockets, while others, like Blue Origin, have helped drop the cost to get to orbit, sending up not only their own satellites, but the ability to bring people and cargo into space on a regular basis. Private companies like Boeing and United Launch Alliance had been supplying rockets for satellites, but these new companies were bringing a slew of new innovations to the field that turned them into viable partners to take on significant chunks of this work. The United States turned its attention back to the Moon in 2017 when President Donald Trump issued [Space Policy Directive-1](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-space-policy-directive-calls-for-human-expansion-across-solar-system/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which called for NASA to "lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.” This new program was Artemis, and it would recycle some of the hardware and technology that had been used in the Space Shuttle and Constellation programs. Artemis 1 launched in November 2022, an uncrewed flight that tested the Space Launch System (SLS), the Orion spacecraft, and the European Service Module as it flew out to the moon and back. From there, the plan was for two additional missions: Artemis II, which would send a crew of astronauts around the moon for a three-week mission in 2023, which would then be followed by Artemis III in 2024, which would touch down on the Moon. Successive missions would follow, and there would be an additional piece of hardware: the Lunar Gateway space station, which would serve as a support facility for the ground missions. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/1920px-Apollo_17-_Cernan_on_moon-_AS17-140-21391-1.jpg) Apollo 17, Eugene A. Cernan on moon, AS17-140-21391\. Image: NASA While the Apollo 11 mission gets all of the attention for the space race, it's worth remembering that it was the tail end of a deliberative series of steps that included two other dedicated spaceflight programs: Mercury and Gemini. It's helpful to think about these programs as a sort of ladder, with NASA discovering certain things with each step. Mercury showed that people could go into space in a capsule on top of a rocket and return safely. Gemini built on that by figuring out how to do some complex tasks like long-duration spaceflight, space walks, and rendezvousing and docking two spacecraft together – all essential techniques if you want to land on the Moon. Apollo was also deliberative: it included a series of test flights of the various rocket stages, then launched a trio of uncrewed missions (Apollos 4, 5, and 6), before finally launching crewed ones. Apollo 7 tested the mission hardware in Low Earth Orbit, Apollo 8 tested the systems in Lunar orbit, Apollo 9 practiced with the command and landing modules in Earth's orbit, and Apollo 10 served as a dress rehearsal for the eventual landing. This was all unknown territory, and each step along the way imparted plenty of lessons that led to the next step. [Objects from out of this worldNow on display at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier: moon rocks!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-96.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1776-1.JPG)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-moon-rocks-apollo-11-artemis-mission/) I've always felt that the quick pace of the Artemis program from 2019 was somewhat rushed: an initial uncrewed test mission, followed by a crewed Lunar mission and then a landing mission. That's a lot of ground to cover, and while we've gotten better with rockets in the 50 years since, the Artemis mission is utilizing a lot of new and untested hardware and configurations. The SLS had its share of issues with its hydrogen fuel systems, while the Orion capsule's reentry during the Artemis I mission revealed some significant areas of concern with its heat shield. NASA has long faced a troubling dynamic: it has to work fast to achieve its goals, but if it goes too quickly, the consequences can be deadly. Apollo 1 went up in flames during a test, killing its crew, while the crew of Apollo 13 almost met a similar fate when a short in an oxygen tank in the service module exploded. The Challenger [spacecraft disintegrated shortly after launch](https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/) and Columbia burned up upon reentry. The Artemis II mission was supposed to launch earlier in February, but after NASA’s planners detected issues with the rocket’s hydrogen fuel system, they pulled it back in to fix whatever was leaking. While they worked out those issues, NASA's administrators also took another look at the program and made some big changes to its future. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/04/55165160217_db37eb221c_k.jpg) NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, left background, and NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, during NASA'S Ignition event on March 24th, 2026\. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) At the end of March, NASA [held an event that it called Ignition](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-unveils-initiatives-to-achieve-americas-national-space-policy/?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which they laid out those changes. “If we concentrate NASA’s extraordinary resources on the objectives of the National Space Policy,” Administrator Jason Isaacman said “clear away needless obstacles that impede progress, and unleash the workforce and industrial might of our nation and partners, then returning to the Moon and building a base will seem pale in comparison to what we will be capable of accomplishing in the years ahead.” Part of that realignment is a [new launch cadence and changes](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-adds-mission-to-artemis-lunar-program-updates-architecture/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to the Artemis program, which includes “standardized vehicle configuration” and an additional launch in 2027\. [Space fashionAxiom Space has unveiled the spacesuit that the Artemis astronauts will wear when they return to the moon ... whenever that happens![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-97.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/GaL6AHfW8AAt85P.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/axiom-spacesuit-nasa-artemis-3/) The big news here is that Artemis III’s mission is changing again: initially, it had been slated as an initial landing mission on the Moon’s South Pole, but in the years since the start of the project, it’s been continually pushed back for a whole variety of issues that include funding cuts to the program, a lack of space suits, technology issues, and Orion’s heat shield. It had been bumped to 2028, but now it’s been moved up to 2027, and will be “designed to test out systems and operational capabilities in low Earth orbit to prepare for an Artemis IV landing in 2028.” That mission will include testing out the landers that are coming from SpaceX and Blue Origin and all of the other systems that they’ll need for the actual landing: sort of like what Apollo 9 did back in 1968\. The addition of Artemis IV in early 2028 means that we’re not going to go through long, two-year waits between launches and for Artemis V (launching in late 2028) and beyond, Isaacman noted that they’ll be working to fold in more hardware from the commercial providers to increase their launch tempo, with the goal of returning to the Moon every six months. That's another quick pace, but a cadence that feels like they'll be taking a slightly more deliberative approach, rather than shoving every test into a smaller number of missions. As part of that, NASA is ”pausing” the planned Lunar Gateway space station, in favor of a lunar base that they’ll phase in over time. The initial plan is a three-phased approach, with the first getting down to the surface and testing out vehicles and technology, the second setting down “semi-habitable infrastructure and regular logistics” and the third featuring heavy infrastructure for long-duration missions. Plenty of people [aren't happy about it](https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2026/03/cancel-useful-lunar-gateway-and-drop.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), because it doesn't feel like a next step so much as a giant leap that we aren't ready for. I’d expect that to change even under the best of circumstances. --- A space program is a difficult thing that requires considerable commitment from policymakers and contractors. Artemis is a very, very ambitious project, and it’s driven in no small part because of the efforts and ambitions from China (and I’m sure in no small part because of Trump’s ego — the possibility of being the president that oversaw the return to the Moon is probably too good to pass up.) The Space Race was driven entirely by geopolitical concerns — the Moon was the ultimate symbolic high ground when it came to delivering nuclear bombs to one’s opponents. With the initial landing in July 1969, the urgency that the country felt in reaching the lunar surface evaporated, and the subsequent arms controls measures in the 1970s and 1980s and collapse of the Soviet Union lessened it further, allowing NASA to focus on its scientific and Low Earth Orbit missions. China has established itself as a major world power, and while the urgency this time around isn’t the result of an arms race, the combined industrial and technological base that can produce and deliver a lunar landing is an enormously symbolic and consequential accomplishment. China has spent the last couple of years building up its capabilities in LEO and with landers and orbiters for the Moon’s surface. It’s believe that they’re targeting a crewed landing for sometime in 2029 or 2030, but it’s hard to say for sure how far along they are. Space is hard, after all. Those plans — realistic or otherwise — are likely what’s helped NASA and policymakers with the recent adjustments for Artemis. If they want to reach the Moon ahead of China, the steps that they need to take aren’t ones that they can take overnight. Today’s launch is another step, one that will hopefully take us a bit closer to the goal of planting the American flag on the lunar surface. ### Table of Contents, April 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-scifi-fantasy-horror-short-fiction-april-2026/ Last updated: 2026-05-01T15:44:48.000Z I've often thought of short fiction being the engine that drives speculative fiction. So many authors cut their teeth with shorter works, and it's a phenomenal way to meet new storytellers and creators – as well as new publications. Since I've launched this column, I've been adding new publications as I come across them, and if you turn back to [March's installment](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-march-2026/), you'll find a whole bunch of newer publications that have arrived on the scene. Give them a try and see what they're bringing to readers. Find this column useful? Consider leaving a tip to help underwrite the work that goes into assembling it: [Learn more ](#/portal/support) Okay, here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Adventitious*](https://www.adventitious.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 2) Subscribe [here](https://www.adventitious.net/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[All Under Heaven](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/all-under-heaven-marie-brennan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Marie Brennan - “[Madam Strzyga’s Pagan Pest Control](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/madam-strzygas-pagan-pest-control-katharine-tyndall/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Katharine Tyndall - “[Fernie](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/fernie-angela-liu/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu - “[Passing Through](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/passing-through-laurie-doyle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Laurie Doyle - “[We Decay In The Dark](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/we-decay-in-the-dark-ayida-shonibar/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ayida Shonibar - “[Of Sight, Of Mind, Of Heart](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/of-sight-of-mind-of-heart-samantha-murray/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Samantha Murray - “[Penance](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/penance-jennifer-hudak/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Hudak - “[Fractal House](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/fractal-house-merc-fenn-wolfmoor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor - “[Raze My Brain, Open My Eyes](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/raze-my-brain-open-my-eyes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Faith Allington - “[Spirit Alembic Keeper](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/spirit-alembic-keeper-emma-burnett/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Emma Burnett - “[The Place of Oblation](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/place-of-oblation-deborah-l-davitt/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Deborah L. Davitt - “[Last Edit to THE ALL BANGERS LIST Made By Your Sex Robot at 11:39 A.M.](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/all-bangers-list-natalie-zutter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Natalie Zutter - “[Fire and Brimstone](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/fire-and-brimstone-s-i-fapohunda/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by S. I. Fapohunda - “Biter” by Michelle Knudsen --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026) ### Fiction - "[Junie and Kamal in the Machine](https://amazingstories.com/2026/04/junie-and-kamal-in-the-machine-by-jessy-randall-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jessy Randall - "[Rock and Roll](https://amazingstories.com/2026/04/rock-and-roll-by-norman-cowie-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Norman Cowie - "[Make Space Great Again](https://amazingstories.com/2026/04/make-space-great-again-by-mike-strickland-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mike Strickland --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 152) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [Excerpt of *The Cellar Below the Cellar*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/excerpt-of-the-cellar-below-the-cellar-by-ivy-grimes?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ivy Grimes (4/6) - "[One Last Light to Guide Me Home](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/one-last-light-to-guide-me-home?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Avery Parks (4/28) ### Nonfiction - "[Intellectual Colonialism and the Erasure of South and Eastern European Writing Voices: Another Tikka-Masala](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/intellectual-colonialism-and-the-erasure-of-south-and-eastern-european-writing-voices-another-tikka-?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos (4/14) - "[Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/words-for-thought-short-fiction-review-issue-152?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.C. Wise (4/21) --- ## [*Aurealis*](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue #189) Subscribe [here](https://aurealis.com.au/product-category/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "From the Cloud" by Stephen Higgins - "Out of Time" by Carolyn Galbraith - "Little Drid Makes a Call" by Andrew Renganathan Roberts - "Epimetheus" by Luke Weavell ### Nonfiction - William Walker, His Fiction and Now-Solved Mystery by Gillian Polack - Fallout as Critical Retrofuturism by Ani White - Building Empires and Stories: A Conversation with Nicola Zhang by Natalia Soriano --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issues 445 and 456) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Sparrow Tree](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-sparrow-tree/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alma Alexander - "[Song, Skin, Sea](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/song-skin-sea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tamara Vardomskaya - "[Concerto for Winds and Resistance](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/concerto-for-winds-and-resistance/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cara Masten DiGirolamo - "[In The Blood](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/in-the-blood/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Irvine - "[The Long Weeping Arms of the Parasitic Horde](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-long-weeping-arms-of-the-parasitic-horde/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bee Hyland - "[On the Origin of Song](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/on-the-origin-of-song/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Naim Kabir --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)() Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Macaroni Art in the Age of Filtration](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cole%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ryan Cole - "[D0G](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fordwalker%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tania Fordwalker - "[The Trajectory of Memory is Forward](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rajeev Prasad - "[Eternity in Their Hearts](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K. J. Khan - "[Shelter](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/aldsen%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nadia W. Aldsen - "[The Forgetting Code](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/macia%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Malena Salazar Maciá - "[Human Studies 401](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yee%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Abby Nicole Yee ### Nonfiction - [Sleeping to the Stars: The Science and Fiction of Cryosleep](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/collins%5F04%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jason Collins - [Feynman Lectures Riff: A Conversation with John Chu](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chu%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Hope and Friendship Will Carry Us Through: A Conversation with Suzanne Palmer](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 131) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Windows](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/windows/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byIbrahim Ojedokun - "[The Tale’s in the Telling](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-tales-in-the-telling/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAngela Slatter - "[Dromedary Mary](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/dromedary-mary/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byPhoenix Alexander - "[Wendigo](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/wendigo/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMichael Kelly --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (April 2026, Issue 51) ### Fiction - "A Past Life" by George Larson - "Grampa’s Shed" by K.b. Olszewski - "Just Birds" by Beau Maibaum - "The Ank Williams Story" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "The Melting Pot Of Us" by Khaled T. Aly - "The Slow Apocalypse Of The Clockwork Saints" by Lucien R. Starchild - "The Thing About Ashridge" by Bri Eberhart - "The Simoom" by Rex A. Paar - "We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program" by James Rumpel - "Grasshoppers" by Theodora Sterling --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[No Mother to Replace](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-42/no-mother-to-replace/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nosawema O. - "[In This Corner of the World](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-42/in-this-corner-of-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. E. Weisgerber - "[The Dog](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-42/the-dog/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phoenix Mendoza - "[After Messiaen: A Quartet for the End of Time](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-42/after-messiaen-a-quartet-for-the-end-of-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.B. Lemberg --- ## [*Diabolical Plots*](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026) Support [here](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[The House Knows](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-134a-the-house-knows-by-meghan-arcuri/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Meghan Arcuri - “[Davy Jones, Lobsterman](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-134b-davy-jones-lobsterman-by-daire-mcnally/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Daire McNally --- ## [*Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026, Issue 38) Subscribe [here](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Minority Museum" by T.T. Gibran - "On The Autonomy Of Whales" by Amanda Helms - "Copula" by Briana N Cox - "The Canines Never Lie" by Virgo Kevonté - "Midnight In The Devil’s Punchbowl" by Lisa Bennett Bolekaja - "What We Do" by Darise Jeanbaptiste ### Poetry - "This Time, Next Time" by Akua Lezli Hope - "Someday" by Christopher Leigh Silverberg - "Root Code" by Argelia Salmon --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 151) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Ten and Out](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#ten-and-out)" by Myna Chang - "[For Solomon Fishkowski Who Carved Chess Sets in Siberia](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#for-solomon-fishkowski-who-carved-chess-sets-in-siberia)" by KD Casey - "[Remembering Dodem Ansibar](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#remembering-dodem-ansibar)" by Sam E. Sutin - "[The Last Eleven Seconds](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#the-last-eleven-seconds)" David Farrow ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: By the Numbers](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#editorial-by-the-numbers) by Rebecca Halsey --- ## [*Flash Point SF*](https://flashpointsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 2) Subscribe [here](https://flashpointsf.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[I Crave My Meat a Little Rare](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/04/24/issue-2-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#i-crave-my-meat-a-little-rareby-rajiv-mote)" by Rajiv Moté - "[Driving On](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/04/24/issue-2-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#story-title-1)" by J. Y. Zhang - "[Grandfather’s Pond](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/04/24/issue-2-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#story-title-1)" by Aeryn Rudel - "[Raja](https://flashpointsf.com/2026/04/24/issue-2-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#story-title-1)" by Moh Afdhaal --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(April 2026) ### Fiction - "[House of Honeyed Soil](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/04/01/house-of-honeyed-soil/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Natalie Wollenweber --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 191) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Saint Zero of the Hollows and the Eagle Knight](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/saint-zero-of-the-hollows-and-the-eagle-knight/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by V.M. Ayala (4/9) - "[Hell Is Empty](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/hell-is-empty/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.R. Dawson (4/9) - "[Dad Died on Discord](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dad-died-on-discord/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Dana Hudson (4/16) - "[Six-Gun Vixen and the Machinist of Doom Valley \[Part 1\]](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/six-gun-vixen-and-the-machinist-of-doom-valley-part-one/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ashok K. Banker (4/16) - "[Update on Rules for the Spatiotemporal Use of Campus Spaces](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/update-on-rules-for-the-spatiotemporal-use-of-campus-spaces/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrea Kriz (4/23) - "[Six-Gun Vixen and the Machinist of Doom Valley \[Part 2\]](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/six-gun-vixen-and-the-machinist-of-doom-valley-part-two/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ashok K. Banker (4/23) - "[Empathetic Psychosis](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/empathetic-psychosis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Justin C. Key (4/30) - "[Time Management](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-management/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by P.A. Cornell (4/30) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: April 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Joseph Adams (4/9) - [Author Spotlight: V.M. Ayala](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-v-m-ayala-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Leighanna DeRouen (4/9) - [Author Spotlight: J.R. Dawson](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-j-r-dawson-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Phoebe Barton (4/9) - [Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-ashok-banker-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Erik Grove (4/16) - [Book Review: *Sauúti Terrors* by Eugen Bacon, Stephen Embleton, and Cheryl S. Ntumy, eds.](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-sauuti-terrors-eugen-bacon-stephen-embleton-and-cheryl-s-ntumy-eds/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Arley Sorg (4/16) - [Book Review: *The Witch* by Marie N’Diaye, translated by Jordan Stump](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-witch-by-marie-ndiaye-translated-by-jordan-stump/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (4/23) - [Author Spotlight: Justin C. Key](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-justin-c-key-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (4/30) - [Book Review: *Aicha* by Soraya Bouazzaoui](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-aicha-by-soraya-bouazzaoui/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (4/30) --- ## [*Mythmaxis*](https://mythaxis.co.uk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(Spring 2026, Issue 45) Support [here](https://ko-fi.com/mythaxismagazine?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Agentic Necklace](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/the-agentic-necklace.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Frank Baird Hughes - "[On Miracles](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/on-miracles.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P. W. Lewis - "[The Perfect Mother](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/the-perfect-mother.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jude Clee - "[The Negotiation](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/the-negotiation.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vanessa Fabiano - "[Search History](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/search-history.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jon Clendaniel - "[Pultu's Lesson](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/pultus-lesson.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sean Myers ### Nonfiction - [Reintroduction](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/reintroduction.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Leon Hudson - [The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/the-spear-cuts-through-waterd-simon-jimenez.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mattia Ravasi - [Short Reviews – October 2025 to January 2026](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/short-reviews-oct-2025-to-jan-2026.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Leon Hudson --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[False Hope](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00616-7?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hall Jameson - "Homelessness of the heart" by Tomias Keno - "[Ozymandias undead](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01065-y?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bryce Saputo - "[New year, old me](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01067-w?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Robert Blasiak - "[Waiting for them](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01069-8?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen - "[The memory dealer of Old Jeddah](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01071-0?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Addidi Youness - "[In the flesh](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01073-y?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Jasmin Kirkbride](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01073-y?ref=andrewliptak.com#author-0) - "[Immolation](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01039-0?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lucy Zhang --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 163) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Final Girl Trap](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-final-girl-trap/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.C. Wise (4/8) - "[The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-spiders-you-swallow-in-your-sleep/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wendy Nikel (4/15) - "[We Are All in the Same Boat](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/we-are-all-in-the-same-boat/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAvi Burton (4/22) - "[graveyard of butterflies](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/graveyard-of-butterflies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (4/29) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: April 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-april-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (4/8) - [Author Spotlight: A.C. Wise](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-a-c-wise-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (4/8) - [The H Word: Why Do We Like the Weird?](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-why-do-we-like-the-weird/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by RSL (4/15) - [Author Spotlight: Avi Burton](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-avi-burton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (4/22) - [Interview: Dan Coxon](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-dan-coxon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alex Puncekar (4/29) --- ## [*Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine*](https://www.penumbric.com/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Vol 9, Issue 6) ### Fiction - "[You Must Be This Tall](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/dehaanTall.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Laura DeHaan - "[Formative Years](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/westFormative.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jacqueline West - "[Bones for Safe Keeping](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/winterBones.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Charlie Winter - "[Body Count](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/earlyBody.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sage Early - "[Carrion](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/hirschCarrion.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jordan Hirsch - "[The House with White Walls](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/beehrHouse.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dana Beehr - "[Charts of the Sorcerer 1: Duel](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/emeryDuel.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phil Emery - "[The Archaeology of Yarn](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/daltonYarn.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A J Dalton - "[Return to Foreverland](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/kevonteReturn.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Virgo Kevonté - "[A Bargain's a Bargain](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/leenBargain.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gerri Leen - "[So That We May Remember](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/songRemember.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rina Song - "[Unabashed Appetite](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/sargentUnabashed.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lynne Sargent - "[Alakhani](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/kashyapAlakhani.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ananya Kashyap - "[My God, What Has Happened?](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/townendHappened.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by SJ Townend - "[In the wake of this decay](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/smithDecay.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mahaila Smith - "[The New Air](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/hudsonAir.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Neil James Hudson - "[The Wedding Speech You Weren't Asked to Give, for the Couple Who Didn't Invite You](https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/krigerWedding.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S.R. Kriger --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(April 2026) ### Fiction - "[Let’s Go to the Zoo](https://reactormag.com/lets-go-to-the-zoo-louis-evans/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Evans - "[The Day-Blind Stars](https://reactormag.com/the-day-blind-stars-christopher-rowe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christopher Rowe - "[I Spin Records Into Gold](https://reactormag.com/i-spin-records-into-gold-daria-lavelle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Daria Lavelle --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026, Issue 34) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[My Favorite Human](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/my-favorite-human/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Corrie Haldane - "[Sacrifice Homecoming](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/sacrifice-homecoming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Manuela Amiouny - "[The Stars Play Tug-of-War Sometimes](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-stars-play-tug-of-war-sometimes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeannie Marschall - "[The Numbers](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-numbers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Susan Taitel - "[Sea Witch](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/sea-witch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Faith Allington - "[A Noose is a Knot](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-noose-is-a-knot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. R. Edgeworth - "[Our House](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/our-house/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanor Lennox - "[The Vampire Contemplates Skin Care](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-vampire-contemplates-skin-care/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lynne Sargent - [The Things You’ll Wish You’d Known](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-things-youll-wish-youd-known/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kristen Koopman --- ## [*Solarpunk Magazine*](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March/April 2026, Issue 26) Support [here](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/shop/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “The Mycelium Daughter” by Bella Chacha - “Hangnail” by Emmett Amphibia - “The Baobab Data Tree” by Irene W. Collins ### Poetry - “The Soft Reboot of the World” by Aspen Greenwood - “The Ships of Terabythia” by Kray Van Kirk ### Essay - “Humans Aren’t the Only Victims of War” by Aya Al-Hattab --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Houses of the Stars in Heaven](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-houses-of-the-stars-in-heaven/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ferdison Cayetano - "[Underneath the Underneath](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/underneath-the-underneath/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Audrey Zhou - "[The Tiger in the Room | 방안의호랑이](https://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2026/04/27/the-tiger-in-the-room/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Moon Young Park, translated by Paige Aniyah Morris - "[Heavens Fall | 杞忧](https://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2026/04/29/heavens-fall-%e6%9d%9e%e5%bf%a7/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lu Qiucha, translated by Hal Y. Zhang ### Poetry - "[Many of you have been asking what happens when an angel dies](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/many-of-you-have-been-asking-what-happens-when-an-angel-dies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Seoung Kim - "[Code Blue](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/code-blue/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Victoria Ojo - "[laurels](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/laurels/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Crystal Sidell - "[Dead City Dreaming](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/dead-city-dreaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joshua Ginsberg - "[Skiinfolk](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/skiinfolk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jamie McGhee - "[Refuse](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/refuse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Megan Branning - "[The Shut-in on the 55th Floor](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-shut-in-on-the-55th-floor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Abby Nicole Yee - "[The Approach of the Dead | نهج الموتى ](https://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2026/05/01/the-approach-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ali Wajeeh, translated by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp ### Reviews - Monday: [*Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre* by Joy Sanchez-Taylor](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dispelling-fantasy-authors-of-color-reimagine-a-genre-by-joy-sanchez-taylor/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nick Hubble - Wednesday: [*When They Burned the Butterfly* by Wen-Yi Lee](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-they-burned-the-butterfly-by-wen-yi-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kyle R. Garton - Friday: [*The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses* by Malka Older](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-potency-of-ungovernable-impulses-by-malka-older/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Safia H. Senhaji - Monday: [*The Faith of Beasts* by James S. A. Corey](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-faith-of-beasts-by-james-s-a-corey/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bill Capossere - Wednesday: [*Book of Potions* by Lauren K. Watel](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/book-of-potions-by-lauren-k-watel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Danielle Hanson - Friday: [*Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures* edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/climate-imagination-dispatches-from-hopeful-futures-edited-by-joey-eschrich-and-ed-finn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seamus Sullivan - Monday: [*Krackle’s Last Movie* by Chelsea Sutton](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/krackles-last-movie-by-chelsea-sutton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hana Carolina - Wednesday: [*Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters* edited by Randy Brown](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/cryptids-kaiju-corn-poems-and-micro-stories-about-modern-midwest-monsters-edited-by-randy-brown/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Thomas E. Simmons - Friday: [*Isaac* by Allee Mead](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/isaac-by-allee-mead/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Kingsley --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (April 2026) ### Fiction - "[Strawberries](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/strawberries?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires - "[Corpse Pose](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/corpse-pose?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rich Larson - "[Northern Lights and Southern Robots](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/northern-lights-and-southern-robots?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brenda Cooper --- ## [](https://solarpunkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March/April 2026, Issue 69) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Welcome to Heroism](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/welcome-to-heroism/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Wiswell (4/7) - "[The Woman Who Stole Flowers](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-woman-who-stole-flowers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Theodora Goss (4/7) - "[Permanent Press](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/permanent-press/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sunwoo Jeong (4/7) ### Poetry - "[Nuclear Deterrence Doll](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/nuclear-deterrence-doll/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Mixon (4/7) - "[The Truth About Wolves](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-truth-about-wolves/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen (4/7) ### Nonfiction - [What Does It Mean to Be Immortal?](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-immortal/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang (4/7) - [What Prose Writers Can Learn from Script Writers (and What Not to Learn)](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/what-prose-writers-can-learn-from-script-writers-and-what-not-to-learn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jane Espenson (4/7) - [Interview: Sunwoo Jeong](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-sunwoo-jeong/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (4/7) --- Thanks for reading, and check back at the end of the month: I'll update the links for stories as they come out. I'll have the first book list for April coming next week. ### When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/footfall-larry-niven-jerry-pournelle-alien-invasion-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-03-27T21:00:02.000Z Throughout the ages, people have looked to the skies and wondered if we're alone, and after that brief, terrifying thought, what might happen if whoever's out there arrives on our doorstep. It's an idea that we've seen throughout the history of science fiction, from H.G. Wells' malevolent invaders in *War of the Worlds* or Cixin Liu's *The Three-Body Problem* to the uninterested in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's *Roadside Picnic* and even to the more benevolent (ish) as in Arthur C. Clarke's *Childhood's End*. These are stories that are often about our anxieties for our place in the world, and [*Footfall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345323446?ref=andrewliptak.com), the 1985 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle serves as a useful time capsule of the fears that we'd accumulated throughout the decades of the Cold War. The book kicks off in 1985, astronomers detect an object moving through the solar system from Saturn towards Earth, and quickly realize that it's not a natural comet or asteroid: it's an alien spacecraft. Our hails to it go unanswered, and the US dispatches congressman and space enthusiast Wes Dawson to a Soviet space station to greet them. Upon its arrival, the alien ship launches an attack against the space station, capturing Dawson and the Soviet crew, and against the various militaries of the world, shooting down aircraft and missiles. It's a bloodbath, and they quickly gain control of space and the air, leaving humanity with few options to strike back. The aliens are called the Fithp, who look a bit like baby elephants with several prehensile trunks. They've spent nearly a century traveling from their home near Alpha Centauri onboard their ship, the *Thuktun Flishithy*, to Earth. With a good chunk of their population going into stasis for the trip, they eventually arrive in our system and set up shop on an asteroid near Saturn that they call the "Foot," before turning their attention to Earth, hoping to turn it into their new home. The aliens live in a herd-based society, and they had arisen from the ashes of a larger conflict on their own world, where a predecessor civilization developed a considerable amount of technology before wiping themselves out. Upon their arrival at Earth, they're bewildered by humanity and why they've attempted to greet them peacefully, rather than duke it out and figure out who is the superior "herd." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Over the rest of the book, humanity works to figure out how to counter the invasion. Their militaries severely degraded, the US and USSR launch a massive nuclear strike against the Fithp when they touch down in Kansas, wiping out their initial invasion, and astonishing the invaders at the extreme measure. From there, they double down on their efforts, redirecting the Foot and sending the asteroid crashing into the Indian Ocean, causing widespread devastation, before following up by landing ground forces in Africa, where they get bogged down when the humans begin using asymmetric tactics. As they work to pacify the humans, the United States has formulated their own plan: launch a ship called the Michael, inspired by the [Project Orion concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project%5FOrion%5F%28nuclear%5Fpropulsion%29?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which a spacecraft is propelled by nuclear bombs. This ship would be launched into orbit quickly, where they'd use its onboard weapons and smaller fighter craft to attack the *Thuktun Flishithy.* A big, dramatic space battle ensues, and humanity ultimately prevails, forcing the Fithp to surrender. The result is a book that's a bit self-indulgent (the science fiction writers are literally stand-ins for Niven, Pournelle, and Robert A. Heinlein, and the pair are more than willing to drop in a lecture about the values of self reliance or the pitfalls of the US welfare system), but scattering the story across a bunch of viewpoints is an approach that I like, especially when you're looking at big problems [that the world is confronting](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/), [like an alien invasion](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-h-wilson-hole-in-the-sky-first-contact-sci-fi-book-review/). By playing this story out across its huge cast of characters, from various members of the government, members of a doomsday prepper group who've set up an isolated community, reporters, science fiction writers, astronauts, and the Fithp, Niven and Pournelle get to really think through the complexity that an alien invasion might bring, nicely grounding the story and playing out a world that's contending with an ongoing disaster, while its characters are also figuring out how to make it to the next day. [How the US military uses sci-fi to imagine the future of warHow the military is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-93.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/f73f1092-98b3-477d-b139-00e7c57c8434_4276x2851.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) But what really captured my attention is how this book is the product of a particular moment in US history, and how there's more than a small meta element to all of this. Science fiction writers have long imagined what futuristic wars might look like: it's a tradition that you can trace all the way back to the late 1800s with British Army Colonel Sir George Tomkyns Chesney's novella [*The Battle of Dorking*](https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-battle-of-dorking?ref=andrewliptak.com), and which you can follow throughout the 20th century through pulp science fiction to fictional scenarios from military officers all the way up to the modern day. The future of warfare looked pretty damn science fictional by the time you reached the late 1970s and 1980s. The Cold War did something that prior conflicts couldn't: threaten humanity with the possibility of outright extinction with nuclear weapons. This was a battlefield that stretched from the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Eastern Europe to beyond Earth's atmosphere and to the surface of the Moon. It involved new-fangled technologies like computers, which did everything from allocated resources and logistics to guide the missiles that could circle the Earth and deliver a nuclear bomb to a target on the other side. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan [made an speech to the American public](https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/documents/sdi-speech.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) in which he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a weapons program that would utilize a range of new technologies, including lasers, particle beams and missiles, weaponizing space in an effort to overcome the strategy of mutually assured destruction that deterred both the US and USSR from launching ICBMs at one another. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/IMG_9448.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak It was also a strategy that a group known as the Citizen's Advisory Council was advocating for. The group formed in 1980 following Reagan's election to assist the incoming administration's transition team with its science and space policies. In his book [*Reagan's War Stories: A Cold War Presidency*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781682477786?ref=andrewliptak.com), Benjamin Griffin noted that the group was "the brainchild of science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle," who was already heavily connected to California's Republican party and now had a somewhat direct connection to the new White House. Through his work and his science fiction, Pournelle had long explored the intersection of technology and warfare, and with Reagan's election, now had the opportunity to try and transform some of those ideas into reality. "Strategic defense was the centerpiece of their agenda," Griffin writes, and the group was composed of not only science fiction editors and writers like Jim Baen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Niven, Pournelle, Heinlein, and others, but also physicists, computer scientists, engineers, and even astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Fred Haise, and Phil Chapman. The group met several times before Reagan entered office, and ultimately produced a "two-hundred page document covering a wide array of space-related issues the members hoped the Reagan administration would address," Griffin explains, with the writers taking "scientific jargon into language that 'made it far more interesting.'" The report landed on Reagan's desk who "reportedly read the entire document rather than just the executive summary," and it impressed him so much that his first National Security Advisor, Richard Allen, made it a point to consult with the group when it came to space policy. The group was an influence in the conception of Reagan's rollout of the SDI, Griffin writes: "The speech's primary writer, Dana Rohrabacher, was in contact with the science-fiction community as he drafted it and was aware that 'a lot of creativity' was available to the administration on space issues," even borrowing language from their white paper. Later that summer, Pournelle and fellow author Dean Ing published a fictionalized version of their report, which they titled *Mutual Assured Survival*, which advocated for the initiative's various priorities and technological suggestions. Shortly thereafter, Niven and Pournelle, who had collaborated 1977's [*Lucifer's Hammer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780449208137?ref=andrewliptak.com) and 1981's [*Oath of Fealty*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647100483?ref=andrewliptak.com), teamed up again for *Footfall* in 1985, which bears the marks of their time with the Citizen's Advisory Council. The pair play out a scenario where space has been turned into a battlefield, and through the Fithp, they demonstrate the use of the sorts of advanced weapons the SDI could lead to, and that such a system could be used to protect the world from the threat that the Cold War arms race posed. While *Footfall* was a bestseller, it and the SDI were controversial within science fiction fandom: the field had largely been divided by the experiences of the Vietnam War, and prominent authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke advocated against the program, with the latter testifying before Congress against the probability that such a program would militarize space and advocated for more peaceful and cooperative solutions. His testimony prompted Heinlein to excoriate him at one of the CSC gatherings, which damaged their long friendship for years afterwards, and in which Clarke tearfully asked Greg Bear as he left, "do most American science fiction writers feel this way?" This entire episode prompted editors David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer to point out in their anthology [*The Hard SF Renaissance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780312876364?ref=andrewliptak.com)that US and UK fandom had reached a division, and that this was a consequence "of the overt right-wing politicization of American Hard SF that began in the 1970s." In his book [*The History of Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781137569592?ref=andrewliptak.com), Adam Roberts goes further, noting that *Footfall* and other similar books *"*reflected a widespread political shift, the dominance of Reagan's scorched-earth Republicanism in the USA and Thatcher's monetarist Conservatism in the UK." *Footfall* is a full-throated advocation for a future where space becomes a battleground for Earthly affairs, and it's a good demonstration of how narrative can be a useful tool for conveying a complicated topic to a wider audience. In many ways, it's a gripping yarn that comes with plenty of action and excitement, while also delivering the group's leanings to the wider public: an advanced network of spaceborne weapons could nullify the long-established policy of armed deterrence. I'd like to think that their goals were well-intentioned: the mutually assured destruction doctrine carries with it [plenty of](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/) [dramatic scenarios](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kathryn-bigelow-house-of-dynamite-trailer-watch-nuclear-war/) that will lead to our extinction in a matter of minutes. But it's also the continuation of a mindset that only serves to escalate the tensions between global superpowers, and a rejection of the policies and agreements that would rein in the use of these destructive weapons. Published nearly four decades ago, the tensions between the United States and Soviet Union *Footfall* depicts might feel like ancient history, given that the former began to disintegrate in December 1991, and Reagan's SDI program ultimately never did anything but cost taxpayer dollars. But the threat of the apocalyptic destruction nuclear war could bring has never gone away. While the US and USSR signed on to international treaties that curtailed the use of ICBMs, the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the growing tensions between the nine countries who possess nuclear weapons serves as a stark reminder that the factors that resulted in the formation of the Citizen's Advisory Council and the SDI are still simmering. *Footfall*, for all that it brings out a brash, cinematic blockbuster of an alien invasion, feels less like a cautionary tale than it does remind us that we haven't really left that era in the past. ### For All Mankind is coming to an end with Season 6 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/for-all-mankind-season-6-renewal-ending-star-city/ Last updated: 2026-03-26T13:00:54.000Z I have some good / bad news for you: Good news: Apple has [renewed](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2026/03/apple-tv-renews-award-winning-and-globally-acclaimed-space-drama-for-all-mankind-for-sixth-and-final-season/?ref=andrewliptak.com) its *outstanding* science fiction series *For All Mankind* for a sixth season. Bad news: Season Six will be the last one. Good news: Season 6 will fill out the plan that the showrunners set out to do: bring the story up to the modern day. Good news: A spinoff, *Star City*, is coming on May 29th. I've [raved](https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/1/20941718/for-all-mankind-review-apple-tv-plus-ronald-moore/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about this show since the beginning: an alternate history in which the Soviet Union reached the Moon first, prolonging the space race and over the course of the following seasons, took us out to not only the Moon, but to Mars and beyond. It's a really smart show, one that really digs into the reasons for why the space race took place and plays out as a fun thought experiment for what might have been, looking at the role that the Cold War and conflict played in our endeavors beyond our planet. Season five begins streaming tomorrow (March 27th), and it's teasing out a story of the Martian colonists who're getting frustrated with Earth's oversight, frustrations that threaten to bubble up into revolution. [A revolution is coming on For All MankindSeason 5 debuts on March 27th![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-92.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/For_All_Mankind_Photo_050105-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/for-all-mankind-season-5-apple-scifi-trailer-watch/) The show begins in the 1970s, and with each successive season, it's jumped forward a decade, which should mean that Season 6 brings us up to the 2020s. Speaking to [*Variety*](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/for-all-mankind-end-renewed-final-season-6-apple-tv-1236697248/?ref=andrewliptak.com), series co-creator Matt Wolpert said that “I think from the beginning, the thing that we were focused on, and we didn’t know quite how many seasons it would take to get there, was that we wanted to reach the present day.” > “We wanted to tell the arc of the story from the initial divergence of 1969, and then reach the present moment, and see just how different the world we’re in now could have been had we kept pushing for progress and kept pushing forward as a species.” I've seen over the years that the Wolpert and his co-creators (Ronald D. Moore and Ben Nedivi) had [plotted out a seven-season run for the show](https://collider.com/for-all-mankind-seven-season-plan-writers-comments/?ref=andrewliptak.com), telling *Collider* in 2023 that "early on, we planned this out over six or seven seasons, so we're still on the road map, and I'm proud to say that we've stuck to, I think, the big goalposts we've had so far." Crucially, plans change as time goes on, and it seems as though this is bringing everything to a good closing point. And this isn't the last that we've seen of the world: after Season 5 finishes out its run in May, Apple will debut a spinoff series: *Star City*, which goes back into the heights of the Cold War from the perspective of the Soviet Union: > But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humankind forward. Earlier this week, Apple released a first teaser for the show, and it looks pretty excellent: ### Stephen Colbert is writing a Lord of the Rings movie URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-shadow-of-the-past-stephen-colbert-film/ Last updated: 2026-03-25T15:17:43.000Z Warner Bros. and Peter Jackson are returning to Middle-earth in an interesting and unexpected way. This morning, Jackson [released a short video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DWSw38BAKWu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and provided a brief update about Andy Serkis's film *Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum*, and announced a new project: *Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past*, with one of the most qualified people to write it: Stephen Colbert. In the video, Colbert explains he had been thinking about some of the material that didn't make it into Jackson's original trilogy, and how those un-adapted episodes might fit into them. "Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?" Colbert worked with his son Peter and came up with a way to frame it. He eventually brought up the idea to Jackson in 2024, who liked it, and they began working with Philippa Boyens to develop the story. They've since brought it to New Line Cinemas and Warner Bros., who've set the wheels into motion to continue its progress. --- The project comes after Warner Bros. has been working to expand the Middle-earth franchise. Back in 2022, film producer Saul Zaentz's company sold the film rights that it had long held for *The Lord of the Rings* to Embracer Group, a Swedish media holding company, which had produced a handful of video games set in the world. They made their intentions clear at the time of the sale: they would explore "additional movies based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and continue to provide new opportunities for fans to explore this fictive world through merchandising and other experiences." That's since been realized: a year later, Warner Bros. [struck a deal](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warner-bros-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-films/) with the company for more *Lord of the Rings* films (joining the animated film *War of the Rohirrim*, which was announced in 2021), announcing in 2024 that they would be bringing back Jackson, Boyens, and Fran Walsh to produce a pair of new films, the first of which would be *The Hunt for Gollum*. [Gollum, Gollum!Andy Serkis will direct a new Lord of the Rings film about Gollum![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-90.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/BB1C96D1-F84C-4009-ACB9-2034DB4A4B50.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gollum-gollum/) In the video, Jackson noted that Serkis has been hard at work on the script and preproduction for the film: "a lot of the old team is back together again, familiar faces, and some new faces... it's looking amazing." The project is reportedly bringing back Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Elijah Wood as Frodo, [as well as Kate Winslet](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/kate-winslet-lord-of-the-rings-hunt-for-gollum-1236527619/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in some unknown capacity. It's tentatively scheduled to hit theaters for December 17th, 2027\. (All of this is separate from Amazon's Middle-earth franchise, *The Rings of Power,* which recently wrapped up its third season, and which is expected to start work on its fourth season later this year.) Now, it looks like they've settled on that second film, *The Lord of the Rings*: *Shadow of the Past*. Colbert outlined what he had in mind: looking at a handful of chapters early in *The Fellowship of the Ring* that Jackson largely skipped in his adaptation, starting with the book's third chapter "Three is Company," and running through "A Short Cut to Mushrooms," "A Conspiracy Unmasked," "The Old Forest," "In the House of Tom Bombadil," and "Fog on the Barrow-downs." The pair buried the lede in their video. this is a film that could take on one of the trilogy's biggest omissions: the absence of Tom Bombadil, who Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin encounter shortly after they set out from the Shire. To back up a bit: in *The Fellowship of the Ring*, Gandalf set out from Bag End after Bilbo's party and in which Frodo was given the home and the Ring. Realizing that there's something off about the ring, he does some research and discovers that it's likely The One Ring, heads back, and tells Frodo that they need to bring it to the Elves in Rivendell to figure out their next steps. Sam accompanies him and they're eventually joined by Merry and Pippin. In the books, this takes place over 18 years. In "Three is Company," Frodo departs and is joined by Sam and Pippin days later, where they then encounter one of the Nazgûl. In "A Short Cut to Mushrooms," they meet Farmer Maggot, who helps them with some food, and they're then joined by Merry. These parts are in Jackson's adaptation, but they're squished around a bit, but he largely skipped what followed in "A Conspiracy Unmasked", in which Frodo tells his companions about the Ring and his quest at his new house in the village of Crickhollow, where they decide to go through the Old Forest to evade the Black Riders who're hunting for the Ring. In "The Old Forest", the quartet gets lost and encounters a malevolent tree called Old Man Willow, which traps Merry and Pippin, and who're then saved by [Tom Bombadil](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Tom%5FBombadil?ref=andrewliptak.com), who lives nearby. They head to his house in "In the House of Tom Bombadil," where he reveals that he knows about their quest and it's shown that the Ring doesn't affect him. From there, the hobbits travel through the [Barrow-downs](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Barrow-downs?ref=andrewliptak.com), a site that's home to a number of graves dating back to the world's First Age, and which is home to some spirits called [*Barrow-wights*](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Barrow-wights?ref=andrewliptak.com), which attack and capture them, only for them to be saved once again by Tom Bombadil, who destroys the wight. After freeing them, they take some blades, and continue onto their journey, which takes them to the town of Bree and the Prancing Pony, which is where the story once again converges with Jackson's adaptation. Boyens, Jackson, and Walsh ultimately cut this segment of Tolkien's story for their film, with Jackson later explaining that meeting Tom Bombadil didn't really advance the story of Frodo carrying the Ring to Mordor. It's an omission that brought about a lot of criticism for the film trilogy as it was coming out, but it's a criticism that's long since been overshadowed – it does take a long time for the quest to really get started in the books, and Jackson's approach for the film really does make a lot of sense. I got chills when Colbert revealed himself. While he's well known for his work as a comedian, for *The Colbert Report*, and as the host of *The Late Show*, he's also a *huge* fan of Tolkien's works: Jackson described him as having an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, something that he's showcased throughout his shows and as moderator for big panels and the like. He also appeared in Jackson's films: as "Laketown Spy" in *The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.* Back in July, Colbert [announced](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqEZx6TmfI&ref=andrewliptak.com) that Paramount was cancelling *The Late Show*, a role that he'd held since September 2015\. With the show coming to an end at the end of May, Jackson noted that he now had time to work on this new project. Following Jackson's video, the [studio released a synopsis](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/stephen-colbert-writing-lord-of-the-rings-movie-1236546504/?ref=andrewliptak.com): > “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began." This is pretty interesting: it's not a "let's film these lost chapters" situation, but potentially an interesting way to frame this particular episode. In the novels, Frodo and Sam bring the Ring to Mount Doom and it's destroyed (Today, March 25th!). From there, the Hobbits recover over the course of the summer and return home to the Shire in October/November, and the events of "The Scouring of the Shire" take place. (Another unrealized – and I'd argue more consequential – episode from the Jackson adaptation.) Two years later to the day, the Third Age comes to an end: Sam's daughter Elenor is born, and later that year, Frodo departs from Middle-earth for the Grey Havens, leaving behind Sam, Merry, and Pippin. From the looks of it, this film is going to be doing what *The War of Rohirrim, The Rings of Power*, and *The Hunt for Gollum* have been doing: drawing on the appendixes from *The Lord of the Rings* to build out the story and world a bit more. Appendix B provides some extensive timelines of the world and what comes after the War of the Ring: 14 years would line up around the year 1436 in that timeline, in which Tolkien provided: > "King Elessar *\[Aragorn\]* rides north and dwells for a while by Lake Evendim. He comes to the Brandywine Bridge, and there greets his friends. He gives the Star of the Dúnedain to Master Samewise, and Elanor is is made a maid of honour to Queen Arwen." In the years immediately prior, Merry had become "Master of Buckland," Perry is named Thain – a sort of master-at-arms for the Shire, and Sam is elected mayor of Hobbiton. This particular adventure featured in this film doesn't appear in the Appendixes, but it does feel like it could fit with where the characters have ended up: the trio adjusting to this new world and their roles in it, while setting off to relive the glory days of their adventure, with Elanor learning about it this particular lost episode of the tale as they do so. With *The Hunt for Gollum* (potentially) bringing back Wood and McKellen to reprise their roles, this seems like an ideal way to bring Sean Astin (Sam), Dominic Monaghan (Merry), and Billy Boyd (Pippin) to come back in a way that makes sense for a sequel film a quarter century after the original films, and I could see them taking advantage of the de-aging advances that's been utilized to varying success in the last decade. If they go this route, I can see Wood taking part (he has been coy about what his involvement will be with Serkis's film, but [has said](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/elijah-wood-if-the-lord-of-the-rings-didnt-screw-me-up-what-will-83bh8f8j9?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'd like to return to the role if able). While Tom Bombadil was skipped over in Jackson's films, Amazon [did include him in the second season of *The Rings of Power*](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/tom-bombadil-the-rings-of-power-first-look?srsltid=AfmBOorWsgFi1tEFMEr9a39D9b%5Fiva8trf63xeENnWjw-evDCuRgPozU&ref=andrewliptak.com), where he's played by actor Rory Kinnear. Should he be part of this project, it'll be an interesting opportunity to try and tackle the character and to insert some additional nuance or complexity to Jackson's films. This is all a fine line to walk: legacy sequels and endless franchises are what audiences really do seem to want, even if people complain up and down about the lack of originality in Hollywood. Jackson's *Lord of the Rings* trilogy set an impossibly high bar, and his *Hobbit* trilogy, Amazon's *Rings of Power,* and *The War of the Rohirrim* haven't come close to it in vision or quality. I'd also worry about the sort of wide-eyed, fannish "what if *this* happens??" story conception that ultimately doesn't advance the story other than bring back fan-favorite characters in an endless string of derivative scenarios. ([See my issues](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-book-of-boba-fett-season-1-review/) with *The Book of Boba Fett*.) That said, I was encouraged by Serkis's involvement in *The Hunt for Gollum* – if there's anyone who understands the character and story, it's him – and Colbert penning *Shadow of the Past* strikes me as a positive sign: there's nothing superficial about his love of this world. But I do worry that there isn't quite the overarching vision for the future of this franchise is beyond stripping Tolkien down to the bone for these types of projects. But ultimately we'll have to see how these two films turn out. I don't think that I'll hold out for something hitting the level of the originals, but I do hope that they'll slot in nicely alongside them. ### Choosing one's path URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-rainseekers-matthew-kressel-sci-fi-novella-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-03-20T14:00:52.000Z Towards the end of Matthew Kressel's novella [*The Rainseekers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250392435?ref=andrewliptak.com), his narrator makes an astute observation: "those who find others dull aren't digging deep enough. Inside every person is a story worth telling, and we have only ourselves to blame if we don't perk up our ears and listen." It's a point that anchors this short read, and as a journalist, it's something that has long rung true for me. It's a good way to look for stories that have an impact, and it's what makes this such a delightful and thought-provoking read. In the somewhat distant future, humanity has spread out into the solar system and has begun terraforming Mars. The atmosphere has changed enough that plants have begun to grow, and under the right conditions, someone can breathe outside. What's missing is rain, and scientists believe that the first rainfall is imminent. To capture the moment, a small group of inhabitants put together an expedition and begin chasing a weather front that – if all goes well – will see the first raindrops fall on the red planet. Accompanying the group is Sakuja Salazar, a former influencer who had risen to incredible fame back on Earth, only to eventually realize that her life and work was incredibly unfulfilling. After crashing out, she picked up and left to travel the solar system in an effort to find some sort of meaning. She ends up on Mars, and took up photography, which attracted the attention of a magazine editor who wants her to document the trip out into the wastelands. It's with this framing that Kressel's story really shines. Sakuja is there to document the trip, and as she photographs their journey, she begins talking to her companions, teasing out their stories. One tattooed woman tells the story of how her Hasidicfather left his secluded upbringing and ended up on Mars to meet her biologist mother, the expedition's mechanic explains how he took up his job after a rough upbringing in the foster system and overcoming addition, and while one of their drivers details her backstory of domestic abuse and a lengthy prison sentence. By probing their stories (and recounting her own), Sakuja reveals how everyone's lives are made up of small decisions, happenstance, opportunities, and circumstances that ultimately bring them together as unlikely companions on this expedition. It's a fine character study, if a bit selective of people with tragic pasts, all coming to a point that each person arrived where they are because of the decisions that they made. Sakuja realized that her life hawking products on social media was empty when she learns two years after the fact that her best friend was killed in a drone accident, and decides to change her life. Jivanta explains that her father decided to get out of an arranged marriage and his insular world after realizing that he wasn't satisfied with its constraints, Doug decided to throw himself into his studies to get away from his upbringing, and Shabnan eventually snaps after her abusive husband puts his hands on her one too many times and kills him in self defense. Something that I've been thinking a lot about writing recently is how the stories that work the best are the ones that are about how the decisions a character makes shapes their journey. It's their decisions that show how they react to the changes in their path, how they overcome problems and conflicts big and small, ensuring that they aren't just coasting along on momentum. They're an active participant in their journey. This easily could have been a more passive book: Sakuja just listening to the stories of her fellow passengers as they roll along the Martian surface, but Kressel balances these stories along with the journey that they're undertaking – and the decisions that each expedition member makes along the way to reach their destination. They run into plenty of problems, from mechanical breakdowns to fatal accidents to rough terrain, but as they move forward, almost everyone is making the choice to keep going – the same choice that each character vignette has reinforced: everyone chooses to keep moving forward, little by little, until they find themselves in one another's company. ### Dune: Part Three teases a grim future for the galaxy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-three-denis-villeneuve-frank-herbert-messiah/ Last updated: 2026-03-25T20:51:41.000Z Warner Bros. has dropped the first teaser trailer for Denis Villeneuve's *Dune: Part Three.* The film is being billed as the "epic conclusion" to the *Dune* saga and adapts Frank Herbert's novel *Dune: Messiah,* picking up the story of Paul Atreides 17 years after the events of the last film as he figures out how to navigate his existence as leader of the Fremen and galaxy while also protecting his family. There's a lot to take in here: glimpses of the ongoing, genocidal war that Paul has instigated, of the threats that other powers in the galactic hierarchy that are threatening to topple him, and conflicts within his family that could undermine everything. It looks as though this'll be a much darker film. Here's the trailer: *Dune: Messiah* is a really interesting novel, and it looks like this is going to be a really intriguing continuation from the first films. Speaking on a live-stream ahead of the teaser's release, [Villeneuve noted that this film is](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/dune-3-zendaya-robert-pattinson-trailer-1236535615/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "a very different movie than the first ones. It’s a good idea to come back to those world, not by nostalgia, but by urgency. If the first movie was contemplation, a boy exploring a new world, and the second one is a war movie, this one is a thriller. It is action-packed and tense.” That's fitting, because the novel really takes the story of Paul and upends everything, turning into a real meditation on what power does to a person. It's going to be really, *really* interesting to see how audiences respond to this film, because it's going to take Paul to some unexpected places. *Dune: Part Three* finishes off part of the story that Villeneuve began in 2021 with *Part One* and continued in 2024 with *Part Two*. Those first two films did what had stymied filmmakers for decades: successfully adapting [Frank Herbert's epic](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441013593?ref=andrewliptak.com) – and dense – space opera for cinema. While he adapted the first book in two parts, this third part moves onto the next book in the series, *Dune: Messiah*, a radical take on the story that angered its original editor so much that he refused to publish it. [The original Dunes Part 1 and 2Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is now out in theaters, and it’s a good opportunity to look back on how it was originally published![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-82.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/430074146_919100470216620_4037519820437062827_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/frank-herbert-dune-serialized-analog-denis-villeneuve/) Herbert originally serialized *Dune World* in *Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction*, starting in December 1963, and after a little trouble, published *Dune* through Chilton, a publisher traditionally known for its car manuals, in 1965\. While not initially a hit, it soon found an audience in the counter-culture movement Ace published its edition in 1967\. The novel follows a young noble called Paul Atreides, whose family is assigned as caretakers for a desert planet called Arrakis. Shortly after they arrive, a rival family called the Harkonnens retakes the planet and kills his family. Paul and his mother are forced to flee into the planet's deserts, where they link up with the native Fremen, who believe that Paul is a Messiah-like figure called the Lisan al-Gaib who was foretold to will help them free the planet. Paul has some innate psychic powers, the product of a generations-long breeding program from an order known as the Bene Gesserit, and can see into the future. He has some frightening visions: he'll lead the Fremen to victory, but in doing so, will unleash a jihad that'll consume the galaxy, killing tens of billions of people. He ends up taking up the mantle of the Fremen to retake Arrakis, and ends up kicking off that galaxy-wide genocide. Paul, as it turns out, was never really a hero, but a cautionary tale. That's where Herbert picks up the story with the second installment: *Dune Messiah*. It's set 12 years after the events of *Dune*, and Paul has now maneuvered himself to rule the galaxy from his seat on Arrakis. The jihad that he envisioned came to pass, and he's realized that he's powerless to stop it, even as he sees that the outcome could have been much, much worse. He's now trying to put humanity on to a firmer path that won't lead to a galactic-wide decline and dark age, and now faces considerable threats from within his own world: he married the Princess Irulan, daughter of deposed Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV in a political marriage, who's been sabotaging his efforts to have a child with his lover and concubine Chani, while members of the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit, have been trying to topple him. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. When he published *Dune* through *Analog*, his editor John W. Campbell Jr. was thrilled at this story that ultimately comes down to a superhuman, heroic figure, writing to Herbert "Congratulations! You are now the father of a 15-year-old superman!" But Herbert wanted to break away from the traditional story of heroics that Campbell was so keen on, which [Haris Durani described](https://hdernity.medium.com/dunes-not-a-white-savior-narrative-but-it-s-complicated-53fbbec1b1dc?ref=andrewliptak.com) as "a “western” notion of the myth of individual triumph, as opposed to stories of broader social, collective movements." Instead, he flipped the script by turning Paul into an anti-hero: "it’s my contention that the difference between a hero and an anti-hero is where you stop the story," Herbert told Willis E. McNelly in 1969\. "If you’re true to life, giving these ingredients, then the story goes on, because human beings go on." The move prompted Campbell to reject the next arc that would eventually become *Dune: Messiah*. Herbert instead sold it to *Galaxy Magazine*, which began serializing it July 1969, and G. P. Putnam's Sons, which published it in October. Herbert later [wrote and spoke](https://web.archive.org/web/20120107220342/http://www.frankherbert.org/news/genesis.html) quite a bit about his approach and beliefs here: he was very wary of the power that charismatic leaders wielded – power that the people they represent give to them: "personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it." > "Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero." This is why I'm really intrigued by *Dune: Messiah*: it's a mature, insightful take on what power does to a person, and by undermining Paul's apparent path as a heroic figure, he turns him into a tragic, cautionary tale. It's something that audiences don't always expect (I've often wondered if Rian Johnson was inspired by *Dune: Messiah* when he wrote *Star Wars: The Last Jedi*), but in doing so, it takes the characters from mythological constructs and reminds us that they're human, with all the problems that come with it. Villeneuve changed up the ending to *Dune: Part Two*: Paul kills Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (in the books, his sister Alia, imbued with superpowers, does), while in the film Chani rejects Paul and the horrific future he's ushering in (where before, she accepted his arranged marriage to Princess Irulan) and leaves for the deserts. The changes felt like Villeneuve was teeing up *Part Three* by telegraphic Paul's fall in a more explicit way, and I'll be really interested in seeing how he handles undermining Paul's heroic journey into something more in line with what Herbert envisioned. We'll find out how this adaptation plays out when it's released on December 18th. ### 17 more SF/F books to read in March 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2026-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-roundup/ Last updated: 2026-03-17T15:20:58.000Z One of the things that I really enjoy about my day job is that one of my duties involves running a small bookstore. It's a fun challenge to keep things in stock, and to continually hunt down and search for new books that are coming out that are specifically about Vermont's history. Sometimes, that's searching through Amazon for new titles to pop up, or overstock sites like Book Depot to find remaindered copies of more popular titles. Sometimes, and most excitingly, I come across books randomly, like one that just crossed my desk this morning. It's called [*A Continued Clap of Thunder: Essays to Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution*](https://store.benningtonmuseum.org/products/bennington-museum-publication-a-continued-clap-of-thunder?srsltid=AfmBOoo6L8enYWGw%5FvQxu25CRIPOEmU6lwWNds7DTtyIWP--NlUy82gh&ref=andrewliptak.com), and it's published by the Bennington Museum. Bennington is down in the southwestern corner of the state, and for a long time, it was a hotbed of revolutionary agitation, and was at one point, targeted by the British in 1777 as they drove down Lake Champlain to try and split the colonies in two. The Battle of Bennington lives large in Vermont's history and memory, even if the battle didn't actually take place here (American forces met the British a couple of miles over the border in New York.) As we enter the 250th anniversary of the United States, there's a lot of scholarship into the history of the country, some unflinchingly patriotic, some critical, and most somewhere in between. But something that I find interesting about books like this – and others like Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward's [*The American Revolution: An Intimate History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525658672?ref=andrewliptak.com) *–* demonstrate that there's still a lot to learn about the history of the revolution and its ongoing impact, a quarter of a millennium later. There are all sorts of new interpretations, discoveries, and stones to overturn. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is supported by a small contingent of readers who've [signed up as a supporting subscribers](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or who've left a [tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). If you've found this newsletter useful or enlightening in any way, you can support it by signing up as well! Your membership will help with the next batch of work that I've got in the pipeline, nearly 30 pieces that I've got on the schedule, from more book lists to commentaries, reviews, and interviews. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, onto more futuristic topics. As always, you can find prior book roundup over on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag, and you can read the first list for March [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-new-books-march-2026/). Here are 17 more books to check out for the rest of the month: ### [*Aicha*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316582018?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Soraya Bouazzaoui (March 24th) Portugal has extended its empire into Morocco, ruling with an iron fist, and Aicha is the daughter of a freedom fighter who's seen far too many of her people die in their cause. She's angry, and it's awoken something in her. As the fight intensifies, that something is about to be unleashed. *Library Journal* gave it a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/aicha-by-soraya-bouazzaoui-sff-debut-of-the-month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "readers will be swept up in the lyrical prose, compelling relationships, and timely commentary of Bouazzaoui’s debut rooted in Moroccan mythology." ### [*Between Two Fires*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250439208?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Buehlman (March 3rd) I've heard excellent things about Christopher Buehlan's novels [*The Blacktongue Thief*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799975?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Daughters War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250887696?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which I've been meaning to get to for ages. (A third installment, [*The Thrice-Bound Fool*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250621214?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* is coming out in October). In the meantime, his debut novel is getting a snazzy re-release from Tor Books, *Between Two Fires*. Set in 1348, it follows a disgraced knight named Thomas who discovers a girl in what remains of a Norman village. She was the only survivor of the Black Death that swept through the village, and explained that it was only part of a greater disaster that was unfolding: a war between heaven and hell. She convinces him to take her across the land to Avignon, where she can confront the evil that's threatening everything. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316582018?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Deep Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210185?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Miles Cameron (March 24th) Miles Cameron follows up his space opera [*Artifact Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210161?ref=andrewliptak.com)with *Deep Black,* in we continue following the adventures of Marca Nbaro onboard the Greatship Athens. In this distant future, Greatships are massive, city-sized transports that hold human space together, and something has been targeting them. She and her crew have to locate their enemy, when one of the aliens that they've been tracking decides to defect to humanity. Now, their mission is even more dangerous, and Marca has to figure out how to extract the defector and figure out its secrets before it's too late. ### [*Beatrice the Sixteenth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262051620?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Irene Clyde (March 31st) This is the latest installment of Joshua Glenn / HiLobrow's *Radium Age* series, dedicated to unearthing science fiction from the turn of the 20th century. This book is a pioneering feminist utopian story that originally came out in 1909, and follows a British explorer named Mary Hatherley, who's kicked by a camel and wakes up to find herself in what seems to be an alternative version of Earth. When she arrives in Armeria, she finds a society where the concept of gender is unknown, and she has to figure out her bearings. This one comes with an introduction by Lucy Sante. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-80.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Blank-8-Grids-Collage-3.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) ### [*Honeysuckle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639736737?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bar Fridman-Tell (March 24th) Bar Fridman-Tell reimagines the Welsh myth of [Blodeuwedd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blodeuwedd?ref=andrewliptak.com) in her debut novel Honeysuckle. Long ago, a boy named Rory grows up with only an older sister for company. Annoyed by him, she makes a playmate, a girl woven from flowers, and Rory's thrilled that he finally has a friend, but is soon distraught when he finds that she won't last long – she has to be rewoven at the end of the season, or she'll fall apart. As the two grow older, their friendship deepens, and Rory is desperate to try and find a way to keep her together and alive, all while Daye wants some control over her existence. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781639736737?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Fridman-Tell uses her eerie fairy tale premise to masterfully unpick all of the squirmy ethical implications of the created-lover trope, spinning a story that is as powerful in its human aspects as in its magic." ### [*Flaxman Low: Occult Detective*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262051651?ref=andrewliptak.com) by E. and H. Heron (March 31st) This is a another new installment from The MIT Press's *Radium Age* series, and it's a collection of stories by mother-and-son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh “Hex” Prichard, who published as “E. and H. Heron. This collection of stories (published between 1898 and 1899) features Flaxman Low, literature's first occult detective, who uses science to figure out what's behind paranormal phenomena. Low is an Oxford-trained psychologist who takes on everything from ghosts to mummies to vampires to a mushroom mannequin, and it sounds like a ton of fun. ### [*Seasons of Glass and Iron*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250341006?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amal El-Mohtar (March 24th) Amal El-Mohtar brings together some of her award-winning short stories, including the title story "[Seasons of Glass and Iron](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/seasons-glass-iron/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[The Green Book](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-green-book?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[Madeleine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/madeleine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[And Their Lips Rang with the Sun](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/and-their-lips-rang-with-the-sun/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[The Truth About Owls](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-truth-about-owls/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," and quite a few more. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250341006?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "There’s not a false note here. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Daughter of Crows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593818947?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mark Lawrence (March 24th) Mark Lawrence kicks off a new series (*The Kindness Academy*) with *Daughter of Crows*. He introduces us to the Academy of Kindness, which is designed to create agents in the form of Furies – that can stand up to the gods if needed. Every year, a hundred are brought to its halls, and after a decade of training, only three will survive. Those who do are trained in ancient secrets and rituals, and are bound to uphold the old laws. While only the desperate sell their children to the Kindness, Rue has decided to enter herself, and after a lifetime of bloodshed, she's finally found peace, only to have a war arrive on her doorstep. John Mauro [reviewed the book](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-daughter-of-crows-by-mark-lawrence/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *Grimdark Magazine*, saying that it's "grimdark to the core, but with a sense of literary maturity that the genre rarely sees outside of Anna Smith Spark." ### [*Wretch or, The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668070093?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric LaRocca (March 24th) Simeon Link is overcome with grief after the death of her husband, and she seeks out help from a support group from The Wretches, who have an unconventional and addictive source of relief. When she's introduced to a figure named Porcelain Khaw, she has the opportunity to have one last, intimate moment with the people they loved – but it's an opportunity that comes with a steep price. *Library Journal* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/wretch-or-the-unbecoming-of-porcelain-khaw-100005942?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "a labyrinth of stories within stories," and that it's "a treasure chest of asides and casual musings that could be whole novels unto themselves." ### [*No Man's Land*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345493156?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Richard K. Morgan (March 24th) Richard K. Morgan sets his latest fantasy novel during the height of the First World War, in which England is suddenly overcome by dense forests. They've been brought by an ancient race of fae called the Huldu, who have decided that humanity's time on Earth should come to an end. One veteran, Duncan Silver, has decided to take matters into his own hands and fight back, armed with iron and a quest to recover the children who the Huldu have been stealing. When he's hired by a mother to recover her daughter Miriam, he finds that she was a pawn in a much greater fight for dominance over the Earth. Alexandra Pierce [reviewed the novel for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/review/no-mans-land-by-richard-k-morgan-review-by-alexandra-pierce/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Morgan’s prose is precise and evocative and gripping; Duncan’s story is compelling and intriguing." ### [*Voidverse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668065600?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Damien Ober (March 10th) Damien Ober introduces us to a girl named Sinker, who escaped into the void a place of infinite nothingness, where people live on small lands called rocks each which have their own peculiar characteristics. Most people are afraid of the void, but she isn’t. She spends her time running from her past jumping from place to place. When she comes to the aid of Emery and when her home is shortly thereafter destroyed, they set out to find a way to save the world, which seems to be collapsing. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668065600?ref=andrewliptak.com) "combining impressive worldbuilding and thrilling action, including some fun twists and unexpected reveals, this is sure to please." ### [*Jitterbug*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835414514?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth L. Powell (March 3rd) Gareth L. Powell is back with a new space opera, in which both Jupiter and Saturn have been destroyed, with *something* taking their remains and building a huge, habitable sphere in their place. A group of criminals escape capture by heading into the object, a bounty hunter named Copernicus Brown, his sentient spaceship Jitterbug, and his crew are tasked with hunting them down. When they rescue a woman named Amber Roth, they find themselves the targets of attacks by some of the system's rich and powerful, who are trying to get their hands on a chip that she possesses. While those pieces fall into place, they also have to contend with an ancient presence coming into the solar system from the depths of space. ### [*Enemy of My Enemy: A Daredevil Marvel Crime Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781368095365?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Segura (March 24th) I'm a big fan of Marvel's *Daredevil* comics and the Netflix adaptation (I'm about to start the new *Born Again* series on Disney+), so this new book from Alex Segura is right up my alley: a new crime novel about Daredevil. In it, Matt Murdock gets reports that the Kingpin and a police officer have been killed, and Frank Castle – The Punisher – has turned himself in for the crime. While both of them off the streets would be good, Matt realizes that there's something wrong with the story that he's heard, and can't abide by someone going away for crimes they didn't commit. He ends up representing Castle in court, and has to figure out who was really behind the crime. This one'll come just in time for the second season of *Daredevil: Born Again*, which debuts on the same day on Disney+. [The devil’s work is never doneDaredevil: Born Again promises to bring some variety to the stakes of the MCU![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-293.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___hypebeast.com_image_2025_01_15_disney-plus-marvel-daredevil-born-again-tv-show-trailer-stream-000.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mcu-marvel-daredevil-born-again-trailer-watch/) ### [*Steel Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316577038?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Richard Swan (March 31st) This is the second installment of Swan's *Great Silence* trilogy (it's preceded by [*Grave Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316577007?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which the nature of the Great Silence is now apparent. Nations have begun to fall to a mind plague, and Sova Ambassador Renata Rainer has been tasked with trying to save the world, traveling abroad to get help from her nation's enemies, while Lieutenant Peter Kleist is dispatched to the New East's forests to try and find answers. While this is happening, others are working to try and study the Great Silence for answers on this world and beyond, and time is running out. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-swan/steel-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This is one wild, intricate ride: Grim, grotesque, vivid, thrilling, and with spot-on insights about our mundane reality." ### [*All These Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221617?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dennis E. Taylor (March 24th) Saga Press recently picked up Dennis E. Taylor's self-published *Bobiverse* series, in which a guy named Bob froze himself, only to be awoken in a dystopian future and who subsequently gets his brain uploaded into a self-replicating probe and shot out into space. In this third installment (preceded by [*We Are Legion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221570?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*For We Are Many*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221594?ref=andrewliptak.com)), the many Bobs have been out in the galaxy for nearly a century, seeding colonies to propagate humanity throughout the universe. But while they've expanded, some of humanity's deeper grudges and rivalries persist, and when Bob accidentally provokes a dangerous alien civilization, Bob knows that after a disastrous first encounter, a second has to go well to ensure humanity will continue to exist. But rallying the other Bobs is harder than it sounds, and he's going to have to convince them to help save humanity. ### [*Nobody's Baby*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250342263?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Olivia Waite (March 10th) Olivia Waite follows up her science fiction mystery novella [*Murder by Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250342249?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which we were introduced to Dorothy Gentleman, a spaceship detective. In this new cozy adventure, Dorothy is trying to figure out who left a baby on her nephew‘s doorstep — a baby that shouldn’t exist. Trish Matson [reviewed the book for the *Skiffy and Fanty* show](https://skiffyandfanty.com/blog/book-review-nobodys-baby-by-olivia-waite/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "by turns efficient and thoughtful, it occasionally sparkles with nifty metaphors and wonderful phrasing." ### [*Trace Elements*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250372604?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250372604?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer (March 24th) Jo Walton and Ada Palmer come together for this book of essays about the history and state of science fiction and fantasy, examining how it's created and consumed, and examining everything from the history of publishing, the relationship between readers and writers, what distinguishes the genres, and how SF/F creators can learn from outside influences. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/trace-elements-conversations-on-the-project-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy-100007983?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "highly recommended for collections of literature studies, particularly but not limited to studies of SF and fantasy." --- What books catch your eye this round? Are there any that you've added to your TBR? ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915998286?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035914975?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2026-nebula-award-finalists-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-awards/ Last updated: 2026-03-19T00:41:50.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists for this year's Nebula Awards, the annual prize for excellence in the science fiction and fantasy genres published in the last year. The Nebula is one of the biggest awards in the science fiction and fantasy world. It's been handed out annually since 1966, honoring the works in the bigger categories like novels and short stories, and it's been expanded in recent years. This year marks two new categories: Best Poem and Best Comic. Here are the winners from [2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2025-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/), [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2021/). ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. If you're a SFWA member, voting is now underway and will run through 11:59pm PDT on April 15th. The winners will be announced at this year's [Nebula Conference](https://store.sfwa.org/nebula-conference/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Chicago on Saturday, June 6th. Here are the finalists (I've added links for the stories that are available online): ### Best Novel - *When We Were Real* by Daryl Gregory - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Katabasis* by R.F. Kuang - *Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor - *The Incandescent* by Emily Tesh - *Sour Cherry* by Natalia Theodoridou - *Wearing the Lion* by John Wiswell ### Best Novella - *Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle* by Renan Bernardo - *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar - *The Death of Mountains* by Jordan Kurella - *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz - *But Not Too Bold* by Hache Pueyo - “[Descent](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/talabi%5F05%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Wole Talabi (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 5/25) ### Best Novelette - “[Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/our-echoes-drifting-through-the-marsh/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Marie Croke (*Beneath Ceaseless Skies* 1/9/25) - “[Uncertain Sons](https://undertowpublications.com/uncertain-sons?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Uncertain Sons*) - “[We Begin Where Infinity Ends](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ihezue%5F02%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Somto Ihezue (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 2/25) - [*The Name Ziya*](https://reactormag.com/the-name-ziya-wen-yi-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Wen-Yi Lee (Tor) - “[Never Eaten Vegetables](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pak%5F01%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by H.H. Pak (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 1/25) - “[The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-life-and-times-of-alavira-the-great-as-written-by-titos-pavlou-and-reviewed-by-two-lifelong-friends/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny Magazine* 3-4/25) ### Best Short Story - “[Through the Machine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/through-the-machine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P.A. Cornell (*Lightspeed Magazine,* 5/25) - “[Six People to Revise You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-people-to-revise-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by J.R. Dawson (*Uncanny Magazine,* 1-2/25) - “[In My Country](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F04%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld Magazine* 4/25) - “[The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead](https://podcastle.org/2025/02/18/podcastle-879-the-tawlish-island-songbook-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by E.M. Linden (*PodCastle* 2/18/25) - “[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aimee Ogden (*Strange Horizons* 6/16/25) - “[Laser Eyes Ain't Everything](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-123b-laser-eyes-aint-everything-by-effie-seiberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Effie Seiberg (*Diabolical Plots* 5/25) ### Andre Norton Award for Best Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction - *The Tower* by David Anaxagoras - *Gemini Rising* by Jonathan Brazee - *Wishing Well, Wishing Well* by Jubilee Cho - *Sunrise on the Reaping* by Suzanne Collins - *Into the Wild Magic* by Michelle Knudsen - *Goblin Girl* by K.A. Mielke ### Best Game Writing - *Spire, Surge, and Sea*, Stewart C. Baker (Choice of Games) - *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,* Guillaume Broche & Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (Kepler Interactive), Developer: Sandfall Interactive, Sandfall S.A.S. - *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, Ari Gibson & William Pelen (Team Cherry)\* - *Dispatch*, Ashley Jeffalone, Suzee Matson, Chris Rebbert, Chad Rhiness, & Pierre Shorette (AdHoc Studios) - *Hades II*, Greg Kasavin (Supergiant Games) - *Blue Prince*, Tonda Ros (Raw Fury, Developer: Dogubomb) \*Provisional nomination; awaiting acceptance and response on LLM-use. ### Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation - *KPop Demon Hunters*, Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang, & Hannah McMechan (Netflix)\* - *Sinners*, Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros Pictures)\* - *Severance,* "Chikhai Bardo", by Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman (Apple TV+)\* - *Pluribus*: Season One, Vince Gilligan (Apple TV+)\* - *Superman*, James Gunn (Warner Bros Pictures)\* - *Murderbot*: Season One, Chris Weitz (Apple TV+)\* \*Provisional nomination; awaiting acceptance and response on LLM-use. ### Best Comic - *Second Shift* by Kit Anderson - *Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal* by Amy Chu - *Helen of Wyndhorn* by Tom King - *Fishflies* by Jeff Lemire - *Mary Shelley's School for Monsters: The Killing Stone* by Jessica Maison - *Strange Bedfellows* by Ariel Slamet Ries - *The Flip Side* by Jason Walz - *The Stoneshore Register* by G. Willow Wilson ### Best Poem - “Though You Always Are” by Linda D. Addison & Jamal Hodge (*Everything Endless*) - “[They Said Robots Are](https://www.penumbric.com/archives/June2k25/aimerRobots.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Casey Aimer (*Penumbric* 6/25) - “[The World To Come](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-world-to-come/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Hudak (*Strange Horizons* 12/22/25) - “[The Mourning Robot](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mourning-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (*Uncanny Magazine* 9-10/25) - “[Care for Lightning](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/care-for-lightning/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mari Ness (*Uncanny Magazine* 1-2/25) - “[To Be the Change](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/to-be-the-change/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Nico Martinez Nocito (*Strange Horizons* 3/10/25) --- 2025 felt like a really strong year for books, and I was happy to see a bunch of books [that I really liked](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/) – *Automatic Noodle, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Death of the Author,* and *Katabasis –* made the final cut*.* After last night's best picture loss, I'm happy to see that *Sinners* is on there, but I also really enjoyed *KPop Demon Hunters, Murderbot, Pluribus,* and *Superman.* What are your thoughts on the ballot this year? Let me know in the comments. ### Here’s the cover for Annalee Newitz’s next book, A Wall Is Also a Road URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-a-wall-is-also-a-road-scifi-book-cover-reveal/ Last updated: 2026-03-16T18:38:38.000Z One of my favorite science fiction authors writing at the moment is Annalee Newitz. Back in 2002, they co-founded the website *io9* (where I wrote for a number of years, an experience I'm enormously thankful for) and has written some fantastic novels, [*Autonomous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392084?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Future of Another Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392114?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228024?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as some mind-expanding nonfiction books that blend science and history, [*Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307949424?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393882452?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324110460?ref=andrewliptak.com). Their next book is [*A Wall Is Also a Road*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228031?ref=andrewliptak.com), a science fiction novel about a sentient slime mold named Gardenpath, which comes out on October 6th. I'm very excited for it, and I'm very pleased that Tor Books has provided the cover for me to reveal. It's illustrated by acclaimed Italian artists [Anna and Elena Balbusso](https://www.balbussotwins.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), also known as the Balbusso Twins. Here it is: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/awallisalsoaroad_final-copy.jpg) Image: Tor Books Gardenpath is a graduate student studying biology and is working toward a academic prestigious prize, in which they have to discover a novel thing within the universe. They head off to a remote planet that everyone thinks is uninteresting, and discovers a civilization of multicellular creatures. When Gardenpath changes their shape to mimic them, they meet a woman named Murtis, a brothel worker in a city called Pompeii, and who introduces them to life in this bustling city. It's an encounter that profoundly transforms Gardenpath and changes their priorities as they get closer to their subject, and realize that there's more to life than the world of academia. I had a bunch of questions for Annalee about the book. Here's my interview with them: --- ### I'm excited to read this new book! Set it up for us: how did this story come to you? This story has been in the back of my mind, slowly evolving into something deeply weird, ever since I researched and visited Pompeii for my book *Four Lost Cities*. I was reading Sarah Levin-Richardson's superlative archaeological investigation [*The Brothel of Pomepii*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/brothel-of-pompeii/30A33063D0317A93E86D821FCDF86A79?ref=andrewliptak.com), where she goes through all the material evidence from the lupanar, or brothel, including graffiti. Some of the graffiti was written by women who worked there, and Levin-Richardson talked briefly about one piece of graffiti which read "Murtis \* Felatris," which she translates as "Murtis, fucktress." Another, more poetic, translation might be something like "Murtis, queen of the cocksuckers." Either way, the sex worker Murtis was boasting about her powers. ### Something that I've noticed with all (I think?) of your novels is that you have some sort of non-human protagonist – Whistle in *The Terraformers* and Staybehind/Cayenne/Sweetie/Hands in *Automatic Noodle*. Now we've got Gardenpath in this one. What draws you to these types of characters? I've always identified with the non-human creatures in stories. When I saw Star Wars as a kid, I thought R2D2 was the hero (which – let's be real, he kind of is); and when I watched kaiju movies I wanted to be either Gamara or Ghidorah. Like many nerdy people, I have to put on my "normal human" mask in social situations. So it feels natural to write characters who wear literal human masks to hide their alien bodies and predilections. In the case of Gardenpath, I wanted to write about what it feels like to be a graduate student trying to succeed at a big, hyper-competitive university. I got my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, and I'm grateful for what I learned. But also, to be quite honest, the reality of academic life crushed my spirit and made me feel like an alien monster. Gardenpath is an expression of all the impostor syndrome, alienation, and rage that many grad students feel when they realize that there is no such thing as a pure, free "life of the mind." Instead there are abusive bosses and corrupt status games, like in every other industry. [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-68.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1166-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) ### Science fiction often uses aliens as a sort of camouflage –humans in disguise for some issue. I've never gotten that impression with yours: how do you go about building these characters and make sure that they're really different from us? I'm really interested in how our bodies and environments shape our perceptions, and so I always start with the physicality of a character. When I set out to write a slime mold, I imagined being a single-celled organism that could stretch in every direction and climb walls as easily as they ooze across a floor. A cell communicates by sending and receiving molecules and ions through receptors on its surface, and that would obviously affect how and what they can say to each other. I talked to Allyson Sgro, biologist and slime mold expert, and Wesley Swingley, a molecular biologist. I made long lists of the kinds of movements that a slime mold might make, and how they would do things like smile or look upset (I decided they would elongate to smile, and wrinkle their membrane if they were upset). I thought about all kinds of weird shit like what it would feel like to communicate with someone by literally sticking an arm inside them, or how slime mold protesters could use a diffuser to "amplify" molecular speech. And then I had to think about the environment where Gardenpath lives, which is the circumgalactic medium, a sphere of gas that surrounds our galaxy (it's also where the Magellanic Clouds are). I took all of those alien bodies and perspectives and plopped them down into the familiar terrain of organized academia. And my characters started blobbing around and squirting each other with ammonia and having debates about life in the galactic plane. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### *A Wall Is Also a Road* is about a researcher who finds that there's more to their subject than meets the eye, when they get close to what they're studying. From the outside, it always feels like science has to be this sterile, observational thing, when it's really not that: researchers and scientists often get close to their subjects. What are you hoping to explore with this book? Gardenpath comes to Earth because they just want to figure out whether life can evolve on a planet in the galactic plane – after all, their whole civilization evolved in a gas cloud very distant from the terrifying radiation and pressures of the Milky Way's flat disc. They're doing what we call basic research, with no aim other than pure knowledge. And then they find this life form with language and culture, which most of their professors say can't exist. So they have to hide some of their findings, because they can't risk being laughed out of their program by making the outlandish claim that they've discovered intelligent life inside the galaxy. This is a book that is very profoundly about university politics, and why organized academia can sometimes prevent people from discovering new things – or sharing what they have found. It's about why academia is broken, and how a brave band of weirdos try to fix it. ### You mentioned recently that you're focusing on coziness. *The Terraformers* and *Automatic Noodle* felt like that to me: people finding their communities and working to make the world slightly better, but there's also an edge to them that coziness is something that you have to actively make. How does *A Wall Is Also a Road* fit into this? I think cozy stories work when they show us something that is dark or scary, but instead of wallowing in the horror, they offer a humble way for the characters to survive it. Often a cozy tale will foreground the way people resist the darkness by forming communities of safety and acceptance, or by taking a whimsical, unexpected action that winds up defeating a powerful malignant force. All of that is in *A Wall Is Also a Road.* Plus, you get to learn a bunch of silly stuff you never knew about the Roman Empire, and there is a satisfyingly complicated romance. (Don't worry – it has a happy ending.) [Automatic Noodle is a bite-sized robotic delightAnnalee Newtiz’s latest is a bite-sized sci-fi story is a testament to the power of building and fostering community![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-69.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5727-4.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/) ### What do you hope readers will walk away from this book with? I want to remind people that there are ways to educate ourselves outside organized academia. We can build new communities devoted to learning, doing science, and preserving our ancestors' knowledge. Universities did not always exist, and maybe now is the time to come up with the next great institutions devoted to knowledge. Also, I hope everybody develops a deeper appreciation for sapphic tentacle sex. --- *A Wall Is Also a Road* will be released on October 6th and is [now available for preorder](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228031?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### An animated Firefly series is in development URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/firefly-animated-series-development-nathan-fillion/ Last updated: 2026-03-19T16:22:06.000Z It's not a promo for some Funko Pops, an audio drama, or a live action series. During the *Firefly* reunion panel at AwesomeCon in DC, Nathan Fillion revealed that an animated series based on the series is in the works. Nearly a quarter century after it debuted on Fox, the science fiction series grew an enormous a cult following, and despite the boom in streaming shows and nostalgia-laced revivals, a return to the world never quite managed to come together. Until now. After [weeks of teasing a big announcement](https://www.andrewliptak.com/firefly-nathan-fillion-scifi-television-rumors/), the cast revealed that they'll be reprising their roles for the prospective series, which appears to be titled *Firefly: Still Flyin'*. It will be set in between the conclusion of the television series and the followup film, *Serenity*. The show [is being developed](https://deadline.com/2026/03/nathan-fillion-firefly-animated-series-development-1236754122/?ref=andrewliptak.com) under Fillion's production company Collision33 and 20th Century Animation, which has recruited producers Marc Guggenheim (Arrow and *The Flash*)and Tara Butters (*Agent Carter* and *Dollhouse*) to serve as showrunners. They've already written a script for it, and at the panel, they've revealed some concept art for the project. Notably, series creator Joss Whedon has given the series his blessing, but he's not otherwise involved in the project. Crucially, the project isn't a sure thing yet: in a [post on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DV6Js56jT3F/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Fillion explained that while they have a lot of the pieces in place, they still need to find a place to pick the series up to put it into production, and he'll be starting the process to pitch the series to outlets soon. The announcement comes months after Fillion and star Alan Tudyk started a podcast, *Once We Were Spacemen*, in which they reminisced about their careers and time on *Firefly*, and often inviting their former cast members on to talk about the show and their work. In recent weeks, Fillion has been releasing videos with those cast members, teasing some sort of big reveal. Both seem designed to reignite the fan base that surrounded the series and generate hype ahead of the announcement and sales pitches. Ever since Fox cancelled the series in 2002, fans have wondered if the series would come back in some form. In 2005, Universal produced a spinoff film called *Serenity*, which brought some of the storylines (and characters) to an end, and in the years since, there's been a handful of tie-in novels and comic books. While fans have long wanted a live-action continuation of the series, the various schedules and careers of the respective actors seems to have kept that a distant possibility. While the cast has said in interviews over the years that they had continually talked about coming back together, it seems that the stars never quite lined up until now. On during the panel (which was recorded and [released on the *Once We Were Spacemen* podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-set-out-to-do-the-impossible-again-episode-19/id1850503639?i=1000755935606&ref=andrewliptak.com)), Fillion provided some details about the project. This has been in the works for five years, and he described it as being at the "final stage." He also explained that he is writing a pair of episodes based on ideas that Tudyk had pitched during the show's original run. He also clarified that it'll be set within the continuity of the regular series: "I'm not looking to change anything up or make anything new," he explained. "I don't want Wash to be a robot or AI, I don't want Shepherd Book to have passed. I want what I loved. "I'm only interested in happened before *Serenity*, with all my friends," he continued, noting that there was clearly some progression between the end of the final episode and the film, and that he had some ideas for what might have taken place in that space. He also explained that he's been inviting a lot of people that he's worked with over the years who've noted that they were big fans of the series: it'll be interesting to see what familiar faces pops up along the way. An animated series feels like the best – and probably last – way forward for the series. It allows the story to continue with the entirety of the characters from the series (Wash was killed in *Serenity*, while actor Ron Glass died in 2016), and allow the returning cast to reunite in a way that works for their schedules and lives. In a [followup interview in *Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2026/03/nathan-fillion-alan-tudyk-firefly-animated-series-interview-1236759356/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Fillion explained that he pitched animation to his former castmates as means of convenience: "if I could bring it back, if I could do it in such a way that nobody has to move back to LA and everybody can keep the jobs that they have. If I could do it so that you’re just recording in the back room of your house, whenever is convenient for you. You guys want to bring this back?” Everybody said, yes." He also noted that animation was the only way to bring Book back, and that they will be doing so. That the series hasn't found a home yet is curious: this feels like a natural fit for the Disney-owned Disney+ or Hulu, both of which have plenty of animated shows in their portfolios. Science fiction animation has been having a bit of a moment in the last couple of years – look at the success of *Rick & Morty,* *Scavenger's Reign*, *Star Trek: Lower Decks*, and the continuation of *Futurama*. Hopefully, someone will be receptive, especially as 2027 will mark the 25th anniversary of the show's original run. *Update: I've added some details that Fillion teased about the series from the panel.* *Update #2: added information from the* Deadline *interview.* ### Lego's next Ideas project is Tintin's Moon Rocket URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lego-tintin-rocket-ship-herge-toys/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T15:28:07.000Z Right on the heels of [releasing a set of the spaceship from the upcoming film *Project Hail Mary*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lego-project-hail-mary-set-space-sci-fi-toys/), Lego has announced the release of another iconic spacecraft: the Moon Rocket from the Tintin comics [*Destination Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316358453?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Explorers on the Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316358460?ref=andrewliptak.com)! I don't think I've ever preordered something so quickly. This set comes from [Lego's Ideas lineup](https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/ideas?ref=andrewliptak.com): a program that began in 2008 in which members of the Lego fan community can submit ideas for a potential set. If enough people (at least 10,000 of them) vote for an idea, it'll then go to Lego for review, and if they like it, the company will make a set based on it. Some of the sets that have made it through this process include The DeLorean Time Machine from *Back to the Future*, Ecto-1 from *Ghostbusters,* NASA's Apollo Saturn V rocket, a Tuxedo and Orange cat, and a ton of others that have gone on to become viral hits. The idea behind this kit was [submitted back in 2022](https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/5253cea1-64c9-4058-8fbe-ba84034fc5f0?ref=andrewliptak.com) and was approved last summer. The final kit (21367) features the iconic Red-and-White rocketship, and comes with minifigures of Tintin, his loyal dog Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the hapless detectives Thomson and Thompson. It isn't quite mini-figure scaled, but it does include a cool, breakaway panel that shows the ship's bridge. [Lego is making a Project Hail Mary SetBased on the movie based on Andy Weir’s novel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-70.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/bltfe9034ee5bed08f3-11389_WEB_SEC03_NOBG-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lego-project-hail-mary-set-space-sci-fi-toys/) I have a lot of nostalgia for the *The Adventures of Tintin*. I first encountered them while in high school, and I've read through the series many, many times in the years since. Originally released in the Belgian newspaper *Le Vingtième Siècle* in 1929, it's illustrated by cartoonist Hergé, who continued the strip and eventually began collecting them into books starting in the 1940s. They follow a young Belgian reporter named Tintin, who's often accompanied by his Wire Fox Terrier Snowy as he travels around the world as he reports on various reporting adventures, often with a geopolitical or crime focus. He's encountered fallen meteors, smugglers, strange afflictions, aggressive nations, Yeti, and quite a bit more, and is often accompanied by a fun cast of characters, including Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, detectives Thomson and Thompson and an opera singer named Bianca Castafiore. (I'll note that some of the earlier comics are rough – there's a bit of colonial racism to contend with.) I loved the comics because of the sense of globetrotting adventure that they brought with them: Tintin visited all corners of the Earth (and beyond!) and ran into all sorts of challenges, and they were always exciting. I think a reread is in order. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/destination-moon.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/explorers-on-the-moon-1.jpg) Images: © Hergé / Tintinimaginatio Out of the entire series, my favorite two books are *Destination Moon* and *Explorers on the Moon.* In the first installment*,* Professor Calculus summons Tintin to Syldavia to help weed out potential saboteurs on a top-secret scientific facility that's working to build a rocket to reach the moon. In the latter, Tintin and company are assigned to crew of the mission, and have to contend with a stowaway and other complications. This particular arc is notable because it was first released in 1950, nearly two decades before the first actual lunar landing, and years before the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space in 1957\. The rockets that eventually delivered men to the Moon in 1969 are quite different from the one that Hergé imagined, but he did conduct a good amount of research into what the experience of travelling to space might be like, down to the lighter lunar gravity and the general feel of the lunar surface when they do eventually arrive. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/image-1.png) The rocket that brings Tintin and his friends to the Moon was loosely based off of the V2 bombs used by the Nazis during the Second World War, and painted in a red-and-white pattern. Unlike the real-world Saturn V rockets, this one doesn't launch in stages, which had been an early consideration in the space race, but instead flips and lands on its fins before taking off again. It's not the most practical, but it is a beautiful ship. I sort of wonder if this could open the door to other Tintin sets. There are a bunch of kits that I can see them making, from some of the vehicles that are used in the comics to larger sets like Captain Haddock's home of [Marlinspike Hall](https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Marlinspike%5FHall?ref=andrewliptak.com). This new kit from Lego was an instant preorder for me: I bought the Saturn V rocket and Lunar Lander kits a couple of years ago, and I've really appreciated the attention to detail that they both have. This looks like it'll be a great addition to sit alongside them. It retails for $159 and is now [available for preorder](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/tintin-moon-rocket-21367?ref=andrewliptak.com) ahead of an April 1st release date. I can't wait to build it. ### Is Firefly coming back? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/firefly-nathan-fillion-scifi-television-rumors/ Last updated: 2026-03-07T17:29:46.000Z Over the last couple of weeks, *Firefly* star Nathan Fillion has teasing *something*, and it's been getting fans of the long-canceled science fiction series worked up: is an announcement about some sort of revival imminent? Or is something else in the works? Back in November, Fillion and costar Alan Tudyk launched a new podcast, [*Once We Were Spacemen*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-spacemen-with-nathan-fillion-alan-tudyk/id1850503639?i=1000735369046&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* in which they explained that they became good friends while working on the show, and how they've spent the years since attending conventions and talking to fans about their experiences on the show. In the months since, they've invited a handful of their costars onto the show to walk down memory lane and catch up on what they've been doing with their lives since, including [Jewel Straite](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-bejeweled-with-jewel-staite-episode-2/id1850503639?i=1000736402227&ref=andrewliptak.com) (Kaylee), [Gina Torres](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-warrior-women-with-gina-torres-episode-4/id1850503639?i=1000738499007&ref=andrewliptak.com) (Zoë), [Sean Maher](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-had-tongue-rings-with-sean-maher-episode-13/id1850503639?i=1000747998755&ref=andrewliptak.com) (Simon), and [Summer Glau](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-foolish-girls-with-summer-glau-episode-15/id1850503639?i=1000750294488&ref=andrewliptak.com) (River), as well as some of the folks they've worked with over the years on non-*Firefly* projects, like [Mark Addy](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-jousters-with-mark-addy-episode-6/id1850503639?i=1000740622728&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Alexi Hawley](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-had-some-not-so-horrible-bosses-with-alexi/id1850503639?i=1000742575907&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Melissa O'Neil](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-rookies-with-melissa-oneil-episode-9/id1850503639?i=1000744106013&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Seth Green](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-were-low-huggers-with-seth-green-episode-11/id1850503639?i=1000746022883&ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Felicia Day](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-we-subverted-the-system-with-felicia-day-episode-17/id1850503639?i=1000753031112&ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a fun show to listen to – Fillion and Tudyk have some great charisma together and it's been fun listening as they reminisce about their careers and approach to their work and creativity as actors and writers. At the end of February, Fillion began posting a series of cryptic videos on Instagram, in which he visited [Torres](https://www.instagram.com/oncewewerespacemen/reel/DVHV3%5Fljlh7/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Morena Baccarin](https://www.instagram.com/oncewewerespacemen/reel/DVMYhlblStW/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Inara), [Maher](https://www.instagram.com/oncewewerespacemen/reel/DVRiH2SjjKd/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Glau](https://www.instagram.com/oncewewerespacemen/reel/DVZQrMTlNIG/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Straite](https://www.instagram.com/oncewewerespacemen/reel/DVeaFkfEVbS/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Adam Baldwin](https://www.instagram.com/p/DVjqirjD2NC/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Jayne), knocking on their door and telling them that "it's time" / "it's happening", after which they spend an uncomfortable and pointed moment nodding at one another. He's followed up with some cryptic captions – "some of you have guessed convention, podcast, or cross-over. You are wrong," and sprinkled in some pointed references to *Firefly* before explaining that "an announcement is coming on Sunday, March 15th." --- It's hard to understate just how prevalent *Firefly* was in the late 2000s: despite its cancelation after an eleven-episode run on Fox in 2002, the series was catapulted into cult fandom when the entire series – including a trio of unaired episodes – were released on DVD in December 2003\. Much like [George R.R. Martin not finishing *Winds of Winter* has become a meme](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-westeros-fantasy-history/) in and of itself, *Firefly* is the prototypical example of "why on Earth was a show like this canceled after only 14 episodes?" This is something that's been written about ad nauseam, but the shortest version is that the series never found an audience on Fox. The network bears its share of mistakes here: executives weren't confident in the pilot episode, so they commissioned a second episode to act as the show's introduction, and aired three of the episodes out of order, aired them on Friday nights (a difficult night to find an audience), preempted a handful of episodes for sports broadcasts, and generally marketed the show as a lighter romp than something with a heavier feel and tone. This was something of a heyday for science fiction shows: Ron Moore's miniseries reimagining of *Battlestar Galactica* landed on the SCIFI channel around the same time, and shows like *Andromeda,* *Farscape, Stargate SG-1*, *Stargate Atlantis,* and *Star Trek: Enterprise* were all airing around this time. *Firefly* came out on the cusp of the binging era – it was short enough that someone could sit down and watch the entire series in one go, and good enough for them to watch it over and over again. Shortly after the series was canceled, creator Joss Whedon began to work on ways to continue the story, and bolstered by the growing fan fervor and strong DVD sales, Universal Pictures agreed to produce a film continuation. He pulled together a variety of ideas from what would have been the show's second season, and began filming what would become *Serenity* in the summer of 2004\. It was a good coda for the series: it wrapped up some storylines and gave us another, super-sized adventure, and while it left the door open for more stories down the road, it was something of a sleeper hit, and it's been the last time we've seen the crew, outside of a series of comics and [tie-in novels](https://web.archive.org/web/20181120200129/https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18097173/firefly-big-damn-hero-james-lovegrove-nancy-holder-joss-whedon-book-review). **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it costs time and effort to put together. If you'd like to support the newsletter (and get posts like this in your inbox when they come out), consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) --- I can't imagine how many times the cast has been asked "are you ever going to get back together and film another season of *Firefly*?" over the years at convention Q&As and interviews. Various members of the cast have said that they'd be happy to return if the opportunity arose, and given how important preexisting worlds have become in the last couple of decades, I've always figured it's a "*when*, not *if*" situation. [As recently as 2020,](https://www.andrewliptak.com/joss-whedon-firefly-revival-fox-reboot/) executives at Fox noted that they were "wide open" to the possibility of revising the series, if they could figure out the right approach. But a lot of time has passed since *Firefly* and *Serenity* last flew. Despite its passionate fandom, *Serenity* didn't exactly light the film world on fire. The stars of the show have continued their careers: Fillion has been the lead in two massively popular shows, *Castle* (2009-2016) and *The Rookie* (2018-present) and films like *Superman*, while Tudyk has appeared in a ton of projects, including *Rogue One* and *Andor, Resident Alien, Moana*, and others. Morena Baccarin, Jewel Straite, and Gina Torres all have their own shows (*Fire Country / Sheriff Country, Stargate: Atlantis/Family Law,* and *Suits/9-1-1: Lone Star*, respectively), while others like Adam Baldwin, Sean Maher and Summer Glau have made steady appearances over the years. (In a recent podcast episode, Glau said that she was generally a stay-at-home mom). [You can’t take the sky from meWrestling with a complicated favorite![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-66.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/1772943.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/firefly-legacy-fandom-20-years-joss-whedon/) I'm guessing Whedon has also been a factor here: after *Serenity,* he went on to direct another science fiction series that Fox cancelled too quickly, *Dollhouse*, before jumping over to Marvel to helm *The Avengers* and *Avengers: Age of Ultron*, and took over DC's *Justice League* from director Zack Snyder, before writing and directing a short-lived series on HBO Max, *The Nevers*. While he was busy with all of those projects, his career cratered after an avalanche of accusations of some pretty nasty behavior from the cast of *Justice League*, which was followed with even more from a ton of writers and actors from throughout his career. Lila Shapiro [published a good report in *Vulture*](https://www.vulture.com/article/joss-whedon-allegations.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)back in 2022 that runs down most of the issues here*.* He's been been quiet ever since. In the past week, Fillion's videos have been reigniting the speculation that *something* is in the works with the franchise, but it's not clear what. There's been nothing in the usual entertainment trade publications, and the secondary tier outlets have all been running the news about this publicity stunt. The entire cast will be assembling at [Awesome Con in DC](https://awesome-con.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for a reunion panel on March 15th, and presumably, that's when they're announcing whatever this is. --- Fillion has already said that it's not a "convention, podcast, or cross-over." We can cross those off the list. So, let's engage some wild speculation as to what this could be. ##### A new season? Ever since the series ended, anytime [someone wrote](https://www.tvinsider.com/gallery/canceled-shows-fans-most-want-back/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [down a list](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/best-tv-shows-canceled-after-one-season/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [of what canceled](https://fandomwire.com/canceled-tv-shows-that-deserve-another-season/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [shows that should be brought back](https://www.buzzfeed.com/laurengarafano/tv-shows-that-never-should-have-been-canceled?ref=andrewliptak.com), *Firefly* is almost always on there. If there's one thing the show's fandom wants, it's a television revival that reunites the cast and brings them out on some sort of new adventure. But there's a lot stacked against a television revival. It was a show that lasted a mere 14 episodes, and while it did get a movie, it's been 25 years, and a lot of people have moved on. The cast has shifted from saying "[why hasn't Netflix picked us up](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/firefly-cast-recalls-crazy-joss-930757/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" to "is there going to be a *Firefly* reboot with all of us in it? Live action? [I seriously doubt it](https://bleedingcool.com/tv/firefly-star-morena-baccarin-discusses-revival-chances-joss-whedon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" in recent years. And, there hasn't been any sign of any activity on that front: no big or small announcements at up-front events, and there hasn't been any reports in the big entertainment trades about anyone signing onto a deal to write or direct or anything. But, 2027 is the 25th anniversary of the series’ original run on Fox, which feels like a good excuse to return to the world, and television is where the story thrives. It's a concept that's well suited for the weekly crew-on-a-space ship-go-off-and-have-adventures that television affords, and there's a lot of possibilities for what types of stories they could tell. The media environment of 2026 is very different from that of 2002, and the advent of streaming has meant that streamers can stand up an 8 to 10-episode streaming season where the economics might not have worked out on traditional television. On top of that, revivals are a big thing right now, especially on the Disney-owned Hulu: the streamer released *Alien: Earth* and a new season of *Futurama* last year, and there are revivals of [*Buffy the Vampire Slayer*](https://deadline.com/2025/02/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-reboot-sarah-michelle-gellar-hulu-pilot-chloe-zhao-1236273767/?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [the *X-Files*](https://deadline.com/2026/02/ryan-coogler-x-files-reboot-hulu-pilot-order-daneille-deadwyler-1236733363/?ref=andrewliptak.com)in the works, not to mention others like [Amazon's upcoming *Stargate* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-stargate-sg1-franchise-revival-martin-gero-streaming/). *Firefly* would not be amiss in that lineup. I've seen a lot of suspicion that an announcement for a show like this seems unlikely coming from one of the actor's Instagram accounts, but that doesn't strike me as odd: *Firefly*'s fandom has always been very online and connected to these actors, and this *is* getting a lot of people talking. Fillion and the cast have had fans telling telling them how much this series means to them for the better part of a quarter of a century. I have to imagine that they know what impact dropping coy references to the show would have on people, and I just I can't imagine that at any point they'd go through this amount of trouble and hype up something that would ultimately be a letdown for those fans. ##### Maybe it's an animated project? Another possibility that comes to mind is that that this could be an animated film or television project. Most of the cast have have done voiceover work (Tudyk especially), and given that they're generally busy, this could be a easier bar to get everyone involved. Animation could allow them to get around the fact that everyone is decades older from when the show started. You could easily bring back characters like Wash or Book, and have a freer hand with what they can do and when they can set it. I could see this being a solid possibility. ##### Another film? If it’s not a live-action series, maybe they could be getting the band back together for another film? I could see this as a possibility, given how almost everyone involved has been busy with various shows and projects. While the streaming wars have cooled a bit, they're still looking for content, and and there has been a bit of a push back to theaters or made-for-streaming films. *Serenity* wasn't gangbusters at the box office, but it wasn't a studio-ending flop either. It strikes me as the sort of thing that could do decently in theaters and really pick up steam at home. Still, I think this is a somewhat outside possibility. ##### Maybe it's an audio drama? Another outside possibility came to mind: an audio drama, which isn't *technically* a podcast. Back in 2023, [Audible debuted](https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/audibles-slayers-a-buffyverse-story-set-to-premiere-on-october-12?srsltid=AfmBOorc5A2toisOWBQRjkFwLVTfotJk2vqrd3tkEpNtbbx1kBpeQicZ&ref=andrewliptak.com) a *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* project called [*Slayers*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Slayers-A-Buffyverse-Story-Audiobook/B0CGJ1DNQ1?srsltid=AfmBOoqlxD5xUlhfgcWxcZubTT8D1b7sGw5HDknk5y3qcngiDdBPZ%5FGs&ref=andrewliptak.com), which saw a number of the show’s original cast members reprise their roles. Like an animated project, it could be an easy way to keep the cast connected to the world around their schedules, even if it isn’t exactly in the same format. ##### Video game? Eh, maybe? There's a board game that came out a while back, and there was a video game in the works called *Firefly Online* in 2013, but that seems to have died on the vine. Seems unlikely. ##### A toy release? I've seen a ton of comments from people talking about this as just being a lead-in for a Funko Pop release. The main argument I've seen here is people being unable to figure out time stamps for social media posts and the fact that everyone's bobbing their heads in the videos. Also, most Funko Pops... aren't bobble heads? I don't think that is the case, if anything because Funko released a line of toys based on the characters a year ago, and I don't think that I've ever seen the company do a really big blowout campaign like this for any of their products. The *Firefly* cast did [shoot a video for Funko last year](https://www.instagram.com/p/DMJASpVqXTT/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but that was a quick thing at a convention, from the looks of things, and not this big buildup. If it is something like that, a lot of people are going to be ticked off. ##### More books or comics or other tie-ins? Highly doubt this: we've already had a line of novels and tie-in comics that have come out over the years, and they didn't launch with the same level of anticipation. ##### A tour or special event? *io9*'s Germain Lussier [dismissed the idea that it was a revival](https://gizmodo.com/the-world-is-convinced-nathan-fillion-is-reviving-firefly-via-instagram-posts-2000730393?ref=andrewliptak.com) – "we just don’t think that if it were a revival or something bigger, this would be the way Fillion would do it" and suggested that it could be some sort of "mega, 25th-anniversary reunion… something. Either a one-time event or possibly even a tour." Eh. See my prior comments that the actors know their fan community pretty well, and these videos are just there to drum up attention, but I see his point. But I'm not sure that a tour makes a ton of sense though: what are they going to do that they don't already do at cons? ##### Could it be a non-*Firefly* project? I and a lot of people are operating under the assumption that they're teeing up some sort of *Firefly* project, and those hints have been getting stronger and stronger. But maybe it's misdirection for something else? Seems unlikely, but hey, let's add that idea just to cover all of our bases. --- ### **Whatever it is, who’s doing it?** Let's assume that they're teasing some sort of *Firefly* continuation. Live action, animated, who knows? If the show is coming back, who would do it? Disney purchased 20th Century Fox back in 2019 and in 2020, the folks at Fox were open to doing something with the story and that they had conversations happening every now and again about the possibility. If it's a show, it wouldn't surprise me if it would arrive on Hulu (or Disney+, which is taking over Hulu at the end of the year) as an 8 to 10-episode season. Now for the who: despite the 2022 *Vulture* article, Whedon still feels like a person non grata in Hollywood, and I haven’t seen the sorts of PR efforts that go into rehabilitating folks, even as some of those people who were booted from the field have been taking some steps back in. If this is a show/movie/project, I’d be very surprised if he’s involved in anything other than a contractual “consulting producer” credit or something. And, there is that *Buffy* series that's in the works that he isn't involved in. I also don't think that he's really necessary for a revival. The show as it stands now is certainly unique to his voice and tone, but he's not the only person who can do quirky action, comedy, and drama. *The Rookie* has all of that in most of its episodes. Tim Minear, who co-wrote and directed a bunch of episodes, has been busy with the *9-1-1* franchise that stars Baccarin. That’s a lot on someone’s plate, but maybe he’s made some room? And, he's talked about it a bit over the years, so maybe he's still in the conversation somewhere. But if I want to speculate — and I’m 100% going out on a limb here — here’s a scenario that I can see taking place: Fillion's been pretty successful in the years since as a leading man for shows like *Castle* and *The Rookie*, the latter of which he's been an executive producer on for its whole run. Maybe he's at the point where he has some clout, a story, and people in place to make the case for it. But that's just me taking various bits and pieces and mashing them together into something that appears to make sense. ### Do we really need a revival of *Firefly*? *Firefly* was enormously popular in the late 2000s / early 2010s, and I'd make the argument that it was an important show in the mainstreaming of genre stories, alongside things like *Battlestar Galactica, LOST*, and *Game of Thrones*. It helped show that online fandoms were vocal and somewhat powerful back before that was readily apparent. Now, it's commonplace to see fandoms spring up around all sorts of shows and films. But is *Firefly* something that people are really clamoring to see more of? Nostalgia is a helluva drug, and I've made the argument that *Firefly*'s brevity is what made it a cult classic in the first place. It had 14 good-to-great episodes and a good movie that played out a tantalizing story and characters – not a guarantee that the *next* 14 episodes wouldn't be shit. You see this with acclaimed television shows all the time: *Battlestar Galactica* knocked it out of the park with its first and second seasons, only to get a bit mushy in the third and fourth seasons. *Futurama* also comes to mind; its first handful of seasons remain classics. Its latest seasons? They're fun, but nothing that has really hit the same heights as what came before. It's very easy for a show to wear out their welcome, and I've always thought that a show's sweet spot is around the five season mark. *Firefly* feels like a story where we've gotten the best of what we can get with those fourteen episodes and film: to add more runs the risk of diluting it down. It never had the chance to really be bad, and had it run longer, it probably would have – some of the ideas for unproduced episodes wouldn't have aged well. On top of that, there's been a shift in that nostalgia. It's lost some of its shine – there are some weird worldbuilding elements like an Anglo-Chinese culture without many Chinese people in it and some weird, orientalist overtones, quite a bit of sexism (especially from Mal), and the general vibe and tone that Whedon is known for just doesn't land like it used to. It was a show that captured a particular moment and tone, one that I think we've largely moved on from for better things. But on the other hand, returning could bring something great to fans. *Firefly* does hold up for a lot of people because of its rich, conflicted characters and the complicated world they were living in, and its short run really felt like we scratched the surface of it. A continuation could bring diminishing results, but in the right hands? Look at what the writers behind *Andor* did with the building blocks they had within the *Star Wars* franchise. (I'm not saying that as a breathless fan, just that it's a Schrödinger's cat situation: there's just no way to know, good or bad.) Whatever it is, I'm intrigued at the possibility of seeing this world and these characters again. It's super easy to get one's hopes up to sky-high levels or dismiss it out of hand, and it's absolutely impossible to calibrate one's expectations for whatever's coming. We'll have to wait and see what they say on March 15th. In the comments, let me know what you think: what would you like to see? Do any of the possibilities that I speculated about make more sense than others, or is there something that I missed? I'll definitely be checking in next weekend to see if I hit the mark – or if I missed it completely. ### For the historical record URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/jay-kay-kline-fandom-photographs-uc-riverside-phoenix-alexander-digitization/ Last updated: 2026-04-03T18:04:49.000Z If you want a sense of what SF fandom in the 1960s and 1970s looked like, one invaluable resource is the [Jay Kay Klein photographs and papers on science fiction fandom](https://calisphere.org/collections/26943/?ref=andrewliptak.com) collection at [UC Riverside's Special Collections & University Archives](https://library.ucr.edu/libraries/special-collections-university-archives?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Klein](https://fancyclopedia.org/Jay%5FKay%5FKlein?ref=andrewliptak.com) was a photographer who began attending conventions and contributing to fanzines starting in 1945\. In the decades that followed, he brought his camera with him to photograph the attendees and activities, publishing them as annual photo guides, in magazines, and presentations. He [died in 2012](https://locusmag.com/2012/05/jay-kay-klein-1931-2012/?ref=andrewliptak.com) at the age of 80\. Before his death, Klein donated his vast collection of more than 65,000 film negatives to the archives, which began digitizing them in 2017, releasing around 6,000 images on their digital platform, Calisphere, where they solicited community input to add information to the images. That publicly-available collection just got a bit bigger. Last week, Phoenix Alexander, the Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside (and author!), [announced](https://live-ucr-librarywebsite.pantheonsite.io/sites/default/files/2026-02/kleinphotosannouncement%5F02%5F20%5F2026.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) that his team had released another 2,000 images that made up the first eleven boxes from Klein. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/iiif_26943_curivsc_ms381_001_000062_0001.jp2-1.jpg) Jay Kay Klein, from 1952\. Image: Jay Kay Klein Estate via UCR Library’s Special Collections & University Archives. In an email, Alexander told me that their main priority for this digitization project is to get the images before the public, which they hope will be able to help with identifying the subjects in the images. "The metadata for these many thousands of images will take years to complete, and we didn't want to wait that long to make the images accessible. We'll be continuing to work on descriptions and names over the coming years, incorporating community feedback." This is a daunting project: after this latest batch, Alexander noted that they have around 55,000 images to go, and noted that while the COVID-19 pandemic slowed them down, he "anticipate\[s\] a quicker timeline for these remaining images." Alexander explained that the library's digitization department starts the process, capturing the negatives in their studio, which they then clean up and upload in batches sorted by convention as high-resolution JPEGs for the platform. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. After each image is uploaded, Alexander and a pair of archival professionals then add the metadata for each image. "We're following Jay Kay Klein's organization," he said. "he organized the negatives in eleven boxes, and we are currently on number four. The boxes are roughly (but not exactly) chronologically arranged (by convention date.)" This latest batch of digitized images spans the years 1950 to 1967\. In his announcement, Alexander noted that they've "decided to implement a two-phase approach to our descriptions. Some photos from the new box will appear with basic information about the convention or event they belong to, with Klein's original identifiers for his images as temporary titles. These will be updated later with more details about the people and topics depicted. Other photos will have descriptions already enhanced by myself and Andrew Lippert, both subject specialists (albeit not infallible ones!)." To get information from the general public, [they've set up a website](https://library.ucr.edu/about/policies/digital-collections-commenting-policy?ref=andrewliptak.com) that explains their commenting policy, and notes that they're hoping to get details about "the lesser-known individuals in the photographs, in particular, fan attendees," as opposed to high-profile figures such as Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein. Comments can be added directly to each image. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/image-1.png) Fans in Star Trek costume at art show, St. LouisCon, 1967\. Jay Kay Klein Estate via UCR Library’s Special Collections & University Archives. For researchers, these photographs represent a profound glimpse into this community. "A lot of researchers have been particularly interested in the cosplay photographs, particularly around *Star Trek*, given its prominent place in twentieth-century SF fandom," Alexander says. "Such research also allows for a kind of forensics of literary genealogy: which writers were in contact with one another, which editors or publishers were present, and so on." These "photographs offer a visual record of the history of fandom, and it is my hope that fans can look on these images and remember, with fondness, happy times, in which the future was literally being created over a clutch of drinks, a room party, or a particularly inspiring panel." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/03/iiif_26943_curivsc_ms381_001_001791_0001.jp2-1.jpg) Samuel R. Delany in 1967\. Image: Jay Kay Klein Estate via UCR Library’s Special Collections & University Archives. Another joyful experience, Alexander says, is that way photographs serve a way for a community to remember its past. "I am hoping that people will be able to look at these photos for enjoyment and education: either seeing themselves and/or old friends in the images, or encountering for the first time, perhaps, the people and programming that sustain literary, cultural communities." > It's a really lovely mixture of personal photos — of the Kleins (Doris and Jay Kay), cats, squirrels, landscapes, buildings — as well as, of course, conventions and gatherings bringing together both famous and lesser-known figures from the history of SF. I personally love seeing how communities are sustained over the years, and tracing the shifts in fashion (hairstyles, clothes) and technology, as you see what kinds of setups and devices people are using. The cosplay competition photographs are wonderful, too. Speaking as a researcher specifically interested in the history of cosplay, the Klein collection really helps viewers visualize these elements of fandom. I specifically used a pair of images in my book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) because of the quality and variety of the collection, and I now want to go back through the book and check to see what images Klein might have taken of some of the people pictured in other collections. Exploring this era of history is important, not just as fans and readers, but as genres like fantasy and science fiction have grown in prominence throughout popular culture. Genre fiction is more popular than ever, and it's all built on this foundation of enthusiasts, professional and semi-professional writers, and industry pros who came up with these fantastic worlds that we're either drawing from or are influenced by. These images help show the environment in which these stories were influenced and conceived, another layer of detail that we don't have to leave to our imaginations. ### Awards onslaught URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/british-science-fiction-bram-stoker-la-times-awards-finalists/ Last updated: 2026-03-04T18:42:26.000Z Awards season is coming for the SF/F world, and a handful of organizations have been announcing their shortlists of books and stories published in the last year. I [just posted about the finalists for the Compton Crook Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2025-compton-crook-award-finalists-scifi-fantasy-books/) and [Philip K. Dick Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-k-dick-award-finalists-2025-scifi-books/) but in recent days, the British Science Fiction Association, the Bram Stoker Awards and *The LA Times* unveiled its finalists for their respective awards. These types of awards are always useful if you're looking for a good, curated crop of books to check out from the last year. ### British Science Fiction Association Awards Presented since 1970, the awards are voted BSFA members and members of that year's national science fiction convention, Eastercon. Voting [is now open](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfGLySDmKxq7lydcBpgOYaON3aoPAsTHZFge9oYeHCeAzaz1g/viewform?ref=andrewliptak.com), and will close on Friday, April 3rd at 23:59\. ##### **Best Novel** - *The Salt Oracle* by Lorraine Wilson - *Edge of Oblivion* by Kirk Weddell - *When There Are Wolves Again* by E. J. Swift - *Project Hanuman* by Stewart Hotston - *A Granite Silence* by Nina Allan ##### **Best Short Fiction** - "One Step at a Time" by Rick Danforth (*Vivid Worlds*) - "[The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-life-and-times-of-alavira-the-great-as-written-by-titos-pavlou-and-reviewed-by-two-lifelong-friends/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 63) - "[25 Peppercorns](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-43/25-peppercorns.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Emma Burnett (*Mythaxis Magazine*, Issue 43) - "Of Seagrass Fins and Slippery Fingers" by A. J. Van Belle (*Auger* Issue 8.2) - "[Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike](https://podcastle.org/2025/07/29/podcastle-902-godzilla-as-a-young-man-named-mike/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by E.M Faulds (*Podcastle*) ##### Best Shorter Fiction - "Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen" by Cecile Cristofari (*Cities Are Forests Waiting to Happen*) - "[The Apologists](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson%5F11%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tade Thompson - "The Art of Time Travel (In One Million Times)" by Teika Marija Smits (*One Million Times: A Science Fiction Anthology Series*) - "[Descent](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/talabi%5F05%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wole Talabi - "The River Has Roots" by Amal El-Mohtar (*The River Has Roots*) This year’s Eastercon, [*Iridescence*](https://eastercon2026.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), will be at the [Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel](https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/bhxmetw-hilton-birmingham-metropole/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the 3rd of April to 6th of April 2026, where the winners will be announced. Here's [the full shortlist](https://bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards-shortlist?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Bram Stoker Awards The Bram Stoker Awards are awarded every year since 1987 by the Horror Writers Association, which honors "Superior Achievement" in the horror field. Awards are selected via a process that produces a recommended reading list, then a preliminary ballot, before being whittled down to a final ballot. Here's a selection: ##### **Superior Achievement in Long Fiction** - *Cathedral of the Drowned* by Nathan Ballingrud - “Uncertain Sons” by Thomas Ha - “[Squid Teeth](https://reactormag.com/squid-teeth-sarah-langan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Langan - *Pam Kowolski is a Monster!* by Sarah Langan - “[Wolf Moon, Antler Moon](https://reactormag.com/wolf-moon-antler-moon-a-c-wise/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by A.C. Wise ##### **Superior Achievement in a Novel** - *Witchcraft for Wayward Girls* by Grady Hendrix - *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* Stephen Graham Jones - *The Bewitching* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *Girl in the Creek* by Wendy N. Wagner ##### **Superior Achievement in Short Fiction** - “Stomata” by L.E. Daniels (*Darkness Most Fowl*) - “Inheritance” by R.J. Joseph (*Full Throttle: A Dark Dozen Anthology*) - “[Saint Dymphna’s School for Borderland Girls](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/st-dymphnas-school-for-borderland-girls?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (*Weird Horror* #10) - “\[Ir\]reversible” by Anna Taborska (*Witches and Witchcraft: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Essays*) - “[Autogas Ferryman](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/autogas-ferryman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Champ Wongsatayanont (*Nightmare Magazine* #156) Here's the [full list of finalists](https://bramstokerawards.horror.org/front-page/horror-writers-association-releases-the-2025-bram-stoker-awards-final-ballot/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The winners will be announced at this year's [StokerCon](https://www.stokercon.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will take place in Pittsburgh, PA from June 4th to June 7th, 2026. ### *The LA Times* Book Awards And finally, the LA Times Book Awards have been around since 1980, but they added a dedicated science fiction and fantasy category (originally named for Ray Bradbury) in 2019\. Here are this year's finalists: - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Esperance* by Adam Oyebanji - *The Death of Mountains* by Jordan Kurella - *Luminous: A Novel* by Silvia Park - *Death of the Author: A Novel* by Nnedi Okorafor Here's the [full list of nominees](https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books/book-prizes?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the winners will be announced at a [ceremony during the LA Book Festival](https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books/book-prizes?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Friday, April 17th, 2026 at 7 pm. ### Table of Contents, March 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-march-2026/ Last updated: 2026-04-01T15:29:22.000Z Welcome to the March installment of Table of Contents, a roundup of the latest short fiction hitting the web for the science fiction and fantasy world. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-february-2026/) – it's been newly updated with the stories that came out over the course of February 2026\. I've also added a couple of publications to the longer list. You can check out prior installments of this column [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Adventitious*](https://www.adventitious.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February / March 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.adventitious.net/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[*What Any Dead Thing Wants*](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/what-any-dead-thing-wants-aimee-ogden/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden - *"*[*The Soundtrack of My Afterlife*](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/the-soundtrack-of-my-afterlife-pa-cornell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P. A. Cornell - *"*[*Recording of Professor Elizabeth Boucher’s Opening Lecture on Death Ages Novels, University of Presque Isle, March 32, 2667.*](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/professor-boucher-lecture-turner/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stacie Turner - *"*[*This is Why Magical Realism and Family Tree School Projects Shouldn’t Mix*](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/magical-realism-family-tree-guerrero/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Abigail Guerrero - "[A Húlíjīng Always Keeps One Tail Hidden](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/a-hulijing-always-keeps-one-tail-hidden-melissa-ren/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melissa Ren - "[What A Name Does Is Let You Leave](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/what-a-name-does-is-let-you-leave-meagan-kane/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Meagan Kane - "[Hunter Mother Sailor Wife](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/hunter-mother-sailor-wife-catherine-tavares/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Catherine Tavares - "[Teapot](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/teapot-williams/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ben Williams - "[The Furthest Point](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/the-furthest-point-alethea-paul/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alethea Paul - "[To Devour Your Own Name](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/to-devour-your-own-name-katlina-sommerberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katlina Sommerberg - "[A Place to Grow](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/a-place-to-grow-sarah-grace-tuttle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Grace Tuttle ### Nonfiction - [This won’t exist yesterday](https://www.adventitious.net/stories/this-wont-exist-yesterday/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) ### Fiction - "[Freshly Minted](https://amazingstories.com/2026/03/freshly-minted-by-nick-hartland-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nick Hartland - "[Shells](https://amazingstories.com/2026/03/shells-by-alexander-zelenyj-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alexander Zelenyj - "[The Tyrant in Retrograde](https://amazingstories.com/2026/03/the-tyrant-in-retrograde-by-scott-morris-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Scott Morris - "[The Factory](https://amazingstories.com/2026/03/the-factory-by-lucy-egan-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lucy Egan - "[Dreaming of Home](https://amazingstories.com/2026/03/dreaming-of-home-by-josh-clark-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Josh Clark ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 152) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Ascension" by P.L. McMillan — 3/3 - "The Island of Sea Turtles and Blood" by Angela Liu — 3/17 - "Un Lamento de Flores" by A.P. Thayer — 3/24 - "Citizen Komarova Finds Love" by Kat Sedia — 3/31 ### Nonfiction - ["Musings from Maryland"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-issue-152?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - Interview with Author P.L. McMillan by Marissa van Uden — 3/5 - "Not a Scab, but a Wound" by Storm Humbert — 3/17 --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March/April 2026,*Vol. XCVI No. 3 & 4*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Consumer" by Stephen Case - "And Wear A Golden Sorrow" by Eric Del Carlo - "Rovers" by Paul Carlson - "False Light" by MB Valente - "Songbirds" by H.A.B. Wilt - "Shade" by David Whitmarsh - "Slingshot" by David Gerrold - "Carbon" by Jay Werkheiser - "The Pearl Divers Of Connell-b" by Scott Steensma - "The Three Billion Base Pairs Of The Prophet" by Gregor Hartmann - "Godspeed" by C.R. Hodges - "Seeking Singularity" by Joel Richards - "The Shiny New Folk" by Steve Rasnic Tem - "Conscience" by Tom R. Pike - "On The Origins Of The Species" by Edd Vick - "No Place On Earth" by Mary Soon Lee - "Sour Grapes" by Holly Day ### Nonfiction - Homes Away From Home, Michael Carroll - Seeds Of Cities: Science Fiction Novums, M.c. Childs - Patterns And Plausibilities, Howard V. Hendrix - Guest Editorial: Artificial Stupidity, Stanley Schmidt - In Times To Come - The Alternate View, John G. Cramer - Unknowns: Out Of Sequence, Alec Nevala-lee - The Reference Library, Rosemary Claire Smith - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March/April 2026, *Vol. 50 Nos. 3 & 4*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Ghosts of Goldilocks" by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber - "Satan’s Slave" by R. Garcia y Robertson - "Quest for the Corpus Mundi" by Preston Grassmann & Paul Di Filippo - "How to Live With Polar Bears" by Octavia Cade - "A Fierce Need" by James Van Pelt - "The Placemat at Baldy’s Diner" by Michael Libling - "How Else" by David Ebenbach - "The High Shrines" by Stephen Case - "Antarctic Radio" by Gu Shi (translated by Andy Dudak) - "Decoherence" by Jennifer Crow - "Ice House" by Anuel Rodriguez - "Spacesick" by Grace Fitzgibbon - "AITA for Killing All the Humans?" by Jenna Hanchey - "Time-Lost Stamps" by Adele Gardner - "Sounds of Silence" by Robert Frazier - "Zero-G Soliloquy" by Connor Yeck - "Creation" by Archie Abaire ### Nonfiction - Editorial: Nothing Gold Can Stay by Sheila Williams - Reflections: Round-Robin by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Impending Dooms by James Patrick Kelly - On Books by Peter Heck --- ## [*Aurealis*](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue #188) Subscribe [here](https://aurealis.com.au/product-category/subscriptions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[A New Game](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#anewgame)" by Matt Freeman - "[Anna, in the Abstract](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#annaintheabstract)" by Andrew David - "[The Book of Middles](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thebookofmiddles)" by EC Fuller - "[The Quirky Life of Hugo Gernsback](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#thequirkylifeofhugogernsback)" by Lynne Lumsden Green - "[An Interview with Stephen Higgins, Creator of ‘Valis’, a Musical Album Inspired by the Words of Philip K Dick](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#aninterviewwithstephenhigginscreatorofvalisamusicalalbuminspiredbythewordsofphilipkdick)" by Michael Pryor - "[Hacking the Flesh: the Future of the Human Form](https://aurealis.com.au/?ref=andrewliptak.com#hackingthefleshthefutureofthehumanform)" by Stuart Olver ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: From the Cloud](https://aurealis.com.au/store/aurealis-188/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eugen Bacon --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issues #452 and #453) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Mother’s Hearth](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/mothers-hearth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by W.A. Hamilton - "[The Sea Child](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-sea-child/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Justin Wesley Ferguson - "[Where the Dream Train Goes, Pt. I](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/where-the-dream-train-goes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jason Sanford - "[Where the Dream Train Goes, Pt. II](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/where-the-dream-train-goes-pt-ii/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jason Sanford - "[The Book Collectors](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-book-collectors/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.W. Halicks --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(March 2026, Issue 234) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Bend Like the Palm](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/levine%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David D. Levine - "[First Human Ghost on Mars](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/meza%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.L. Meza - "[Crosstalk, Elysium](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/zhao%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carolyn Zhao - "[Scion](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha - "[Scion: Afterword](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha2%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thomas Ha - "[Those Who Left History](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fengnian%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wanxiang Fengnian, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu - "[You Are Invited to Our SPRING CELEBRATION](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dyer%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Thoraiya Dyer - "[Person, Place, Thing](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/lingen%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen ### Nonfiction - [The Hands and the Brain: Complementary Dominance](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kinney%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Benjamin C. Kinney - [Anatomy of a Novel: A Conversation with J.M. Sidorova](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sidorova%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Fluidity, Desire, and Survival: A Conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/roanhorse%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: The Best from 2025](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F03%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 130) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Ugly House](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-ugly-house/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byBianca Carvalho - "[Nameless](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/nameless/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAliya Whiteley - "[The Empty Vessel](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-empty-vessel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byRhys Hughes - "[R is for Remains](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/r-is-for-remains/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySteve Rasnic Tem --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (March 2026, No. 50) ### Fiction - "Abednego Wept" by Cy Hill - "Devour" by Alyssa Wallinder - "The Tale Of The Three Sages (Metamorphosis)" by John Randolph - "The Tokyo Tango" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "A More Perfect Union" by Edward Ahern - "Capture The Magic Press" by G. W. Mcclary - "Evidence" by Ty Cronkhite - "Encounter" by Nick Young - "Night Visits" by Matt Fox - "Grasshoppers" by Theodora Sterling --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Winter 2026, Issue 41) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[You Build Your House on Your Father’s Corpse](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/you-build-your-house-on-your-fathers-corpse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sadoeuphemist (fiction; online 3/2) - "[The Breeze & The Black Door](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/the-breeze-the-black-door/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mack W. Mani (poetry; online 3/5) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 150) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “The Sacrificials” by Andrew Kozma - “Moss Senses” by Beth Goder - “The Piano Made of Fingers” by Abigail Koury - “Float. Sink. Tread. Swim.” by Shelly Jones - “The Oil King” by Bree Wernicke - “Moonmouse” by S.L. Harris, and - “Second Film” by Chistopher St. Prince. --- ## [*Diabolical Plots*](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) Support [here](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Jefferson Dines Alone](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-133a-jefferson-dines-alone-by-s-l-harris/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by S.L. Harris - “[Well Tester](https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-133b-well-tester-by-e-m-faulds/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by E.M. Faulds --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Float. Sink. Tread. Swim](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#float-sink-tread-swim)" by Shelly Jones - "[The Piano Made of Fingers](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#the-piano-made-of-fingers)" by Abigail Koury - "[Moss Senses](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#moss-senses)" by Beth Goder - "[The Sacrificials](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#the-sacrificials)" by Andrew Kozma ### Nonfiction - "[Transformations: 150 Issues & Counting!](https://flashfictiononline.com/issues/march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com#transformations-150-issues-counting)" by Rebecca Halsey --- ## [*Fusion Fragment*](https://www.fusionfragment.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 27) Support [here](https://www.patreon.com/cw/fusionfragment?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “A Prescription for Suicide” by Anya Leigh Josephs - “Digital Love Spell – 78% Effective!” by Katharine Tyndall - “Extinction” by Ross Showalter - “One Last Round in the Arena of Little Gods (Or, Asan and the Lion)” by Ewen Ma - “Overgrowth” by Cate W. Tam - “The Animal Years” by Jaye Case - “The Sum of Her Parts” by J.Y. Zhang --- ## [*Future Tense Fiction*](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Pocket Box™](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-the-pocket-box-gunnar-anderson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gunnar Anderson ### Nonfiction - "[What Happens When a Groundbreaking Invention Falls Victim to Human Impulse?](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/technological-adoption-consumerism-bosch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Torie Bosch --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(March 2026) ### Fiction - "[About Face](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/03/01/about-face/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Teresa Milbrodt --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“Once Upon an Invasion”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/once-upon-an-invasion-by-amanda-cecelia-lang/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amanda Cecelia Lang - [“Outbreak](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/outbreak-by-michele-h-porter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michelle H. Porter - [“Out to Sea”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/out-to-sea-by-dom-d-borg/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dom D. Borg - [“Ponyhenge”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/ponyhenge-by-faith-allington?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Faith Allington - [“The Tipping Point”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/the-tipping-point-by-s-m-french-byrne?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sean French-Byrne - [“Diamonds”](https://kaleidotrope.net/sping-2026/diamonds-by-grant-stone?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Grant Stone - [“Astral Source”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/astral-source-by-k-l-neidecker/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K.L. Neidecker - [“A Life in the Day: with Chris Wheeler, CEO of Tricentennial”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/a-life-in-the-day-with-chris-wheeler-ceo-of-tricentennial-by-matt-hornsby?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Hornsby - [“Ma’anu Wei: What We Know Thus Far”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/maanu-wei-what-we-know-thus-far-by-eliezra-schaffzin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eliezra Schaffzin - [“A Tree That Can’t Be Chopped](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/a-tree-that-cant-be-chopped-by-timothy-mudie?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Timothy Mudie - [“Wolftongue”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/wolftongue-by-em-harriett?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Em Harriett - [“Rara Avis”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/rara-avis-by-meg-elison?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Meg Elison ### Poetry - [“Awakening”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/awakening-by-mari-ness?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mari Ness - [“Even in Our Sleep”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/even-in-our-sleep-by-mark-rich/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mark Rich - [“Bridge and Tunnel”](https://kaleidotrope.net/spring-2026/bridge-and-tunnel-by-anne-perez/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anne Perez --- ## [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 20265, Issue 6.1) Subscribe [here](https://www.khoreomag.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[This Kingdom, Your Ficus; Its Belly, Your Fig](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/this-kingdom-your-ficus-its-belly-your-fig/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lowry Poletti - "[In My Time of Dreaming](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/in-my-time-of-dreaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" [by Megan Chee](https://www.khoreomag.com/author/megan-chee/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The Tale of Afonso](https://www.khoreomag.com/translation/the-tale-of-afonso/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dea Anugrah, translated by Annie Tucker - "[Letters from Light’s End](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/letters-from-lights-end/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phoenix Alexander - "[Banquet for All!](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/banquet-for-all/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by jesutomisin ipinmoye ### Nonfiction - [Letters from the Editors](https://www.khoreomag.com/editor/letter-from-the-editors-volume-6-issue-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Interzone*](https://interzone.press/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 304) Subscribe [here](https://shop.interzone.press/b/IxvFR?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Stories by: - Rachael Cupp - R.T. Ester - Dominic Green - Simon Guerrier - Val Nolan - Jennifer Jeanne McArdle ### Nonfiction by: - Alexander Glass - Una McCormack - Val Nolan - Aliya Whiteley - Kelly Jennings - Paul Kincaid - Paul McAuley - Val Nolan - Nick Lowe --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 190) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Eat, Prey, Love: A Modest Proposal for Ensuring Gender Equality Through Selective Dietary Practices; or, a Geriatric Millennial’s Guide to #GirlDinner](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/eat-prey-love-a-modest-proposal-for-ensuring-gender-equality-through-selective-dietary-practices-or-a-geriatric-millennials-guide-to-girldinner/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jilly Dreadful (3/5) - "[The Devourers of War; or, An Excerpt from the Cookbook of the Gods](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-devourers-of-war-or-an-excerpt-from-the-cookbook-of-the-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (3/5) - "[Espie Droger Dreams of War](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/espie-droger-dreams-of-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew Kressel (3/12) - "[The Tide Folk](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-tide-folk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jennifer Hudak (3/12) - "[An Encounter at the Dawn of the Time War](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/default/an-encounter-at-the-dawn-of-the-time-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by JT Petty (3/19) - "[Lotus Dew for the Emperor’s Tea](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/lotus-dew-for-the-emperors-tea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vanessa Fogg (3/19) - "[Terms of Enlightenment](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/default/terms-of-enlightenment/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Patrick Hurley (3/26) - "[When We Loved Giants](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/when-we-loved-giants/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sara S. Messenger (3/26) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: March 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (3/5) - [Author Spotlight: Matthew Kressel](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-matthew-kressel-5/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (3/12) - [Book Review: *Midnight Somewhere* by Johnny Compton](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-midnight-somewhere-by-johnny-compton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (3/12) - [Author Spotlight: Vanessa Fogg](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-vanessa-fogg-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (3/19) - [Book Review: *The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers* by Kenneth Hunter Gordon](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-girl-who-made-a-mouse-from-her-grandfathers-whiskers-by-kenneth-hunter-gordon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (3/19) - [Author Spotlight: Patrick Hurley](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-patrick-hurley/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (3/26) - [Author Spotlight: Sara S. Messenger](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-sara-s-messenger/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (3/26) - [Book Review: *The Franchise* by Thomas Elrod](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-franchise-by-thomas-elrod/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (3/26) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (March 2026, Issue 065) Subscribe [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Fiction - "The End of the World, Simon et al." by T. L. Xue - "Ghost Story" by Feby Idrus - "Squilla of the Flower Moon" by M. McNamara - "Private Cabin, Ocean View" by Jane Campbell - "Laisha" by Amantia Menalla - "Stevie" by Bendix Ross - "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" by Sylvie Althoff - "The Disparity of Confidence" by Emmie Christie - "Heart's Desire" by K.M. Reed - "Eva" by Ashley Burnett - "Are We There Yet?" by Allison Mulder - "The Sleeper in the Crypt" by Tiffany Tang - "Brighton" by J. Nathan - "The Bride and Her Thief" by Safiya Cherfi - "Warp and Weft Rising" by Pauline Barmby - "Dance It Trippingly" by Sadie Leewood --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Sock. Something. Um](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00614-9?ref=andrewliptak.com)." Daniel Roop - "[Evolution](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00612-x?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zhouhe Zhang and Haochen Hua - "[First bot, singular](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00610-z?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Preston Grassmann - "[All the world is staged](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00131-9?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mark S. Bailen --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 162) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Will the Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-the-last-one-to-leave-please-turn-out-the-lights/?ref=andrewliptak.com)?" by Gordon B. White (3/4) - "[The Doll Problem](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-doll-problem/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu (3/11) - "[Her Dark Places](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/her-dark-places/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAdam-Troy Castro (3/18) - "[Zooming Past Shotgun Houses](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/zooming-past-shotgun-houses/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eva Roslin (3/25) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: March 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Wendy N. Wagner (3/4) - [Author Spotlight: Gordon B. White](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-gordon-b-white-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (3/4) - [The H Word: Laughing to Swallow My Screams](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-laughing-to-swallow-my-screams/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ryan Habermeyer (3/11) - [Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-adam-troy-castro-18/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (3/18) - [Media Reviews: March 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/media-reviews-march-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Adam-Troy Castro (3/25) --- ## [*Otherside*](https://othersidespec.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) () Support [here](https://othersidespec.com/support/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[This Is Not Your Extinction Event](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/this-is-not-your-extinction-event/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elena Sichrovsky - "[The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/the-vetala-of-crystal-vellam-inlet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Simo Srinivas - "[Vitrification](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/vitrification/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ishmael Grey - "[The Claywife](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/the-claywife/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by tanadrin - "[Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/your-first-days-back-in-the-court-of-arthur/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Abigail Eliza - "[Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/mother-mansrot-in-the-glass-mountain/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Pauling - "[Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/curriculum-for-girls-who-will-survive/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nadia Radovich - "[Situationship](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/situationship/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Seoung Kim - "[The Homeowner’s Bride](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/the-homeowners-bride/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ayida Shonibar ### Poetry - "[blessing for molly grue.](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/blessing-for-molly-grue/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elisheva Fox - "[Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/ignore-all-previous-instructions-and-inject-estrogen/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ann Leblanc - "[Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/vulture-bees-transfigure-the-man-i-tried-to-be/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rick HOllon - "[Eat It Out](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/eat-it-out/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cypher - "[Electrolysis](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/electrolysis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nico Santana ### Nonfiction [He Is Survived by His Wife](https://othersidespec.com/pieces/he-is-survived-by-his-wife/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jackie Hedeman --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(March 2026) ### Fiction - "[Blade Through the Heart](https://reactormag.com/blade-through-the-heart-carrie-vaughn/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn - "[Cutting Corners](https://reactormag.com/cutting-corners-yoon-ha-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Yoon Ha Lee - "[Tatterdemalion](https://reactormag.com/tatterdemalion-michael-cisco/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Cisco --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 33) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Seven Virtues of Chevalière Jacqueline Aridon](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-seven-virtues-of-chevaliere/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S. C. Mills - "[Nothing Bright but the Shine of Your Coat](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/nothing-bright-but-the-shine-of-your-coat/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cressida Roe - "[Foxes on Her Wrist, Fire on Her Ankle](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/foxes-on-her-wrist-fire-on-her-ankle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Akis Linardos - "[Just Before the Mission Gulch Fire](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/just-before-the-mission-gulch-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Taylor Jones - "[The Dragon and It](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-dragon-and-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Francia - [Gemini creatures](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/gemini-creatures/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rachael Brooks - "[I Once Fell in Love With a Jackalope](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/i-once-fell-in-love-with-a-jackalope/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chase Anderson - "[They Live So Little and They Die So Fast](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/they-live-so-little-and-they-die-so-fast/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mira Singer - "[tell us about doubt](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/tell-us-about-doubt/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rath Mercury --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Bitter as the Sea](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/bitter-as-the-sea/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.E. Bronstein - "[This Obituary Has Been Retracted](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/this-obituary-has-been-redacted/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P.C. Verrone - "[Five Medicines You Found in the Garden of Unfinished Poems](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/five-medicines-you-found-in-the-garden-of-unfinished-poems/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jenna Hanchey ### Poetry - "[Afterstory](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/afterstory/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Janet McAdams - "[You Will Disembowel the Bird (Viator)](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/you-will-disembowel-the-bird-viator/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dacey Eliot - "[An Inheritance of Air; or, You Are Cordially Invited to Attend My Presentation on Genealogy](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/an-inheritance-of-air-or-you-are-cordially-invited-to-attend-my-presentation-on-genealogy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sophia Zhao - "[Narcissus Meets the Ghost of AI in a Dark Alley Behind a Fusion Restaurant](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/narcissus-meets-the-ghost-of-ai-in-a-dark-alley-behind-a-fusion-restaurant/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lesley Hart Gunn - "[\[minutes between city and forest #4\]](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/minutes-between-city-and-forest-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ceridwen Hall - "[Pennsylvania Cryptid](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/pennsylvania-cryptid/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amelia England - [The O’Neill Cylinder in Geostationary Orbit Above Earth’s Equator](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-oneill-cylinder-in-geostationary-orbit-above-earths-equator/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katlina Sommerberg ### Nonfiction - [Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/spec-fic-and-the-politics-of-identity/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eugen Bacon - [That Soft and Gentle Feeling: Relationships In Cosy SFF](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/that-soft-and-gentle-feeling-relationships-in-cosy-sff/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.L. Dove Cooper ### Reviews - Monday: [*The Inescapable March* by Hana Carolina](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-inescapable-march-by-hana-carolina/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nick Hubble - Wednesday: [*Into the Midnight Wood* by Alexandra McCollum](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/into-the-midnight-wood-by-alexandra-mccollum/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenny Hamilton - Friday: [*The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts* by Kim Fu](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-valley-of-the-vengeful-ghosts-by-kim-fu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tina S. Zhu - Monday: [*ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction* edited by Marissa van Uden](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/eco24-the-years-best-speculative-ecofiction-edited-by-marissa-van-uden/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Wednesday: [*This Brutal Moon* by Bethany Jacobs](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/this-brutal-moon-by-bethany-jacobs/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Roseanna Pendlebury - Friday: [*The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains* by Reena McCarty](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-tricky-business-of-faerie-bargains-by-reena-mccarty/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande - Monday: [*Crisis at Proxima* by Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/crisis-at-proxima-by-travis-s-taylor-and-les-johnson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andy Sawyer - Wednesday: [*Witchcraft for Wayward Girls* by Grady Hendrix](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/witchcraft-for-wayward-girls-by-grady-hendrix/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amritesh Mukherjee - Friday: [*When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor* by Veronica Roth](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-among-crows-and-to-clutch-a-razor-by-veronica-roth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Electra Pritchett - Monday: [*Beings* by Ilana Masad](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/beings-by-ilana-masad/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Lewis - Wednesday: [*The Iron Garden Sutra* by A. D. Sui](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-iron-garden-sutra-by-a-d-sui/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Kingsley - Friday: [*Monsters in the Archive* by Caroline Bicks](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/monsters-in-the-archive-by-caroline-bicks/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric Primm --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026) ### Fiction - "[When Your Ex-Husband Lies Dying and Only You Can Get Him the Magic Elixir from the Bodega](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/when-your-ex-husband-lies-dying-and?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ben Francisco - "[La Sirena’s Blessing of Belonging](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/la-sirenas-blessing-of-belonging?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by V.M. Ayala - "[Self-Portrait, with Bones](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/self-portrait-with-bones?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Irving - "[In Your Dreams](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/in-your-dreams?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Leah Cypess --- ## [*Three-Lobed Burning Eye*](https://www.3lobedmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March 2026, Issue 147) Support them [here](https://www.3lobedmag.com/support.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Final Safest Place](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory1.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wendy N. Wagner - "[Our Darkness to Take](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory2.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hailey Piper - "[Kindredhood in Medieval Tongues](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory3.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eugen Bacon - "[The Show is in the Basement](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory4.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Keith Rosson - "[Someday, The Rules Were (Mostly) Clear](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory5.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Maxwell I. Gold - "[book club for bots](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue47/3lbe47%5Fstory6.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Clay McLeod Chapman --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (March / April 2026, Issue 69) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[What We Mean When We Talk About the Hole in the Bathroom](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/what-we-mean-when-we-talk-about-the-hole-in-the-bathroom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (3/3) - “[Chimera](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/chimera/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anjali Sachdeva (3/3) - “[When Things Went Bad](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-things-went-bad/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Stephen Graham Jones (3/3) - “[The Mighty Impervious Woman Considers Retirement](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mighty-impervious-woman-considers-retirement/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Izzy Wasserstein (3/3) - “[machining of little moons](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/machining-of-little-moons/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eva Papasoulioti (3/3) ### Nonfiction - “[The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-64/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Michael Damian Thomas - “[Bittersweet Endings (for All Who Live to See Such Times)](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/bittersweet-endings-for-all-who-live-to-see-such-times/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Samantha Mills (3/3) - “[Endings and Other Lies](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/endings-and-other-lies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jim C. Hines (3/3) - [Interview: Anjali Sachdeva](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-anjali-sachdeva/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (3/3) --- ## [*Weird Horror Magazine*](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026, Issue 12) ### Fiction - Chloe N. Clark - Roy Graham - Rick Kennett - Annika Barranti Klein - "[Moksha](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/moksha?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rajiv Moté - "[You Scream Ice Cream](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/you-scream?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Russell Nichols - "[A View from the Window](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/window?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rory Say - R.L. Summerling - "[Horncrowns](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/horncrowns?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D. Matthew Urban - "[Last Night](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/last-night?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aliya Whiteley ### Nonfiction - [European Weird Vs. American Weird](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/on-horror-12?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Simon Strantzas - [Suspicious Manors: Old Dark Houses and the New Gilded Age](https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/grey12?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Orrin Grey --- Remember to check back at the end of the month for updates as new stories come online, and to let me know in the comments what caught your eye! ### 14 new SF/F books to check out in March 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-new-books-march-2026/ Last updated: 2026-03-02T20:36:16.000Z This week, Vermont has a unique and quirky civic event taking place, Town Meeting Day. It's a unique democratic tradition here, where towns gather for a meeting to discuss the year's business. It depends a bit on the size of the town: bigger cities like Burlington and Montpelier have your traditional voting by ballot, but some of the smaller ones will hold in-person meetings where anyone can raise an issue or proposal, debate budget line items, and generally take a hand in their governance. It's a neat tradition, and one that I think really helps our little state stand apart in this day and age. Here's my usual pitch: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: you can [sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (you'll get some additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel), you can leave a [one-time tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support), or you can purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below! Thank you: your support helps keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) As always, you can check out prior installments of these recommendations over on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. You can also check out new review copies as they come in (and talk about them!) over on the [TO Subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/rtransferorbit/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Okay, here are 14 new science fiction and fantasy books to check out in the first half of this March: ### [*The Last Unicorn*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-last-unicorn?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter S. Beagle (March 3rd) The Folio Society releases their Spring Collection, and for it, they're bringing back one of their recent Limited Editions: Peter S. Beagle's *The Last Unicorn*. It's a classic fantasy novel, and it comes with an introduction by Patrick Rothfuss and 9 full-page color and 28 black and white illustrations by artist [Lily Seika Jones](https://www.lilyseikajones.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [The Folio Society unveils 2026 spring collectionLots of SF/F titles to look forward to![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-51.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/spring-collection-2026-reveal.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-2026-spring-collection-weir-homer-mandel-mievlle/) ### [*Crawlspace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250381286?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Christopher (March 17th) Olivia O'Connor is the mission lead for an experimental spacecraft, which could change the course of humanity: it will potentially open up the depths of space for human exploration. But as her and her crew jump through dimensions, they find strange things: voices, long-lost glimpses of people, and strange symbols carve into the ship, all while ancient entities are appearing outside. ### [*Spoiled Milk*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385551595?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Avery Curran (March 10th) A young woman named Emily Locke is in her last year attending the Briarley School for Girls when Violet, a fellow student, falls and his killed. Emily and her rival Evelyn agree that it was no accident, and they set about trying to prove that the schoolmistress was behind it. Emily turns to an unlikely solution: spiritualism, connecting with spirits from beyond to try and figure out what happened, and is shocked when she encounters Violet, who warns them that something far more dangerous is in store for the school. Kirkus Reviews calls it a "queer, eerie debut" and that it's "true strength is exploring the complex relationships among the girls—both living and dead—and the unknowns of the world." ### [*Transmentation | Transgression*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212185950?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Darkley Lem (March 17th) Writing collective Darkley Lem follows up last year's [*Transmentation Transience*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212185998?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* a shared-world project about interdimensional travelers who find themselves in the midst of a greater conflict between two societies. After his last mission, intelligence officer Malculm Bysotič has found himself in disgrace and is assigned to work on a new initiative: evicting travelers from Burel Hird, a grim assignment that's mired in cruelty. As he conducts his work, he begins to question the society that he serves. Meanwhile, newly-acceded councilor Priema Dhalgrim is carrying out her program of control, working to expand Burel Hird's territory across the Many Worlds. Writing in *Locus Magazine*, Alexandra Pierce [says](https://locusmag.com/review/transmentation-transgression-by-darkly-lem-review-by-alexandra-pierce/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "this series is doing bold and clever new things with many-worlds narratives and anyone with an interest in such ideas needs to be reading it." ### [*Green & Deadly Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250342188?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenn Lyons (March 3rd) This is a standalone fantasy in which necromancy once nearly destroyed the world long ago, or so people thought. An aspiring knight named Mathaiik has been training for his entire life to join the Idallik Knights, an order devoted to preventing the return of necromancy, of which only small traces still exist in the world. The knights soon face a new threat and find that they're unable to stop it: the forests are beginning to come to life and consume anyone who steps foot inside. To stop them, Mathaiik does the unthinkable, awaken one of the long-sleeping Grim Lords, Kaiataris, who awakens in a new world, and realizes that what everyone thought was their story was very wrong. ### [*Station Eleven*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/station-eleven?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emily St. John Mandel (March 3rd) Another offering from the Folio Society's Spring 2026 collection is Emily St. John Mandel's outstanding post-apocalyptic novel *Station Eleven*, which explores life after a devastating pandemic kills off a significant chunk of the population. This edition comes with a new introduction by Mandel and art by [Zoë van Dijk](https://zoevandijk.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who contributed six illustrations. [Imagining the way to a small, angry planetA look at the art in The Folio Society’s stunning edition of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-65.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-White-Black-Minimalist-Bottle-Label.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-becky-chambers-van-dijk-art-interview/) ### [*Perdido Street Station*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/perdido-street-station?ref=andrewliptak.com) by China Miéville (March 3rd) Folio Society is bringing out another Limited Edition offering to the masses, this time in the form of China Miéville's classic *Perdido Street Station*, which is set in his steampunk city of New Crobuzon in Bas-Lag. Humans live alongside mutants and arcane creatures, and when a stranger arrives in the city, something is unleashed that will change it forever. This one comes with an afterword by Miéville and art by Doug Bell: 11 color illustrations and 8 black and white illustrated part-title pages. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*River of Bones and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982153816?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebecca Roanhorse (March 3rd) Rebecca Roanhorse brings together a whole bunch of her award-winning short stories in this new collection, such as “[Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience?srsltid=AfmBOorhazu2yrkqzkXaKt%5FT44aULWUU4mq9vW43Iz%5FY98y9xhlA91U5&ref=andrewliptak.com),” “[A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/a-brief-lesson-in-native-american-astronomy?ref=andrewliptak.com),” and a whole bunch of others. But what I'm really excited for is a new story in her Sixth World series, following her two novels [*Trail of Lightning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534413504?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Storm of Locusts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534413535?ref=andrewliptak.com). Set in a climate change-ravaged, post-apocalyptic near future where magic has returned to the world, she picks up Kai’s perspective as he and Maggie head back to his home to save his ex from their own family. *Kirkus Reviews* gave it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rebecca-roanhorse/river-of-bones-and-other-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This collection is best read with plenty of time to sit and reflect after finishing each piece." ### [*Children of Strife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316598965?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (March 17th) One of the best science fiction novels to come out in recent years was Adriak Tchaikovsky's [*Children of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452502?ref=andrewliptak.com), an epic read about terraforming, intelligence, evolution, and civilization, following the uplifting of spiders on a distant colony world and the clash between them and a band of colonists from a destroyed Earth. He followed it up with [*Children of Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452533?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Children of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316466400?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now, *Children of Strife*. In this installment, we're back to seeking out the other worlds that Earth began terraforming before it collapsed. A motley crew of humans, spiders, and mantis shrimp head out into the depths of space where they encounter one such colonial world. When they arrive, a human named Alis discovers that only she, the ship's captain, and its AI are the only ones left on the ship – and it's up to them to figure out what happened to the others who set off to explore the world and the arkship orbiting it. I've loved reading these books, and this type of story: people heading out to explore the crumbling remains of a colony or spaceship, is something that I love to delve into. ### [*Pretenders to the Throne of God*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035914975?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (March 10th) As if adding to that series wasn't enough, Tchaikovsky adds another installment to his *Tyrant Philosophers* series, which began with [*City of Last Chances*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781801108447?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and continued with [House of Open Wounds](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035901364?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Days of Shattered Faith*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035901524?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Lives of Bitter Rain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035911448?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* (It'll end with one final installment, *The Grave of Perfection.)* In this installment, the Palleseen have been working to correct the imperfect world, setting their sights on the state Eres Ffenegh (the City on the Back of a Crab), only to find that its inhabitants aren't going to give up their freedom without a fight. The Palleseen have laid siege to the city, which has dragged on. The invading army is beginning to look at what they'll be ordered to do next, while in the city, folks are figuring out how to bargain and survive the coming onslaught. ### [*The Book of Fallen Leaves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316588089?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. S. Tamaki (March 17th) In this fantasy novel, a prince named Sen Hoshiakari has been exiled after his father's rebellion failed. He was saved by a peasant named Rui, and is now setting off to restore his family's land and honor. Rui has found herself adrift and aimless, unaware that she has a destiny. As a civil war erupts and demons emerge to wreck havoc, the pair have to figure out how to survive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780356525884?ref=andrewliptak.com) "It can be a challenge to keep track of the fast-moving coups and battles, but lovely snippets of poetry, appealing protagonists, and fascinating interpersonal dynamics will keep readers hooked. Tamaki is an exciting new voice in epic fantasy." ### [*Accelerated Growth Environment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781970458022?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lauren C. Teffeau (March 3rd) A scientist named Dr. Jorna Benton is part of a sea-based nursery called the Climasphere, which can support most of the Earth's biomes. As she sets off on her mission to restore collapsed ecosystems along the Atlantic Coast, an explosion nearly destroys their work, and it appears to be sabotage. She's labeled the prime suspect, and to clear her name and save the mission, she has to take drastic measures by confronting a secret that she's hidden for years. ### [*The Martian*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-martian?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andy Weir (March 3rd) Andy Weir's debut novel *The Martian* is getting the Folio Society treatment! It's one of my favorite books, which follows a lone astronaut as he's stranded on Mars and has to figure out how to survive. Particularly exciting about this release is that it has art from Dániel Taylor, who did an excellent job with Iain M. Banks' *Culture* series in recent years. I've got my original hardcover edition of the novel, but I'm sorely tempted to snag a copy of this one. [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-50.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0832-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) ### [*The First Step*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217188420?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Tao Wong (March 10th) Tao Wong originally launched his *A Thousand Li* series back in 2019 (it's run for 12 installments), and Ace Books has recently picked it up for republication, starting with *The First Step*, following Long Wu Ying, a farmer's son who jumped at the chance to become a cultivator, a person who can cultivate his magical abilities. When he's conscripted into the army, he saves his fellow soldiers and is brought to the attention of the Verdant Green Waters sect, a school for magical cultivation, introducing him to a world where he's very much out of his depth. *Publishers Weekly* [says that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798217188420?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the worldbuilding and magic system impress," and that while Wu Ying needs some fleshing out, "there’s enough intrigue to make readers curious about where the series goes from here." --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments what catches your eye, and what you're looking forward to reading. ### Library of America is publishing Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ursula-k-le-guin-wizard-of-earthsea-library-of-america-fantasy-book/ Last updated: 2026-02-28T00:19:41.000Z Library of America, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to celebrating America's great literature and writing [is publishing](https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/forthcoming-fall-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) one of the best works of fantasy literature: Ursula K. Le Guin's *Earthsea* series. The six-book cycle will be broken into two volumes, which will be released on September 8th. [Volume One](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538502?ref=andrewliptak.com) will contain *A Wizard of Earthsea*, *The Tombs of Atuan*, and *The Farthest Shore*, as well as two shorter stories, while [the second](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538519?ref=andrewliptak.com) will include *Tehanu*, *Tales from Earthsea*, *The Other Wind*, and the rest of the short stories set in the world. The books will also include Le Guin's essays about the series and her previously-unseen, hand-drawn maps. The books will be available individually and as a [boxed set](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538526?ref=andrewliptak.com). Le Guin published *A Wizard of Earthsea* after Parnassus Press publisher Herbert Schein entreated her to write a book for younger readers in 1967\. It prompted her to begin thinking about wizards and where they learned about magic, and she quickly came up with a coming-of-age story about a promising young wizard named Ged. After saving his village, he goes off to attend a magical academy in an archipelago and accidentally unleashes a shadow, prompting him to try and escape. It's a phenomenal read, and having picked it up a recently, it holds up wonderfully. While LoA usually decks their books out in a standardized black cover, they've brought in artist and printmaker [Olivia Lomenech Gill](https://www.oliviagill.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to produce the cover art and boxed set for this edition. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Le Guin is a familiar name for Library of America: the publisher has been steadily working its way through her books, including [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Five Novels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598537734?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*The Lathe of Heaven,* *The Eye of the Heron,* *The Beginning Place*, *Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand*, *Lavinia*), [Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598537369?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598536683?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Gifts,* *Voices,* *Powers*), [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598536034?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Author’s Expanded Edition), [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535389?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Rocannon’s World,* *Planet of Exile,* *City of Illusions,* *The Left Hand of Darkness* , *The Dispossessed*), [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535396?ref=andrewliptak.com)(*The Word for World Is Forest,* *Five Ways to Forgiveness,* *The Telling*), [*Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Orsinia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598534948?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Malafrena*, *Orsinian Tales*), [*Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538298?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Ursula K. Le Guin: Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538311?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Le Guin's works have been reprinted a *lot* in recent years. The Folio Society has produced some [great editions](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/authors/ursula-k-le-guin?ref=andrewliptak.com) of her books, Tor recently released [*Worlds of Exile and Illusion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781260?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which includes *Rocannon's World,* *Planet of Exile,* and *City of Illusions*), Saga Press released [*The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481475976?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668243213?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Books-of-Earthsea/Ursula-K-Le-Guin/Earthsea-Cycle/9781481465588?ref=andrewliptak.com), while HarperCollins will include [*The Dispossessed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063484122?ref=andrewliptak.com)in its [forthcoming](https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/press-releases/harpercollins-to-publish-american-classics-collection-on-may-5-2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) Harper Perennial Modern Classics series. There's also an [excellent graphic novel adaptation](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063285767?ref=andrewliptak.com) of *A Wizard of Earthsea* that came out last year and a television adaptation [somewhere in the works](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wizard-of-earthsea-ursula-k-le-guin-fantasy-tv-a24/) in Hollywood. There's certainly no shortage of choices when it comes to finding new editions of her books. That said, I really like what Library of America produces: these books are nicely curated with additional essays or commentary, and if you're looking to save some space, they're pretty compact. But more than that, I think of these as carrying a level of prestige with them: they're included in this incredible, curated body of American writing that the publisher has been putting out since the 1970s. [Library of America to publish the works of Octavia ButlerNonprofit publisher Library of America is expanding its speculative fiction offerings: it’ll release a volume containing the works of Octavia Butler in 2021, co-edited by Nisi Shawl and Gerry Canavan. Shawl revealed the news on Twitter, noting that they’ll be writing an introduction for the book, which will![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-53.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/OctaviaButler-headshot-740x425.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-library-of-america-nisi-shawl-gerry-canavan-kindred-fledging/) LoA has been slowly adding genre novels to its collection, including authors such as [Octavia Butler](https://www.loa.org/writers/756-octavia-e-butler/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Philip K. Dick](https://www.loa.org/writers/261-philip-k-dick/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Shirley Jackson](https://www.loa.org/writers/276-shirley-jackson/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Madeleine L’Engle](https://www.loa.org/writers/694-madeleine-lengle/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [H.P. Lovecraft](https://www.loa.org/writers/118-h-p-lovecraft/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Joanna Russ](https://www.loa.org/writers/724-joanna-russ/?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as anthologies and collections such as [*The Black Fantastic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538113?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598531572?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598536355?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Future Is Female: Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535808?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598537321?ref=andrewliptak.com). Le Guin's *Earthsea* cycle isn't the only genre title coming out from LoA this year: in October, it'll release [*Peter Straub: Three Novels of the 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538540?ref=andrewliptak.com), which includes *Julia*, *If You Could See Me Now*, and *Ghost Story*. ### Here are the finalists for the 2026 Compton Crook Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2025-compton-crook-award-finalists-scifi-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2026-02-28T21:50:36.000Z The Baltimore Science Fiction Society has announced this year's finalists for the 2026 Compton Crook Award! This is an annual award (since 1983), handed out by the members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society at each year's Balticon. It's named for Compton Crook (the pen-name for author Stephen Tall), it award honors the "best of each year's English language first novel by an author in the field of science fiction, fantasy, or horror." Here's this year's finalists: - [*A Song of Legends Lost*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668086834?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.H. Ayinde - [*Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101367?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yaroslav Barsukov - [*All the Water in the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250353528?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eiren Caffall - [*The Book of Lost Hours*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668076347?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hayley Gelfuso - [*The Raven Scholar*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316577229?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Antonia Hodgson - [*Splinter Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250349309?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Ludington The winner gets a prize of $1,000 and an invitation to be the Compton Crook Guest at Balticon for two years. Last year's winner was Samantha Mills, for her book [*The Wings Upon Her Back*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964146?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and the2024 winner was Kemi Ashing-Giwa for [*Splinter in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668008485?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This year's winner will be announced in April. This year's convention is [Balticon 60](https://www.balticon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will be held between May 22nd and 25th, 2025 in Baltimore. ### A revolution is coming on For All Mankind URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/for-all-mankind-season-5-apple-scifi-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2026-02-24T17:41:55.000Z Apple unveiled a new trailer for the fifth season of its science fiction streaming series *For All Mankind*, showing that the state of the solar system is about to heat up considerably. The show debuted way back in November 2019 as one of the company's launch titles, set in an alternate timeline in which the Soviet Union reached the Moon first in 1969, rather than the United States. From there, it's played out a story about a continued space race that's taken humanity to the Moon and to Mars, and all the problems that come with it. In Season 1, NASA worked to build up a base on the Moon in the 1970s, while the action jumps ahead to the 1980s in the next season, where the nuclear tensions of the Cold War erupt and threaten their progress. In Season 3, the action shifts to the race for Mars in the 1990s, and Season 4 jumps to the establishment of a permanent base on the Red Planet in the 2000s, in which the new Martians work to capture a valuable asteroid. That brings us up to the 2010s for this upcoming fifth season. The Happy Valley settlement on Mars is thriving, now populated by thousands of people, and they're starting to look even further out into the solar system for signs of life. Not everyone is thrilled at these efforts: people on Earth (and a new president) are looking to rein in spending and try and get a bit more control over the Martian colonies, which threatens to erupt into violence between the two planets. You can watch the full trailer here: In a bunch of ways, I'm getting some prequel to James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* vibes, given that in that story, Mars had broken away from Earth and the two were pretty hostile to one another. It's fitting that this is the focus for this season in 2026, given that it's the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As seen in the trailer, the people on Mars are really being pressed by the faraway leaders on Earth, and it really looks like there's a big fight coming up this year. We've seen some elements of space-based warfare before ([way back on the Moon in Season 2](https://www.andrewliptak.com/war-in-space/)), and I'm really excited to see how they approach it on the Red Planet later on. The series will debut on Apple TV on March 27th. ### John Scalzi's next book is Monsters of Ohio URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-monsters-of-ohio-sci-fi-book/ Last updated: 2026-02-19T20:20:16.000Z Last fall, John Scalzi was our headlining guest at the Green Mountain Book Festival, where we talked about humor, worldbuilding, and writing science fiction and genre literature. Over the course of the day, Scalzi told us about what his next book would be about: people in a rural farming community have been feeling all sorts of pressures because of politics and culture, and they begin to explode and turn into monsters. Fittingly, it's called [*Monsters of Ohio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389039?ref=andrewliptak.com), and he and his publisher announced that it'll be out in November this year. Here's the plot description: > In many ways Richland, Ohio is the same tiny, sleepy rural village it has been for the last 150 years: The same families, the same farms, the same heartland beliefs and traditions that have sustained it for generations. But right now times are especially hard, as social and economic forces inside and outside the community roil the surface of the once-placid town. > > Richland, in other words, is primed to explode... just not the way that anyone anywhere could ever have expected. And when things do explode, well, that’s when things start getting *really* weird. > > Daniel Garvey left Richland decades back, to find his own way in the world. But when he is called back to his hometown to tie up some loose ends, he finds more going on than he bargained for, and is caught up in a sequence of events that will bring this tiny farm village to the attention of the entire world... and, perhaps, spell its doom. It sounds very much in line with the type of books that he's written over the years, from aliens coming to Earth and acquiring Hollywood representation to better appeal to humans ([*Agent to the Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250176516?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to cats running the world ([*Starter Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250879394?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to the Moon turning to cheese ([*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)*. Over on his blog, Scalzi [says](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/cover-reveal-monsters-of-ohio/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that you can consider it to be "Cozy Cronenberg." [The idea is never the problem: an interview with John ScalziMy interview with John Scalzi from the Green Mountain Book Festival![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-36.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7263-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-interview-burlington-vermont-scifi-old-mans-war/) Something that I've appreciated with Scalzi's books is that he's willing to do these sorts of zany adventures, and while a bunch of those books are [pretty light fare](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/), he's usually able to squeeze in [some serious or thoughtful musing](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/) that really elevates the book by the time you reach the end. *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* felt like a pointed meditation on our collective memory and the COVID-19 pandemic, while [*Redshirts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com)*'* three codas turned a funny gag (what happens if the expendable characters from a *Star Trek-like* show realized they were in a TV show?) [into an emotional read](https://www.andrewliptak.com/meta-stories-redshirts-scalzi-rick-morty/). Scalzi's an astute observer, and from eyeballing the description and what little he explained about it last year, I think it's reasonable to imagine that this is a story that'll be drawing some cues from the state of rural America and how we've weathered the last couple of decades as a country. I'm eager to see what this ends up looking like, and we'll find out toward the end of the year. (Also, can we applaud the cover, illustrated by [Michael Koelsch](https://koelschstudios.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)? It's so great to see a book with a fully illustrated cover, rather than just the usual typography or abstract covers [that are the style these days](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/).) ### Eight more science fiction and fantasy books to check out this February URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-february-2026-ashton-okorafor-mcauley/ Last updated: 2026-02-19T16:03:04.000Z I've been behind on my reading so far this year, but I have been enjoying what I've got on my TBR. Currently at the top of the list is a much older book: [*Footfall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345323446?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I came across it in a Reddit thread, where it was described as a plausible, hard science fiction alien invasion novel, which piqued my interest. It's pretty zippy and very much a product of the Reagan era, but it's really holding my interest. Plus, it has a wonderfully pulpy cover: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak It's certainly giving me lots to think about, especially as I'm planning on doing a little more writing about alien invasions later on this spring/summer. Stay tuned for that. Here's the usual plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it does cost time and resources to put together. Here's what goes into these lists: - I start off the year with 12 shells, and as I get press releases, advanced reviewer copies, come across book announcements / cover reveals / articles / recommendations, I add them up. - From there, I look at what books on that list really speak to me, and what might be of interest to you, the reader, and I whittle it down to a manageable number, generally around 15-18\. If it gets longer, I'll split it into two lists. - From there, I take a look at the books, read bits and pieces from them, look up reviews, and write up the captions, and add in links from Bookshop.org. - I'll then gather up whatever finished / advance copies I've got and photograph them for the header picture. (Except for today, because I didn't get any of these ones.) - Write it up, proof it, and send it out to you. I hear from folks that these lists are a good way for them to find their latest favorites. I'm always glad to hear that: I write these lists because I like sharing cool-looking books to people who might like them. If you want to help support this work, please consider signing up as a supporting member, or by [leaving a tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/support). In the meantime, February's brought a solid crop of newer books along with it to check out. You can see the first list for February [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-february-2026-dinniman-star-wars-sanderson/), and posts for prior months [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). Here are eight that caught my eye for you to check out over the rest of the month: ### [*After the Fall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250375650?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Edward Ashton (February 24th) In Edward Ashton's latest, humanity was conquered by aliens more than a century ago, and one survivor, John, has a mantra to ensure that he stays alive: "Humans must be silent. Humans must be obedient. Humans must be good." He's bonded to one of the "good" aliens, Martok Barden, also known as Black Hand, who's treated him decently. However, when Martok decides to go build a wilderness retreat for his wealthier counterparts, he puts John up as collateral, and the human finds the limits of what that friendship was, and discovers what life is like for a lot of other people. He also has to contend with something in the woods that's been killing people. He has sixty days before Martok's loan comes due to figure out how to not only ensure that the alien's plan works, but also how humanity ended up in the state that it is. ### [*The Rainseekers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250392435?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Kressell (February 17th) An influencer named Sakunja Salazar was able to earn incredible wealth and status and bring her family out of poverty, only to crash hard because of addiction. She's given a new chance when an editor came across her photography and offered her an opportunity to accompany an expedition to Mars, where they'd get to witness the first rainfall. She's now tasked with boosting others, and discovers a whole new world and sense of awe at the experience. Writing in *New Scientist*, Emily H. Wilson [says](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26935820-600-exploring-sci-fi-treats-from-george-saunders-and-matthew-kressel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Kressel is very good at telling people’s stories, powerfully and in just a few words, and that gives the novella some heft." ### [*Loss Protocol*](https://store.gollancz.co.uk/products/loss-protocol?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul McAuley (February 12th) It took eight years, but Marc Winters has finally been able to put the downfall of a dangerous cult behind him, becoming a wildlife ranger on a quiet island, where he's working to help preserve the place against a backdrop of climate change and bad weather. That quiet life is interrupted when his narrowboat is robbed and the police come to investigate. He soon finds that everything he thought he knew about the cult and his sister's involvement was wrong, and the police think that he might have some information into their dealings. ### [*The Halter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798895150887?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Darby McDevitt (February 17th) Kennedy Stark is a "halter" – someone who tracks down people lost in virtual reality, and sometimes pulls people out before it kills them. After one rescue attempt goes south, he's offered a new job: track down a software engineer named Delia Wash – Kennedy's ex – who vanished in a program called "The Forum." He slips in and finds that it's different than he expected: a place for cutting-edge research and thinking, but one where corruption is rampant. As he searches, he finds that Delia was working on a new project that could transform The Forum, and that not everyone was eager to see that happen. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/979-8-89515-088-7?ref=andrewliptak.com) "McDevitt’s Chandleresque protagonist finds the path to halting Delia’s immersion challenging and hazardous, creating a gripping and twisty mystery for readers." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*The Daughter Who Remains*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418991?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor (February 17th) Nnedi Okorafor closes out the story that she began with her Africanfuturist breakout [*Who Fears Death*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756417109?ref=andrewliptak.com)and continued with [*She Who Knows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419998?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*One Way Witch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418977?ref=andrewliptak.com). In *She Who Knows*, Okorafor filled in the story of Najeeba, a sorceress who had The Call, and she set off from her village to mine salt at the Dead Lake, where she finds that her presence on the road has a profound effect on everything. In the second, *One Way Witch*, Najeeba had become the kponyungo, the beast of wind, fire and dust, but eventually settled into a life where she married and had a daughter, Onyesonwu (the lead character in *Who Fears Death*). She's now on a path to track down and kill the demon spirit that had been terrorizing her father's family, and accompanied by a glassmaker and a camel, she's headed back to where everything began, where she'll be forced to face her deepest fears. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nnedi-okorafor/the-daughter-who-remains/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this is a page-turning novella for all the mothers and daughters faced with impossible tasks who have the resolve to carry on anyway, a fable-like story about how to walk straight into the storm, face insurmountable challenges, and fight for freedom." ### [*The Iron Garden Sutra*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645662143?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. D. Sui (February 24th) Vessel Iris, a member of the Starlit Order, is tasked with performing funeral rites across the galaxy. While he finds his work fulfilling, he's also lonely. When a long-lost starship called the *Counsel of Nicaea* is rediscovered, he's assigned to the mission to study it, and to work to put its long-dead crew to rest. When he arrives on the ship, he finds himself at odds with his fellow expedition members, who react to his work with amusement and downright hostility. They also discover that the ship has turned into something of a forest, with sentient vines covering the entire thing. They're also hiding something that's been capturing the newcomers one by one... *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/the-iron-garden-sutra-by-a-d-sui-sff-pick-of-the-month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Sui’s elaborate novel takes a locked-room murder mystery into outer space. Exploring themes of faith and philosophy, evolution and self-awareness, Sui creates a beautifully crafted world, sprinkled with a bit of horror and romance." ### [*The Red Winter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250362766?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Sullivan (February 24th) Decades ago, monster hunter Professor Sebastian Grave attempted to hunt down a creature known as the Beast of Gévaudanin the 1760s after it went on a rampage through France. With the help of a demon that resided inside of him, he was able to take it down, something that nearly killed him in the process. Two decades later, he receives terrible news: the Beast has returned, and it's resumed killing. He's been called back by an ex-lover named Antoine Avenel d’Ocerne to try and finish it off for good. Upon his return to Gévaudan, he finds a changed landscape: reminders of his past failures are everywhere, and the local clergy are wary of his tactics. But should he fail, the Beast will bring chaos to Europe. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cameron-sullivan/the-red-winter/?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "a delightful, genre-defying debut." ### [*The Obake Code*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063430860?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Makana Yamamoto (February 17th) Malia got away with a huge heist that has her set for life. She's now living it up in a great apartment on Kepler Station, but something's missing, and she's bored. She had been living as the most infamous hacker in the galaxy, and misses the highs and lows of her previous life. When she goes and rigs a couple of fights, she finds herself on the bad side of a brutal gang leader. Instead of a beat-down, she's "offered" a new gig: take down a promising, up-and-coming politician to get him out of the way, or get killed. She takes the job, and pulls in some old friends for it, only to find that there's a much bigger conspiracy at play, and he has to figure out how to get out of the way of what's coming. --- Thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments what catches your eye and what you're currently reading! ### Here's the new trailer for The Mandalorian & Grogu URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-grogu-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2026-02-17T16:10:10.000Z With just a couple of months to go before the first *Star Wars* film in just over six years hits theaters, we have have a full trailer for *The Mandalorian & Grogu*. It's a long-awaited continuation / spinoff from the Disney+ series that kicked off the franchise's television era, and from the looks of things, it'll have all of the elements that made the show so appealing: lots of action, a plethora of strange aliens, and the titular Baby Yoda, who's living his best life adventuring alongside Mandalorian Din Djarin. Watch the full trailer here: The *Star Wars* television era – and *The Mandalorian* itself – has been ... something of a mixed bag. The first and second seasons of the show were fantastic expansions of the world, digging into the galaxy's unsavory criminal underworld and ongoing fight against the remnants of the Empire, while the two seasons of *Andor* represented a [high water mark](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) for the franchise. Other parts, like *The Mandalorian*'s third season, *The Book of Boba Fett*, and *Ahsoka* suffered from "homework syndrome" and felt like excuses to bring out unnecessary cameos at the expense of storytelling. [Nostalgia’s limitsThe Book of Boba Fett was a nice bit of worldbuilding, but that’s about it![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-49.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Boba-2-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-book-of-boba-fett-season-1-review/) When the [first teaser for the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-first-trailer-watch-disney-plus/) came out back in September, I wrote that it looked very much like the film could veer in that direction: a continuation that exists only because Disney's priorities are to get a *Star Wars* film into theaters, rather than coming about because they had a story that they need to tell; "a standalone episode with a beefier budget, one that ends on the right note that keeps the door open for more adventures down the road, depending on the box office growth?" I still have those cynical concerns: this is undoubtably a film that partially owes its existence to Disney's marketing department, and that we're in an era where the franchise's future is [probably going to be stacked with safer projects that'll be aimed to appease fans](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-starfighter-production-news/), rather than [anything that'll be remotely challenging](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-empire-fascism/). On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with a crowd-pleaser, and this latest trailer looks like it'll deliver that in droves. There's a *lot* packed in here: we've got the overarching story of Din looking after Grogu, and it looks as though he's picking up from where we left him at the end of Season 3, where he offered to help the New Republic with some of their various problems on the Outer Rim. If I had to guess, they're going to be working to take out some of the supports from the Imperial Remnants, and end up finding some sort of connection between them and the Hutts, which brings them into their crosshairs. There's some familiar faces that show up – Zeb from *Rebels*, a bunch of callbacks to the series, and a whole bunch of aliens and designs that I'm guessing have shown up in the background or in concept art, enough for the diehard fans like me [to do a Rick Dalton](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pointing-rick-dalton?ref=andrewliptak.com), and enough action and movement to keep the film buzzing along. *Star Wars* doesn't have to be profound each and every time: as much as I think *Andor*'s the best that the franchise has ever produced, it's also worth remembering that it's a franchise that contains something for everyone. I'm hoping that it'll hit the bar high enough that it'll be closer to the high point of what the first season of the show brought, rather than the third. If it can do that, it'll be a good day at the movies. --- On the movie-marketing front, it's been a it's been perversely fun to watch the chronically-online *Star Wars* commentariat work themselves into knots of rage over this film over the last couple of months. It's been just over six years since we've seen the franchise in theaters, and there's been an endless stream of doom-and-gloom predictions about how Disney has essentially abandoned the film and that they're not properly hyping it up, recounting anecdotes about how they've spoken with people who aren't aware that a new film is coming out at all. The first-first trailer for the film hit at last year's Star Wars Celebration in Japan: an extended sequence of Mando taking out the crew of an AT-AT on an icy planet. Then in September, we had the [first teaser](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-first-trailer-watch-disney-plus/) for the project, and then not much, until earlier this month, when Lucasfilm dropped a goofy ad for it: Oh man, did Star Wars Twitter light up with rage. I'll admit, my first reaction was a "huh?" – I, like everyone else, had been expecting a proper TV spot + online trailer for this, and what we got was a parody of one of the classic Budweiser commercials. This feels like one of those situations that Richard Newby wrote in an article that I still think about quite a bit: "[Marvel Disappointed the Rumor Mill at D23](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/marvel-fans-sad-henry-cavill-jodie-comer-1235218078/?ref=andrewliptak.com)", where he wrote about how studios are facing a problem of a fan culture that churns up all sorts of "scoops", rumors, speculation, and wish-fulfillment, only to see few – if any – of those things actually turn out to be true. In the weeks before the Superbowl, there was plenty of speculation about what a trailer might have in it, only to show something that likely won't be in the film at all. A big part of this is a lack of understanding of how marketing a film like this actually works, or it's a case that demonstrates the principle of *Car Talk*'s [Andy Letter](https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter-0?ref=andrewliptak.com) perfectly: "Do two people who don't know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about?" *Star Wars* is one of Disney's biggest properties, and there'll be a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that everyone in the world knows that there's a new film coming. The people who *don't* need to be told is that online contingent of hard-core fans. They're already aware, starting with that Celebration scene, something that was perfectly calibrated for the crowd. (You can find leaked versions of it floating around online.) Trailers for these types of blockbusters generally follow a predictable pattern: a short teaser that stakes out the release date and the general vibe of what to expect, which we got in September. Then you get a full trailer that sketches out a bit more of the vibes, as well as what to expect from the story. We'll probably get a third trailer about a month before the film, timed around when tickets for screenings open up. This is a process that happens with just about every highly-anticipated film, and it's funny how the chronically-online contingent forgets that. Last year, Disney did something similar with its live-action adaptation of *Lilo & Stitch*: fans at its D23 convention got a first look at the film, and a teaser dropped in November 2024, followed not too long after by another one. They then released a [goofy not-a-trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-QGMqCVqPA&ref=andrewliptak.com) at the Superbowl, which was then followed a month later by a proper trailer. The film went on to become the second highest-grossing film of 2025\. I can't say whether or not that *The Mandalorian & Grogu* will share the same box office success, but Disney's definitely not ignoring the film. A teaser like this at the Superbowl is the starting gun going off: it's unconventional and gets people talking – particularly that much larger part of the population that aren't *fans.* With the exception of 2018's *Sol0*, all of Disney's *Star Wars* films have crossed the coveted billion-dollar mark at the international box office, and I would be surprised if this one didn't do the same. --- I'll admit, I've been sort of forgetting that we've got this new film coming in a couple of months. The teaser was fine, but this new trailer feels like it's shaking off some of the cynicism that I've had about the *Mandalorian* in recent years. It's worth remembering what George Lucas has said his intentions were about his story when he first released it: it's for kids. It's meant to be fun. I know I'm enjoying starting a rewatch of the series with my daughter, who's about at that right age to really start enjoying it, and I imagine that when we go out to see it in theaters, we'll have a good time. ### Lego is making a Project Hail Mary Set URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lego-project-hail-mary-set-space-sci-fi-toys/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T18:40:37.000Z Well, this is cool: Lego [announced](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/project-hail-mary-11389?CMP=AFC-AffiliateUK-JF2DY0n6uhs-3146997-1539294-10&ref=andrewliptak.com) last week that it's making a set that ties in with the upcoming film *Project Hail Mary*, based on [Andy Weir's novel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135228?ref=andrewliptak.com). This is a kit that's part of Lego's Icons lineup, which is comprised of sets that are aimed at older collectors and which are a bit more complicated to build. As such, this'll be a sort of scaled-down version of the spaceship from the novel, along with a display stand. It's due to be released on March 1st, and retails for $100\. Ever since it began releasing *Star Wars* sets, Lego has increasingly been focusing on movie tie-ins sets, but I'm trying to think of a time where we've seen something like this: a set that doesn't really come from an established franchise, and for a story that's mainly known for the novel, given that the film isn't out until March 20th. I enjoyed [*Project Hail Mary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135228?ref=andrewliptak.com) when I read it last year after an abortive attempt when it first came out. It follows a scientist who wakes up on a spaceship far from Earth. His two fellow crew members died in hibernation, and he initially can't remember who he is or what he's doing. As his memory comes back, we learn that Earth's sun has been dimming because of a contagion from an alien life form, and he's been dispatched to a system in hopes that he can find a way to stop that from happening. [Empirical stepsAndy Weir’s Project Hail Mary harkens back to an older science fiction tradition![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-47.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/518270347_1299185562208107_306802531037380922_n-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-first-contact-murray-leinster-hard-scifi/) While this doesn't initially feel like the sort of thing that Lego would release a set for, it does when you think back to some of the company's iconic toy lines: Lego Space. In 2023, Lego released [*LEGO Space: 1978 - 1992*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781506725185?ref=andrewliptak.com), an exhaustive overview of the company's various science fiction toys. It's a cool book to flip through, especially if you grew up alongside these particular toys. In its prologue, author Tim Johnson explains that Lego was developing as a company in the midst of the global space race, and that the prospect of going to space and visiting other worlds was fresh in people's minds, which helped push the company to develop the lineup, which evolved over time into this distinct identity with a whole bunch of specific themes – the classic lineup was followed by the Futuron and Blacktron sets in the late 1980s, then Space Police, M:Tron, Blacktron: Future Generation in the early 1990s, and then the Spyrius, Ice Planet 2002, Unitron, Exploriens, Roboforce, UFO, and Insectoids. With the rise and focus on its various tie-in products in the early 2000s, it feels like Lego has really turned away from some of the original IP that it was known for in the 1980s and 1990s – lineups like the Aquazone, Space, Town, and Castle. They haven't vanished entirely – the company did release a revised Space Police and Alien Conquest in 2011, and Galaxy Squad in 2013 – but its focus on space has veered away from the science fictional and into the realm of more realistic depictions, like space shuttles, space stations, or Mars missions, only turning to those classic toys when they're catering to the older adult fans through advanced kits like the [Blacktron Renegade](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/blacktron-renegade-10355?ref=andrewliptak.com). This particular kit feels a little like a bridge between the two – something that is purely science fictional, but with an element of the harder science fiction realism that Weir is known for. I doubt that this kit will kick off an other lineup of Lego's classic space era, but wouldn't it be cool if it did? Looking over those older kits, there's something about them them that I feel like most of the original and tie-in sets are really lacking – this sense of zany exploration and colorful fun that came in the form of the array of yellow / green / blue / red / orange transparent windows, specialized equipment, space suits, and so forth. Real space is certainly cool – and a Lego designer once told me about how he was struck at how influential the company's toys were when he visited NASA – but it's just never really felt like it has the same charm. This is a much broader issue for the genre – the harder science fiction stories of the 1970s and 1980s [has been widely outstripped by fantasy and cozier genres](https://www.andrewliptak.com/romantasy-science-fiction-fantasy-books-publishing-sales/) in recent years, and while there are some [excellent books out there](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-h-wilson-hole-in-the-sky-first-contact-sci-fi-book-review/) playing in the space, they're fewer and further between to the point where a toy like this stands out to me. There's certainly a lot of attention being directed towards the upcoming *Project Hail Mary* film – MGM dropped a [big, final trailer](https://youtu.be/P0XN3-n-2Lo?si=EOJ4ZqOUyMWeBuoO&ref=andrewliptak.com) for it during last weekend's Super Bowl, which is as good an indication in their confidence that it'll be a hit – and hopefully, the [upcoming Artemis II mission](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-moon-rocks-apollo-11-artemis-mission/) will provide some inspiration for creators and readers to dig into it a bit more. In any case, it's a neat reminder and quasi-throwback to the company's influential lineup. ### Objects from out of this world URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-moon-rocks-apollo-11-artemis-mission/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T14:00:40.000Z This is something a little different for you this week: every now and again at the Day Job (the Vermont Historical Society), I get to curate an object case that we have at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier. This month, with the Artemis II mission coming up, we wanted to bring out some really cool items in our collection: a pair of rock samples from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions. I wrote up the label for the exhibit, which I've since adapted into a [blog post for the VHS website](https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-history-state-flag-moon-rock-apollo-11-space-artemis-2?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- On July 20th, 1969, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step foot on the Moon, a monumental scientific and engineering achievement that captured the world’s attention. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) landed five additional missions to the moon through 1972, before refocusing its priorities on other initiatives. Apollo 11’s official objective was to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” and as part of the mission, Armstrong and Aldrin collected a total of 58 lunar samples, amounting to 21.5 kilograms, from Mare Tranquillitatis. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/as17-134-20382-large.jpg) **Astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 lunar module pilot, stands near the deployed United States flag on the lunar surface during extravehicular activity (EVA) of NASA's final lunar landing mission in the Apollo series. Image: NASA* Three years later, the Apollo 17 mission, carrying Astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt, landed at the Taurus-Littrow Valley on December 11th, 1972\. This mission featured an extensive array of scientific objectives, and over the three days, both astronauts performed three moon walks, where they placed scientific stations, conducted seismic experiments, and collected 741 rock samples, totaling 110.5 kilograms. While NASA’s astronauts returned with samples of the moon, they also took part in a long-standing tradition of bringing commemorative items along for the ride. The Apollo 11 and 17 missions carried with them a “flag kit”, which included small, 4x6 inch flags of most of the world’s countries and each US state and territory, which accompanied them to the lunar surface. Following their respective returns to Earth, small pieces of the lunar samples and the flags were incorporated into commemorative plaques, which were then distributed to their respective states and countries. [The Apollo 11 plaque](catalog?search%5Fcollection=nasa&search=Search) features four tiny samples of lunar basalt embedded in a resin sphere, with the flight-flown Vermont flag mounted below it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/IMG_1753.JPG) Image: VHS The plaques were a goodwill gesture to the various states and countries around the world, on behalf of the Nixon Administration. The text reads "Presented to the people of the State of Vermont by Richard Nixon, President of the United States" and "This flag of your state was carried to the Moon and back by Apollo 11, and this fragment of the Moon's surface was brought to Earth by the crew of that first manned lunar landing." Many of these items ended up in a variety of state collections, and in 1970, Governor Deane C. Davis gifted it to the Vermont Historical Society's collection. The Apollo missions that followed might have flown some commemorative objects, but it wasn't until Apollo 17, the final lunar mission, that another plaque was commissioned and distributed to the states and countries in 1974\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/IMG_1766.JPG) Image: VHS [This plaque](catalog?search%5Fcollection=nasa&search=Search) contains both a flight-flown flag and a lunar sample, and reads "This fragment is a portion of a rock from the Taurus Littrow Valley of the Moon. It was part of a larger rock composed of many particles of different shapes and sizes, a symbol of the unity of human endeavor and mankind's hope for a future of peace and harmony," and "This flag of your state was carried to the Moon aboard Spacecraft America during the Apollo XVII mission, December 7-19, 1972\. Presented to the people of the state of Vermont by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." The rock included in this object comes from a larger sample designated “[70017](https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/samples/atlas/compendium/70017.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com),” and was recovered close to the lunar lander on December 14th. NASA describes it as a “medium-grained high-Ti basalt’ that formed 3.7 billion years ago in the Moon’s upper mantle, which was later deposited on the lunar surface around 220 million years ago. This sample is thought to be from the last rock picked up during that mission, known as the “Children of the World rock,” and was dedicated by Cernan and Schmitt, [who said that](https://www.collectspace.com/resources/moonrocks%5Fgoodwill.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) “we hope that this will be a symbol of what our feelings are, what the feelings of the Apollo Program are, and a symbol of mankind: that we can live in peace and harmony in the future.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/02/IMG_1779.JPG) Image: VHS After the Apollo 17 mission, NASA cancelled the program, but repurposed some of its hardware for Skylab, the United States' first space station launched in 1973\. When NASA gifted Vermont the Apollo 17 plaque, it was accompanied by another commemorative object: a [poster](catalog?search%5Fcollection=nasa&search=Search) signed to the people of Vermont by Skylab astronauts Alan Bean, Owen Garriott, and Jack Lousma, who wrote "to the people of the State of Vermont for their contribution to making the dream of a manned earth orbiting space station a reality," alongside an image of the space station and a flight-flown American flag and mission patch. While it's been nearly a half-century since humans have stepped foot on the Moon, that could soon change with the Artemis program. Artemis II's crew of four, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, won't step foot on the surface, but will instead orbit the moon and test out the hardware for the eventual Artemis III mission, which is expected to land humans on the Moon sometime in 2028. When Artemis II takes off, it will continue one tradition from its Apollo predecessors: NASA is [packing along another goodwill kit](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-2/nasas-artemis-ii-mission-to-fly-legacy-keepsakes-with-astronaut-crew/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that contains a number of historical relics, such as a swatch of fabric from the Wright Brothers' airplane, tree seeds, flags and images from other notable space missions, programs, and partners, and from all fifty states and territories, including at least one representing the State of Vermont. ### 16 new SF/F books to check out this February URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-february-2026-dinniman-star-wars-sanderson/ Last updated: 2026-02-07T20:21:48.000Z I feel like I've been in something of a book rut for the last couple of weeks. It's not a numbers game, but usually, I've worked my way through a handful of copies by this point in the year, but I've only managed to get through two. Maybe it's the length – *The American Revolution: An Intimate History* has a lot to go through, or maybe it's the fact that I've been working on catching up with some TV: I've finished Apple's *Mythic Quest* and *Murderbot* in recent weeks, and have been working my way through the second season of *Foundation.* But lately, the only thing that I've been able to process has been lighter and fluffier things, like Amazon's *The Grand Tour* or BBC's *Top Gear.* There's also a lot going on in the country. I try and and compartmentalize as much as I can, focusing on the little bits and pieces of good that I can meaningfully accomplish, rather than spin my tires in outrage and frustration at the state of the place. But some of that despair bleeds over, and I can't help but feel so very hopeless at times. But I try to remember that history is long, and that as storytellers, we're often playing the very, very long game, planting seeds of stories and small acts that will hopefully grow with the proper nurturing. I hope it's enough. So, I look for stories of people getting through big, insurmountable problems. Fiction doesn't always mesh onto the real world 1:1, but certainly, those authors and creators find their inspiration from somewhere, and try and [convey that hope in their words](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/). And even if that isn't the goal, stories can be a powerful thing in and of themselves, conveying worlds different from our own, and serving as a way to recharge our emotional batteries for whatever horrors the next day brings. Okay, here are 16 SF/F books that caught my eye this month: ### [*Columbus Day*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798347023615?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Craig Alanson (February 3rd) Fellow Vermont author Craig Alanson has made a name for himself with his *Expeditionary Force* series, which turns ten this year. To celebrate, he's got a new edition of the novel coming out, which follows a group of humans who have to contend with an alien invasion and subsequent expedition into the depths of space. This edition features a new afterword from Craig. [Expeditions in self-publishingHow Craig Alanson forged a new path a a self-published author![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-309.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3522-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) Also now out? The 19th installment of the series, [*Ground State*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GJV2ZGYG?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F18&storeType=ebooks&qid=1770051338&sr=1-3&ref=andrewliptak.com), in which the Merry Band of Pirates arrived too late to contain their enemies, and they're going to have to turn to some wacky ideas for out how to fight them off. ### [*The Art of Star Wars: The Acolyte*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419777349?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kristin Baver (February 3rd) I enjoyed *Star Wars: Acolyte* when it debuted on Disney+, and I was a bummed that the reception that it got, and that it isn't continuing beyond its first season. It was an interesting take on the *Star Wars* franchise, and while it didn't work all the time for me, I hope that Lucasfilm and Disney will take some cues from it moving forward. There's a new art book about the series that's now on its way into stores, which should make for an interesting perusal: given that this series takes place a century before the Skywalker Saga, I'm eager to see how they went about designing the world and making it familiar-but-different, and what types of design choices went into it. [Swinging for the fencesStar Wars: The Acolyte felt like a bold experiment for Lucasfilm, one that didn’t quite work out. That shouldn’t stop the studio from trying again.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-44.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/the-acolyte-101-highlights-noodle-shop_8feb2237-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/) ### [*Maria the Wanted*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803366722?ref=andrewliptak.com) by V. Castro (February 10th) Maria had been enjoying a quiet life: she was married, saving up to immigrate to America from Mexico, when everything changed: the factory where she works is attacked by a vampire, and she's turned in the process. Now, she has a new purpose: to serve as a protector for the innocent, and there are now a ton of people after her: an Aztec trafficker, a cartel boss, her employer, and others. She soon discovers that there's a much larger supernatural community in the world, and a simmering conspiracy that threatens all of humanity. *Publishers Weekly* says "Maria herself is a force to be reckoned with, and readers will gladly cheer her on her bloody way." ### [*Star Wars: Outlaws: Low Red Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874493?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Chen (February 10th) Back in 2024, Ubisoft released a new *Star Wars* game called *Outlaws,* following aguy named Kay Vess shortly after the events of the Battle of Hoth, who puts together a team for a heist in order to escape from a crime syndicate. In his latest book, Mike Chen sets up the events of that game: he follows an heir named Jaylen Barsha, who saw his family and riches stripped away from by the Empire. When the family is attacked by a battle droid, Jaylen is the only survivor, and manages to disable and reprogram the droid, ND-5\. Now going under the name of Jaylen Vrax, he and his new companion set out integrate themselves into the galaxy's criminal underworld and find out who destroyed his family . ### [*A Day of Breath*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Darby Cox (February 10th) Oly is a Champion: a warrior who protects Niawa by guarding the Edge, a rift between worlds from which demons come to try and destroy her home. Her powers are now failing, and she's worried that when the demons return, she won't be able to turn them back. There's one day that might offer some reprieve: the Day of Breath, a sacred day when the rift if fully sealed, allowing her to leave and beg for her powers to be renewed. But when the day comes, there are new horrors arriving in Niawa, and she has to figure out how to stop the onslaught before the day ends, and when there won't be anyone to protect the kingdom. ### [*Operation Bounce House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820308?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (February 10th) Matt Dinniman is best known for his [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com) series (I've heard good things, and it's on my t0-read list), and while that series is still ongoing, he's got a new book coming. It follows a New Sonora colonist named Oliver Lewis who's enjoying a simple life: he's got a band, helps his sister mind a fleet of robots on their family ranch, and enjoys the shows and films that come from Earth when the transfer gate opens up. Things soon get complicated. While Earth promised the colonists on New Sonora that they'd be left alone, the government struck a deal with a major corporation, and now they're trying to evict the colonists, using AI soldiers piloted by gamers who're piloting war machines from home. Now Oliver and his friends have to figure out how to fight back. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/matt-dinniman/operation-bounce-house/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "a disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business." ### [*The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878724?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Fischer (February 10th) There are no shortages of books about the impact that George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola have had on cinema, but this new book takes a look a the three of them in context: Paul Fischer looks at their entry into the film industry and how they came to know one another and become friends, and how their respective journeys reinvented American cinema. Chris Vognar of the *Boston Globe* [describes it as a](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/06/arts/last-kings-hollywood-paul-fischer/?p1=SectionFront%5FFeed%5FContentQuery&ref=andrewliptak.com) "serious-minded film book that also happens to be a great deal of fun, carefully structured and well-reported." ### [*Green Mountain Quartet: Essays on Antiquarian Vermontiana*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/green-mountain-quartet-essays-on-antiquarian-vermontiana/2O5ZYPTIFCJAVCYKA3IS4O7D?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) by J. Kevin Graffagnino (February 10th) This is the latest book that we're publishing through the Vermont Historical Society by our former director and prolific Vermont History scholar Kevin Graffagnino. This is a passion project that brings together the writings of four notable history scholars, and is something of a companion to his 2024 book [*Vermontiana*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/vermontiana/1416?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false&ref=andrewliptak.com). It's also a very pretty book: if you have anyone in your life that's a fan of Vermont's history, this would make for good gift for them. ### [*The Hospital at the End of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063290488?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Justin C. Key (February 3rd) Set in the near future, the world is run by a massive AI system that's controlled by a megacorporation, and the world's medical schools are overseen by the Shepherd Organization, save for one, a hospital in New Orleans, Hippocrates, which prioritizes human-led medical care. It's the school of choice for one ambitious New Yorker named Pok. When his father mysteriously dies, Pok believes that it's connected to "the shepherds" and their CEO, and ends up following clues that lead to Hippocrates, where he finds that there's an epidemic underway that seems to be afflicting newcomers who grew up under the Shepherd's care. *Kirkus Reviews* [says that it's](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/justin-c-key/the-hospital-at-the-end-of-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "an enjoyable tale about AI’s dark underbelly." ### [*The Forest on the Edge of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250376831?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jasmin Kirkbride (February 3rd) Echo and Hazel are two time travelers recruited by a mysterious Project Kairos to help keep the timeline that we're on safe: the project's goal is to prevent ecological disaster, and the pair are sent off to opposite ends of the timeline: Echo is tasked with becoming a healer's assistant in ancient Greece, while Hazel finds herself the last human alive, working in a laboratory with only robots and an AI for company. Each can't remember their past lives, but when they dream, they meet one another, and begin to discover the bonds that connected them, and what elements of the past have threatened humanity's future. *Library Journal* [says](https://archive.ph/https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-forest-on-the-edge-of-time-100004773?ref=andrewliptak.com) "As harmonious as it is mysterious, Kirkbride’s time-traveling climate-fiction novel is recommended for fans of Annalee Newitz and will leave readers with hope and a call to action." ### [*She Made Herself a Monster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063436374?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anna Kovatcheva (February 10th) A woman named Yana travels from village to village, taking care of problematic monsters that might be plaguing them, and telling stories of fantastical creatures and vampires, leaving behind a sense of hope when she leaves. When she arrives at the village of Koprivci, she finds that it's got some real problems: illness runs rampant, and most children don't survive infancy. While there, she meets an orphan whom the villagers blame for the curse, Anka. Anka is about to be married off against her will, and when Yana arrives, the pair concoct a plan to blame a monster so vile that it'll give Anka cover to escape. But as they plot, their tale gains a life of its own. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/anna-kovatcheva/she-made-herself-a-monster/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Kovatcheva excels when facing unpleasant details head-on, launching into descriptions of 'earth…warm with a cloying, unwashed sweetness,' and a spirit 'peel\[ing\] itself like a hangnail from the dark.'" ### [*Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250419538?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ian McDonald (February 2nd) In a strange, nearish and post-apocalyptic future, introduces us to Tif Tamim, who's grown up wanting nothing more than to be a dinosaur handler. He's moved from circus to circus, hoping to finally get a chance to ride one of the creatures in the spotlight, but he's yet to be given the opportunity. After freeing a dinosaur from an abusive owner, he heads into the American west, he's presented with the opportunity to shepherd an abused carnotaur back into the Cretaceous, and ends up joining a circus that brings them back and forth in time. I've been reading this and have been enjoying it quite a bit, and *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250419538?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "McDonald makes their trek exciting, thoughtful, immersive, and faintly absurd in the best way. It’s a joy to watch Tif come into his own and the found-family elements delight." ### [*Isles of the Emberdark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250415394?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brandon Sanderson (February 3rd) Brandon Sanderson is back with a new standalone novel set in his larger world, Cosmere, *Isles of the Emberdark*. It follows Sixth of the Dusk, a trapper on the island of Patji, where he spends his time trapping supernatural birds called Aviar. When interstellar invaders arrive, looking to exploit the Aviar, he pushes his people into a race to modernize, and he soon realizes that he and his people could lose themselves in the effort. Meanwhile, a dragon trapped in the form of a human, Starling, and her starship crew have found themselves in debt and could soon loose their freedom. When they find an ancient map to a portal that leads them into the world beyond the emberdark, they jump at the chance to clear their balance sheets. When an opportunity arises to travel beyond his world to the emberdark, Dusk takes it, hoping to find a way to save his people. The two eventually find one another and could solve one another's problems. [Apple will adapt Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universeAnother big adaptation from Apple![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-45.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2623-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-cosmere-stormlight-archive-apple-tv-streaming/) ### [*The Glowing Hours*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781641297011?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leila Siddiqui (February 3rd) Leila Siddiqui looks back on the fateful summer of 1816 when Mary and Percy Shelley, Mary's stepsister Claire, John Polidori, and Lord Byron were holed up in Lake Geneva for the summer. The Shelleys are accompanied by Mehrunissa Begum, a newly arrived immigrant from India who arrived in London from India to deliver a letter to her brother, only to find him missing. She ends up taking a job with the Shelleys as a housekeeper. After arriving at Lake Geneva, Mehr finds that strange things are occurring there: the weather is unsettling, portraits seem to be shifting, and while Shelley works on the story that she'll become most famous for, Mehr begins to worry that she'll be trapped and driven to madness in this strange place. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the novel a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781641297011?ref=andrewliptak.com), and says that "though the life of Mary Shelley has often been mined for material, Siddiqui brings a fresh perspective through the eyes of the witty and sullen Mehr, whose backstory and fraught relationships with the increasingly entangled Geneva party add to the intrigue." ### [*The Universe Box*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964504?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Michael Swanwick (February 3rd) Acclaimed author Michael Swanwick brings together a number of his short stories (including a pair of new ones), in a new collection, *The Universe Box*. They include stories about a thief racing against time to defeat trolls, a scientist dealing with the consequences of AI, heists, strange technologies, and quite a bit more. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964504?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "All of Swanwick’s stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers." ### [*The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky*](https://subterraneanpress.com/tchaikovsky-tboat/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (February) There's something that happens anytime I post up news about Adrian Tchaikovsky in the TO Slack: someone marvels at the guy's output. It's monumental. Here's the first book of his to come out this year: a collection of his short fiction from Subterranean Press. It's bringing together a ton of stories from all over the genre, from ants bent on taking over the world, to investigations, space operas, robots, and quite a bit more. It's limited to 1000 signed and numbered hardcover copies, and includes a foreword by John Scalzi. --- As always, thanks for reading. This is the first of two book lists that you'll get this month: the next will drop in a couple of weeks. Andrew ### The Folio Society unveils 2026 spring collection URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-2026-spring-collection-weir-homer-mandel-mievlle/ Last updated: 2026-02-05T15:27:56.000Z After a couple of teases in the last week, The Folio Society [unveiled](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1530597175738678&set=a.688236196641451) its upcoming Spring Collection on its social media this morning, and this batch includes a great lineup of science fiction and fantasy titles. For decades, the publisher has been releasing special editions of classic books, usually with additional artwork, forewords/introductions/essays, and nice slipcases, and after a concerted push into science fiction and fantasy literature starting in 2015, [I've found](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/) that they make for excellent additions to one's bookshelves. This latest batch has me thinking that I'm going to need to find some room for a couple of additional volumes. Here's what will be included: - *The Last Unicorn* by Peter S. Beagle - *The Great Gatsby* by F. Scott Fitzgerald - *The Iliad* by Homer - *Conrad’s Fate* by Diana Wynne Jones - *Station Eleven* by Emily St John Mandel - *Perdido Street Station* by China Miéville - *Masters of the Air* by Donald L. Miller - *Jerusalem* by Simon Sebag Montefiore - *The Martian* by Andy Weir Of those, *The Last Unicorn, Station Eleven*, *Perdido Street Station,* and *The Martian* look the most promising. I'm also happy to see that they're doing *Masters of the Air*, which looks like it'll be a good followup to [their edition of Stephen Ambrose's *Band of Brothers*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/band-of-brothers-stephen-ambrose-folio-society-wwii-military-history/). *The Illiad* also comes right in time for Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey* later this summer. It's a book that the publisher has released numerous times before, and last year, it was published alongside *The Odyssey* as a limited edition. Another returning book is *Perdido Street Station*, which came out last year as another of its [special, limited editions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r3egTy20I&ref=andrewliptak.com). It came with a special case at the hefty price of $600\. This'll be its regular "core" edition, and eyeballing the product pictures, it'll have a different cover (and should come at a lower price point.) *The Martian* comes with a familiar name attached to it: artist Dániel Taylor, who illustrated Folio Society's editions of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. I was really impressed with the work that he did for those books, and I'll be really interested to see what he draws up for this book. [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-46.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0832-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) This is actually the second special edition of Weir's novel: late last year, Penguin Random House [announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/) that it was releasing a deluxe edition of the book (it'll be released in May), which featured its own slipcase and sprayed edges. I'm a bit skeptical of what that will look like: I've been finding that most of the "deluxe" editions are essentially repackaged trade editions, and I've little doubt that while The Folio Society's version will cost more, it'll be a much better volume. The publisher hasn't released prices, but has said that they will go on sale on March 3rd. ### Table of Contents, February 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-february-2026/ Last updated: 2026-02-28T18:09:06.000Z Welcome to another installment of Table of Contents: a roundup of the latest short fiction hitting the web for the SF/F world. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-january-2026/) – it's been newly updated with the stories that came out over the course of January 2026, and you can check out prior installments of this column [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). --- ## [*Amazing Stories*](https://amazingstories.com/free-stories/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026) - "[The ICE Man Goeth](https://amazingstories.com/2026/02/the-ice-man-goeth-by-tom-easton-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tom Easton - "[All-Inclusive](https://amazingstories.com/2026/02/all-inclusive-by-bruce-strand-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bruce Strand - "[Ansible Report](https://amazingstories.com/2026/02/ansible-report-by-r-l-farr-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R. L. Farr - "[Commercial Ambitions](https://amazingstories.com/2026/02/commercial-ambitions-by-d-m-woolston-free-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D. M. Woolston ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2026, Issue 152) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["Unsettled Nature" by Jordan Kurella](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/unsettled-nature?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Piglet Delivers](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/piglet-delivers?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Maria Haskins — 2/17 - "[Shrinkage!](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/shrinkage?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ashlee Lhamon — 2/10 ### Nonfiction - ["Musings from Maryland"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-issue-152?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - "Intellectual Colonialism and the Erasure of South and Eastern European Writing Voices: Another Tikka-Masala" by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos — 2/5 - Interview with Author Maria Haskins by Marissa van Uden — 2/19 --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issues 450 and 451) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[A Dirge for the Mirrorbirds](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-dirge-for-the-mirrorbirds/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Emily C. Skaftun - "[Precipice Sun](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/precipice-sun/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ewen Ma - "[Like Thorns on Her Tongue](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/like-thorns-on-her-tongue/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.Z. Held - "[Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/medusas-ship-or-the-thing-about-bodies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Natalia Theodoridou - "[Bloom Where You Are Planted](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/bloom-where-you-are-planted/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melanie Mulrooney - "[What Might Come of Today](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/what-might-come-of-today/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Leah Ning - "[To Atone for Evil](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/to-atone-for-evil/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Megan Chee - "[Hollow in The Hope](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/hollow-in-the-hope/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(February 2026, Issue 233) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Remember Me in the Meat](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pauling%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Pauling - "[Chip](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/spires%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires - "[Think of Me Before I Disappear](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/alvi%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Raahem Alvi - "[A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - "[The Iron Piper](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fiona Moore - "[Painstaking](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/larson%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rich Larson - "[Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hall%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Inglis Hall ### Nonfiction - [Will Tiny Black Holes Solve Dark Matter](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/franklin%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Terry Franklin - [The Literary Buffet: A Conversation with James Sallis](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sallis%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [The Wondrous Nature of Existence: A Conversation with Michael Swanwick](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/swanwick%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: 2025 Readers' Poll Finalists](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F02%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issue 129) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[In Absentia](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/in-absentia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySuzan Palumbo - "[Nā Heʻe](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/na-he%ca%bbe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byWailana Kalama - "[Hunger](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/hunger-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMichael Kelly - "[Within the Pink Paisley Walls](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/within-the-pink-paisley-walls/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byKelsea Yu --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (February 2026, Issue 49) ### Fiction - "Helpless" by Andy Kumpon - "Whoever Said" by Stephanie Halldorson - "Harold The Harbinger" by Rain Sullivan - "02:28 Hours To Yuma" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "The Queen’s Justice" by Solar Hoàng - "I Miss You" by Jeremee Nute - "Islands In The Stream" by Zeke Jarvis - "Lifelong Sentence" by Robin J. Bartley - "A Full Moon Botheration" by Lesley L. Smith - "Long Ride Home" by John Tavares --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Winter 2026, Issue 41) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [**in which orpheus is a hmong daughter**](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/in-which-orpheus-is-a-hmong-daughter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phoua Lee (poetry; online 2/2) - "[On the Anthology Entitled “Frames of Colour and Un-Colour](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/on-the-anthology-entitled-frames-of-colour-and-un-colour/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dmitri Akers (fiction; online 2/5) - "[Mushaboom](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/mushaboom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeremy Morris (fiction; online 2/12) - "[Babe](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/babe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by gray lindsey (poetry; online 2/16) - "[A Woman Is Screaming](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/a-woman-is-screaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joe Koch (fiction; online 2/19) - "[Sole](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/sole/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aliya Whiteley (fiction; online 2/26) ### Nonfiction - [Bible Verses for the Dying and the Heathen](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/bible-verses-for-the-dying-and-the-heathen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Wheeler (nonfiction; online 2/9) - [Ask a Necromancer: C’est ici de l’empire de la Mort](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/ask-a-necromancer-cest-ici-de-lempire-de-la-mort/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amanda Downum (nonfiction; online 2/23) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issue 149) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Me an’ Streeter (an’ Vince) Chase a Comet](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/me-an-streeter-an-vince-chase-a-comet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Christopher Degni - “[This Blue World](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/this-blue-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Samantha Murray - “[A Thimbleful of Need](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-thimbleful-of-need/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Christine Hanolsy - “[Everyone Hates It When The Alien Shows Up At The Club](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/everyone-hates-it-when-the-alien-shows-up-at-the-club/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elijah J. Mears - “[A Lesson On Learning Your Place In the Universe](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-lesson-on-learning-your-place-in-the-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Price, and - “[In Brightness and in Darkness, We Sit](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/in-brightness-and-in-darkness-we-sit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Christopher Blake --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026) ### Fiction - "[What Would Akanda Do?](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-what-would-akanda-do-basu/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samit Basu ### Nonfiction - [The Dividing Towers of Mumbai](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/mumbai-urban-politics-celebrity-shourie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Moira Shourie --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(February 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Winter of the Icebergirl](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/02/01/the-winter-of-the-icebergirl/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Renan Bernardo --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issue 189) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Death Echoes Overlapping](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/death-echoes-overlapping/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Megan Chee (2/5) - "[Six Sides of a Fairy Tale](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/six-sides-of-a-fairy-tale/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Audrey Zhou (2/5) - "[The Worldbuilder](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-worldbuilder/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phoenix Alexander (2/12) - "[Dream Destinations (From the Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide)](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dream-destinations-from-the-lost-travelers-tour-guide/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Alexander Weinstein (2/12) - "[Sensor Ghosts](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/sensor-ghosts/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Deborah L. Davitt (2/19) - "[The Salt and the Cure](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-salt-and-the-cure/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Rukman Ragas (2/19) - "[Warren’s Tentacle](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/warrens-tentacle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Susan Palwick (2/26) - "[A Handbook to Spirit-Hunting](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-handbook-to-spirit-hunting/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Modupeoluwa Shelle (2/26) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: February 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-february-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Joseph Adams (2/5) - [Author Spotlight: Megan Chee](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-megan-chee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Phoebe Barton (2/5) - [Author Spotlight: Alexander Weinstein](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-alexander-weinstein-6/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Erik Grove (2/12) - [Book Review: *The Best Weird Fiction of the Year Volume One* by Michael Kelly, ed.](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-best-weird-fiction-of-the-year-volume-one-by-michael-kelly-ed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Arley Sorg (2/12) - [Author Spotlight: Deborah L. Davitt](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-deborah-l-davitt-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robin Jeffrey (2/19) - [Book Review: *The Hospital at the End of the World* by Justin C. Key](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-hospital-at-the-end-of-the-world-by-justin-c-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Melissa A Watkins (2/19) - [Author Spotlight: Susan Palwick](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-susan-palwick-5/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Delia Cullity (2/26) - [Book Review: *Reliquary* by Hannah Whitten](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-reliquary-by-hannah-whitten/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Chris Kluwe (2/26) --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nature.com/nature/subscribe?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Eviction notice](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00138-2?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Celso Antonio de Almeida - "[18,000,000 minutes](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00136-4?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Spencer Nitkey - "[Mid-cycle update](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00134-6?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lucien R. Starchild - "[The future perfect continuous passive and other transitive disorders of the mind](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00132-8?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Timothy Quinn --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issue 161) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Ghost in Apartment 5K](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-ghost-in-apartment-5k/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Everdeen Mason (2/4) - "[Rest Stop](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/rest-stop/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pedro Iniguez (2/11) - "[Twelve Facts About the Dermestid Beetle](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/twelve-facts-about-the-dermestid-beetle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marisca Pichette (2/18) - "[when i die](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/when-i-die/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew Wollin (2/25) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: February 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-february-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Wendy N. Wagner (2/4) - [Author Spotlight: Everdeen Mason](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-everdeen-mason/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Devin Marcus (2/4) - [The H Word: Snakes Beneath the Kudzu](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-snakes-beneath-the-kudzu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Broadbent (2/11) - [Author Spotlight: Marisca Pichette](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-marisca-pichette/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Carrie Finch (2/18) - [Plumbing the Depths: Haunted Writers and Haunted Writings](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/plumbing-the-depths-haunted-writers-and-haunted-writings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Mike Thorn (2/25) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(February 2026) ### Fiction - "[Agency](https://reactormag.com/agency-george-sandison/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by George Sandison - "[Of Two Bloods](https://reactormag.com/of-two-bloods-nisi-shawl-cynthia-ward/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward - "[Deathcap](https://reactormag.com/deathcap-lara-elena-donnelly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lara Elena Donnelly --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026, Issue 32) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Drinking the Heron](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/drinking-the-heron/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by RJ Aurand - "[Straw Gold](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/straw-gold/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mari Ness - "[Grief Trawling](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/grief-trawling/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Suzanne J. Willis - "[Stop Thinking, the Kid Can Hear](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/stop-thinking-the-kid-can-hear/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lucy Eller - "[Mary’s Bag](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/marys-bag/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marisca Pichette - "[The Beauty You Cannot Buy](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-beauty-you-cannot-buy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Vibbert - "[A Simulacrum of Self](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-simulacrum-of-self/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden - "[(Just) Alice](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/just-alice/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Diana Olney - "[7 Things the Tychonaut Princess Elisabeth Did NOT Experience on her Marvellous Voyage to the So-Called Medicean Stars](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/7-things-the-tychonaut-princess/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. J. Pettit --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Mother, Darling](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/mother-darling/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Allison Pottern - "[A Night with Hui ‘Enehana ‘Ike](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/a-night-with-hui-enehana-ike/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Maʻemaʻeolehua Matsumoto - "[The River Speaks My Name](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-river-speaks-my-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ocoxōchitl la Coyota ### Poetry - "[Plastic Paradise Awaits](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/plastic-paradise-awaits/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Josh Pearce](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/josh-pearce/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The Sunfish Considers Flotation Therapy](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-sunfish-considers-flotation-therapy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Alison Clara Tan](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/alison-clara-tan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Why You Don't Buy Your Wife a Dishwasher for Her Birthday](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/why-you-dont-buy-your-wife-a-dishwasher-for-her-birthday/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Larina Warnock](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/larina-warnock/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The Point](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-point/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Darius Jones](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/darius-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[They Leave](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/they-leave/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Garth Upshaw - "[The Secret to Being a Dragon](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-secret-to-being-a-dragon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carolina Marchioro ### Nonfiction - [Statement on ICE Operations in the USA](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/statement-on-ice-operations-in-the-usa/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by the *Strange Horizons* staff ### Reviews - Monday: [Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/spiderlight-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andy Sawyer - Wednesday: [Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/brigands-breadknives-by-travis-baldree/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande - Friday: [Hazelthorn by C. G. Drews](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/hazelthorn-by-c-g-drews/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Miguel - Monday: [Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/cathedral-of-the-drowned-by-nathan-ballingrud/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Holder - Wednesday: [Arctic Knot by Ivan Leonov](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/arctic-knot-by-ivan-leonov/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tristan Beiter - Friday: [Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989 by Andrea Horbinski](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/mangas-first-century-how-creators-and-fans-made-japanese-comics-1905-1989-by-andrea-horbinski/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Cordasco - Monday: [Into the Sun by C.F. Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/into-the-sun-by-c-f-ramuz-translated-by-olivia-baes-and-emma-ramadan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Macdonald - Wednesday: [Lies Weeping by Glen Cook](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/lies-weeping-by-glen-cook/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Roz Kaveney - Friday: [Slow Gods by Claire North](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/slow-gods-by-claire-north/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ian J. Simpson --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (February 2026) ### Fiction - "[Wounds](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/wounds?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Celia Marsh - "[Realm of the Shorn](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/realm-of-the-shorn?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Bowles - "[The Definition of a Second](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-definition-of-a-second?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn - "[Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of sky](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/let-the-waters-bring-forth-swarms?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P. Lee --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 68, January / February 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [Words That Wither, Words That Bloom](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/words-that-wither-words-that-bloom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jules Arbeaux - "[The Memory Hounds of Bak-Ankham](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-memory-hounds-of-bak-ankham/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. W. Prihandita - "[This Story Does Not Exist](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/this-story-does-not-exist/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kylie Lee Baker ### Poetry - "[A Field Guide for Broken Sons in Transit](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-field-guide-for-broken-sons-in-transit/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joemario Umana - "[The Parsley Girl](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-parsley-girl/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Theodora Goss ### Nonfiction - [I Write in English Because I Can](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/i-write-in-english-because-i-can/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jana Bianchi - [Frognative Dissonance](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/frognative-dissonance/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Riley Silverman - [Interview: A. W. Prihandita](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-a-w-prihandita/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim --- Remember to check back at the end of the month for updates as new stories come online, and to let me know in the comments what caught your eye! ### Apple will adapt Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-cosmere-stormlight-archive-apple-tv-streaming/ Last updated: 2026-02-03T20:35:03.000Z There must be someone in Apple's streaming division who's really into science fiction and fantasy novels. Since it launched, it seems as though the company has been focusing on good storytelling over catalog size, and when they've been adapting existing genre books, they've been picking out some big names: [Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-isaac-asimov-foundation/), [Hugh Howey's *Wool*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugh-howey-wool-silo-apple-tv-streaming-history/)*,* [Martha Wells' *Murderbot* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/)*,* Lauren Beukes' *Shining Girls*, and [William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)*.* This week, word broke that the company is adding another heavyweight author to the mix: Brandon Sanderson. Per [*The Hollywood Reporter*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/brandon-sandersons-mistborn-stormlight-archive-movie-tv-1236487271/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Apple has signed an "unprecedented" deal for his Cosmere universe, in the form of film adaptations for his *Mistborn* novels, and a television series for *The Stormlight Archive*. Sanderson will have "rarefied control" over the adaptations, and "will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals" – privileges that *THR*'s Borys Kit says that not even George R.R. Martin or J.K. Rowling enjoy. This is a huge get for Apple, which hasn't really dipped its toes into the epic fantasy scene yet. [HBO has its Westeros franchise](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-westeros-fantasy-history/) (*Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon,* and *A Knight of Seven Kingdoms*), while Amazon has *Lord of the Rings*: *The Rings of Power* and had *The Wheel of Time* and Netflix has *The Witcher.* There's some dithering you can make about their respective qualities and impact, but collectively, they're big, enormous projects that have the potential to really make an impact on the cultural zeitgeist. Sanderson is as big as you can go these days, and his *Cosmere* novels are not only big in size and scope, but they come with an enormous fandom. This is the type of piece that **Transfer Orbit*'s supporting members regularly get: a deep-ish dive into genre news that seeks to go a little beyond the standard "this is what happened" post. They're designed to inform and provide context for why this sort of news matters, and if you want to help ensure that these pieces come out, please consider signing up as a member! [Become a member ](#/portal/signup) ### Cosmere Sanderson's began writing consistently while attending Brigham Young University (BYU) as an English major in the late 1990s: he wrote a novel called *Dragonsteel* for his Master's degree, and published his first novel, [*Elantris*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765381026?ref=andrewliptak.com), in 2005\. From there, he continued to write: he published [*Mistborn: The Final Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250868282?ref=andrewliptak.com) the following year, and [*The Well of Ascension*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250868299?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2007 and [*The Hero of Ages*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250868312?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2008\. Early on, Sanderson was determined to make sure that his books fit together into a cohesive world. Inspired by author Isaac Asimov, who wrote two series, *Foundation* and *Robots* and later brought them together, he [explained](https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/how-when-did-you-come-up-with-the-idea-of-the-cosmere/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was probably better to build that into his plans from the onset. Cosmere isn't so much an ongoing series as it is a world: they share a broad mythology, but can stand on their own. *Elantris, Mistborn, Well of Ascension*, and *Hero of Ages* all fell into that larger world. As he was doing this, he attracted the attention of Tor Books editor Harriet McDougal, who was married to fantasy author Robert Jordan. Jordan had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and was working to complete his own epic fantasy series, *The Wheel of Time,* ultimately putting together reams of notes in case he ran out of time. McDougal was impressed with *Elantris* and invited Sanderson to complete the series after his passing: the last book became three: [*The Gathering Storm*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765337832?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Towers of Midnight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765337849?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*A Memory of Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765337856?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### *The Stormlight Archive* His work on *Wheel of Time* helped bring him to a much greater audience, and he turned his attention to his own fantasy epic, *The Stormlight Archive*. This was a series that he had been planning for years: he began writing it in 2003, and after writing and re-writing, he eventually published the first installment in 2010: [*The Way of Kings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765365279?ref=andrewliptak.com), a novel set on a harsh world called Roshar, and in which humanity endures constant threats from monsters known as the Voidbringers, and who've set up the Knights Radiant to protect them. This is a massive novel in the tradition of Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin: it's loaded with intersecting characters and lands, an elaborate magical system, and a long-running plot that Sanderson has said will run across ten novels. In 2024, he published the second installment, [*Words of Radiance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250166531?ref=andrewliptak.com), and followed it up with[*Oathbringer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250297143?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2017), [*Rhythm of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250757302?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2020), and [*Wind and Truth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250319180?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2024), which made up the first arc of the epic. Along the way, he's published a number of other novels, some set in the broader Cosmere world, such as [*Warbreaker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765360038?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2009) and [*Mistborn: The Alloy of Law*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250860002?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2011), as well as some that stood on their own. In 2022, Sanderson [revealed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/) that he had written four novels during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and was going to publish them directly via Kickstarter, which included three Cosmere novels ([*Tress of the Emerald Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899668?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Yumi and the Nightmare Painter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899705?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Sunlit Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899729?ref=andrewliptak.com)). Another novel in the world, [*Isles of the Emberdark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250415394?ref=andrewliptak.com), is due out next week. ### The Adaptations There's been good amount of interest over the years in adapting Sanderson's books: in 2016, *Variety* [reported](https://variety.com/2016/film/news/brandon-sanderson-cosmere-movie-adaptation-dmg-1201902500/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he had signed a huge deal for an adaptation of the Cosmere universe with DMG Entertainment, a US-based studio with a particular focus on the Chinese market. At the time, the plan was for a series of adaptations, starting with *The Way of Kings* (screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan were tapped for the project) to be followed by an adaptation of *Mistborn*. Not long after, DMG [announced it was spending a significant amount of money](https://variety.com/2017/film/news/brandon-sanderson-cosmere-dmg-1202407849/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to produce a unique pitch for the projects: a 15-minute VR "experience" drawn from *The Stormlight Archives*, which would help demonstrate the look and feel of the world. It eventually [released a look](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mplesv9U4g&ref=andrewliptak.com) at the experience in 2018, and my colleague Chaim Gartenberg, [noted at the time](https://web.archive.org/web/20180304160857/https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17071468/brandon-sanderson-stormlight-archive-vr-experience-way-of-kings-escape-the-shattered-plains-htc-vive) that it was a pretty faithful depiction of the world: "as someone who’s a fan of the series, it’s pretty great to see and experience some of the magic and locations from the novel, most of which have never had any real visualizations before beyond what I’ve imagined in my head." The same year, Sanderson published his annual end of the year "State of Sanderson" roundup, in which he [noted](https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/state-of-the-sanderson-2018?ref=andrewliptak.com) that things were moving along smoothly: the studio had commissioned scripts adapting *The Emperor’s Soul*, *Mistborn*, and *The Way of Kings*, and had been working on pitching those projects to various studios, particularly a film series based on *Mistborn* and a TV series of *The Way of Kings*. He reported slow and steady progress over the next couple of years: he stepped in to write treatments and [as of 2024](https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/state-of-the-sanderson-2024?ref=andrewliptak.com#part-six-hollywood-and-video-games), it looks like *Mistborn* got pretty far along but ended up getting set back to square one, and it looks as though DMG ended up dropping the property altogether. In December, he [hinted](https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/state-of-the-sanderson-2025?ref=andrewliptak.com#part-four-film-television-video-games) that there was news coming: he had been making pitches to studios starting in May, and that things looked promising. As it turns out, Apple was one of the studios that was interested, and [in a post on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cosmere/comments/1qps9wy/update%5Ffrom%5Fbrandon/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Sanderson explained a bit more of the timeline: he had begun looking for a new partner in May, and that this time, he was being courted by a number of high-level executives. "Not just producers or low level executives. And this led to some really tough choices. I got the red carpet treatment, and liked everyone I met." Ultimately, he went with Apple, saying that he was pleased with two things: the level of control that he'd get to have over the project, and their track record of quality programming. "I find virtually every thing of theirs I watch is excellent and creator driven." It looks like it'll be a major focus for him, and he says that he'll be devoting much of this year on writing the screenplay for *Mistborn*, to the point where he's setting aside work on the various novels that he has in the works at the moment. --- There are a couple of things jump out at me about how this has progressed. First, Sanderson has enjoyed a pretty incredible career so far, and along the way, he's been able to really leverage a the opportunities that have come his way: getting plucked out of the pack to finish *A Wheel of Time* brought him a ton of name recognition, and his *Stormlight Archive* series has been steadily growing as he's been producing them. The Kickstarter project also seems to have had a huge knock-on effect: at nearly $42 million, it's currently the second biggest project ever on the platform's history, and while that undoubtably introduced him to a ton of new people because of that news, it also helped him build a company around his books. In that time, he was also somewhat involved in Prime Video's *Wheel of Time* adaptation as a producer. I don't know to what extent he was involved in the day to day (it doesn't sound like much), but that, combined with the grind of pitching films and shows to Hollywood seems to have really given him a good idea of how the industry works, and that's something that he's used to his advantage this next go-around. While DMG doesn't appear to be involved in this new iteration of the project, it does seem to be following some of the same goals: a film series for *Mistborn* and a television series for *Stormlight Archive*. Something that's impressed me with Sanderson is how he's been able to build a community around his books and the larger Cosmere world. It's a world that – much like other settings, contains depths and space for fans to engage with the lore, characters, and story, and keep them coming back over and over again. He also engages with those fans a lot: he's constantly on the road, holds an annual convention, and provides a lot of updates about his work and what he's up to on online through platforms like Reddit and his blog. All of those factors have put him in a good place for a deal like this: it's clear that he's got a good team behind him to handle the management and logistics for getting his stories out to bookstores and reader, and he appears to have a clear vision for what he wants adaptations of those stories to look like. And, it seems that for all of the talk about the streaming wars coming to an end with consolidation and [the pullback of](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wheel-of-time-cancelled-prime-video-streaming/) [big budget projects](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/), there's still an appetite from places like Apple for a big swing like this. A fantasy television project – especially an ambitious one like *The Stormlight Archive*, is no small undertaking: it requires extensive behind the scenes work to mount these types of productions, and up until this point, most haven't really been able to justify those costs: using these projects to goose subscriber growth seems to have hit a ceiling. I've always seen Apple as being something a little different from places like Netflix or Warner Bros.: Steve Jobs instilled a deep industrial culture of focusing on quality, something that you saw with his involvement at Pixar (I highly recommend checking out [*Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593594643?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace for some insights there), and it feels like at times that most of the metrics that streaming services seem to live or die by take a second seat to devoting time and energy into producing something that's really good. That seems to have convinced Sanderson that Apple was the right home for this, and that the wild popularity of his works will eventually translate into a solid offering to expand the company's suite of services and products on the creative side. Undoubtably, it'll be a while before we see anything – if it gets to the point where cameras start rolling. **Update, 2/3/2026**: Sanderson rolled out a short video about the deal, and noted something that didn't come out elsewhere: he's looking to be showrunner / co-showrunner on the projects. ### Read my new short story, "Deficiency Agent" URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/deficiency-agent-military-science-fiction-future-tense-ai/ Last updated: 2026-01-30T15:43:25.000Z My latest short story, "[Deficiency Agent](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-deficiency-agent-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" is now available on *Future Tense Fiction*, from Arizona State University’s [Center for Science and the Imagination](https://csi.asu.edu/?ref=andrewliptak.com)! [Deficiency Agent | Future Tense FictionAndrew Liptak’s story takes us to the front lines, where Marines fight alongside an unpredictable AI agent.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/cropped-issues-favicon-270x270.png)Issues in Science and TechnologyCosplay: A History![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/deficiency2-socmed-1800x1013.png)](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-deficiency-agent-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com) I am very, very happy that this is now out: it's a story that I've been thinking about for the better part of a decade, and I was thrilled that the folks behind *Future Tense* liked my pitch for it and decided to pick it up for the project. The story follows a Surface Systems Support Officer (3S0) who's tasked with accompanying soldiers in the field as a sort of interpreter for an artificial intelligence system called TION (Tactical Intelligence Optimization and Navigation), which is a system that pulls in all sorts of information from across a battlefield – signal intelligence, satellite photos, internet traffic, you name it – and turns it into actionable directions for the folks in the field. But AI doesn't really operate like a person, so sometimes, what it's telling you doesn't make sense, and it doesn't bother to (or can't) explain its reasoning. This story was inspired by something that happened while my wife and I were driving home from the holidays in Pennsylvania: we left early because of some bad weather, and halfway home, traffic hit a standstill. The route on Google Maps turned a dark red, and we could see that there were miles and miles of stand-still traffic ahead of us. We decided to pull off and drive along state roads, only to find that the system really didn't like that: it kept trying to put us back into traffic, and then began suggesting routes that took us really far out of the way, adding hours to our trip home. While driving, I began thinking about why that was happening: Google Maps wasn't malfunctioning or anything, it was just trying to steer us onto a route that it thought was most efficient, but we had more information than it. We could see that the route it wanted to steer us onto wasn't a good one. Around this time, I'd been writing a lot about the military and artificial intelligence on the battlefield (which eventually led to [this feature](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-ai-nformation-battlespace/)), and I realized that there was an interesting nugget of a story here: a soldier recognizing that the directions that he was getting from a battlefield AI might not be the best. I jotted the idea down in a notebook, and continued to mull over it for a while, and eventually began writing it in the summer of 2023 when I came up with the opening line. I eventually took it to the folks at *Future Tense*, and they liked the concept enough and after giving me some notes, I finished it. I feel like it's coming at a good time, given all the chatter and discussion and consternation about AI these days. [*Future Tense*](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)is the perfect home for this sort of story, and I've long admired the fiction they've been publishing. I've found them to be thoughtful, interesting meditations on the near future of technology and how we use it, and I can't recommend their stuff enough. (Check out their anthology from a couple of years ago, [*Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781944700959?ref=andrewliptak.com).) The other really cool thing that they do: they pair up stories with a companion essay, and they selected Candace Rondeaux, senior director of Future Frontlines and Planetary Politics programs at New America and professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies to write it. I was floored by it: she brought an incredible, real-world perspective to the world I imagined, and it's an enormous validation for this vision of the future that I've had in my head for so long. [The Algorithmic Fog of War | Future Tense FictionArtificial intelligence is deeply embedded in military operations and decisionmaking. We’re ceding power to a black box we can’t interrogate.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/cropped-issues-favicon-270x270-1.png)Issues in Science and TechnologyPutin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/deficiency1-socmed1-1800x1013.png)](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/ai-combat-black-box-rondeaux/?ref=andrewliptak.com) I have a couple of people from the team to thank: Joey Eschrich, Andres Martinez, Mia Armstrong-López, and Jay Lloyd, who all helped hammer this story into shape, and who made the entire process delightful. Rey Velasquez Sagcal created some fantastic images for the story and the companion essay. I hope you read and enjoy it: I'm very pleased with the entire thing. Time to start working on the next one. ### Here's the January 2026 book list! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/heres-the-january-2026-book-list/ Last updated: 2026-01-22T20:16:41.000Z A new year means a whole bunch of new books to look forward to in the months ahead: January is always an interesting time, as I sort out what's on my TBR that's lingering from last year, and looking ahead to what's to come. This month brings a whole bunch of long awaited books from some favored authors, as well as some exciting debuts. This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit.* There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you: your support helps keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are 15 new SF/F (and related) books to check out this month: ### [*Twelve Months*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199336?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jim Butcher (January 20th) After a lengthy hiatus (six years since [*Battle Grounds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199312?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Jim Butcher is back with the latest adventure of Harry Dresden, *Twelve Months*! In this new installment, Harry has been through a lot and is taking stock of things. He's saved Chicago countless times, and has lost people he's cared about along the way. He's struggling, but it's hard to take the time that he needs: Ghouls are hunting civilians throughout the city, his brother is dying, and the White Queen of the Fae and the White Court of Vampires are allying themselves – and he's been wedded off to the vampire Lara Raith to make things official. [The Dresden Files might be getting a new adaptationAnother wizard named Harry for your viewing pleasure![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-5.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4578-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dresden-files-jim-butcher-profile-streaming-urban-fantasy-adaptation/) ### [*Artifact Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210161?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Miles Cameron (January 27th) Miles Cameron is debuting the first installment of a new space opera trilogy: *Arcana Imperii*, in which follows a young woman named Marca Nbaro, who's long dreamed of escaping from her meager upbringing and heading into space via the city-sized Greatships that ferry humanity's cargo across space. She's made her way onto one of the crews, but now, she faces a new threat: something has begun targeting them. The books originally came out in 2021 overseas, and at the time, Adrienne Martini reviewed Artifact Space for *Locus Magazine*, [saying it was a delight](https://locusmag.com/review/adrienne-martini-reviews-artifact-space-by-miles-cameron/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and that "The plot dips and dives as Nbaro and her friends try to save the *Athens* from an unknown fate. In the process, Nbarro works through some of the baggage her early years saddled her with. It is both a familiar structure and a surprising one that works well in Cameron’s hands." The good news is that the rest of the trilogy, [*Deep Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210185?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Whalesong*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668210208?ref=andrewliptak.com)are hitting stores in March and August of this year. ### [*The Starseekers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063293632?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicole Glover (January 6th) In an alternate 1960s, the space race is on, but the world also has magic at its disposal. Cynthia Rhodes is an arcane engineer at NASA and hosts a magical education show on television. When her show is disrupted by a cursed museum curator, she decides to investigate, along with Theo Danner, a professor of arcane archeology. As they begin looking into the curator and a recent theft, one of her coworkers dies in a lab accident, and Cynthia is convinced that it wasn't an accident, but a murder. Moreover, the incidents appear to be linked, and that someone is trying to disrupt the space program and its goals. This is the latest in Glover's *Murder & Magic* series, and it's preceded by [*The Conductors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358197058?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Undertakers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358197102?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Improvisers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063293595?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-starseekers-100005629?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Glover’s ability to weave and construct historical events within a layer of magic is astounding and entirely believable; this is another absolutely wonderful installment in her series." ### [*A Hole in The Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781836730095?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter F. Hamilton (January 20th) Peter F. Hamilton kicks off his new *Arkship* trilogy with *A Hole in the Sky*, following 16 year old Hazel, a passenger on a generation ship called the Daedalus, which is 500 years into its journey to a new world. The inhabitants have reverted to a agricultural lifestyle after their machines fell apart after a mutiny, and they're overseen by an artificial intelligence who makes sure that all of the ship's resources are recycled – including the passengers when they reach the age of 65\. Hazel soon discovers a population known as the Cheaters – people who've refused to be cycled, she learns that the ship has been damaged and that its atmosphere is depleting, and when her brother is paralyzed in an accident and is slated to be cycled, she joins up with them, discovering that much of what they've been told about their lives is a lie. ### [*Through Gates of Garnet and Gold*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250339409?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seanan McGuire (January 6th) Seanan McGuire adds a new installment of her now long-running *Wayward Children* series, which started a decade ago with [*Every Heart a Doorway*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765385505?ref=andrewliptak.com), about the inhabitants of the Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children, who often find themselves headed off to magical worlds. In this one, Nancy was sent away from the Halls of the Dead and sent to the school, and when the opportunity came to return to the Halls, she took it. She finds that years have passed, and that the dead are roaming the halls, killing the living statues, with the Lord and Lady who rule the place unable to stop the onslaught. ### [*A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217302574?ref=andrewliptak.com) by George R.R. Martin (January 13th) I don't usually include media tie-in re-releases, but with the release of *A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms* earlier this week, I figured I might as well add this one on, because I really enjoyed the hell out of it. This is a collection of three novellas that Martin wrote, all taking place around a century before the events of [*A Game of Thrones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553381689?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* They follow a hedge knight, Dunk, and his squire, Egg, as they go off on a couple of adventures. I felt that they really showed a different side of Westeros from the main novels, and I thought they were a lot of fun. [Kingdom comeHow George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones took over popular culture![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-33.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8723.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-westeros-fantasy-history/) ### [*Detour*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871379?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jeff Rake and Rob Hart (January 13th) When Ryan Crane ended up saving the life of billionaire and presidential hopeful John Ward, he lucked out with an offer to join a space mission to Saturn's moon Titan. He was initially reluctant to go, not wanting to spend the two years away from his family, but the paycheck that he'd get would more than pay for the care that his son needed. When the ship ends up arriving in Saturn's orbit, they're rocked by a series of explosions, and end up returning home, where they're hailed as heroes. But Church and his fellow astronauts realize that something's different when they return. They soon find that they're being tailed and their messages are being scrambled, and they have to go to great lengths to figure out what's happened and how to resume their old lives. ### [*Halcyon Years*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316607087?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alastair Reynolds (January 27th) A private investigator aboard a spaceship, the Halcyon, has been keeping the peace as it rockets its way through space, helping out his community while sometimes getting into trouble with the police. When he's hired by a woman named Ruby Red, she wants him to look into the death of one of the Halcyon's elite members, only to be told to drop it by another woman named Ruby Blue. Things escalate from there. Russell Letson reviewed the book for *Locus Magazine*, [saying](https://locusmag.com/review/halcyon-years-by-alastair-reynolds-review-by-russell-letson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the resolution finally makes all the parts of the puzzles consistent and places the whole multigenre mashup firmly in Reynolds’ usual hard-SF territory. But it’s the getting there that is the fun: roaming the mean streets of a starship, riddled with trapdoors and secret passages and deep-held secrets." ### [*Monster in the Moonlight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593953570?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annelise Ryan (January 27th) Annelise Ryan adds a new installment to her *Monster Hunters Mystery* series ([*A Death in Door County*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593441596?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Death in the Dark Woods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593441626?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Beast of the North Woods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593816066?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which a body turns up on an Wisconsin back road that might have some connection to the "Beast of Bray Road," bit of local folklore about a werewolf-type creature that's supposed to life there. The police bring in cryptozoologist Morgan Carter, and as she begins her investigation, she finds that there's a bigger mystery at play. ### [On Sundays She Picked Flowers](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668091210?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yah Yah Scholfield (January 27th) Judith Rice fled from her home, leaving behind an abusive mother. She ended up in Southern Georgia, where makes a home in a house with its own violent past. She figures out how to coexist alongside the ghosts and spirits that reside there, and becomes something of a local healer in the area. But when a strange woman shows up on her doorstep, the peace that she's made for herself begins to come undone, and brings back memories of the life and family she thought she left behind. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/on-sundays-she-picked-flowers-100007281?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Through their vivid, intoxicating prose, Schofield creates a visceral tale infused with feminine rage and the inherited trauma from being Black in America that is beautiful, bloody, and gory." ### [*Coyote Horizon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204062?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Coyote Destiny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204079?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Allen M. Steele Last year, Open Road Media brought Allen M. Steele's initial *Coyote* trilogy ([*Coyote*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204031?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Coyote Frontier*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204055?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Coyote Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337204048?ref=andrewliptak.com)) back to print after lapsing for a couple of years, and now, the next two installments of the series, *Coyote Horizon* and *Coyote Destiny* are making their return! In the first novel, the colonists on the titular moon have had to contend with a new wave of settlers from a diminished Earth, while they've also allowed the alien *hjaad* to set up an embassy, and who begin to run into some issues when one human begins to preach on their behalf. In the second, decades have passed since a starbridge was destroyed in a terrorist attack, cutting off contact with Earth. When a new ship arrives, they find that Earth has plunged into chaos. These books are fantastic, and I'm really glad to see that they're available once again. [One of my favorite space operas is coming back to printLong out of print, Allen M. Steele’s Coyote series is getting a rerelease![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-34.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/537228530_1328667295930502_4052706792273769253_n-1-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/allen-steele-coyote-sci-fi-space-opera-reprint/) ### [*The Regicide Report*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250373861?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charles Stross (January 27th) Charles Stross brings his long-running [*Laundry Files*](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/the-laundry-files-an-updated-c.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)series to a close with *The Regicide Report*. Over the course of her reign, Queen Elizabeth has accumulated a considerable amount of mana from believers in the British Commonwealth, which proves to be a major threat to the UK's new Prime Minister – an Elder God in disguise. When an assassin is tasked with killing the queen and negating the threat of the Black Pharaoh, Bob Howard and Dominique "Mo" O'Brien are brought in to protect the ruler from harm. ### [*To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780771004216?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jon Tattrie (January 20th) One of the recent tragedies in the fantasy and horror field was the quiet passing of Charles Saunders, who [died in May 2020](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/charles-r-saunders-obituary-black-journalist-sword-and-sorcery-1.5723704?ref=andrewliptak.com). Saunders was a longtime journalist in Nova Scotia who began writing fantasy (particularly of the sword and soul variety) in the 1970s. A new book explores his life, written by one of his colleagues, who delves into his life to chart Saunders' story: how he fled to Canada during the Vietnam war, how he came up with his fantasy world Imaro, and the influence that he left behind. It looks like a fitting tribute, and hopefully, it'll help introduce more people to his work. ### [*For We The Many*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221594?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dennis E. Taylor (January 20th) Last month, Saga Press republished Dennis E. Taylor's novel [*We Are Legion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221570?ref=andrewliptak.com), about a guy named Bob who cryogenically froze himself, only to discover that the future wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and decides to accept an offer to be converted into a self-replicating AI and get shot into space. Now that he (and his fellow Bobs) have been dispatched into the depths of space, they now have to contend with some new problems: humanity has just about wiped itself out, and they've encountered an alien civilization that sees humanity and other life forms as food. And along the way, he's encountered a primitive civilization that now sees him as a sort of god. --- As always, let me know in the comments what catches your eye, and what you've been reading lately. You can also discuss over on the [TO Subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/rtransferorbit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)! ### Kingdom come URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-westeros-fantasy-history/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T14:35:43.000Z There’s a story that George R.R. Martin has often recounted about his level of fame. Shortly after he published [*A Game of Thrones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553381689?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1996, he went on a book tour, where at one of the stops, he found he wasn't the only notable guest. When he arrived at the Barnes and Noble in Texas, he was greeted with a crowded parking lot, and went in, thinking that it was a good sign for the book: “Boy, this book is big. Look at all these people coming in.” They weren't there for him: he was competing with Clifford the Big Red Dog, and the hundreds of people who had showed up at the store were for the character, while only a couple were there to see him. Three decades later, this sort of reception is unimaginable. Martin’s *A Song of Ice and Fire* — as of yet unfinished — has morphed from a niche epic fantasy into a popular culture juggernaut, with five bestselling novels, blockbuster author events that command thousands of passionate readers, a trio of big-budget adaptations, and enough name recognition that if you stop anyone on the street and ask what they might know of the author, they’ll likely know that he's long overdue on the series’ next installment, *The Winds of Winter*. A series of grim, dense, and morally complicated fantasy novels*, A Song of Ice and Fire* has been the most unlikely of publishing success stories, and is the latest chapter in an already unlikely career. It's also a series that's followed the dramatic changes in the publishing industry, the motion picture industry and rise of streaming, and the changes that have come with popular culture and fandom. ### 40 years to an overnight success George R.R. Martin wasn't destined for success. Born on September 20th, 1948, he grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman and housewife who had fallen on harder times. He [described his hometown as an insular, working class community](https://web.archive.org/web/20150323092315/https://asimovs.com/%5Fissue%5F0410/theheartofasmall.shtml) – "a city unto itself ... a world unto itself, really," and that his early childhood was a lonely one: "I wonder whether imagination isn’t born of need as well. I *had* to make up stories and adventures. If I hadn’t, it would have been very lonely in that backyard, with just me and my sticks. I had no friends or playmates." He eventually found peers when he and his family moved into a series of newly-built public housing projects, and they became an outlet for his vivid imagination, sometimes charging them for each story. Along the way, he began spending his allowance on cheap paperbacks and comics, eventually [writing a fan letter](https://georgerrmartin.com/a-sense-of-wonder-a-life-in-comic-fandom/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to Marvel Comics, which introduced him to the world of comics fandom and fanzines. When he was in middle school, he discovered J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*, [which](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/10/books-interview-george-rr-martin?ref=andrewliptak.com) "blew my mind." Martin eventually left Bayonne to study journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois, but he never strayed far from his interests in science fiction and fantasy, eventually publishing 'The Hero,' his first story in *Galaxy Science Fiction* in February 1971\. It was the start to a notable career as a science fiction author. Within a couple of years, and numerous stories later, he was attracting the attention from colleagues and readers across the field: he was a finalist for the 1973 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now the Astounding Award), and picked up his first nomination for a Hugo award for 'With Morning Comes Mistfall' in 1973, and a win for his novella 'A Song for Lya' in 1975, the first of a steady stream of award placements and wins over the course of the decade, thanks to stories such as 'Nightflyers,' 'Sandkings,' and others. Writing in *Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction*, author and genre historian Brian Aldiss characterized Martin's as "a romantic whose ideas and imagery spanned a wide and colourful spectrum. Vampires and spacecraft sit cheek by jowl in his stories," and that his defining trait was to "imbue the expected magazine formulae—romantic, often sentimental and mechanistic—with a degree of realism.” He also began writing novels during this period, first serializing *After the Festival* in *Analog Magazine* starting in in April 1977 before publishing it as [*Dying of the Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553383089?ref=andrewliptak.com) later that year, [*Windhaven*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345535498?ref=andrewliptak.com) (co-written with Lisa Tuttle) in 1981, [*Fevre Dream*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553577938?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1982, and [*The Armageddon Rag*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553383072?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1983\. Upon its release, *The Armageddon Rag* halted the momentum of Martin's career. *Fevre Dream* brought his career to new heights, and his next was his most experimental [and was](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6sqDg2Yh1c&ref=andrewliptak.com) "supposed to be a gigantic bestseller; they paid me a lot of money for it" only for nobody to buy it. It was "a total commercial disaster," [he later told *Publishers' Weekly* in 2005](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/27319-of-hybrids-and-clich-s.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). "Instead of taking me to the next level, it almost destroyed my career." The failure prompted Martin to take a break from life as a novelist, but there was a silver lining: producer Philip DeGuere had optioned *The Armageddon Rag* with the intent of making a film. The film never materialized, but following the success of his series *Simon and Simon*, DeGuere was given the chance to reboot *The Twilight Zone*, and [hired Martin as a staff writer for the series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1uYQLEPkjw&ref=andrewliptak.com). Thus began the next phase of Martin's career: as a screenwriter. He adapted his novella *Nightflyers* in 1987, and worked on a variety of shows, including *Max Headroom* and *Beauty and the Beast*. He also maintained some connections to the SF community: he began work on a shared-universe project called *Wild Cards*, set in the post war period as humanity contends with the arrival of an alien virus that imparts people with superpowers. By this point, Martin was becoming disillusioned with Hollywood. His pitches and drafts were going nowhere, and [as he recounted to *The New Yorker*'s Laura Miller in 2011](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/just-write-it?ref=andrewliptak.com), his vision often outstripped the capabilities of television. As one producer told him "You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses *and* Stonehenge." He decided to go back to that first love: books, where he wouldn't have to worry about the constraints from producers. "I’m sick of this," he [recalled to Jennifer Armstrong of *Entertainment Weekly*](https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george-r-r-martin/?ref=andrewliptak.com), "I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons." When I started **Transfer Orbit* back in 2018, I wanted to use it as a place to write about genre topics and news in ways that I loved reading: a ton of niche detail and explore the complexity and depth of a story, regardless of how long it takes to tell it. That's the case with this story: it's long and involved, and 'm pleased with how it's come together. I learned a lot researching and writing it, and I hope that you will as well. This newsletter is free to read, but it does take resources to write. I've spent the last week taking on long evenings diving into decades-old interviews, chat transcripts, reviews, and pouring through reference books to put this story together. And that's before I went about proof-reading, editing, gathering up books to photograph (rather than rely on stock images). If you enjoyed reading this and want to see more pieces like it, please consider signing up as a TO supporter. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/image-3.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Fantasy ascendant Fantasy's roots stretch back to antiquity, but for the modern state of the genre, J.R.R. Tolkien's [*The Lord of the Rings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780618640157?ref=andrewliptak.com) helped set the stage for the field we know today. Initially released in the United Kingdom, it found a small and captive audience before making its way to the United States thanks to a [copyright loophole](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/unauthorized-lord-rings/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The resulting back and forth between Tolkien and Ace Books and subsequent "authorized" edition from Ballantine helped prime the trilogy to explode in the 1960s, where it found a ready and eager population of readers in the counter-culture movement. The result utterly transformed the genre world as publishing houses worked to find their own versions of Tolkien's masterpiece. In 1969, Ballantine Books launched an imprint devoted to republishing the genre's classics, such as from Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft, and many others, while other authors such as [Fritz Leiber](https://levgrossman.substack.com/p/that-other-american-tolkien), Michael Moorcock, and Ursula K. Le Guin found new audiences for their fantastic worlds and characters. Writing in [*Fantasy: A Short History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781350407824?ref=andrewliptak.com), Adam Roberts notes that "through the 1970 the popular success of Tolkien in the 1960s was consolidated via a considerable number of new fantasy works written in more-or-less straight imitation of *Lord of the Rings*," and that as readers began looking around for other stories, there was a boom in new imitators. "1970s authors also began writing new-minted Tolkienian fantasy of various kinds, and various quality – though few of these exercises in pastiche Tolkieniana have any real merit – and some where very successful in commercial terms." Authors such as Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, and Roger Zelazny etched out durable and long-lived careers penning high fantasy series. Roberts notes that while there were many imitations of Tolkien's stories, they were also popular with readers. "This mismatch in success and quality is in itself interestingly indicative of a wider cultural logic, but it has a particular valence for fantasy: readers chasing 'enchantment' in amongst increasingly reified and repetitive-iterative copies of copies." It's in this environment in which Martin found himself while trying to figure out how to move on from Hollywood. In 1991, he began writing a new science fiction novel set in his larger "[Thousand Worlds](https://grrm-thousand-worlds.fandom.com/wiki/George%5FR.%5FR.%5FMartin%27s%5F%27Thousand%5FWorlds%27%5FUniverse%5FWiki?ref=andrewliptak.com)" universe, *Avalon*. He didn't make it far. A new idea came to him: the scene where the Starks discover a dead direwolf, with a litter of starving puppies. "When I began, I didn’t know what the hell I had," [he told Alison Flood of ](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/10/books-interview-george-rr-martin?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/10/books-interview-george-rr-martin?ref=andrewliptak.com). "I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head, I couldn’t not write it. So it wasn’t an entirely rational decision, but writers aren’t entirely rational creatures.” This was something altogether different for the writer, who built his career as a science fiction author. Martin makes an appearance in Patti Perret's 1984 photography book *The Faces of Science Fiction: Intimate Portrait of the Men and Women who Shape the Way We Look at the Future*, in which he mused about how not all of his books fit the SF label perfectly. "So maybe I have to plead guilty to being a writer first and an sf writer second. Still, if they want me to get out of this field, they'll have to drag me out bodily, kicking and screaming... I'm an sf *person*, and always will be." Seven years later, and he was contemplating something very different. "Tolkien had an enormous influence on me," he told Flood, "but after Tolkien there was a dark period in the history of epic fantasy where there were a lot of Tolkien imitations coming out that were terrible \[and\] I didn’t necessarily want to be associated with those books, which just seemed to me to be imitating the worst things of Tolkien and not capturing any of the great things." He set *Avalon* aside and began working on this new project. As he wrote, he began building out the world. He drew up a map, started charting family trees, and soon realized that this was much larger than a shorter story. "I didn't even know whether it was a novel or a novella or something at first," [he told *io9*'s Charlie Jane Anders](https://web.archive.org/web/20130805095651/http://observationdeck.io9.com/george-r-r-martin-the-complete-unedited-interview-886117845), "By the summer of '91, you know, it just came to me out of nowhere, and I started writing it and following where it led. But by the end of that summer I knew I had a big series." Hollywood wasn't quite in the rearview mirror, and he still had some irons in the fire: a concept of a science fiction television show called *Doorways*, about parallel worlds. He was able to successfully pitch the show to earn a pilot order, which went into production in the spring of 1992\. While ABC liked the series enough to order a handful of additional scripts, the network didn't end up picking it up. (IDW would eventually adapt the series as a comic book in 2010.) Martin wrote pilots for another couple of shows, but ended up returning to the fantasy story that he set aside to work on the show. He showed his agent what he'd come up with, and provided a broad outline for what would follow: the first novel, *A Game of Thrones*, would be followed by two additional books: *A Dance With Dragons* and *The Winds of Winter*. But by the end of 1995, he'd written more than 1,500 pages and told Anders that he "wasn't anywhere close to the end of the first book," and that he determined that he would have to split that first novel into two. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8648.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak There was precedence for this in the publishing world. In 1990, author Robert Jordan, who began writing fantasy in the 1980s (notably a run of seven *Conan the Barbarian* novels in three years), released the first installment of a new fantasy epic series called *The Wheel of Time,* [*The Eye of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250251466?ref=andrewliptak.com), in February 1990\. Like many of his predecessors, Jordan was loosely inspired by Tolkien's epic, down to its trilogy structure. His publisher, Tor Books, was enthusiastic for it, and took a number of steps to prime it for success: "We did it in trade paper because we were afraid we couldn’t get enough out of a fat hardcover book," publisher Tom Doherty [recalled](https://reactormag.com/talking-with-tom-a-conversation-between-tom-doherty-and-harriet-mcdougal//?ref=andrewliptak.com). "Trade paper wasn’t anywhere near as big then as it is now, but we thought that’s good, too, because it will call attention to itself. It’ll be different. So we did it in trade paper and sold 40,000 copies, which was huge for trade paper in those days, for the first of a fantasy series." It worked: *The Eye of the World* hit The New York Times bestseller list. Tor followed it up months later with another fat paperback, [*The Great Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250251480?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* The series was quickly growing: a third installment, [*The Dragon Reborn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250251497?ref=andrewliptak.com)followed a year later in November 1991, and a fourth, [*The Shadow Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250251923?ref=andrewliptak.com), hit bookstores in 1992\. "We did a book each year, and each book built," Doherty said. "By the time we got to the fourth book, we were selling the first book in mass market paperback. It was hooking people and bringing them in. Then the next book would grow, because people wouldn’t want to wait." By 1996, *The New York Times* [profiled](https://web.archive.org/web/20110514010535/https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/books/flaming-swords-and-wizards-orbs.html) Jordan's rise, saying that he "may be an heir of sorts to Tolkien, in attention earned if not achievement," and that he had "come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8635-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### *A Game of Thrones* That same year, Martin was ready to jump into the fray. He and his agent sold the story as a trilogy to Bantam Spectra, and his publisher recalled that while they were enthusiastic for the first novel, they were cautious with their initial projections. "We costed our offer on modest sales in our territories – expecting, or should I say, hoping for, something like 5,000 hardbacks and 50,000 paperbacks," Jane Johnson, HarperCollins' publisher [noted in *The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/05/game-of-thrones-an-epic-publishing-story-george-rr-martin?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2016\. *Publishers Weekly* [reported](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/77490-george-r-r-martin-dreamer-of-fantastic-worlds.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that there was an air of excitement around this new book: a bold return after years of exile, bolstered by an initial print run of 75,000 copies, along with a rave, [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780553103540?ref=andrewliptak.com): "Although conventional in form, the book stands out from similar work by Eddings, Brooks and others by virtue of its superbly developed characters, accomplished prose and sheer bloody-mindedness...Martin's trophy case is already stuffed with major prizes, including Hugos, Nebulas, Locus Awards and a Bram Stoker. He's probably going to have to add another shelf, at least." The novel came with another important blurb" "Grabs hold and won't let go. It's brilliant," wrote Robert Jordan. In July, Martin published a novella-length extract from the novel, titled "Blood of the Dragon," in *Asimovs Science Fiction*, and on August 1st, the book officially hit bookstore shelves. Two decades later, Martin [described the release](https://grrm.livejournal.com/496185.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) as "nothing spectacular." Reviews were excellent, but sales were just okay, with modest crowds at his various tour stops around the country. Johnson noted that "Initial sales were only moderately encouraging," but that they soon took off as "word-of-mouth recommendation was soon spreading like wildfire around fans. And it wasn’t long before we exceeded all of our original expectations." *A Game of Thrones* introduced readers to the world of Westeros, a pseudo-medieval realm ruled by seven kingdoms with considerable political intrigue. Westeros has been at relative peace for years following the chaotic rule of Aerys II Targaryen, known as the Mad King. After his assassination, the surviving members of his family were exiled across the oceans, and Robert Baratheon, the leader of the revolution that toppled him took his place. As the book opens, Baratheon asks a close ally, Eddard Stark, to become his hand, setting into motion a series of decision and actions that threaten the stability of the realm – there are plenty of questions about succession and bloodlines, loyalties and hostages, all coming together into a delicate series of alliances that hold feuds and grievances in check, but there are plenty of opportunists who're jostling for power and working their way up the chain of command. Meanwhile, there are other threats: Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen, the offspring of the last king who went insane have been exiled, and work to plot their return to Westeros by recruiting the tribal members of the Dothraki people, and to the far north, a massive ice wall protects the realm from the northern tribes – and there are signs of the undead, which could threaten everyone. The books resonated with readers, and while he and his publishers might not have characterized it as the wild success that Jordan enjoyed with his series, word was spreading. Fans quickly assembled fan website called Dragonstone, and in the next awards season, they were showing their appreciation: It earned the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel from the readers of *Locus Magazine* and a Best Novel nomination in the 1997 World Fantasy Awards. "Blood of the Dragon" picked up its own set of awards: a Hugo Award for Best Novella, a second place finish for the same category in the Locus Awards, while *Asimovs*' readers awarded it third place in that year's readers choice awards. It also picked up nominations for that year's World Fantasy and Nebula Awards. The book is a masterclass in writing: Martin lays out a vivid characters and their complicated relationships with one another, all in an engrossing world with a rich imagined history and lore that stretches back millennia. In Fantasy: A Short History, Roberts characterizes Martin's writing as the "pre-eminent work of Grimdark fantasy," and that his emphasis on a realistic vision for a fantastical realm helps to subvert expectations that helped it stand apart from the legions of Tolkien imitators that laid down ink before him. "Martin is interested not just in how an army fights on the battlefield," Roberts writes, "but in how it is mustered, where the money is coming from to pay for it, how its discipline is maintained," and that "this text's whole point is to deconstruct notions of honour, nobility, loyalty, and innocence, to reveal them for the whited sepulchers they are, or at least that the consensus nowadays believes them to be." In 2005, critic (and later author of his own fantasy series,) Lev Grossman [declared that Martin was](https://time.com/archive/6675462/books-the-american-tolkien/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the "American Tolkien," in no small part for this outlook: "What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil...Martin’s wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. " ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/clash.jpg) Image: Michael Gorman ### "The tale grew in the telling" With his epic saga off to a promising start, Martin now had to untangle some of the complications that he was making for himself. During the release of *A Game of Thrones*, [Martin told *Publishers Weekly*](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/77490-george-r-r-martin-dreamer-of-fantastic-worlds.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he "recently come to the realization that I’m not going to be able to do it in three books, even though the books are bigger than I thought they’d be. I expected about 700 pages in manuscript, but the first one was close to 1100.” He decided to split the narrative into two novels, titling the next installment [*A Clash of Kings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553579901?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and noted that his story would be a four book series, rather than a trilogy*.* Like the first installment, his next was no less ambitious, with the story picking up after the ascent of Baratheon's young, sociopathic son Joffey to the Iron Throne and subsequent, shocking death of Ned Stark and depicts Westeros's descent into a civil war when Ned's son Robb declares himself "King of the North" and as others throughout the realm make their own moves for control of Westeros, all while the problems to the north and across the oceans continue to foment. Some of that length came as a result of his experiences in Hollywood, he explained. "In Hollywood, \[television\] screenplays are very tight...Such economy can be a virtue, but at the same time there’s a richness in being able to create a whole world, in having the time to look at minor characters and allow things to happen on \[the\] side.” *A Clash of Kings* lived up to that, bringing in a handful of new viewpoint characters that added to the action and drama. As he continued to write, he quickly realized that his four-book plan was quickly becoming unrealistic. [Speaking with Amazon.com's Craig E. Englerin 1999](https://web.archive.org/web/19991013131915/http://cyberhaven.com/books/sciencefiction/martin.html)*,* Martin explained that as the story was growing in that second, overflow book, he needed to take a hard look at the longer plan. "I actually called a halt for a while and I did some reorganization and I figured out how I could tell the story I wanted to tell and do justice to it, but at the same time not spend the rest of my life doing it. And six books seemed to be the most viable way to go." Three books became four, and then six. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/image-4.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Detours The size and depth of Martin's world meant that there were plenty of other things to explore as well. He told Anders that " I do get distracted by other stories," and that he'd put his work on the books aside to explore those side stories and characters that bubbled up in his imagination. Two such characters were Dunk and Egg, a roaming hedge knight and his squire, who lived about a century before the events of *A Game of Thrones*, which he explored in a novella called "The Hedge Knight." In a [2026 podcast interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQ6XhuVo7o&ref=andrewliptak.com), Martin explained that he had been approached by editor Robert Silverberg, who had just sold a major anthology, [*Legends: Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765300355?ref=andrewliptak.com). It was designed to showcase a series of new stories from major fantasy authors, including Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McAffrey, Terry Pratchett, and a number of others. "I signed a contract to write an original Westeros story," he explained. "It had to be a Westeros story, and then afterwards, I said 'oh god, what do I do?' I don't have a Westeros story for him, and I can't because \[I've not finished the story yet!" Martin realized that if he had to provide a story, it would have to be set before the events of his main story, and "then the idea came to me for what would become 'The Hedge Knight', beginning with Dunk. I wanted to tell a story that focused to some extent on the small folk, as I call them, on the people who were not lords." He almost didn't make it, noting that Silverberg set a hard deadline: he would turn in his manuscript on January 1st. Martin turned it in on December 31st. When it was released in August 1998, the novella provided Martin's readers with a new sense of history and lore that further supported the larger world he was creating. The story is small in scale, following Ser Duncan the Tall as he encounters Egg on his way to a tournament, where he hopes to prove himself and make a name for himself. Martin laces the story with names familiar to anyone who'd read the novels, lending a sense that the relationships and bonds seen in those novels have deep roots in this realm. "That was one of the best decisions I've made as a writer," Martin explained. "Because in subsequent years, going to cons, I ran into a lot of people who would say to me, 'you know, I'd never heard of you before. I know you've been around a long time, but I'd never read any of your books. But I picked up *Legends* for the Anne McCaffrey story, but yours was the best story in the book." Those readers went on to seek out his novels, and Martin noted that he saw a real uptick in readers by the time his next novel hit stores. *A Clash of Kings* hit stores on November 16th, 1998, and it became clear that the soft start to the series was temporary: it landed on *The New York Times* bestseller list, and shortly thereafter, a pair of fans named Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson, launched a fan site, [Westeros.org](https://westeros.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which included a forum that allowed fans to connect with one another and talk about the world, its characters, and the stories Martin was producing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/storm.jpg) Image: Michael Gorman After his tour, Martin embarked on the next installment, titled [*A Storm of Swords*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553381702?ref=andrewliptak.com), which he envisioned as a closure to the first big arc of the story that had been growing and growing. He [provided](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/1999/05/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [updates](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/1999/06/?ref=andrewliptak.com) throughout 1999 to fans, but by [early](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2000/01/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [2000](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2000/02/?ref=andrewliptak.com), he noted that he was running behind, and [later explained](https://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/grrmartin.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the manuscript had ballooned to 1,500 pages by the time he turned it in in April. But astonishingly, he wrote the entire thing in a year, a major feat, considering how sprawling the story and characters had become. It was also revealing another problem: he was hitting the upper limits to what a publisher could practically print and bind, and in some instances, foreign publishers simply opted to split the book into multiple volumes. [Speaking to *io9*](https://web.archive.org/web/20130805095651/http://observationdeck.io9.com/george-r-r-martin-the-complete-unedited-interview-886117845) in 2013, Martin explained that the books were getting longer and longer, in part because of the momentum that the stories were taking: "You write a chapter and then in your next chapter, it can't be six months later, because something's going to happen the next day. So you have to write what happens the next day, and then you have to write what happens the week after that. And the news gets to some other place. And pretty soon, you've written hundreds of pages and a week has passed, instead of the six months, or the year, that you wanted to pass." *A Storm of Swords* arrived in stores in the fall of 2000\. Like its predecessors, it was a hit, hitting bestseller lists and earning Martin another Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, along with nominations for the Hugo and Nebula awards. With book three under his belt, Martin told fans that he'd be taking a short vacation before spending the summer working on copy edits and other pre-release details before diving into the next installment of the series, [*A Dance with Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553385953?ref=andrewliptak.com). In the aftermath of the quickly-written *Storm,* he appears to have been confident that this next novel would come quickly, [telling a reader to look for the book](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2000/09/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "sometime in 2002." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/feast.jpg) Image: Michael Gorman ### Powerhouse Following the release of *A Storm of Swords*, the series and Martin's popularity began to snowball. While *A Game of Thrones* might not have come roaring out of the gate in 1996, word was spreading throughout the fan community with each successive novel. Writing in *The New Yorker* in 2011, Laura Miller noted that "it won the passionate advocacy of certain independent booksellers, who recommended it to their customers, who, in turn, pressed copies on their friends." Martin and his novels were already enjoying the presence of a dedicated fan website, but that fandom was now translating into real-world turnout. At the 2001 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, a group of fans assembled for a dinner at a nearby restaurant, with Martin in attendance, calling themselves the Brotherhood Without Banners – a reference to a group of outlaws from the stories. They gathered again for a room party the next night, and over the course of the evening, one fan asked Martin to knight him. “I can’t knight you," Martin [told him](https://web.archive.org/web/20140729113949/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/just-write-it), "you haven’t gone on a quest yet!” The soon-to-be-knighted was sent off on a queset to acquire a Philly cheesesteak, and the group was dubbed the Knights of the Cheesesteak, beginning an informal tradition. The Brotherhood Without Banners has continued as a grassroots organization with gatherings at other successive WorldCons and other conventions. "We go to panels," Xray the Enforcer, the "baroness" of the group wrote on its Westeros.org forums, "We sit on panels. We volunteer to help run conventions, site-selection voting, and at the Hugos ceremony. We throw parties. We hang out in the bar. We hang out with each other. Some of us cosplay. Some of us are into combat demos. Some of us just really dig books." As Martin went to conventions, book signings, and other events around the world, the Brotherhood often in attendance, a loose order of dedicated readers who were engrossed in his world, filling out seats and adding to the enthusiasm. This level of fervent fandom is usually reserved for huge franchises like *Star Wars* or *Star Trek*, or established classics like Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*. Martin had created a world and narrative that invited people to explore its rich details and relationships as he explored the trials and shifting balances of power between the characters and kingdoms, and it was turning casual readers into dedicated fans. With the publication and promotional schedule for *Sword* complete, Martin turned to writing the next book in the series in early 2001 and immediately realized that he had a problem: the narrative would bring about some consequential events for the series: the arrival of Daenerys Targaryen from exile to Westeros, where she'd work to reclaim the throne. To bring up the ages of the characters and move past smaller events, Martin planned to advance the story by five years. But once he began writing, he realized that a lot would happen in that gap; his characters would have undertaken plenty of actions that would need to be told through flashbacks – a lot of them. In a 2003 interview, he [explained](https://web.archive.org/web/20030704125949/http://www.dusksite.ukgo.com/article.php?53.0) the problem he was facing: > "The structure of these books is extremely complex. I'm working with eight or nine different viewpoint characters, essentially writing a novel about each of them for each of these books and then weaving them together. What I found was that while the five-year gap worked admirably for some of those characters it didn't work at all for others. And I was skipping many events or relating them only in summary or flashback, many events which I feel could be very effectively dramatized, and would work better if dramatized. After a year of struggling with the problem, he scrapped the time jump, [telling attendees at a reading during the 2001 WorldCon](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2001/09/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that what would have been skipped over would now be a new book, [*A Feast for Crows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553582031?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* *A Dance With Dragons* would now become the fifth book in the series, and would be followed by the sixth and final installment, *The Winds of Winter* (While Martin stuck with the idea that this would be a six-book series, his then-partner Parris was already speculating at this point that he'd actually need a seventh book to contain it all.) By this point, it was clear that the hoped-for 2002 release date wouldn't happen. With a new plan in place, Martin continued work on the novel, but work was coming along slowly. By 2003, [he was](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2003/02?ref=andrewliptak.com) [reporting](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2003/04?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the book was taking longer than expected, [and that it was becoming difficult](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2003/08?ref=andrewliptak.com) to contain the five years worth of story within it, and in an [interview with Goran Zadravec](https://web.archive.org/web/20040405090522/http://mezmera.posluh.hr/bazaar/interview%5Fgeorge%5Fr%5Fr%5Fmartin.asp) in December, he explained that *A Feast for Crows* was proving to be the most difficult book in the series to write to date: "It still is a tough book to write. I'm still writing it, I'm still struggling with it." One of the reasons for the difficulty was the number of characters that he was now juggling. Where *A Game of Thrones* started with only eight viewpoint characters, the character count for *A Feast for Crows* had more than doubled to 19 viewpoints, all of which had to be coordinated. Additionally, adding new characters required more story and context, he [told attendees at Norescon 2004](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2004/09?ref=andrewliptak.com): > "At one point he was going to do a one chapter prolog that incorporated stuff from Dorne, and stuff from the Iron Isles. That became 2 chapters, then 12 (7 for one and 5 for the other). He realized he couldn't have a 250 page prolog that was all about characters that we have never met before, so he had to rip it up and start over. He wove the material in the prolog into the rest of the book." In February 2004, Martin [passed the 1000 page mark](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2004/02?ref=andrewliptak.com), and over the course of the year, reported that it was growing longer, something he hoped to avoid because of the problems that he and his publishers faced with *Storm.* Along the way, he carved out time to return to another part of his world: Ser Dunk and Egg. Editor Robert Silverberg was assembling a sequel to his *Legends* anthology, [*Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345471093?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which in addition to Martin, featured Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist, Diane Gabaldon, Neil Gaiman, Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, and a number of others. Martin contributed a new adventure of the duo: "The Sworn Sword", which followed them as they come to the aid of the people of Standfast, who're contending with a drought and a dam that a local lady has constructed to supply water to the moat of her castle and fields. Like its predecessor, Martin uses the story to expand his world and shed some light on the lives of the people living in its feudal system. He was also apparently thinking about other stories in the world, telling his partner Parris [that he wanted to write a trilogy](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2005/02?ref=andrewliptak.com) "about one of the Targaryen Kings." At the end of May 2005, [he provided an update](https://web.archive.org/web/20051231002117/http://www.georgerrmartin.com/done.html). *A Feast for Crows* wasn't quite done, but he was facing a now-usual issue: it was too long. "By January, I had more than 1300 pages and still had storylines unfinished," he wrote. "About three weeks ago I hit 1527 pages of final draft, surpassing *A STORM OF SWORDS*... but I also had another hundred or so pages of roughs and incomplete chapters, as well as other chapters sketched out but entirely unwritten." He and his publishers began discussing what to do about it. He wasn't willing to make significant cuts to the stories, and didn't want to break the book into two parts. "It was my feeling that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters." They came up with a novel solution: split the dramatis personae in two. The two books would take place at the same time, but would each feature half of the characters. He had already wrapped up the storylines for the characters in *A Feast for Crows* (all relatively confined to one part of the world) and transferred the chapters he couldn't use to *A Dance With Dragons* (all clustered in another part of the world). When *A Feast for Crows* was published October 17th, 2005, Martin closed out the book with an afterword that explained his decision to split the story up by characters. " Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters you love of love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in *A Dance with Dragons*." It was a fateful declaration. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_2773.jpeg) Image: Robert G. Barker ### King Kong *A Dance With Dragons* wasn't going as planned. In December of 2006, Martin closed out the year on a [dour note](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2006/12/05/good-news-and-bad-news/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "None of the projects I wrapped up was A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. Work has been going well, yes, but not especially on DANCE. I am not going to be able to finish it by the end of the year as I had hoped." He was overly optimistic about his progress. When Martin announced the split between *A Feast of Crows* and *A Dance With Dragons* in May 2005, he closed on an optimistic note that the next book was already halfway done. "Looking at all the Tyrion and Daenerys material that I'd removed," [he later explained on his blog](https://grrm.livejournal.com/217066.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), "I figured I only had another 400 odd pages to go to have another book of equal length, which was likely what prompted me to say the next book would be along in a year. Famous last words, those. Never again." He later reported that much of 2005 was taken up with promotional duties for *Feast*, and that he came into 2006 with little progress. When he next sent in a partial draft to his publisher in 2007, the manuscript had shrunk. Martin provided a stream of updates on his blog, and noted that he was facing increased distractions and other obligations that were pulling him away from the book, including an [extensive home renovation](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2006/01/21/back-from-the-north/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that took place over much of 2006\. In 2005, he noted that with the popularity of his novels came new opportunities, like audiobooks, collectables, comics, games, and interest from Hollywood, which carried with them a considerable amount of hidden work. "He thought it would just be giving an ok," a fan [recounted after a convention](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2005/02?ref=andrewliptak.com), "and then he is involved in picking artists, approving text. All things he enjoys but which also reduce his writing time." In 2006, Martin announced a companion guide to his series, *The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones*, [which he described](https://georgerrmartin.com/bantam-to-publish-the-world-of-ice-and-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com) as an illustrated, coffee-table book that would explore the history and lore of Westeros. He wouldn't be embarking on this project on his own, he explained: he enlisted the help of westeros.org founders Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson, who he frequently consulted about his world's details, who would help assemble the tome, which was eventually released in 2014\. He had other writing projects beyond his series as well. In 2007, he [announced](https://georgerrmartin.com/the-warriors-are-coming/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he was partnering with friend and editor Gardner Dozois to helm a new anthology: [*Warriors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765334770?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he would provide a new novella following the exploits of Dunk and Egg, "The Mystery Knight." It hit stores in 2010\. The pair collaborated another other anthology after that, [*Songs of the Dying Earth: Short Stories in Honor of Jack Vance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765331090?ref=andrewliptak.com), which came out in 2011\. On top of those projects, he was still helming his long-running shared-universe anthology series, *Wild Cards*, which saw five new anthologies hit shelves between 2006 and 2011\. There was another thing that arrived on his schedule that was beginning to take some of his attention away from the novel: a television series. HBO began adapting the series for television, and in the late summer and fall of 2009, Martin traveled overseas to watch his world come to life. None of that was conducive of tackling the work he was undertaking. After rewriting and restructuring in 2006 and 2007, Martin [noted](https://grrm.livejournal.com/217066.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he began to move forward in 2008 and 2009, before really hitting his stride in 2010 and early 2011\. In March 2008, he [provided a brief update](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2008/03/17/dance-gets-covered/?ref=andrewliptak.com): alongside some new cover art for the book, he reported that "if I can deliver the book before the end of June, you’ll see these in your favorite bookstore sometime this fall. If I can’t, well… you’ll still see them eventually, I hope." Adding flames to the fire was his publisher, who listed a product page for the book with a September 30th release date. I would be a year before he posted [another update](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2009/02/19/a-dance-with-dragons/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on his progress: "No, it’s not done." > "I made a lot of progress on the book in the first half of 2008\. So much so that I was optimistic that I would be done by the end of the year. Unfortunately, I did not make much progress on the book in the second half of 2008\. Indeed, I made some regress. Some of the reasons were literary, arising from problems in the narrative itself. He was still optimistic, however: "I am trying to finish the book by June. I think I can do that. If I do, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will likely be published in September or October." Structurally, he had embarked on a complicated book: while he moved several hundred pages from *Feast* to *Dance,* he found that lining up those characters and getting them into the places where they needed to end up was tricky, and he wasn't able to complete the book by that summer or even the end of the year. In a [February 2010 update](https://grrm.livejournal.com/133957.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), he outlined some of the difficulties: > "With all these characters scattered over my entire world, some chapters that span hours and others many months, various journeys and voyages to account for, not to mention the demands of the dramatic chronology, an entirely different matter than the literal chronology… well, it may well make your head explode. It did mine." One of the biggest continuity and plot issues that Martin faced was what he referred to as the "Meereenese Knot," around a plotline involving Daenerys and several other characters. He characterized it as a series of actions that had to work around one another. "All of these things were balls I had thrown up into the air, and they're all linked and chronologically entwined," he [explained](https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2012/07/?ref=andrewliptak.com). "And I had to write all three versions to be able to compare and see how these different arrival points affected the stories of the other characters." This was a plot point that Martin struggled to complete, and he [documented](https://grrm.livejournal.com/106328.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) [his](https://grrm.livejournal.com/107110.html?thread=7294566&ref=andrewliptak.com) [attempts](https://grrm.livejournal.com/107286.html?page=4&ref=andrewliptak.com) throughout the fall of 2009 before ultimately figuring out a solution [months later](https://grrm.livejournal.com/135972.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2010: "At least part of the infamous Meereenese knot was a viewpoint problem. (Not all of it, no, a lot had to do with chronology and causation, but some of it was a POV question). Introducing a new POV \[Ser Barristan Selmy\] helped me resolve those problems." It was during this time that the fandom that rose around his novels was proving to be a double-edged sword: Martin was increasingly facing criticism for the delay from throughout the fan community, especially as he blew past hoped-for release date after hoped-for release date. The delay provided plenty of fodder for readers to talk about it on social media, in message forums, blog posts, and on genre-related sites, commenting on its progress, pouring over every update he made, and sometimes getting into online shouting matches. Martin was soon finding people complaining on his blog when he posted about going about his daily life when he wrote about his hobbies, love of football, travel, and other projects he was working on. In 2008, he [issued a warning on his blog](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2008/9/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "When I do open a post for comments, it’s because I want comments on the subject that I just posted about...I am perfectly aware that A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is late. There’s no need to remind me, thanks, I have plenty of editors and agents and publishers to do that." It was clear that his frustration was mounting with his increasingly-vocal fanbase. In his 2009 update, he noted that readers were messaging him accusing him of making excuses for his slow progress, or outright lying about it, and he noted that he was becoming more and more reluctant to throw out a date when he thought he would be finished. Where he was once transparent about his progress, noting various chapters and characters he was working on, he was now more close-lipped, reluctant to mention dates or other details, lest they kick off a flurry of speculation. The fervor around Martin's progressed reached a point where even other authors were weighing in, with Neil Gaiman famously [writing](https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch." Despite those challenges, he was making some progress: by the fall of 2009, he passed the 1,100 page mark, and by May 2010, the manuscript reached 1,311 pages. [At New York Comic-Con in October](https://web.archive.org/web/20240410224556/https://gizmodo.com/george-r-r-martins-a-dance-with-dragons-is-really-almo-5660273), Bantam Spectra senior editor Anne Groell reported that Martin reported just five chapters left to go. On March 3rd, 2011, Martin [announced](https://georgerrmartin.com/dragon-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that *A Dance With Dragons* finally had a release date: July 12th, 2011\. The book wasn't quite done, he noted, but this wasn't like the prior hoped-for release dates: "this date is real," and in May, he [confirmed that the book was finally complete](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2011/05/19/talking-about-the-dance/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "Kong is dead." The news [spread throughout the](https://ew.com/article/2011/03/03/dance-with-dragons-date/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [internet like wildfire](https://www.vulture.com/2011/03/the%5Fnext%5Fbook%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fgame%5Fof%5Ft.html?ref=andrewliptak.com): the release date for the long-awaited book, Martin explained, was firm, and the only work he was doing on it was the behind-the-scenes copy-editing that supported the publication. The timing worked out perfectly: HBO would soon debut its adaptation in April, providing Martin with a massive new potential audience for the series, which would cover the events of the first novel over its first ten-episode season. Anyone hooked on the series would have four, then five books to dive into to find out what would happen next. By early July, all four books in the series [hit *The New York Times* bestseller list](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2011/07/04/im-number-one-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the publicity efforts for the next was kicking into high gear: websites like *Vulture* put [together chapter-by-chapter read alongs](https://www.vulture.com/2011/07/vulture%5Fbook%5Frecap%5Fa%5Fdance%5Fwit.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Martin would embark on a massive, nation-wide tour, with booksellers and his publisher anticipating enough attention to impose restrictions for each of his events: many would require attendees to get a wristband or purchase a ticket, and then wait in line. To get as many people through signing lines as possible, attendees wouldn't be able to pose for photographs, get their copies personalized, or get any copies not purchased at the store (usually limited to 2-4) signed. The book began hitting stores in July and was greeted with a wave of positive reviews. *Pat's Fantasy Hot List* [declared](https://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/07/dance-with-dragons.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "delivers on basically all fronts. It's everything fans wanted it to be and then some! " Dana Jennings of *The New York Times* [said](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/books/a-dance-with-dragons-by-george-r-r-martin-review.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it "met the high standards set by its four siblings" and that Martin was "a literary dervish, enthralled by complicated characters and vivid language, and bursting with the wild vision of the very best tale tellers." Charlie Jane Anders of *io9* [proclaimed that the novel](https://gizmodo.com/george-r-r-martins-a-dance-with-dragons-worth-the-wai-5819035?ref=andrewliptak.com) was "a brilliant, horrifying, depressing book that takes the characters Martin made you fall in love with, and plunges them just a little bit deeper into hell." Lev Grossman, who named Martin the "American Tolkien" just a couple of years earlier, [said](https://web.archive.org/web/20110711021407/https://time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2081774,00.html) that "his skill as a crafter of narrative exceeds that of almost any literary novelist writing today," and that it was the best installment of the series to date. The novel quickly hit the top of *The New York Times'* bestseller list, where it remained for weeks. When he finally had a chance to catch his breath four days later in Indianapolis, Martin [reported](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2011/07/15/from-indy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that his events were drawing more than a thousand people at each stop, and that "*DANCE* had the highest first day sales totals of any work of fiction released this year. Not just SF and fantasy, but all categories of fiction." It was a tremendous, overdue moment for Martin. He – and his readers – now turned their eyes towards the next moment in the saga, *The Winds of Winter*. Everyone hoped that it wouldn't take another six years to arrive. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8731.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Back to Hollywood In 2008, HBO debuted a new television show: *True Blood,* an adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s *Southern Vampire Mysteries* series. The story was set in a world where supernatural creatures existed and in which vampires began to come out to the public after the invention of a synthetic blood. The series earned widespread acclaim for the network. “The success of *True Blood* proved to \[HBO CEO Richard\]Plepler and his colleagues that HBO could make waves in the fantasy genre — an important realization for the network,” wrote Felix Gillette and John Koblin in their book [*Its Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593296196?ref=andrewliptak.com), and quote creator Alan Ball: “it opened the door for them to do other genre and sci-fi stuff they might otherwise not have done.” Science fiction and fantasy projects were widely growing in popularity in the early 2000s. George Lucas had released his *Star Wars* prequel trilogy, while J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels and subsequent adaptations were drawing enormous followings in bookstores and movie theaters. But it was in December 2001 that Hollywood discovered that audiences were clamoring for fantasy: Peter Jackson released *The Fellowship of the Ring*, the first adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings.* The subsequent films, *The Two Towers* and *The Return of the King* hit theaters in 2002 and 2003, earning considerable acclaim and success at the box office. For a series long considered unadaptable because of its length and detail, Jackson showed that such projects were not only doable, but could be done well. As the success of *A Song of Ice and Fire* rose in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hollywood began to take notice, and Martin began taking meetings to talk about potential projects. In most cases, he was nonplused: he had long been frustrated with the constraints that productions placed on his imagination, and his fantasy series was his way of making sure that everything he wanted to put into a story was in there. Over the years, he described pitches where screenwriters wanted to focus on only specific characters, or change significant plot points to fit the stories into a film, and often mused that the only way to do it properly was to go big: a television series – some fans suggested that HBO, as a cable network known for not shying away from blood and sex, would be an ideal home for such a project. In 2006, screenwriter David Benioff and his writing partner D.B. Weiss read the books and began thinking about adapting the story as a television series. They soon arranged to meet with Martin, and over the course of five hours, impressed him with their knowledge and appreciation of the series. He gave them his blessing, and the pair began working on their pitch to networks, eventually landing at HBO, which [announced](https://variety.com/2007/scene/markets-festivals/hbo-turns-fire-into-fantasy-series-1117957532/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it had optioned the books for a series. Benioff and Weiss "impressed the hell out of me, and I’m really looking forward to working with them," [he reported on his website](https://georgerrmartin.com/hbo-options-ice-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com). "They’re both bright, passionate, enthusiastic. They know the books inside and out, they *get* the books, and they’re committed to bringing my story to your television screens… not a vaguely similar story with the same title (ala *Earthsea*, or what passed for same on the Sci-Fi Channel). *A Song of Ice and Fire* should be in very good hands." Work continued in the background for more than a year, and in November 2008 the network [ordered production for a pilot episode](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/hbo-orders-fantasy-pilot-thrones-50937/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the series, titled *Game of Thrones*. Benioff and Weiss, along with director Tom McCarthy shot the episode on location in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Morocco in October 2009 and wrapped in just under a month. From there, they cut the episode and began screening it for friends and family, and then for HBO, where they got a rude awakening: it was bad. "You guys have a massive problem," Craig Mazin (who later went on to create *Chernobyl* and *The Last of Us* for HBO) told them, and network executives concurred. As relayed by James Hibbard in *Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Series,* executives felt it looked small, that the tone felt off, and they had concerns about the balance of realism and fantasy. "I liked the pilot," Martin said, but "I realized later that I was a poor person to judge because I was too close to it." Benioff and Weiss knew their series had a number of problems and went to HBO with a plan to fix it. Executives later recounted that they knew there was something good there, but they needed to really work to bring it out. They did something almost unheard of for a potential project: they gave it a second chance by [ordering it to a series](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hbo-greenlights-game-thrones-21228/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in March 2010\. The pilot would be reshot and some of the actors would end up being recast. A year later, Martin announced the release date for *A Dance With Dragons*, and HBO planned for a release in April. Benioff and Weiss solved the problems that plagued their initial pilot episode, and the series landed with a wave of acclaim from reviewers and fans, who praised its sense of realism and serious take on the genre. More than 2.2 million people tuned into the network to watch the first episode, and ratings grew over the course of the first season – much like Martin's novels, word of mouth proved to be a critical factor. Two days after the premiere, HBO announced that the series would get a second season, and when it returned, even more people watched. Over the next six seasons, viewer numbers grew, eventually reaching tens of millions of people around the world over the course of its eight-season run. *Game of Thrones* was a massive hit, thanks to a handful of factors. Its source material was already wildly popular, not just within hardcore genre fans, but within a wider, genre-friendly audience. Science fiction and fantasy projects were growing in popularity, thanks to shows like the SCIFI Channel's *Battlestar Galactica* reboot and ABC's *LOST,* which were also changing viewer preferences from shows with an episodic structure to ones that were driven more by the narrative. And on top of all that, the story that Martin created was big and complicated, with tons of characters and their relationships, all depicted in a way that felt modern. Remove its pseudo-medieval and fantasy trappings, and you had characters interacting in ways that felt recognizable, with goals and motives that anyone could relate to. There were other, bigger things in the cultural zeitgeist at the time that helped prime Game of Thrones for the wild success that it enjoyed over the course of its run. Science fiction had been popular at the end of the 20th century, fantasy was rising in popularity and taking its place. "It was an incredibly interesting moment," Lev Grossman ([*The Magicians*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780452296299?ref=andrewliptak.com)) told me in an email when I asked him why the books and story resonated at this point. "We think of science fiction as the genre that critiques and processes technological change, and obviously it does, but fantasy does a lot of that cultural work too. The first big boom in 20th century fantasy followed a time of huge traumatic technological change: WWI, mechanized warfare, the rise of the car, movies, TV and so on. I think that in the 1990s we needed fantasy to respond to the rise of the Internet and the increasing penetration of technology into our personal lives." Another author, Brian Staveley ([*The Emperor's Blades*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765336439?ref=andrewliptak.com)), pointed out another reason: Harry Potter had been wildly successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and as those readers grew up, there was a lot of interest in more mature and sophisticated stories. "Harry Potter made it acceptable for anyone--not just the weird kids--to read fantasy," he noted. "and when those readers grew up, a lot of them found Martin. The explosion of *Game of Thrones* onto HBO just solidified fantasy's place in the pop-culture mainstream." The series also arrived at a time when television was changing drastically. In 2013, Netflix debuted a new series, *House of Cards*, a political drama that telegraphed its intentions. No longer content to just rent and mail films and television shows to subscribers, the streaming service was wading into the world of original content. Netflix executives said “ The goal was to become HBO faster than HBO could become us.” HBO was paying attention: In 2010, it launched such a platform, HBO Go, available to the network's subscribers, first for computers and the network's website and the year later, as a mobile app for iOS and Android users. With shows like *Game of Thrones* doing exceptionally well, HBO began looking for other projects that would appeal to that audience, eventually releasing a genre-bending mystery series *True Detective* in 2014\. Demand for these shows overwhelmed HBO Go, often crashing due to the demand. Later that year, HBO announced that it would release its own standalone streaming service, HBO Now, which would provide a means for non-HBO cable subscribers to consume the network's programming. By this point, *Game of Thrones* was the biggest television show in the world, earning armfuls of awards for its cast and writers, and driving HBO and its nascent streaming service to new heights. And by 2015, the series had begun to run into a new problem: they reached the events of *A Feast for Crows* and *A Dance with Dragons* and were beginning to run out of material to adapt. Martin had long hoped that he would be able to stay ahead of the showrunners by publishing *A Winds of Winter* prior to the release of Season 5\. "I thought Feast for Crows and *Dance with Dragons* would be recombined, because you can't separate them the way I did in the books, and I thought there would be three seasons there, he explained, noting that the show abbreviated some of the events that took place in books four and five. "I thought I had three years to get out the next book, and suddenly I was racing to get it out before season five." In an interview with *Variety* ahead of the season premiere, [Benioff noted ](https://variety.com/2015/tv/news/game-of-thrones-ending-season-5-producers-interview-1201469516/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that things would begin to diverge from the books a bit starting in the sixth season. "We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it. Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it." But it was becoming clear that the series would pass him, and in 2013, Benioff and Weiss met with Martin to learn where he was headed. "It wasn't easy for me," Martin later recounted in *Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon.* "I didn't want to five away my books. t's not easy to talk about the end of my books... I told them who would be on the Iron Thrown, and I told them some big twists." Martin was able to provide them with a general roadmap of where he was thinking, but not the specifics. The story would now diverge, with the series running on its own momentum, and Martin plugging away on his overdue tome. *Game of Thrones* ended with a six-episode eighth season. Its sixth season worked with as much material from the fourth and fifth novels as it could, but was also incorporating elements that Martin released from *The Winds of Winter*, while the next two seasons plunged into entirely new territory guided by what Martin had revealed to them. The results were mixed: the show was more popular than ever, but it was also clear that the show benefited tremendously from Martin's work, with many critics criticizing the way the final season wrapped everything up. On his blog, Martin praised the show, but [noted](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/20/an-ending/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that *his* ending to the series wasn't the same as what Benioff and Weiss created. "I am working in a very different medium than David and Dan, never forget. They had six hours for this final season. I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3000 manuscript pages between them before I’m done… and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I’ll add them." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8737-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Blowin' in the wind As soon as he announced the release of *A Dance With Dragons* in March 2011, Martin [acknowledged](https://grrm.livejournal.com/217066.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that there was more story to tell. "Enjoy the read. Me, I've got another book to write. Yes, climb right on my back... and what a cute little monkey you are..." Like *A Dance With Dragons*, Martin took some of the material that he'd written for the prior book, and shifted it to the next, giving him a bit of a boost going into *The Winds of Winter*. He posted a handful of early chapters to his website, but had largely abandoned the regular progress updates that he had been posting to his blog. That was probably to stave off questions about his activities and commitment to the project, something that continued to plague him, even as other projects and opportunities arose. Following the release of the fifth novel, Martin embarked on a massive publicity tour and was heavily involved in the television series, ultimately writing four episodes in the first four seasons. There were a number of writing work that took up his attention as well: In 2014, he released a long-in-the-works companion book, [*The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and The Game of Thrones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553805444?ref=andrewliptak.com), co-written by Eliot M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson. The year before, he published a new anthology co-edited with Gardner Dozois, [*Dangerous Women*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765332073?ref=andrewliptak.com), which contained a novella titled "The Princess and the Queen," about the fight for the Iron Throne between Crown Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Queen Alicent Hightower, long before the events of the main series, and which were originally been intended to be included in *The World of Ice & Fire*, only to be cut for length. Other stories from cut from that tie-in book found their way into print in other anthologies. In 2014, he and Dozois edited another volume, [*Rogues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345537263?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* in which he provided "The Rogue Prince, or, a King's Brother", about King Viserys I Targaryen, and in 2017, Dozois released [*Book of Swords*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780399593765?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which included the novella, "The Sons of the Dragon," about Aegon the Conqueror. He was also busy repurposing other existing stories: in 2015, he brought the three "Hedge Knight" novellas together into a single volume, [*A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101965887?ref=andrewliptak.com). "These histories began a few years back as a series of sidebars intended for THE WORLD OF ICE & FIRE, our huge illustrated concordance," he [explained](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2018/04/25/fire-blood-on-the-way/?ref=andrewliptak.com), "but I got carried away (as I tend to do) and before long the sidebars got so long they were threatening to overwhelm the entire book, so we pulled them out of that volume… and saved them for this one." That material would now form the basis for a new book: [*Fire & Blood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524796303?ref=andrewliptak.com), which he cautioned wasn't a novel, but something a little different. It was also, he [wrote](https://grrm.livejournal.com/544709.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), the first of two volumes, and which he [hoped](https://grrm.livejournal.com/562606.html?thread=26500782&ref=andrewliptak.com#t26500782) would be out before *Winds*: "regulars here may recall our plan to assemble an entire book of my fake histories of the Targaryen kings, a volume we called (in jest) the *GRRMarillion* or (more seriously) *FIRE AND BLOOD*. We have so much material that it's been decided to publish the book in two volumes." The novellas he published in the anthologies were just abridged versions, he said, and this would expand the world. A second volume, he noted, "will carry the history from Aegon III up to Robert's Rebellion, is largely unwritten, so that one will be a few more years in coming." It seems that it was something of a needed distraction for Martin, who closed out by saying "Archmaester Gyldayn is hanging up his quill for a while," and that he was returning to work on *The Winds of Winter*, which [he had continued to work on](https://grrm.livejournal.com/544709.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Work on the book was progressing, and he told a fan that it had gotten to the point where his publisher [suggested](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2018/04/25/fire-blood-on-the-way/?ref=andrewliptak.com#comment-706) splitting it into two volumes, something he resisted. He also remained heavily involved in the television franchise, [signing a major, five year deal in 2021](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/george-r-r-martin-signs-massive-five-year-overall-deal-with-hbo-exclusive-4155921/?ref=andrewliptak.com) with HBO to continue to develop projects in the post-*Game of Thrones* world, of which the first out of the gate was *The House of the Dragon*, an adaptation of *Fire & Blood.* While a [number of others](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hbo-is-considering-three-more-game-of-thrones-shows/) were in contention, although [not all of those made it out of development](https://www.andrewliptak.com/westeros-updates-george-rr-martin/). Later, he noted that he wished that he had focused more on *Winds of Winter. "*I was red hot on the book and I put it aside for six months” he [told](https://ew.com/article/2015/04/03/george-rr-martin-winds-date/?ref=andrewliptak.com) James Hibbard in 2015 “I was so into it. I was pushing so hard that I was writing very well. I should have just gone on from there, because I was so into it and it was moving so fast then. But I didn’t because I had to switch gears into the editing phase and then the book tour. The iron does cool off, for me especially.” "Get back to work, George," had already become something of a cultural meme. With the television adaptation barreling ahead, there was now even more attention on Martin's deliberative pace, summed up neatly in a performance at the 2014 Emmy Awards when Weird "Al" Yankovic [performed a medley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od9RDlRmNIo&ref=andrewliptak.com) of the year's theme songs, closing out with "Type, George, type as fast as you can. We need more scripts... write them faster write them faster write them faster!" all while someone delivered a typewriter to a bemused Martin, who was sitting in the audience. Nearly a decade and a half later, the book remains unfinished. There have been signs of progress: In during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Martin [explained that had written](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2021/02/02/reflections-on-a-bad-year/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "hundreds and hundreds of pages" of the novel, and that 2020 was "The best year I’ve had on WOW since I began it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the isolation. Or maybe I just got on a roll. Sometimes I do get on a roll." Martin [revealed in an appearance](https://youtu.be/QgCxVdsQH%5Fk?si=7Fvf7d1itqZJ6K-g&ref=andrewliptak.com) on *The Late Show with Stephen Colbert* in 2022 that it would likely surpass the length of both *A Storm of Swords* and *A Dance With Dragons*. "I think I'm about three quarters of the way done. I'm done with some of the characters." A year later in 2023, he [reported](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2023/07/22/actors-join-the-strike/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he was still making progress "And, yes, yes, of course, I’ve been working on *WINDS OF WINTER*. Almost every day. Writing, rewriting, editing, writing some more. Making steady progress. Not as fast as I would like...certainly not as fast as*YOU* would like…but progress nonetheless," and in 2025, he [reiterated his frustration](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2025/05/28/howard-meets-hercules/?ref=andrewliptak.com) with the complains that the book was overdue. > "Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or *THE WINDS OF WINTER*...And I care about Westeros and *WINDS* as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine." In 2026, Martin spoke with James Hibbard for a [lengthy profile](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/george-rr-martin-interview-thrones-winds-dragon-knight-1236473519/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in *The Hollywood Reporter,* he explained some of his process: > “I will open the last chapter I was working on and I’ll say, ‘Oh fuck, this is not very good.’ And I’ll go in and I’ll rewrite it. Or I’ll decide, ‘This Tyrion chapter is not coming along, let me write a Jon Snow chapter.’ If I’m not interrupted though, what happens — at least in the past — is sooner or later, I do get into it.” He reiterated that he was committed to finishing the book, but it was also clear that he was exhausted. There had been problems and conflicts during the production of *The House of the Dragon* between him and its showrunner, and faced a fan at the 2025 WorldCon who pointed asked him if he would hand the series off to another writer because "you’re not going to be around for much longer." The book remains a priority, he said, and if he can free up his schedule and commitments. "I could finish *The Winds of Winter* pretty soon." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8637.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### The future What comes next? Certainly, work on *The Winds of Winter*, which has dragged on far longer than Martin and everyone else would have liked. Looking over the course of his career, a couple of things have become clear: Martin has created an incredibly complex world, one that has ballooned in length in the telling. From the earlier stages of his career, it's been clear that he's committed to the meticulous details of his world and story, one that he's been immersed in for thirty years. That complexity brings out its greatest appeal: characters and relationships that have attracted the attention of fans for successive decades. It also provides a stumbling block: with so many characters and storylines, he's made a lot of work for himself, work that requires lots of coordination, editing, rewriting, and deliberation as he moves forward. There's also a lot for him to do, not just for the book in front of him, but as the center of this much larger world. A new series based on *A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms* just debuted, which comes with a second season already greenlit, while a third season of *The House of the Dragon* is due out sometime later this year. A fourth and final season is in the works. Other spinoffs are also in the works, now an integral part of Warner Bros.' content library, alongside such juggernaut franchises like the DC universe and the Wizarding World*,* and *The Lord of the Rings*. He's also said that he plans another *Fire & Blood*, has story ideas for up to 12 Dunk and Egg novellas, and a handful of other related projects. And then of course, the pressure will be on for *A Dream of Spring*, the final installment of the series. If there's anything that I've found in the research and writing of this piece, it's that Martin is a perfectionist who's been dedicated to producing a book that he's happy with. This is not a work of *content*, which is where I think the conflict between him and his fans originates. It's a situation that I suspect is frustrating to everyone involved, and hopefully, he'll be able to find a way to navigate it in the years to come. Since its publication 30 years ago, *A Game of Thrones* and its sequelshave probably become some of the most important works to the fantasy canon since Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*. Martin's background in science fiction and his attention to realism and detail have prompted him to overcome the fantasy genre that arose in the aftermath of Tolkien by running counter to the tropes and trends that authors produced for an audience ready for more. Grossman pointed out that this is because of the quality of Martin's work. "his work was so structurally sophisticated, and morally complex, and so grounded, in politics and economics and the psychodynamics of royal families, it had the texture of great narrative history." Alongside authors such as Rowling and Pullman, Martin helped transform an entire genre and fandom into a powerful force in mainstream popular culture, supercharged by the adaptations that introduced him to so many new readers and fans, who turned phrases like "winter is coming" have become widespread, mainstream touchpoints. "In general, the *Game of Thrones* franchise has been great for fantasy writers." Michael A. Stackpole explained to me in an email. "It's raised the genre in visibility so folks understand what it is we do. Any writer can use GOT (books or TV) as a jumping off point to explain things through comparison and contrast." Staveley concurred, pointing out that Martin helped plant the seeds for the next generation of writers. "Lots of people have written about how Martin (along with Abercrombie, Jemisin, et al) set out to upend pretty much all of the standard fantasy tropes," and that "the explosion of *Game of Thrones* onto HBO just solidified fantasy's place in the pop-culture mainstream. Now that the door is open, I think a lot of writers who are quite *unlike* Martin can actually get eyeballs on their books just because those shelves are bigger and more popular in the bookstores..." Hopefully, Martin will be able to finish out his remarkable saga, finding an end for his characters and their respective fates. Along the way, he's had an astonishing career, one that has utterly transformed the face of fantasy literature and raising the bar for those who'll follow in his footsteps. --- Thank you very, very much for reading. Much like Martin's writing, this started out as a shorter piece, designed to explain where *A Knight of Seven Kingdoms* came about, only to turn into this much larger piece. I have a handful of people to thank for their assistance with this piece: Ellen Liptak, Eric Barber, Tom Hopper, Cara Gorman, Michael Gorman, Mike Anton, and Robert Barker for help with the extra copies and photographs that I used for this piece. I'd also like to share my appreciation for the folks at Westeros.org for their long-running and detailed curation of Martin's comments throughout the years. And thanks to Lev Grossman, Michael Stackpole, and Brian Staveley for their comments. I really like researching and writing these types of lengthy, behind-the-scenes explorations of how stories come about. I learn a lot from researching them, and I often find that there are lots of interesting influences and developments that take place that shape how these stories come about. If you enjoyed this one, you might enjoy some of the others that I've written: - [*The Expanse*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) - [*Dragonlance*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragonlance-changed-how-we-read-fantasy/) - [Harlan Ellison's *Dangerous Visions*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/at-last-dangerous-visions-harlan-ellison/) - [The *Star Wars* Expanded Universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-books-brian-daley-west-end-games/) - [Lev Grossman's *The Magicians*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lev-grossman-magicians-tv-fantasy/) - [Syfy's *Dark Matter*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-matter-syfy-channel-joseph-mallozzi-graphic-novel-show/) - [Hugh Howey's *Wool*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugh-howey-wool-silo-apple-tv-streaming-history/) - [John Scalzi's *Old Man's War*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) As I noted at the top, if you'd like to see more, the best way to do that is to sign up as a supporting member. You can also leave a [tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/support) or purchase a book via one of the affiliate links in the piece, and if you're new, sign up to get further installments of *Transfer Orbit* in your inbox. I've got a lot planned for 2026. ### Changelog - January 21st, 2026 edit: added section "Detours" after discovery of a new interview that added information about the Hedge Knight stories. Fixed typos. ### Neuromancer is getting a special edition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/neuromancer-william-gibson-cyberpunk-special-edition/ Last updated: 2026-01-15T22:30:13.000Z Here's another classic novel that's getting the "sprayed edges" treatment: William Gibson's *Neuromancer*. *People Magazine* (of all places) [carried the announcement](https://people.com/william-gibson-neuromancer-deluxe-edition-exclusive-11885414?ref=andrewliptak.com), pointing out that Ace Books will be [releasing the edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190379?ref=andrewliptak.com) in September, with new a new cover and sprayed edges art by Tavis Coburn. Presumably, this comes in conjunction with (or anticipating) the release of the [upcoming adaptation from AppleTV](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/). The company hasn't announced a release date yet, but filming was underway last year and everything I've seen has hinted at a late 2026 release. [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-32.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-6.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) It also comes after a couple of other special edition releases for the novel after the 40th anniversary of its publication in 1984: The Folio Society [released a special, limited edition in 2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neuromancer-william-gibson-folio-society-cyberpunk-book-sci-fi/) and a "core" edition last year, while UK publisher Gollancz released its own [special edition](https://store.gollancz.co.uk/products/neuromancer?variant=53500253340027&ref=andrewliptak.com) as well. What's interesting about this particular edition is that unlike every other sprayed edition that's hit shelves in the last couple of years, this is a trade paperback, which I don't think that I've seen yet. To me, this suggests that we're seeing a real saturation with these types of special editions, and it brings me around to point to a piece I wrote last year about this when Penguin Random House [announced a special deluxe edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/) of Andy Weir's *The Martian*: *"*if it's anything like the *Red Rising* edition I got my hands on, it's not likely going to be anywhere near the same class of books that you see from those specialty publishers \[like Subterranean Press or Folio Society.) At what point do these types of books drop the "special"? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2026/01/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak As it happens, [the first book I finished this year](https://bsky.app/profile/andrewliptak.com/post/3mc6v5k5dhs2g?ref=andrewliptak.com) was *Neuromancer*, and the copy that I have is the Gollancz edition. It's a beautiful one: it has the usual sprayed edges (bright orange) and ribbon, but the cover art is gorgeous, the interior type is really well done, the paper is a heavy paper stock, and it has a ton of full-page and accent illustrations. This wasn't a book that was thrown together as an afterthought, and it looks really good on a shelf. This makes me think that we've really hit a point where we've crossed over from publishers have recognized that fans will pay a bit more for higher-end editions to "let's make the regular editions higher end" and adjust the price point accordingly. The current *Neuromancer* [trade paperback has an MSRP of $20](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441007462?ref=andrewliptak.com), while [this new ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190379?ref=andrewliptak.com)[edition jumps up to $22](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190379?ref=andrewliptak.com). That doesn't seem like a lot, but that's a 10% increase, and it's far more than the current inflation rate (2.7%). It's a small thing, but it feels representative of a whole bunch of bigger things in play at the moment: book prices have gone up dramatically in the last couple of years, and we've started to see the cheapest book form, the mass market paperback, [fall out of usage](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mass-market-paperback-novels-publishing-books/), leaving buyers with the more expensive hardcovers and trade paperbacks as their options. If sprayed editions are a means to inflate a book's price under the guise of being special, limited, or deluxe, then it follows that if those features become common across regular editions, we'll see those prices generally creep up as well. I'm not sure that the extra bit of ink and updated cover art is really worth it. ### Here are the nominees for the 2025 Philip K. Dick awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-k-dick-award-finalists-2025-scifi-books/ Last updated: 2026-01-13T20:46:45.000Z The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust have announced the finalists for this year's [Philip K. Dick Award](https://www.philipkdickaward.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The award is issued annually since 1983 to honor the best "science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year," and is selected by a jury. (this year's group consisted of Jim Aikin, Kim Antieau, J. D. Goff, Abbey Mei Otis, and Lisa Swanstrom.) Past winners of the award include William Gibson's *Neuromancer*, Stephen Baxter's *The Time Ships*, and Richard K. Morgan's *Altered Carbon* – [and quite a few more](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip%5FK.%5FDick%5FAward?ref=andrewliptak.com). Last year's winner of the award was Brenda Peynado for her novel *Time’s Agent,* while Adrian Tchaikovsky earned a Special Citation for his novel *Alien Clay.* Here are this year's nominees: - *Sunward: A Novel* by William Alexander - *Outlaw Planet* by M. R. Carey - *Casual* by Koji A. Dae - *The Immeasurable Heaven* by Caspar Geon - *Uncertain Son and Other Stories* by Thomas Ha - *Scales* by Christopher Hinz - *City of All Seasons* by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley Like in prior years, this seems like a solid list: I have *Sunward* on my to-read list, and I've seen great reviews for *City of All Seasons* and *Outlaw Planet*. The winner of this year's award will be announced at [Norwescon 48](https://www.norwescon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Friday, April 3rd, 2026\. ### Table of Contents January 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-january-2026/ Last updated: 2026-03-02T21:15:08.000Z It's a new year, and that means that we have 12 months of stories to look forward to in 2026\. I don't have many resolutions, other than to read 52 books in 2026, but I am hoping to carve out more time to read more short stories. I used to read a lot more, and I've just fallen out of that habit. This column has helped me start that again, and I'll encourage you to do the same, and let me know in the comments what you've enjoyed reading. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-december-2025/) – it's been newly updated with the stories that came out over the course of December, and you can check out prior installments of this column [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Okay, here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**January/February 2026** *Vol. XCVI No. 1 & 2*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Sin Eaters" by Mark W. Tiedemann - "The Origami Man" by Doug Franklin - "Monkey Trap" by Geoffrey Hart - "Salary Man" by Matt Mchugh - "You Who Sought The Stars’ Distant Light" by Stewart C. Baker - "Artificial Cupidity" by Hayden Trenholm - "Still Cold, Still Losing Air" by Sean Monaghan - "A Goodbye At The End Of The Universe" by Ian Baaske - "Silver Hands" by E.l. Mellor - "Unsung" by Derrick Boden - "A Future Full Of Glaciers" by Peter Medeiros - "Flag Lamp" by Jonathan Olfert - "Recognition, Memory" by Benjamin C. Kinney - "Jack Cade’s Rebellion" by Philip Brian Hall - "A Chatbot’s Guide To Self-respect" by Jo Miles - "Like Father, Like Son" by Theodora Sutcliffe - "And She Is Content" by Frank Ward - "Linka’s Out" by Rich Larson - "Iron Star Swing" by Kate Orman - "Jiggity Jog" by Don Mark Baldridge ### Poetry - "Escape Pod" by S.l. Johnson - The Bones They Left" by Shanley Poole ### Nonfiction - Editorial: The State Of The Union by Trevor Quachri - Nor Any Drop To Drink by Kevin Walsh - The War, Astounding, And Campbell by Edward M. Wysocki - Me-n-you-genics by Howard V. Hendrix - In Times To Come - The Alternate View by John G. Cramer - In Memorian: J.t. Sharrah by Emily Hockaday - In Memorian: Bruce Boston by Emily Hockaday - Unknowns: Time Lapse by Todd Mcclary, Edited By Alec Nevala-lee - The Reference Library by Sean Cw Korsgaard - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**January/February 2026** *Vol. 50 Nos. 1 & 2*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Lady in Camo" by John Richard Trtek - "Ecobomb" by Alexander Jablokov - "Stay" by William Preston - "The Tourist" by R.T. Ester - "As Long as We’re Still Here, We Might as Well Dance" by Adam-Troy Castro - "The Greenway" by Susan Palwick - "The Man with the Ruined Hand" by Sean Monaghan - Replacement Theory" by Jack Skillingstead - The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs" by Will Ludwigsen - All My Birds" by K.A. Teryna (translated by Alex Shvartsman) - The Moribund" by Lavie Tidhar - And We Shall Find Rest" by James Sallis ### Poetry - "Monster" by Megan Branning - "The Freetown Bar and Bookstore" by M.C. Childs - "Thirty-Six Views of the Milky Way" by Connor Yeck - "Closing Time" by Brian U. Garrison - "Humans Make Anything Their Pets" by Dawn Vogel ### Nonfiction - Editorial: WorldCon Extravaganza by Sheila Williams - Reflections: The Multiplicity of Mermaids by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Welcome to Just Okay by James Patrick Kelly - Thought Experiment: Bradbury and Truffaut’s Empathy in Fahrenheit 451 by Kelly Lagor - Asimov’s Readers’ Award Ballot - On Books by Kelly Jennings --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026, Issues 448 and 449) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Stone’s Choice](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-stones-choice/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anaea Lay - "[Sing](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/sing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jules Bly - "[Strike First And Then Give Tongue](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/strike-first-and-then-give-tongue/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja - "[The Great King’s Lost Bride](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-great-kings-lost-bride/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.K. Duncan - "[The Lingering Weight of Estrian Steel](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-lingering-weight-of-estrian-steel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rajan Khanna --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(January 2026, Issue 232) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - '[The Stars You Can't See by Looking Directly](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/murray%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samantha Murray - "[Down We Go Gently](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clark%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. L. Clark - "[Donor Unknown](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/murphy%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nika Murphy - "[Je Ne Regrette Rien](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kelly%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James Patrick Kelly - "[Tomorrow's Beautiful Dream](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ju%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ju Chu, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan - "[The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prihandita%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. W. Prihandita - "[Space is Deep](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chambers%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Seth Chambers ### Nonfiction - [Destination: The Asteroid Belt](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Liptak - [Extraordinary Things: A Conversation with Nicola Griffith](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/griffith%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Indomitable Persistence: A Conversation with Alastair Reynolds](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/reynolds%5Finterview%5F2026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: 2025 in Review](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F01%5F26?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026, Issue 128) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The (Mis)Fortunes of Saint Ilia’s School for Gifted Girls, In No Particular Order](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-misfortunes-of-saint-ilias-school-for-gifted-girls-in-no-particular-order/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byCatherine Tavares - "[Three on a Match](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/three-on-a-match/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byJoanne Anderton - "[Rehearsals for the End](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/rehearsals-for-the-end/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySteve Rasnic Tem - "[The Earth Inside Us](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-earth-inside-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAbigail Kemske --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (January 2026, No. 48) ### Fiction - "Dr. Potato Head" by Jd Hoggatt - "Breakthrough" by Jenn Ellis - "Three Day Drunk" by Todd Reissmann - "Reigndeer" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Knock, Knock" by George Larson - "The Good, The Bad, And The Digital" by Bud Pharo - "The Spiritual Apocalypse Of Horatio Murdoch" by Michael Mcstay - "The Shadowlands" by Cy Hill - "Wolves In The Wilderness" by Eric J. Juneau - "Watchdog" by Jaryd Porter --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Winter 2026, Issue 41) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[bark!](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/bark/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Charlotte Suttee - "[The Skull of Francisco Xalbec](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/the-skull-of-francisco-xalbec/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alan M. Fisher - "[The Self-Made Women’s Circle](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-41/the-self-made-womens-circle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marisca Pichette --- ## [*Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Winter 2026, Issue 37) Subscribe [here](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Things We Bury in Each Other" by Timothy Ngome - "Legion" by Karama Neal - "Rather be the Devil" " by Jordan Alexander - "The Sobolo Prophet" by Irene W Collins - "Into the Briarpatch" " by Ella N’Diaye ### Poetry - "my maker is a Black man" by Donnie Moreland - "Notes From A Death Star Rec Room" by upfromsumdirt - "Mother of Synthetic Seas" by Aishatu Ado --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026, Issue 146) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[What to buy your husband of thirty seven-years for his birthday](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/what-to-buy-your-husband-of-thirty-seven-years-for-his-birthday/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jay McKenzie ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: The Best We Can Hope For](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/editorial-the-best-we-can-hope-for/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026) ### Fiction - "[Deficiency Agent](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-deficiency-agent-liptak/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Liptak ### Nonfiction - [The Algorithmic Fog of War](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/ai-combat-black-box-rondeaux/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Candace Rondeaux --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(January 2026) ### Fiction - "[The Last God of Talam Dor](https://giganotosaurus.org/2026/01/01/the-last-god-of-talam-dor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.R. Robinson --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Confessions of the Little Seer](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/confessions-of-the-little-seer-by-emily-linstrom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Emily Linstrom - “[Water Softener People](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/water-softener-people-by-ec-dorgan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by EC Dorgan - “[Bearing the Good Fruit](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/bearing-the-good-fruit-by-r-k-duncan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by R.K. Duncan - “[More Than Feathers](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/more-than-feathers-by-phoebe-barton/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Phoebe Barton - “[Take Flight](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/take-flight-by-dan-peacock/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Dan Peacock - “[Magie Vol, Ogies Toe](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/magie-vol-ogies-toe-by-cl-hellisen/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by CL Hellisen - “[Full Fathom Five](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/full-fathom-five-by-gwendolyn-maia-hicks/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Gwendolyn Maia Hicks - “[Anything Not Impossible](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/anything-not-impossible-by-jayde-holmes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jayde Holmes - “[Rewilding the Many Tethered Winds](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/rewilding-the-many-tethered-winds-by-allison-mulder/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Allison Mulder - “[You Visit a Witch](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/you-visit-a-witch-by-jay-kang-romanus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jay Kang Romanus - “[The Savior of the Three Lands](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/the-savior-of-the-three-lands-by-k-m-veohongs/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by K.M. Veohongs - “[The Mixling Mare](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/the-mixling-mare-by-anneke-schwob/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anneke Schwob ### Poetry - "[Demons in Glass](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/demons-in-glass-by-jennifer-crow/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jennifer Crow - [the visitor](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/the-visitor-by-marisca-pichette/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" [by Marisca Pichette](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/the-visitor-by-marisca-pichette/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[From Water](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/from-water-by-michelle-koubek/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michelle Koubek - "[It Could Worm Inside Your Ear](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/it-could-worm-inside-your-ear-by-akis-linardos/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Akis Linardos - "[The Palms that Tear Through Human Thought](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/the-palms-that-tear-through-human-thought-by-daniel-ausema/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Daniel Ausema - "[Face to face](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/face-to-face-by-brian-hugenbruch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brian Hugenbruch - "[Dali Dancing](https://kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/dali-dancing-by-gretchen-tessmer/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gretchen Tessmer --- ## [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (December 2025, Volume 5, Issue 4) Subscribe [here](https://www.khoreomag.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Trick to Taking Over the World](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-trick-to-taking-over-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K. Lynn Harrison - "[The North](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-north/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Subodhana Wijeyeratne - "[Her Right Arm](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/her-right-arm/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Natalia Theodoridou - "[Skin and Hide](https://www.khoreomag.com/translation/skin-and-hide/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anita Moskát - "[The Body is a Cage Opened Only By Fire](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-body-is-a-cage-opened-only-by-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.A.W. McCarthy --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 188, January 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Mother’s Hip](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mothers-hip/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff - "[Choose Your Own Damnation](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/choose-your-own-damnation/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kehkashan Khalid - "[Bots All the Way Down](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bots-all-the-way-down/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Effie Seiberg (1/15) - "[Where the Chicken-Footed Dwell](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/where-the-chicken-footed-dwell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marisca Pichette (1/15) - "[Hunter, Hunter](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/hunter-hunter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (1/22) - "[Academic Neutrality](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/academic-neutrality/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.R. Robinson (1/22) - "[A Brief Public Announcement](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-brief-public-announcement/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eli Brown (1/29) - "[The Moving Finger](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-moving-finger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adam-Troy Castro (1/29) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: January 2026](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-january-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams - [Author Spotlight: Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-corey-jae-white-and-maddison-stoff/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by [Phoebe Barton](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/authors/phoebe-barton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Author Spotlight: Effie Seiberg](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-effie-seiberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Jeffrey (1/15) - [Author Spotlight: Marisca Pichette](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-marisca-pichette/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (1/15) - [Book Review: *Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms* by Darcie Little Badger, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, and Kinsale Drake, eds](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-beyond-the-glittering-world-an-anthology-of-indigenous-feminisms-and-futurisms-by-darcie-little-badger-stacie-shannon-denetsosie-and-kinsale-drake-eds/?ref=andrewliptak.com). by Arley Sorg (1/15) - [Author Spotlight: Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-oluwatomiwa-ajeigbe-5/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (1/22) - [Book Review: *An Arcane Inheritance* by Kamilah Cole](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-an-arcane-inheritance-by-kamilah-cole/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (1/22) - [Book Review: *Strange Animals* by Jarod K. Anderson](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-strange-animals-by-jarod-k-anderson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (1/29) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026, Issue 065) Support [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The End of the World, Simon et al." by T. L. Xue - "Ghost Story" by Feby Idrus - "Squilla of the Flower Moon" by M. McNamara - "Private Cabin, Ocean View" by Jane Campbell - "Laisha" by Amantia Menalla - "Stevie" by Bendix Ross - "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" by Sylvie Althoff - "The Disparity of Confidence" by Emmie Christie - "Heart's Desire" by K.M. Reed - "Eva" by Ashley Burnett - "Are We There Yet?" by Allison Mulder - "The Sleeper in the Crypt" by Tiffany Tang - "Brighton" by J. Nathan - "The Bride and Her Thief" by Safiya Cherfi - "Warp and Weft Rising" by Pauline Barmby - "Dance It Trippingly" by Sadie Leewood --- ## [*Nature Futures*](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures&ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026) ### Fiction - "[A troubleshooting guide to your flat-pack planet](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04028-x?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Arthur H. Manners - "[Beneath acid skies](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04030-3?ref=andrewliptak.com) " by João Guilherme Bochnia Küster - "[The rich stopped buying yachts the year time went on sale](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03605-4?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sara E. Pour - "[The unfortunate embossing of Subsector XZ-74](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00126-6?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chao Liu - "[Eviction notice](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00138-2?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Celso Antonio de Almeida --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 160, January 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Tailors](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-tailors/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kurt Fawver - "[Dregs](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dregs/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by R. Diego Martinez (1/14) - "[Jennifer’s Daughter](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/jennifers-daughter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sara S. Messenger (1/21) - "[At the Sight of My Grave, I Stumble](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/at-the-sight-of-my-grave-i-stumble/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by April Elaine Carson (1/28) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: January 2026](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-january-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner - [Author Spotlight: Kurt Fawver](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-kurt-fawver-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kevin Figueroa Quiñones - [The H Word: The Merry Macabre of the Renaissance Faire](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-the-merry-macabre-of-the-renaissance-faire/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Barbara Barnett (1/14) - [Author Spotlight: Sara S. Messenger](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-sara-s-messenger/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (1/21) - [Interview: Johnny Compton](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-johnny-compton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (1/28) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(January 2026) ### Fiction - "[Joiner and Rust](https://reactormag.com/joiner-and-rust-lavie-tidhar/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lavie Tidhar - "[Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin](https://reactormag.com/congenital-agenesis-cameron-reed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cameron Reed --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 31, January 2026) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Speaking for Those With Obsidian Tongues](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/speaking-for-those-with-obsidian-tongues/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wendy Nikel - “[As You Were](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/as-you-were/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Adrian Ward - “[Take Root](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/take-root/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Guan Un - “[The Metabolism of Grief](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-metabolism-of-grief/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska - “[The Sauce Packet King of the West Hills](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-sauce-packet-king-of-the-west-hills/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Katherine Quevedo ### Poetry - “[Wolves](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/wolves/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Julia Rios - “[A Keeper of Kingdoms](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-keeper-of-kingdoms/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Michelle Koubek - “[Half of a green fall](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/half-of-a-green-fall/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eva Papasoulioti --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Song of a Non-Human Intelligence](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-song-of-a-non-human-intelligence/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mical Garcia - "[Fingerprints on Glass and Clay](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/fingerprints-on-glass-and-clay/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira ### Poetry - "[Blurbs for forthcoming genre poetry books](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/blurbs-for-forthcoming-genre-poetry-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Clink and Troy Harkin - "[The History of the Playa Michigan Lake Mining Company](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-history-of-the-playa-michigan-lake-mining-company/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Steve Wheat - "[Creature With the Ticking Heart](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/creature-with-the-ticking-heart/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nico Martinez Nocito - "[Questions I Could Not Ask the Giant in Her Presence](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/questions-i-could-not-ask-the-giant-in-her-presence/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R. C. Sherbrooke - "[Chang’e in Exile](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/change-in-exile/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Allison Zhang - "[Priestess IV](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/priestess-iv/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Akua Lezli Hope ### Nonfiction - [Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/feminist-futurism-versus-project-2025-an-empowering-speculative-salon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ada Palmer, Charlie Jane Anders, Andrea Hairston, Annalee Newitz, and Isis Asare ### Reviews - Monday: [2025 In Review: Part One](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/2025-in-review-part-one/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by our reviewers - Wednesday: [2025 In Review: Part Two](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/2025-in-review-part-two/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by our reviewers - Friday: [2025 In Review: Part Three ](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/2025-in-review-part-three/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by our reviewers - Monday: [Syncopation by Whitney French](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/syncopation-by-whitney-french/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Kincaid - Wednesday: [We Will Rise Again edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/we-will-rise-again-edited-by-karen-lord-annalee-newitz-and-malka-older/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Kingsley - Friday: [An Instruction in Shadow by Benedict Jacka](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/an-instruction-in-shadow-by-benedict-jacka/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric Primm - Monday: [Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/daedalus-is-dead-by-seamus-sullivan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sneha Pathak - Wednesday: [Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures by Matthew James Jones](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/predators-reapers-and-deadlier-creatures-by-matthew-james-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James K. Moran - Friday: [Dear Stupid Penpal by Rascal Hartley](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dear-stupid-penpal-by-rascal-hartley/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nataliia Sova --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (January 2026) ### Fiction - “‘[Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/brokeheart-gpt-or-a-superintelligent?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Micaiah Johnson - "[Donuts from the Daydream Network](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/donuts-from-the-daydream-network?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Julia Vee - "[Slake](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/slake?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Victor Manibo - "[The Final Voyage of the Ouranos](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-final-voyage-of-the-ouranos?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Brennan --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 68, January / February 2026) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Be My Horse, Ride the Cowboy](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/be-my-horse-ride-the-cowboy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christopher Caldwell - "[Girl Stuff](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/girl-stuff/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Humphrey - "[The Doorkeepers](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-doorkeepers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. T. Greenblatt - "[I Met You on the Train](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/i-met-you-on-the-train/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.R. Dawson ### Poetry - "[No Kings / No Soldiers](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/no-kings-no-soldiers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.M. Tuomala - "[An underground butterfly](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/an-underground-butterfly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga ### Nonfiction - [The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-63/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Interview: Christopher Caldwell](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-christopher-caldwell-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim - [*Uncanny* Interview with Marie Brennan](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/uncanny-interview-with-marie-brennan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Betsy Aoki and Marie Brennan - [These Stories Teach Us How to Fight](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/these-stories-teach-us-how-to-fight/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Xiana Moon --- Remember to check back at the end of the month for updates as new stories come online, and to let me know in the comments what caught your eye! ### All the books I'm looking forward to reading in 2026 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-2026-murderbot-corey-leckie-anticipated/ Last updated: 2026-01-08T20:09:13.000Z The beginning of a new year is a moment of opportunity: a point to look forward to try and figure out the things that we want to do over the course of the next twelve months. I recently told a friend that I don't have much in the way of new year's resolutions, only to realize that I do have a big one: read 52 books in the coming year. If you've followed this newsletter for any amount of time, you'll know that's something that I take seriously, and in addition to all of the books that I've written about at the start of every month, I also like to take a moment to look at the books that I'm most excited to read in the coming year. Here are my most anticipated lists for [2020](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/most-anticipated-sf-f-books-of-2020/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [2021](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/my-most-anticipated-sf-f-reads-for-2021/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [2022](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/2022-anticipated-books-scalzi-darnielle-expanse-janelle-monae-sci-fi-fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [2023](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/science-fiction-fantasy-anticipated-books-2023/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [2024](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [2025](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-2025-anticipated-books-scalzi-okorafor-cosby-kuang/?ref=andrewliptak.com). There are a whole bunch, most from authors that I've enjoyed in the past, but a few new from newcomers as well. Will I get to all of them? Time will tell: these lists are always aspirational, and I've found that I'll enjoy a bunch, read some only to find that they don't work for me, and some will linger on my to-read list for the next couple of years. They'll be mixed in with all of the books that I'll encounter along the way, some that come out of left field, some that I've been meaning to read for years, and others that I'll pick up on a whim. It's a fun journey. It's a suggestion for myself, rather than a rule, although as with last year, there are a *lot* of books that I'm excited for. I'm looking forward to tackling this pile. As always: this newsletter is powered by readers. If you like these types of lists and find something that you're interested in reading, please consider supporting **TO*: \- Sign up as a paid subscriber ($40/year or $4/month) \- Preorder a book through an affiliate link (purchases yield a small commission to TO.) \- Leave a [tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/support)! \- Share this newsletter with your friends and followers. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are the 19 books that I'm looking forward to the most in the first half of 2026: ## February ### [*Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250419538?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ian McDonald (February 3rd) Years ago, I fell in love with Ian McDonald's *Luna* novels: [*New Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765375520?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Wolf Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765375544?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Moon Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250259547?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as a couple of his other books. His latest looks like it'll be a lot of fun: a novella about an orphan who wants nothing more than to ride a dinosaur at a circus. When he ends up freeing a dinosaur from an abusive owner, he embarks on a journey to bring it to safety. This looks like a sweet, fun adventure, because who doesn't like the idea of a western with dinosaurs? ## March ### [*River of Bones and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982153816?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebecca Roanhorse (March 3rd) Rebecca Roanhorse wrote some of my favorite urban(ish) fantasy novels in recent years: [*Trail of Lightning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534413504?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Storm of Locusts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534413535?ref=andrewliptak.com), set in a climate change-ravaged, post-apocalyptic near future where magic has returned to the world. She hasn't returned to that world in a while, but in her new collection of short fiction, she's got a new adventure set in the world, which I'm super excited to dig into. There's more to look forward to than just that, of course: she also brings together some of her award-winning short stories, like “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” as well stories like “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy,” “Falling Bodies," “Eye and Tooth," and a whole bunch of others. ### [*Children of Strife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316598965?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (March 17th) One of the best science fiction novels to come out in recent years was Adrian Tchaikovsky's [*Children of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452502?ref=andrewliptak.com), an epic read about terraforming, intelligence, evolution, and civilization, following the uplifting of spiders on a distant colony world and the clash between them and a band of colonists from a destroyed Earth. Tchaikovsky followed it up with [*Children of Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452533?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Children of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316466400?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now, *Children of Strife*. [Spiders! In! Space! Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of TimeIn December, I put out a call for recommendations for standalone science fiction novels — in part to assemble a list for The Verge — but also because I was looking for something along those lines. I got a bunch of recommendations, but one that stood out was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-17.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time-science-fiction-book-review/) In this installment, we're back to seeking out the other worlds that Earth began terraforming before it collapsed. A motley crew of humans, spiders, and mantis shrimp head out into the depths of space where they encounter one such colonial world. When they arrive, a human named Alis discovers that only she, the ship's captain, and its AI are the only ones left on the ship – and it's up to them to figure out what happened to the others who set off to explore the world and the arkship orbiting it. I've loved reading these books, and this type of story: people heading out to explore the crumbling remains of a colony or spaceship, is something that I love to delve into. ## April ### [*The Story of Birds: A New History, from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063349711?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Steven Brusette (April 28th) Steven Brusette has become one of the best-known authorities on dinosaurs and paleontology in recent years, thanks to books such as [*The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781432869106?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062951557?ref=andrewliptak.com), which spell out the latest thinking in how life on Earth has evolved over millions of years. He's now back with a new book that continues that story: while the dinosaurs were largely killed off by an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, their descendants have persisted in the form of birds. In this book, Brusette takes a look at how birds have proliferated across the planet and how they've shaped the world. I loved *The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs* and *The Rise and Reign of the Mammals*. I learned a lot from each of them, and as someone who's gained a better appreciation for the birds that surround us, I'm eager to see what I can learn from this one. ### [*The Subtle Art of Folding Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250425409?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Chu (April 7th) John Chu has earned a considerable amount of acclaim over the last decade for his short fiction: he's picked up Nebula and Hugo Awards for shorter works like "[If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/if-you-find-yourself-speaking-to-god-address-god-with-the-informal-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" and "[The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere](https://reactormag.com/the-water-that-falls-on-you-from-nowhere/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." This year, he'll publish his debut novel, *The Subtle Art of Folding Space*, about a woman named Ellie whose world is falling apart: her mother is in a coma, her sister is threatened by assassins, and there's a secretive group working to hijack the universe. It looks and sounds like a fascinating story about generational trauma and secrets. ### [*The Faith of Beasts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525671?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey (April 14th) I've made little secret that I think James S.A. Corey's *Expanse* series is a modern space opera classic, and while that series has ended, I was very impressed with the series that they're following it up with: The Captives War series, which kicked off in 2024 with [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525596?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which humanity has been conquered by an alien collective known as the Carryx, and those who remain have to figure out how to survive amidst their ranks. In *The Mercy of Gods,* Dafyd Alkhor betrayed some of his fellow captives to ensure humanity's survival, and he now has to figure out how to move forward and reshape humanity to serve the Carryx – all while hiding his true intentions. Meanwhile, an entity known as The Swarm has infiltrated humanity, hoping to find a weakness to take down their conquerors from within. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-201.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229-5.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) *The Mercy of Gods* [was one of my favorite books in 2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-best-books-2025/). It featured a new epic world from Corey, some fascinating new characters, and a gripping plot. I'm eager to see where they take the story in this installment. ## May ### [*The Franchise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250406583?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Thomas Elrod(May 12th) I use this newsletter to write a lot about storytelling and the ways that we consume those stories, so this debut novel by Thomas Elrod looks as though it'll be right up my alley: a classic fantasy novel and world called The Malicarn is being adapted as a series of films, and the characters who inhabit it believe that their lives are real. At the same time, a popular actor who's been cast in the series has been doubting what the studio is doing, and freeing its population isn't going to be as easy as he thought. I love a good meta narrative about stories, and this feels like it'll have a neat twist like John Scalzi's *Redshirts.* I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out. ### [*The Republic of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668207192?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mahmud El Sayed (May 5th) Generation ships, empires, revolutionary struggles: these are the types of things that I love reading about, and Mahmud El Sayed's debut has it all. It's about the crew of a ship called the Safina, and it's been enroute to its destination for two centuries, leaving behind a ruined Earth. The crew has been keeping their passengers alive, and when a series of blackouts rock the ship, unrest begins to bubble up amongst the crew, threatening the mission, ship, and its inhabitants forever. Saga Press says that this is inspired in part by the events of the Arab Spring, and I'm very interested in seeing how this comes together. (I'd have already been reading it, had my dog not destroyed my advance copy the minute it came through the door. 😒) ### [*Radiant Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290357?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ann Leckie (May 12th) Ann Leckie is one of the genre's best writers, having written such books as [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565172?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Ancillary Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565196?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Ancillary Mercy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565189?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Provenance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565202?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Translation State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290128?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* She's returning to the world of the Imperial Radch for another standalone novel, set in the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star, something that's been both inspiring and conflicting for the Ooioiaa people. The Radch has deemed it an irrelevant religious site that they'll soon absorb, but they've been forced to reckon with the reality of the situation and allow one final man to become a "living saint." That decision will have a huge impact on the rest of the civilization, exacerbating other issues that have been turning up the temperature. I loved Leckie's last installment in the world, *Translation State*, and I've got high hopes for this one. (And an interview that I *still* need to transcribe. This year, I promise.) ### [*The Last Contract of Isako*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316568654?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Fonda Lee (May 5th) In Fonda Lee's next novel, we're introduced to Isako, a legendary swordswomen who's preparing for the end. Her long-standing client has died, and she's planning on walking out into her planet's frozen wastelands to die in a customary ritual, only to be offered one last contract involving her last dismal apprentice, Martim. Taking the gig, she finds herself immersed in a world of corporate espionage and a looming conspiracy that could change humanity's entire existence in the universe. I do like these sorts of "Samurai's last job" type stories, and it looks like a fun adventure of a story set in a fascinating and immersive world. ### [*Palaces of the Crow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374620752?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Nayler (May 19th) I was a huge fan of Ray Nayler's debut novel [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/)), [*Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250393661?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)), and last year's [*Where the Axe is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com) (one of my [favorites of 2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/)!) and his next looks just as fascinating. It's about a young woman named Nerya who loves biology and befriends a flock of crows near her home, a Polish soldier named Czeslaw who deserts his post, a mute and abandoned boy named Innokentiy, and a Roma horse trader named Kezia, all of whom are facing the German invasion of Europe in June 1941\. They're each forced to flee into the forests and come together to form a deep bond, helped by Nerya's crows – who warn them of danger and threats in the dangerous wilderness. This looks like a fascinating read. Nayler's written some of the best science fiction in recent years, with a deep understanding of European politics and history, and I think this'll be an engrossing and thoughtful read. (I also have an interview with Nayler that I need to get finished up.) ### [*And Side by Side They Wander*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250382054?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Molly Tanzer (May 19th) It's been a hot minute since Molly Tanzer has released a new book, and I'm glad to see that 2026 brings a new one: *And Side by Side They Wander.* For centuries, the world's best artwork has been loaned to an alien museum, and when their loan comes to an end, the extraterrestrial curators aren't willing to return them to Earth. Humanity isn't willing to force the issue: they're way outside of our league, so some enterprising folks decide to try and steal them. They're led by Tarquin, who assembles a crew including an art historian named Fennel Tycho, an insectoid pilot named Tchik-tchik, an enhanced fighter named Misora, and a sensynth hacker named Jack. Together, they have to figure out how to work together to pull off the greatest heist the world has ever seen. This looks like a lot of fun, especially as someone who works at a museum with a lot of art (and in the aftermath of the big Louvre heist!) ### [*Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063236936?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Natalie Zina Walschots (May 19th) Superheroes are often at their best in the pages of a comic book, but every now and again, you get a novel that does an excellent job. Case in point: Natalie Zina Walschot's 2020 novel [*Hench*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062978585?ref=andrewliptak.com), about a woman named Anna Tromedlov, who's tired of the supervillain gig economy, and who after being grievously injured, realizes that superheroes often cause more damage to society, and attracts the attention of a villain, Leviathan, to try and take down one of the world's most powerful heroes, SuperCollider. She's now back with a sequel, and Anna, now known as the Auditor, has been working to take down The Draft, an organization that trains the world's superheroes, all while her relationship with Leviathan becomes strained and as a new enemy emerges, one who is far more her equal. *Hench* was a great read – [I picked it as one of my favorites of 2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-2021/) – and I'm glad to see that Walschots is returning to this world for another adventure. ### [*Platform Decay*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827005?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (May 5th) Martha Wells has a new Murderbot novel coming out: need I say more? In this installment, Murderbot has volunteered to handle a rescue mission, and in doing so, it's going to have to spend more time with folks it doesn't know – including their children. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-21.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255-5.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) This series is phenomenal: it's a wonderful series of adventures with a wonderful character and look at the complications of life and how we interact with one another and form communities and relationships. Also, Murderbot interacting with children just sounds like a hilarious read. ## June ### [*The Unicorn Hunters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128282?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Katherine Arden (June 2nd) Katherine Arden is a good friend of mine here in Vermont, and I loved her last novel, [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128275?ref=andrewliptak.com). Her latest looks like an excellent fantasy: Anne of Brittany finds her life turned upside-down as a child when her realm is invaded and her father killed. She's ordered to marry the King of France, ultimately resulting in her country's annexation, something she promised her father would never happen. Secretly, she plans to short-circuit the French plans by marrying someone else: their greatest enemy, and in a world of magic, she has to go deep into a forest, far from the eyes of French diviners in search of a unicorn for a secret wedding. One appears, along with a legendary figure that might provide her with the means to save her home. [The memories that haunt the battlefieldsKatherine Arden’s novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of wartime trauma and memories, and of finding hope in darkness![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-291.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7838-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*A Trade of Blood: An Ana and Din Mystery*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723852?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robert Jackson Bennett (June 9th) TO readers have been telling me to pick up Robert Jackson Bennett's latest fantasy series, the Ana and Din Mysteries ([*The Tainted Cup* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820716?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*A Drop of Corruption*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723821?ref=andrewliptak.com)), for a while now, and I think this year will be the year to do that. (I loved his *Founders* trilogy: [*Foundryside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525573845?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Locklands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820686?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Shorefall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984822772?ref=andrewliptak.com)) Set in a fantastical empire, two imperial families are about to go to war with one another, an act that could bring chaos to the lands. At the core of the issue is an accusation, that one elder son had committed an unspeakable murder. There's lots of evidence that he did it, and detective Ana Dolabra and her assistant Din have been tasked with trying to figure out what happened, eventually discovering that there's a much greater plot at hand. This sounds fantastic. ### [*Sublimation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250376794?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Isabel J. Kim (June 2nd) Isabel J. Kim earned a considerable amount of acclaim for her short fiction, particularly for her 2024 *Clarkesworld* story, "[Kid In the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." She's now got her debut novel, about a world where immigrating to another country means that you're leaving a copy of yourself behind. Folks sometimes keep in touch with themselves, but one, Soyoung Rose Kang, never did, and never expected to return to Korea until her grandfather dies. It's only when she returns that she finds that the copy who remained behind is planning on taking her place and the life that she's built. This sounds like a fascinating premise, and I'm eager to see how it turns out. It's [also been picked up for a series adaptation](https://deadline.com/2024/04/sublimation-universal-international-studios-tv-isabel-kim-1235882156/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*Star Wars: The Art of Andor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419775680?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phil Szostak (June 30th) I've written at length about my love of *Andor* and how it's one of the best stories in the entire franchise. In addition to its outstanding story and acting, it's also a beautifully-shot series, and I've been waiting for ages for Lucasfilm to put together a behind-the-scenes art book like they've [done for](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748707?ref=andrewliptak.com) [the first two](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419756511?ref=andrewliptak.com) seasons of *The Mandalorian*, [*Rogue One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419722257?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Solo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419727450?ref=andrewliptak.com), *The Force Awakens,* [*The Last Jedi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419727054?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Rise of Skywalker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419740381?ref=andrewliptak.com). These books are excellent windows into their respective productions, and I've made it a point to snag them when they come out. This volume will encompass both seasons of *Andor*, looking at the concept art, visuals, and designs, as well as a number of behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast and crew about the series and how they brought the world to life. As a bonus, Szostak has another book coming out in November for [*The Mandalorian and Grogu*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419787768?ref=andrewliptak.com), which should also be interesting to check out. ### [*Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063398467?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Tremblay (June 30th) With books like *A Head Full of Ghosts* and *Disappearance at Devil's Rock*, Paul Tremblay has remained one of my favorite horror authors, and I'm eager to see how he'll terrify me this summer: his next novel is *Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep*, about a woman named Julia Flang, a former semi-professional gamer who's offered a job that she can't refuse: a tech company needs someone to help bring a man with an AI implanted in his brain from California to the East coast. Meanwhile, a man wakes up in a strange, horrifying wasteland, and is trying to make sense of how he got there, who he is, and and what's happening around him. As Julia uses her smartphone to control him as they work their way across the country, their lives are going to collide as things get complicated. Tremblay's an excellent writer who takes a deft and light hand with the speculative elements of his stories, which makes them stand out for me. I'm eager to see what he does, blending horror with this sort of plausible near-future setting. ## July and beyond After June, release dates get a little fuzzy, but there are a handful of other novels that are coming out later this year that I'm looking forward to: - [*Exit Party*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593321461?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by* Emily St. John Mandel (September 15th) - *The Rouse* by China Miéville (September 17th) - [*A Wall Is Also a Road*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228031?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by* Annalee Newitz (October 6th) - *Harvest* by Joe Hill (October 10th) - *As You Wake*, *Break the Shell* by Becky Chambers (October 13th) - [*Monsters of Ohio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389039?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Scalzi (November 3rd). --- What books are you most looking forward to this year? Let me know in the comments. ### ### Patrick Nielsen Hayden is retiring from Tor Books URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/patrick-nielsen-hayden-tor-books-publishing/ Last updated: 2026-01-05T15:35:15.000Z Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden [has announced his retirement](https://bsky.app/profile/pnh.nielsenhayden.com/post/3mbonp5zss22k?ref=andrewliptak.com), effective today. He noted that it's been in the works for a short while, and that after finishing up a couple of projects with the publisher, he'll be moving on to other things. It's a huge move in the world of SF/F publishing: Nielsen Hayden has been a towering figure at Tor for decades, and has certainly shaped the modern form of the genre in that time. Born in 1959, Nielsen Hayden first became involved in SF Fandom in the 1970s, publishing a fanzine in the 1980s along with his wife, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, helped establish the *The New York Review of Science Fiction*, and was involved in various early internet watering holes in the 1990s. After working in a variety of roles at various New York publishers, he began working for Tor Book as a freelancer before coming on full time at the end of the 1980s as an assistant, and worked his way up the ranks to [eventually become editor-in-chief](https://reactormag.com/fritz-foy-named-president-and-publisher-of-tor-and-forge-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2018\. In that time, he acquired and edited a ton of the genre's best-known authors, including Charlie Jane Anders, Poul Anderson, Glen Cook, Charles de Lint, Cory Doctorow, Terry Goodkind, Jonathan Lethem, Ken MacLeod, George R. R. Martin, Laura J. Mixon, Ada Palmer, John Scalzi, Harry Turtledove, Jo Walton, David Weber, and many others. He also edited a number of the shorter fictional works that appeared on Tor.com. He also edited a handful of short fiction anthologies during his tenure, such as *Starlight* (1996, 1998, and 2001), *New Skies: An Anthology of Today's Science Fiction* (2003), *New Magics: An Anthology of Today's Fantasy* (2004), *The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens: First Annual Collection* (2005) and *Twenty-First Century Science Fiction* (2013). In the latter, he wrote in the preface, that while he and co-editor David Hartwell didn't share identical tastes, "we can fairly well agree on good writers and good stories." > "And we are both students of the history of SF without holding all the same opinions about it. Neither of us is especially interested in being genre policemen, dictating what is and isn't proper SF. And yet, both of us emerge from the core SF audience of the twentieth century – the SF subculture, professional, and fannish, that emerged from the earnest and urgent desire to defend and encourage quality SF in the face of a dominant culture that seemed to hold it in contempt." What I've found notable about Nielsen Hayden is how he's long felt like a figure that's sat in the background of much of the field since the 1980s: he was part of the team that helped set up *Tor.com* (now *Reactor*), has served for years as an instructor at Viable Paradise, giving him a front row seat to the talent who were arriving to the shores of the professional publishing world. I only met him once or twice at conventions, and I've found him to be a no-nonsense, opinionated, and deeply-principled individual, someone who was dedicated to not only guiding good stories, but also ones that were pointed and principled in their visions of the world. It's this background, one foot firmly planted in the culture of science fiction and the other as a professional, that I think helped him guide and really define the boundaries of the science fiction and fantasy genres that we draw so much inspiration from. Authors get a lot of the attention from fans because their names are on the cover, but it's people like Patrick, especially ones who have been in the field for so long, who are really worth paying attention to, because they wield so much influence over what gets a cover. I don't know that he's had a huge, direct influence in recent years, given his larger role as editor-in-chief, but his contributions will certainly be felt for years. ### Destination: Jupiter URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/jupiter-history-nasa-science-fiction/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:54:29.000Z On the evening of January 7th, 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope to the sky and began viewing the planet Jupiter. He observed a trio of lights near the planet, and in the nights that followed, tracked their progress as they moved and vanished. Galileo realized that the objects were orbiting Jupiter, and they were behaving like Earth’s moon did around itself. He had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io, and in doing so, he forever changed how humanity would understand the nature of our solar system and our place in the universe. In the centuries since, writers have imagined how we might eventually visit and live around Jupiter, while new technologies have brought us closer than ever to its swirling atmosphere and the crowd of strange moons that orbit around it. After our sun formed around 4.5 billion years ago, the gas particles that were left over formed an accretion disc that began to snowball into larger objects. As they grew, these growing masses began to hoover up the dust and gasses in the accretion disk from which it formed. The first such planet was Jupiter, and its presence would have a major effect on the development of the rest of the solar system as it captured material and disturbed the orbits of the other, newly forming planets that followed it. When we began looking to the skies, billions of years later, they eventually recognized that our neighboring planets were different: wandering stars that didn’t behave like the others in the background. Ancient Babylonians made countless observations of the movements of the planets starting in the seventh and eighth centuries BCE, helping them develop sophisticated calculations that helped them understand the cyclical nature of the year and seasons. This piece is part of a series that I originally published in **Clarkesworld Magazine*: \- [Destination: Mercury](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Venus](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Luna](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Mars](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mars-history-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Across the world, Chinese astronomers Gan De and Shi Shen made their own detailed observations of the solar system, making some of the first observations of Jupiter in 4 BCE, including a possible first observation of one of the planet’s moons. The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were also familiar with the planets, naming the largest Zeus and Jupiter, monikers that mirrored the most powerful of deities in their respective pantheon of gods. While some ancient astronomers and mathematicians theorized that Earth and the other planets orbited our sun, it wasn’t until 1543 that Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus upended conventional thinking. He proposed a new, heliocentric model of the solar system, which German astronomer Johannes Kepler expanded upon in 1609, presenting a new model that introduced his laws of planetary motion. In 1610, Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s four moons (followed the next day by German astronomer Simon Marius) provided further evidence that the heliocentric models of the solar system championed by Copernicus and Kepler’s views of the solar system were accurate. Marius gave the moons their names, and in the years that followed, other astronomers turned their gaze toward Jupiter. In 1639, Italian astronomer Francesco Fontana made detailed observations of the planet, describing the vibrant bands in its atmosphere, while a couple of decades later, another Italian astronomer named Giovanni Cassini described spots on the planet’s surface. Four years later, English scientist Robert Hooke observed Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. As the scientific revolution crested, authors and artists began to expand their imaginations to these new planets. One of the earliest works that featured the planet came in 1752 when French satirist Voltaire published *Micromégas,* a novella about an alien from Sirius who’s banished from his home and decides to visit our solar system, first arriving at Saturn and befriending its inhabitants, before moving on to Jupiter and its moons, Mars, and Earth. By the late 1800s, science fiction began to coalesce as a distinct body of literature that drew on the scientific knowledge of the day. Authors such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many others had begun incorporating the latest scientific discoveries and theories into their works—often called scientific romances, and by the nineteenth century, plenty of other authors had begun to imagine life out in the solar system, often using Jupiter as a destination for the types of adventure dramas that were popular in the Victorian era: bold explorers heading off to visit the untamed wilderness. In 1886, British author W. S. Lach-Szyrma wrote *Aleriel, or* [*A Voyage to Other Worlds*](https://archive.org/details/alerielorvoyaget00lach/page/n9/mode/2up?q=jupiter&view=theater)*,* a story that follows an adventurer as he travels to the various planets of the solar system. In his preface, Lach-Szyrma outlines his understanding of the nature of the planets, guided by the observations that scientists at the time were making, and folded those discoveries into his story: “The orb of Jupiter was evidently wrapt in clouds—long lines and belts, and broken spaces here and there, through the masses of mist, in which we hoped to see the planet himself.” His characters eventually pass through the clouds and crash-land into a vast ocean, imagining that the planet was in a primitive, early state of existence, not yet becoming a solid. Works such as *A Journey in Other Worlds* (1894) byJohn Jacob Astor*, To Jupiter via Hell* (published anonymously in 1908), and *A Honeymoon in Space* (1900) by George Griffith also played with this idea. In Griffith’s novel, he follows a newlywed couple as they visit the Moon, Mars, and Venus before stopping at Jupiter, in which his narrator says “ . . . no one has the remotest notion of what there is behind the clouds or whatever they are which form those bands . . . my humble opinion is that if we’re able to go through the clouds without getting the Astronef red-hot we shall find that Jupiter is in the same state as the Earth was a good many million years ago.” As the [*Encyclopedia of Science Fiction*](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jupiter?ref=andrewliptak.com)points out, “As astronomical discoveries were popularized, however, the credibility of an Earthlike Jupiter waned rapidly,” and that soon, authors were incorporating the latest discoveries. Fortunately, if there wasn’t a hidden world under the clouds, Jupiter boasted plenty of other places to visit. During this time, astronomers continued to turn their telescopes toward Jupiter. In September 1892, American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard discovered a new body orbiting Jupiter, Amalthea. It was the first new moon to be discovered after Galileo’s discovery nearly three centuries prior, and it was the last moon to be discovered via an optical telescope. As the modern era of science fiction began to emerge in the early twentieth century through pulp magazines, Jupiter and its moons were an attractive destination for plenty of authors: Stanley G. Weinbaum visited Io in 1935’s “The Mad Moon,” and Europa in 1936’s “Redemption Carin,” while Frank Belknap Long published “Red Storm on Jupiter” the same year. During his tenure at *Astounding Science Fiction*, editor John W. Campbell Jr. pushed his authors to incorporate some level of scientific realism when using the planet, eventually publishing “Not Final!” by Isaac Asimov in 1941 (and rejecting another one Ganymede, “Victory Unintentional,” eventually published in 1942), while Clifford D. Simak recognized that Jupiter’s harsh environment wouldn’t be suitable for humans, visiting the planet in 1940’s “Clerical Error” and again in 1944’s “Desertion.” Others would follow well into the 1950s and 1960s: Arthur C. Clarke visited Amalthea in 1953’s “Jupiter Five,” as did Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in their 1960 story “The Way to Amalthea.” In 1956, Alfred Bester used Jupiter as a notable location in his acclaimed novel *The Stars My Destination* as he takes his characters through the solar system. Science fiction’s “Golden Age” coincided with a period of new scholarship and interest in space travel. Following the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on a dangerous arms race that supercharged interest in astronomy and space travel: the space race. In their efforts to find new ways to deliver nuclear payloads to one another, engineers and scientists utilized the advances in rocket technology to bring satellites and men into orbit. Science fiction authors were paying attention to the scientific advances of the era, and in some cases, made their own contributions. In his 1952 rework of the story “Solar Plexus,” James Blish coined the term “gas giant” to broadly describe planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Perhaps the most famous use of Jupiter came in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film *2001: A Space Odyssey*. The film, cowritten by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, was loosely based on some of Clarke’s short stories and follows an expedition to Jupiter, during which the astronauts discover they’re to investigate a radio signal that was sent to the planet after an alien monolith was uncovered on the Moon. In 1972, the last astronaut left the Moon: the cost and other national priorities brought the Apollo program to an end, but NASA’s scientific efforts continued. While the lunar landings captured much of the public’s attention, planetary scientists had long been working on plans to send probes to the outer solar system. In 1964, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Gary Flandro was tasked with studying how the space agency could potentially send probes to the solar system’s outer reaches. During his research, he discovered a once in a lifetime opportunity was approaching: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would align with one another, allowing for a spacecraft to use their respective gravities to zip through the solar system in just a decade. NASA began to put together a program to take advantage of the alignment, “The Grand Tour,” with two dedicated probes that would visit the planets to take photographs and make other observations. It was eventually canceled and replaced by the Voyager program, which would launch in 1977\. While NASA began work on that initiative, it set up a pair of probes through its existing Pioneer program. It launched Pioneers 10 and 11 in March 1972 and April 1973, respectively, to head out to study Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, and Saturn. Pioneer 10 spotted Jupiter on November 6th, 1973, and over the duration of its mission, it took hundreds of photographs and measurements of the planet, the first such probe to reach the gas giant. Pioneer 11 followed, passing by the planet between November and December 1974, taking detailed images of the planet’s atmosphere, Great Red Spot, and the moon Callisto, before heading out to Saturn. Just a couple of years later, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 for the outer planets. These probes carried with them better cameras and sensors, allowing them to take higher resolution pictures of the planet when they arrived in 1979, as well as detailed measurements of its magnetic fields, radiation belts, and moons. Amongst its discoveries were volcanic eruptions on Io, the presence of water on Europa, detailed observations of Jupiter’s atmosphere movements, the presence of its rings, and several new moons. These observations were the closest look we had yet taken in of the planet, showing a world that was stranger and more vibrant than we could have imagined. The discoveries that both Voyager probes made of Jupiter and the other outer planets transformed our understanding of the solar system. They found that the planet and its moons were home to dynamic planetary and atmospheric systems, and that in the case of Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, they might harbor vast, subsurface oceans—which could be the best places to look for life elsewhere in the solar system. But while we learned much from the Voyager probes and their successors (Galileo \[1995\], Ulysses \[1992, 2003/2004\], and Cassini \[2000\]) the idea of life existing *somewhere* on Jupiter was hard to resist: Ben Bova’s 2000 novel *Jupiter* follows an astrophysicist who is sent to the planet to spy on a religious order that might have discovered a new species living in oceans under Jupiter’s atmosphere, while Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel *Manta’s Gift* plays with similar ideas: about a character whose mind is implanted in the body of an alien lifeform found flying in the planet’s atmosphere. But in other instances, scientific realism stuck, and these scientific discoveries percolated into the pages of science fiction stories. Jupiter’s large size and numerous small moons can often be found serving neatly as another home for humanity once it’s adapted to the harsh conditions. Charles Sheffield set his 1992 novel *Cold as Ice* on and in Europa’s oceans in the aftermath of a war that devastated the solar system, while Paul McAuley did something similar in his 2008 novel *The Quiet War*, with the survivors of an interplanetary war settling on the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Similarly, authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing as James S.A. Corey, utilized Jupiter and its various moons throughout their *Expanse* series, describing colonies and settlements that were populated by the outermost inhabitants of the solar system where they could take advantage of the gravity and surface area to grow crops and safely raise their children in domed or subterranean cities. In other instances, the discoveries made about Jupiter by NASA’s various probes have helped to inform authors even if they didn’t set their stories there. In an interview published in [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cambias%5Finterview/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2014, author James L. Cambias noted that the discoveries and theories around Europa played a direct role in how he conceived of an alien world in his debut novel *A Darkling Sea*: “For thematic reasons, Ilmatar had to be a world like Europa, with a shell of ice forever sealing off its inhabitants from the larger universe.” We’re not yet done with Jupiter. In 2011, NASA launched Juno, a spacecraft designed to study the gas giant as part of its New Frontiers program. It arrived in 2016 where it took up station and began to take new measurements of the planet’s magnetosphere, gravitational field, composition, and more, all with the goal of finding clues about how it formed and sending back astonishing new images of its atmosphere. In April 2023, the European Space Agency launched Juice (Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer), which will pay particularly close attention to Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa when it arrives in 2031\. Europa will come under even closer scrutiny in 2030 when NASA’s Europa Clipper mission arrives (launched in October 2024). Its goal will be to survey the moon to learn more about its composition and the oceans that lie under its icy crust and see if it harbors its own ecosystem. These missions will provide the world with our closest look at our solar system’s biggest planet to date, and the discoveries they make will undoubtedly provide plenty of inspiration for the science fiction stories that will come in the years ahead. This essay was [originally published](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F06%5F25/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in June 2025 in **Clarkesworld Magazine* ### My favorite reads of 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-horror-best-books-2025/ Last updated: 2026-01-03T22:18:41.000Z 2025 was a pretty rough year on a whole bunch of fronts: from politics to tragedies to just existing in a world that feels increasingly frustrating, I'm not sad to see it in the rearview mirror. But it's easy to dwell on all the bad things that happened, and I think it's important to remember the bright points as well. For me, 2025 was an excellent year for new books: it brought new reads from a bunch of authors I like and admire and I was introduced to a whole bunch of new authors who I'll now be looking out for. It's always tempting to look back at the year and see if there's anything that ties everything together into a neat, tidy thread. There usually isn't one: everyone's working in their own corner of the world and aren't necessarily writing to *comment* on the state of it, but looking over the books that resonated with me the most, I found a couple of things that seemed to overlap some of them. There was a sense of togetherness that a number of these books seemed to take note of: people coming together to solve a common problem, such as in Garrett M. Graff's *The Devil Reached Toward the Sky*, Joe Hill's *King Sorrow*, Annalee Newitz's *Automatic Noodle*, or qntm's *There Is No Antimemetics Division*. There was also a sense of people pushing against these big, intractable problems of the day, or at least an acknowledgement that our view of the world can be warped and shaped by external forces, as in David Baron's *The Martians*, Alix E. Harrow's *The Everlasting*, Ken Liu's *All That We See or Seem*, Ray Nayler's *Where The Axe is Buried*, *There Is No Antimemetics Division,* and Daniel H. Wilson's *Hole in the Sky*. And in a number of cases, a whole bunch of this year's reads sent their characters into archives to try and figure something out or to gain some insights into the past, as in *The Everlasting*, *King Sorrow*, Stephen Graham Jones' *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, R.F. Kuang's *Katabasis*, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's *The Bewitching. (I'm hoping to write more about that at some point this month.)* ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. I think that says more about me than the books themselves: as we face the coming year with even more challenges and crises ahead of us, I feel like we gravitate toward the stories that offer us some hope for the future, that these stories might, if not lay out a roadmap, hold some solutions for us as we navigate the uncertainty that the future holds. Collectively, these are books about people taking on the big challenges that they face, whether it's ongoing wars, aliens, vampires, dragons, witches, professors banished to Hell, and quite a bit more, and figuring out how to tackle those problems, either to save the world, or sometimes something as small as saving their neighborhood or communities. I think that's a good lesson to go into 2026 with. Here are my favorite books from past years: [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-best-books-2025/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-best-sci-fi-fantasy-books/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-2021/), [2020](https://www.polygon.com/22220762/best-books-2020-sci-fi-fantasy?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and [2019](https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/13/21012122/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-2019?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). --- Okay, here are the 15 books that I enjoyed the most this year: ### [*The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324090663?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Baron How do we confront the problem of misinformation when people truly believe that they're following the truth? This has become one of the biggest problems that we face these days, but it's not a new phenomenon. In his latest book, David Baron takes a look at the time when a devoted group of academics and adherents believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent life, and sought to make contacts with its inhabitants. Baron takes us through the history of science and astronomy and how we observed Mars, and explored the story of Percival Lowell, a Boston-born businessman who became obsessed with the prospect of first contact, even as it became increasingly clear that Mars is as we know it today: a desert devoid of life. It's a striking read that holds plenty of lessons about the assumptions and beliefs that we hold. [Obsession and realityDavid Baron’s The Martians is an engrossing story of speculation and obsession about life on Mars![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-332.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6884-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/life-on-mars-the-martians-david-baron-book-review/) ### [*The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unmaking of the Atomic Bomb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668092392?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Garrett M. Graff I studied the Cold War in graduate school, and ever since, I've been keenly interested in the story of the atomic bomb and how its development and deployment during the Second World War changed the face of warfare – and the world – forever. In his latest oral history, Garrett M. Graff takes a look at the month-by-month, day-by-day and even minute-by-minute story of those first terrible weapons, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. It's a gripping story about how the United States government undertook this massive, secret program and how all of that work went into developing the first nuclear bombs. It's a story about organization and scientific achievement, but also of doubts, purpose, and consequences. [Hand to a hot stoveGarrett M. Graff’s The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb is a deep dive into past that we shouldn’t look away from, and one that we should continue to remember![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-329.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5869-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/atomic-bomb-garrett-graff-devil-reached-toward-the-sky-book-review/) ### [*The Everlasting*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799081?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alix E. Harrow Origin stories are often critical to the soul of a country, and the stories and tales of the people closely involved in the founding of one's nation can often be transformed into a form of legend, one that inspires and unites one's citizens. But those stories can also be misused as tools of oppression, as one hapless historian discovers when he's recruited by his government to write the definitive origin story of Dominion, and is promptly sent back in time to observe his country's heroine in person. As he watches and writes and falls in love with Una Everlasting, he begins to realize that something's terribly wrong; that he's being used to transform Dominion's origin story into something twisted and further away from the character and woman the he falls desperately in love with. It's a powerful read about stories and history, and the distance between truth and legend. [Origin storiesAlix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting is a powerful book about a nation’s origin story and how such narratives can be manipulated![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-19.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7948-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/) ### [*King Sorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200600?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe Hill When Arthur Oakes and his mother are threatened by drug dealers, he and his friends do the only logical thing: summon an ancient dragon to smite them. That works nicely, but it comes with a complication, said dragon, the titular King Sorrow, now expects them to kill someone each Easter, or one of them will die instead. The pact kicks off a story that runs for decades, following this band of characters as they work to come to terms with the terrible task before them and the cost that it extracts. This book is a tome, a rich, sprawling epic that explores the consequences of greed, morality, honor, and magic. [Fantasy book review: Joe Hill’s King SorrowJoe Hill’s King Sorrow is an indulgent epic that shows why it’s unwise to enter into a bargain with a dragon![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-20.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7308-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/king-sorrow-joe-hill-fantasy-horror-dragons-book-review/) ### [*The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668075081?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Stephen Graham Jones An academic comes into the possession of the diary of an ancestor, written in 1912 and hidden away in a wall. As she begins reading and transcribing it, she finds a horrifying story that leads back to the massacre of a group of Blackfeet in the 1800s, and the consequences that rippled out from it. One of those consequences was the fate of a man named Good Stab, attacked and bitten by a vampire-like creature, he recounts his story to a Lutheran pastor, teasing out a story of revenge, pain, and suffering over decades. It's a terrifying novel, exploring the enduring trauma of the American expansion into the west and how it resonates in the modern day, wrapped up in one of the best depictions of vampires that I've ever read. ### [*Katabasis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063446243?ref=andrewliptak.com) by R.F. Kuang How far will you go to get a job recommendation? In R.F. Kuang's *Katabasis*, Cambridge student Alice Law will go to hell and back. The why is complicated: she accidentally (or maybe not) dispatched her mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes to the underworld, and she hatches a plan to follow and retrieve him in order to ensure that her future in the field is secure. Accompanied by her rival Peter Murdoch, she finds more than she bargained for as Kuang takes us through the various levels of hell as they try and find their late professor. Along the way, Kuang takes aim at the culture of academia and the way that it can churn students through its halls and abusive relationships, all while exploring the nature of reality, purpose, and existence and what it all means when it all comes to an end. [Finding one’s self on the road to hellR.F. Kuang’s Katabasis is a gripping quest about the pitfalls of academia and finding one’s true self![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-331.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6641-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rf-kuang-katabasis-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*All That We See or Seem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083178?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ken Liu When an artist named Elli goes missing, her husband Piers turns to an infamous hacker named Julia Z to try and figure out what happened to her. Elli is a world-famous storyteller who brings audiences together into digital, immersive, shared experiences. Initially reluctant, Julia gets drawn into Elli's work and life, discovering that she had been a client of an international criminal group, and that he might be ransoming her for the information she might have gleaned from their shared dreamspace. I've long admired Liu's storytelling and his approach to technology and the creative arts, and this novel provides a deft snapshot of the technological world we're hurtling into. In it, he's exploring the nature of storytelling and the digital world, how these tools shape our perceptions of reality and what it means to be an artist in this environment, all wrapped up into a gripping technothriller. ### [*The Bewitching*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874325?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia I find that gothic horror is best when it really leans into history, and in her latest, Silvia Moreno-Garcia threads a story of witches across three separate times: 1908, 1934, and 1998\. She introduces us to promising young women woman as they contend with a looming supernatural threat, and little do they know, but they're all connected. Alba contends with a malevolent presence on her Mexican farm, only to find that the danger lurks close to home. Carolyn, Virginia, and Beatrice confront something from their Boston campus in 1934, while Alba's granddaughter Minerva begins studying Beatrice's eventual career as a minor writer and finds that she too has to confront the same dark presence. That presence are witches who're attracted to the bright potential that these women hold, feeding on their power and using it to their own ends. The result is a novel that examines the cycles of violence that women have faced and is a look at how the powerful go to great lengths to use use manipulation and greed to hold onto power. [Book review: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The BewitchingA gripping, multi-generational tale of curses, power, and witches![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-333.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6212-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/betwitching-silvia-moreno-garcia-witches-horror-book-review/) ### [*Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Susana M. Morris One of the genre's best authors was Octavia E. Butler, who's best known for books like *Kindred*, *Parable of the Sower, Wildseed*, and a number of others, books that feel prescient and at times, prophetic. She's the focus of a new biography by Susana M. Morris, who delves into her life alongside the changes that the country underwent between the 1960s and 1980s, and paints a portrait of a woman who was motivated by the politics of the day, and who was determined to reach the goals that she set out for herself. Butler's vision for the future wasn't so much prophecy, Morris finds: her impoverished upbringing, painfully shy and timid nature led her to becoming a keen observer of humanity and human nature, and wove those observations into her stories. She was someone who was outraged by the injustices of the world, frustrated by the people in power, and channeled that anger into telling stories that sought to address those issues. It's a wonderful portrait of a tragic figure, one who left us far too soon. [Principled prophetSusana M. Morris’s Positive Obsession is an intimate and tragic look at the life of Octavia E. Butler![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-330.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6998-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/positive-obsession-octavia-butler-biography-book-review/) ### [*Where The Axe is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Nayler Ray Nayler's novel [*The Mountain In the Sea*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) was one of my favorite reads of 2023, and he's become one of those authors that I'll seek out whenever he has a new story out. That was the case with his latest, *Where the Axe is Buried*, which follows a mounting political crisis in a future Europe. An activist and neuroscientist who escaped from the oppressive Federation (Russia) returns home to visit her dying father only to become ensnared in the country's surveillance apparatus, while an aid to the country's President, is involved in his reincarnation – the latest in a succession of the man's attempts to hold onto power by downloading his mind into successive bodies. At the same time, various European nations have turned over control to AI prime ministers, and one political operative is manipulated into undoing the latches on a potentially catastrophic failsafe that could undo the stability that the continent has enjoyed. This is a complicated and dense read, but it's an astute look the intersection of politics and technology, and how easily people – and their avatars – can be manipulated into doing things that they wouldn't normally do. It's a book about how institutions function and how easily they can come down if they aren't supported and tended to. It's a read that takes on special resonance amidst the current backdrop of political chaos that we're witnessing around the globe today. ### [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annalee Newitz I think a lot about how unity, cooperation, and building bonds with one's neighbors is important in the grander scheme of things: how we hold together as a community, nation, a spacefaring republic, or maybe just a neighborhood. In their latest story, Annalee Newitz brings us the story of a band of robots that are looking to rebuild their neighborhood in a war-torn San Francisco by opening up a noodle shop. Each of the robots are terrified of being repossessed by their owners after they're reactivated, and they decide to take matters into their own hands. Their goal: try and build a thriving business that their neighbors will like and appreciate, and which goes above and beyond the usual AI-driven ghost kitchens that pop up briefly. In doing so, they build the space for a thriving community, one that could resurrect their neighborhood against malevolent internet users who'd rather trash their online reputation. It's a cute but powerful story, one that touches on everything from online propaganda to online behavior to dubious ethics of online storefronts and giant conglomerates. It's a read that reminded me that you don't need the high stakes of saving the entire world: sometimes, you just need to plant a seed in a community and give it what it needs to flourish. It's just what we needed in 2025\. [Automatic Noodle is a bite-sized robotic delightAnnalee Newtiz’s latest is a bite-sized sci-fi story is a testament to the power of building and fostering community![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-334.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5727-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/) ### [*Death of the Author*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391147?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor There's a rich tradition of authors penning meta novels about the writing experience, and Nnedi Okorafor's *Death of the Author* is one of the more interesting ones that I've read, exploring the nature of creativity and storytelling as she plays out the story of a former professor and author named Zelu. After she's fired from a job, Zelu pens a novel about robots, set in a far-future Earth. Inspired, the words flow out of her, and when she eventually shows it to her agent, it goes onto become a massive success: she gets a huge publishing deal and a quick film adaptation, and the pressure is on to continue the story. Okorafor tells Zelu's story alongside the vibrant science fiction novel that she's writing, *Rusted Robots*, and we follow her as she comes to terms with her newfound literary stardom and the expectations that come from the fans of the novel. It's a book that feels as though it's very personal to Okorafor, tackling and exploring the fuzzy intersection of fame and creativity in a world that feels extremely familiar to the minefield of social media and pop culture journalism that we're surrounded by. It's a book about stubbornness, keeping one's eyes on the ball and true to one's creative impulses, even if they take you in places nobody's expecting you to go. [Review: Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the AuthorDeath of the Author is a fantastic novel about remaining authentic in the face of the demands fame and success brings![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-337.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2890-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/) ### [*There Is No Antimemetics Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593983751?ref=andrewliptak.com) by qntm How do you fight a war when you can't comprehend the nature of the enemy you're fighting against? That's the premise of qntm's novel *There Is No Antimemetics Division*, in which Earth is contending with some sort of threat that feeds on memories and intelligence, following an operative from a secretive organization that's working to protect the world, even as they can't always remember who or what they're fighting against. It's a spectacular novel, one that looks at the nature of intelligence and memory, and how they shape our perceptions of reality and the world. qntm (the pen name for Sam Hughes), tells the story in discrete installments, each one a gripping look into strange, unseen creatures, spy verses spy-style encounters, glimpses of cosmic horrors, and more. There are times when the world feels unreasonably chaotic and unknowable, and this book feels like an encouragement to move forward and persevere, even if we can't see or conceive of the path before us. ### [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Scalzi I appreciate a book told in an unconventional way, and when John Scalzi announced that his next book would be about the Moon turning to cheese, that struck plenty of readers as a "yep, he's doing something weird." The resulting book takes this strange phenomenon and plays out in largely standalone installments, one for each day of the lunar month, following people around the country and world as they come to terms with the fact that not only has the Moon turned into some sort of cheese, but it's also coming apart, with apocalyptic consequences for humanity. What seems like a goofy, light, and somewhat experimental story ended up becoming a fascinating read about how we approach the extraordinary things that we confront in life, like say, a global pandemic, and how we look back on these types of events with fading and imprecise memories of what actually happened, even as we lived through them. [Review: John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your EyeJohn Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a ridiculous and fun experiment that hides a deeper, pertinent story about the world we face today![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-336.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3692-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/) ### [*Hole In the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385551113?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel H. Wilson What does an alien invasion look like if your own people's past has confronted alien invasions? That's the question at the heart of Daniel H. Wilson's latest novel, in which he plays out an otherworldly encounter through the eyes of four characters: an unnamed man watching a prophetic machine, a worn-down oil worker, a NASA mathematician, and a military specialist who studies UAPs. As all parties converge at the Spiro Mound complex in Oklahoma, Wilson shows that first contact isn't always a "take me to your leader" situation, and how we view intelligence and intention might be very, very wrong. In doing so, he prompts the reader to consider that what we think we know about the world, through the lens of science and cosmology, could be two sides of the same coin, and that we should be ready to assume nothing when it comes to the unknown. [Review: Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the SkyDaniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a tense, gripping thriller about first contact![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-18.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7821.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-h-wilson-hole-in-the-sky-first-contact-sci-fi-book-review/) --- These were my favorite reads of 2025, and as a reader, it was a very good year. What books resonated with you? Let me know in the comments. ### What I read in 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2025/ Last updated: 2026-01-02T00:20:57.000Z 2026 is here, and with the year ticking over, here's a last look back at the pile of books I read in 2025\. I've been keeping track of what I read on social media (mainly on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/andrewliptak.com?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/)), and as I've done in prior years, I set myself a goal of 52 books. At 58 books, I did better than I have in the last couple of years (2024 saw 42 books, while in 2023, I only read 38.) I say *only* like that's a bad thing: most places I've seen say that Americans read around 11-12 books a year, so I'm doing my part to skew that average a bit. Here's what I read in the last year: 1. *Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s* by Adam Rowe ([Interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-worlds-beyond-time-70s-scifi-art-book-interview/)) 2. *The Two Towers* by J.R.R. Tolkien ([Commentary](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-two-towers-grima-wormtongue-corruption/)) 3. *The Return of the King* by J.R.R. Tolkien ([Commentary](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-return-of-the-king-lotr-propaganda-disinformation/)) 4. *The Wandering Earth* by Cixin Liu, adapted by Christophe Bec and illustrated by Stefano Raffaele 5. *A Conventional Boy* by Charles Stross ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/charles-stross-laundry-files-conventional-boy-litrpg-gaming-book-review/)) 6. *The Silmarillion* by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien 7. *Vermont: An Outsider’s Inside View* by Edward L. Rubin 8. *Alien Clay* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-alien-clay-sci-fi-book-review/)) 9. *Daredevil: Born Again* by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli 10. *Death of the Author* by Nnedi Okorafor ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/)) 11. *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of Covid-19 in Vermont* by Garrett M. Graff ([Interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/)) 12. *Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others* by Mike Mignola 13. *The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of the Solar System* by Dante S. Lauretta ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dante-lauretta-osiris-rex-asteroid-hunter-book-review-space-astronomy/)) 14. *The Quiet Before: On The Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas* by Gal Beckerman 15. *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* by John Scalzi ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/)) 16. *All Systems Red* by Martha Wells 17. *Star Wars: Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear* by Alexander Freed 18. *Where The Axe is Buried* by Ray Nayler 19. *Artificial Condition* by Martha Wells 20. *Swedish Machines: Sunset at Zero Point* by Simon Stålenhag ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-zero-point-scifi-book-review/)) 21. *Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly* by Anthony Bourdain 22. *The Martian Contingency* by Mary Robinette Kowal 23. *Damascus Station* by David McCloskey 24. *Project Hail Mary* by Andy Weir ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-first-contact-murray-leinster-hard-scifi/)) 25. *Jurassic Park* by Michael Crichton ([Commentary](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jurassic-park-michael-crichton-tech-scifi-book/)) 26. *How To Kill An Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense* by Robin George Andrews 27. *Automatic Noodle* by Annalee Newitz ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/)) 28. *The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb* by Garrett M. Graff ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/atomic-bomb-garrett-graff-devil-reached-toward-the-sky-book-review/)) 29. *The Folded Sky* by Elizabeth Bear 30. *The Last Vigilant* by Mark A. Latham 31. *The Bewitching* by Silva Moreno-Garcia ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/betwitching-silvia-moreno-garcia-witches-horror-book-review/)) 32. *How To Love A Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World* by Ethan Tapper ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/forests-trees-nature-writing-christopher-brown-ethan-tapper-book-review/)) 33. *Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow* by Tom King and illustrated by Bilquis Evely 34. *Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West* by Aidan Moher ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/aidan-moher-fight-magic-items-jrpg-book-history-review/)) 35. *The Desert Talon* by Karin Lowachee 36. *Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont* by Jeffrey L. Amestoy ([Interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-clarence-darrow-book-interview/)) 37. *Katabasis* by R.F. Kuang([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rf-kuang-katabasis-fantasy-book-review/)) 38. *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones 39. *FotTrot* by Bill Amend 40. *The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America* by David Baron ([review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/life-on-mars-the-martians-david-baron-book-review/)) 41. *Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler* by Susana M. Morris ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/positive-obsession-octavia-butler-biography-book-review/)) 42. *Physics for Cats* by Tom Gauld 43. *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/king-sorrow-joe-hill-fantasy-horror-dragons-book-review/)) 44. *All That We See Or Seem* by Ken Liu 45. *The Shattering Peace* by John Scalzi ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-shattering-peace-scifi-book-review/)) 46. *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley 47. *There Is No Antimemetics Division* by qntm 48. *Hole In the Sky* by Daniel H. Wilson ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-h-wilson-hole-in-the-sky-first-contact-sci-fi-book-review/)) 49. *The Epic of Gilgamesh* 50. *The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/)) 51. *King of Ashes* by S.A. Cosby 52. *Orbital* by Samantha Harvey 53. *Vermont Female Farmers* by JuanCarlos Gonzalez 54. *Runes of Engagement* by Dave Klecha and Tobias Buckell 55. *The Greatest Sentence Ever Written* by Walter Isaacson 56. *Pass the Loot* by Bill Amend 57. *Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right* by Jordan S. Carroll 58. *Ensorcelled* by Eliot Peper With 2026 started, I've reset the clock. My goal is always the same: 52 books in as many weeks. You can follow along with my progress on social media, where I'll be once again tracking what I've been reading. What did you read last year, and what stood out for you? ### A watertight seal URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-spaulding-building-restoration/ Last updated: 2025-12-28T14:00:37.000Z Earlier this fall, the Vermont Historical Society embarked on a large project at the Vermont History Center in Barre: addressing a host of long-standing issues facing the historic Spaulding School Building in an effort to preserve not only our artifact and library collections, but the structure itself. This work will help ensure that the building will remain a safe home for Vermont's treasures for years to come. The Spaulding building has dominated Barre's skyline since it first opened in 1892\. Designed by St. Johnsbury architect [Lambert Packard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert%5FPackard?ref=andrewliptak.com), it was a testament to the state's commitment to education and designed to serve a community that was rapidly growing. Just over a decade later, the city expanded the building to accommodate the growing classes, and over the course of the 20th century, the school district eventually modernized its facilities, with its final class saying farewell in 1995\. In 2000, a new chapter emerged as VHS purchased and renovated the building, turning it into the [Vermont History Center](https://vermonthistory.org/history-center/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/11.18-spaulding-construction-6-1.jpg) An image of the Spaulding Building as the Vermont History Center. Image: Andrew Liptak 133 years is a long time for any structure, and following the flooding and heavy rains that came in 2023 and 2024, it became clear that the building would need to undergo a new round of work to ensure that it would serve the next century. Any homeowner will tell you that water is not something you want coming into a building, and that with enough time, there are plenty of ways for it to work its way in: a leak in the roof or basement can degrade wood and concrete and if left untreated, moisture is a good environment for mold to grow, which can be detrimental to the delicate historic items we're working to preserve in our storage facilities. While those spaces are climate controlled with an HVAC system and dehumidifiers, keeping water from entering the building in the first place is a crucial step. In September, workers from Hunger Valley Construction began work to start addressing the problem. They reglazed the windows on the front of the building – removing and replacing the existing cracked sealant around the glass panes to ensure a watertight seal, which would keep any water out, and any heat from leaking out. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/11.18%20Spaulding%20construction%201.jpg) The exposed foundation of the Spaulding Building, with waterproofing material affixed to the granite. Image: Andrew Liptak In November, workers from Bread Loaf Construction began a more extensive series of projects. During the heavy rains in 2023 and 2024, the underground French drains were inundated with water and sediment and broke. Water moves along the path of least resistance, and when it couldn't empty out into the city's drainage systems, it found another route: through the foundation and into the building. The first step was to get the groundwater away from the building, and to that end, they dug up the grounds and replaced the damaged drains. From there, the workers excavated the front and the back of the building to expose the granite foundation. They installed waterproof sheeting directly onto the stone, which creates a watertight barrier. After that, they covered the space with crushed stone and topsoil, which will direct any precipitation away from the building, into the drainage systems, and away from the building. Where that phase will keep water from entering the building from the ground, the next two phases of the project will ensure that water isn't coming in from above. The first will address the roof, with workers fixing damaged and degraded plywood, shingles, and drains, not only creating a better seal against rainwater and melting snow, but also allowing that water to flow off and away from the building. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/11.18%20Spaulding%20construction%202.jpg) A view of the timber interior behind the brick cladding at the Vermont History Center. Image: Andrew Liptak The final phase will address the building's exterior brickwork. While it looks as though it's made entirely of brick, the building is actually a timber-framed building that's cladded with brick: pull one of the thousands of red-orange bricks out, and you'll see the interior wooden structure. When they were first installed, those bricks kept out the elements, but Vermont's weather can be brutal. As the temperature swings up and down between the summer and winters seasons, the wind, rain, snow, ice and salt all take their toll on the bricks and the mortar holding them together. With enough time – 133 year's worth – the brick and mortar has steadily degraded, thanks to dripping water and the freeze and thaw of the ice. The building's custodians addressed the state of the exterior throughout its life – to a point. While the lower levels have been tended to over the years with repairs here and there, the upper levels were harder to reach. As VHS inspected the brickwork in the upper stories, it became clear that the weather had taken its toll on the bricks and mortar, leaving behind gaps and holes that allowed water to enter the building and fall down into the interior. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/11.18%20Spaulding%20construction%205.jpg) A look at the exterior brickwork on the upper levels of the Vermont History Center. Note the degraded mortar between the bricks at the top of the window arch. Image: Andrew Liptak In January, workers will address the gaps and erosion through a process called repointing: pulling out the degraded mortar and replacing it with new jointing material, while any bricks that have crumbled will be replaced. Once completed, the front facade of the building will be sealed against the elements. These projects aren't the end of the work that will need to be done: there are other sections of the walls, roof, bricks, and windows that will need to be addressed in time, but collectively, these three projects will go a long way towards ensuring that those affected sections of the basement, walls, and roof will keep out their share of Vermont's weather, allowing us to keep to our mission to preserving Vermont's history for generations to come. ### Mythological contacts URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-h-wilson-hole-in-the-sky-first-contact-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-12-27T20:15:43.000Z First contact is one of those genre tropes that's been around for almost as long as science fiction has been around, and it's often a mask for contemporary concerns. I've often viewed H.G. Wells' *War of the Worlds* as a good litmus test for these types of stories: his home country of England can easily stand in as the alien invaders for peoples across the world. In the years since, we've seen no shortage of similar stories about aliens coming to Earth for various purposes, sometimes to warn us of the consequences of our more violent tendencies (as in *The Day the Earth Stood Still*) as conquerors (*Battle: Los Angeles, Independence Day,* James S.A. Corey's *The Mercy of Gods,* or Marko Kloos's *Frontlines* series), assimilators (*Childhood's End*), researchers (*Close Encounters of the Third Kind*), unfortunate encounters (*District 9* or *The Thing*), or just didn't even notice us as they passed through (*Roadside Picnic*). It's a well-trod space, and as such, it's sometimes hard to break through with a new take on it: how many times can you blow up a landmark or dislodge troops without a viewer or reader realizing that they've seen this before? Daniel H. Wilson's new novel [*Hole in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385551113?ref=andrewliptak.com) does just that, not only by spreading out the action across a handful of characters, but also by putting an indigenous spin on it. The result is character-driven and cinematic technothriller that gripped me to the end. Wilson opens with an anonymous engineer who stumbled upon a weird phenomenon with a throwaway project generating poetry that ends up predicting future events and incidences. It's quickly cooped by the military, who lock this hapless guy ("the man downstairs") and begin to act on the things that his algorithm is predicting. 12 years later, it yields its most chilling prediction to date: "An eye opens in the deep": we've caught something's attention, and it's now looking our way. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. From there, we're off to the races as the world begins to realize that something is coming our way. We follow Gavin Clark, a member of the military's Emerging Weapons Tech­nology Group, as he jets around the world to examine Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (the more serious rebrand of the classic UFO) sightings, noting an uptick that has him concerned. Meanwhile, NASA mathematician Mikayla Johnson, who wears a set of AR glasses, detects that the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have just passed *something* in the depths of space and when she decodes the data, she finds a distressing message: horrifying screams. And over in Oklahoma, we find Cherokee oil worker Jim Hardgray, who's just reunited with his estranged daughter Tawny. These three characters all see that something strange is happening: Gavin's been studying and preparing for otherworldly threats for his whole career; Jim and Tawny begin having visions connected to their indigenous heritage, while Mikayla is more than ready for first contact: she has trouble connecting with people and feels as though she's ready to leave this world. They're all coming to terms with this entity in their own way – wonder, caution, excitement – as it's zeroing in for a landing at Oklahoma's [Spiro Mound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro%5FMounds?ref=andrewliptak.com) complex, the remains of a prehistoric Native American culture that dates back millennia. This is where the novel really shines: Wilson melds his alien encounter with elements of Cherokee cosmology – the Pleiades cluster holds special significance – imagining that those mythologies have real, extraterrestrial significance. It's an apt combination, and Wilson has spoken in interviews about how these sorts of invasion stories take on a particular grim significance through an indigenous lens: you don't have to do much to reimagine the the post-Columbian era of North America as malevolent first contact story. As this mysterious object reaches the Spiro Mound and our characters come up close and personal with what it's brought, we see just how scary this sort of contact can go. In Wilson's hands, we're also examining our own assumptions about the nature of intelligence and civilization, of science and mythos, and how these seemingly different things could really just be one and the same: the ancient stories that Jim's ancestors were passing down turn out to be less fictional than anyone could have imagined. It's how we approach the unknowns of the world and the way our assumptions shape our reality that guide how our characters – and readers – approach this world-changing event. It's this approach, blending day science and the deeper cosmology and storytelling that elevates this novel in some unexpected ways, yielding a gripping and thoughtful view of our place in the cosmos. ### Storytelling machine URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/split-fiction-video-game-sci-fi-review-hazelight/ Last updated: 2025-12-22T14:55:37.000Z Imagine if you will: you're a writer who's been working for years grinding away with story after story with little success. You're gearing up to find a publisher for your first novel and you get the call from a mysterious startup tech company to test out a newly-developed machine, with a promise of payment and the hope that it will lead to the big break that you've been looking for. That's the premise that kicks off the story in Hazelight Studios' latest video game, *Split Fiction*. Tech company Rader Publishing invites a handful of aspiring authors, including Mio Hudson (voiced by Kaja Chan) and Zoe Foster (Elsie Bennett) to test its flagship invention: a machine that allows users to experience their stories as though they were in them, promising to bring about a revolution in storytelling and publishing. It's a scenario that doesn't actually feel that far from reality: in the last couple of decades, we've seen the introduction and proliferation of eBooks, and there's been and no shortage of tech companies looking to disrupt publishing through [serialized](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-serialized-fiction-kindle-vella-publishing-experiment/) [storytelling](https://www.andrewliptak.com/serial-box-audio-publishing-science-fiction-roundup/) and microstories on social media platforms, not to mention new device categories such as Apple's Vision Pro or Meta's Quest devices, and the entire question about how AI will figure into all of this. These new technologies and delivery platforms have enabled plenty of enterprising authors to find new ways to bring their stories to their audiences. Zoe (a fantasy author) is excited and optimistic about the possibilities that the company offers, while Mio (who writes science fiction) is cynical and reserved. They and a handful of other authors are gathered to hear a presentation and demonstration by the company's founder and CEO J.D. Rader. The authors are stuck into a bubble that allows them to interface with the machine, and when Mio tries to back out of the experiment, she and Rader get into a fight, which ultimately leads to Mio getting stuck inside of Zoe's bubble. It starts off simply: Zoe and Mio find themselves trapped in one another's fictional worlds, first in one of Mio's science fiction worlds, then into one of Zoe's fantasy ones. The game puts you through a ton of dynamic levels: running through streets, across platforms, swimming through pipes, or flying through the air. As we run through the levels, the two characters are chattering back and forth about their stories, where they came from, muse about the nature of the genres that they're attracted to and why they're driven to to write down their stories. The game's developers aren't afraid to get weird, too: one side-quest takes you into one of Zoe's earliest stories, where you start off playing as happy, farting pigs on a farm, only to get turned into hot dogs that you have to grill to perfection. Another turns you into sugary treats that have to navigate a hazardous candy land before fighting off a sadistic dentist. Others are a little more conventional: exploring fantasy villages or playing in cyberpunk-inspired battle arenas, dodging a maniacal robot that after you for unpaid parking tickets. What really grabbed my attention was the overarching story and stakes from the real world as Rader isn't willing to turn off the machine. As the game goes on, we find that he'd rather hoover up their ideas for IP for his own purposes, the safety of the players trapped inside be damned. As Zoe and Mio quickly realize this, they're forced to run through their stories and find system glitches that'll allow them to evade Rader and find a way to destabilize the machine to escape back into the real world. This is something that I feel like I see everywhere: an intense commodification of popular culture: beloved books become big-budget adaptations, and studios become repositories for IP that they can endlessly mine and remix into new products. Rader's company is the beneficiary of entities like Disney, EA, Microsoft, Netflix, Paramount, and many others, not as a creative endeavor established to entertain, but to serve stockholders and squeeze out every last time from the creativity of artist and writers. It's a warning – in product form, mind – of the state of the creative field and how difficult it is for creators to really break through to their audiences. There's a term for it: [Enshittification](https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification?ref=andrewliptak.com), coined by Cory Doctorow, which broadly describes the decline in quality as platforms and institutions mature, starting with high-quality products or features, but which eventually erode as they focus on profits and serving an ever-widening range of customers. You see it everywhere, from platforms like Facebook and Twitter to streaming services like Prime Video or Netflix and companies like Amazon. Rader's company has essentially jumped the line, looking to bypass the creative stage and just jump right to a pool of intellectual property that he can monetize, if only he can get those blasted kids out of his machine. It's a nice encapsulation of all of these things that I'm really fascinated by: not only is it fun to see some writers put first and forefront into their own stories, but it's a story that I think plenty of writers can see themselves in: facing a world with enormous uncertainty with where we'll end up. Will people enjoy our stories, if we can break through and get them before them? Or are we writing for audiences that are slowly becoming used to the enshittified slop that's easier to produce and distribute? Hopefully, the world that Rader envisions for his company isn't the one that we'll be living in – all the more reason to keep telling new and interesting stories, even if we have to break the machine and figure out different ways to go about doing it. ### Origin stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/alix-harrow-the-everlasting-fantasy-time-travel-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-12-17T21:00:04.000Z Something that I like to tell students about history is that it's a field that's all about storytelling. As historians, we're often tasked with interpreting the past based on whatever sources we can find – everything from contemporaneous sources such as letters, diary entries or other relevant documents, to second-hand accounts and memories, to to physical evidence such as archeological findings or artifacts from a person's life or notable event. But what if you could go back in time to study a person or event? Time travel is one of those tropes that brings out endless thought experiments about what someone might find, with books such as Connie Willis's *Oxford Time Travel* series or Michael Crichton's *Timeline* seeing historians jetting back to the past to try and see for themselves how things played out. In her latest novel, [*The Everlasting*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799081?ref=andrewliptak.com), Alix E. Harrow puts a slightly different spin on studying the past: what if you could go back to the origins of one's nation and nudge the story a bit to prop up a legendary heroine whose tragic death marked the starting point? And what happens when the historian you send back in time ends up falling in love with said heroine? The result is a powerful book that tackles the idea of a nation's founding and the narratives that lie at the center of its consciousness. It's an exploration of the power that storytelling holds for one's nation, and the pitfalls that occur when these narratives are weaponized. The nation of Dominion was founded centuries ago, thanks to a brave orphaned girl named Una who takes up a sword from a yew tree and embarks on a series of quests in the service of Queen Yvanne before she's betrayed and murdered by a rival knight. Fast forward a number of centuries and Dominion is still around: it's become a powerful nation that's been waging a series of offensive wars against its neighbors, in which one patriotic soldier, Owen Mallory, fought before entering academia as a historian. He's the odd one out from his peers. He's mixed-race, the product of what he believes was a short-lived romance between his father on campaign and a local in a war zone, and while he's a steadfast believer in Dominion, they're political radicals, critical of the wars that the country is waging and the tyrannical direction it's headed. When a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, he discovers that it's an impossible manuscript: a first-hand account of the story of Una. Shortly after its arrival, he's summoned to the office of Dominion's Minister of War, Vivian Rolfe, who tells him that it was a loyalty test that he passed. His task isn't to translate the book, but to write it. He soon finds himself face to face deep in the past with this legendary figure. Una Everlasting has been tasked with one final quest to recover a grail from the country's last dragon, and after a bit of convincing, he accompanies her, learning about the stories that have sprung up around her at the time, and following in her literal footsteps to see how this national origin story actually played out. What he finds isn't exactly what he expected: > "They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind-burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows. Your hair was not the sulfuric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone. A thick welt of scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear." Myths are an interesting thing: they're stories that smooth out the past for those in the present, sanding down what once might have been true into a useful tool. In college, I had one influential professor who pointed out that the men who participated in the Boston Tea Party and who were writing pamphlets and agitating for change weren't just ordinary folks who were frustrated – they were political radicals, with views far outside of the norm at the time. They were complicated figures who lived rich human lives, and who would probably not recognize the lionized versions we imagined them to be. This is what Owen discovers when he's abruptly shunted back in time: Una isn't the beautiful, noble figure he had grown up learning about. She was complicated, exhausted, and had lived an incredibly difficult life up to that point. The quests and missions that she had undertaken fell far short of the ones that had been written into legend. In one notable passage, she muses that the queen had sent her off to fight dragons not because they were horrific, evil beasts – indeed, Harrow depicts them as rather pathetic creatures – but because they were a useful as a common threat that the queen could rally her people behind. Harrow has written the *The Everlasting* at an interesting time: in 2026, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the moment of origin for the nation. It, and the American Revolution which surrounded it, have become almost mythic in statue in the minds of the American public. It's a rousing origin story: a band of idealistic figures stand up and defend themselves and their countrymen against the malevolent British Empire, ultimately earning their independence as their own nation, eventually becoming the prosperous nation that affords its citizens with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness today. Any student of history will point out that as origin stories go, the truth is far more complicated and nuanced: the founding fathers were amongst the nation's wealthiest individuals (in no small part because they were slaveowners), that the buildup to revolution wasn't quite as clear-cut as it appears looking backwards, and that the very idea of rising up against Great Britain was a divisive and controversial act that wasn't universally shared amongst the American colonists. But origin stories are powerful things, and you don't have to look far for people who're downright hostile to any ideas that run counter to the mythologies that we internalized at school: just look at the right-wing freakout over the way Ken Burns presented the conflict in his recent series *The American Revolution*, or [to online spaces where any type of history is being discussed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/united-states-vermont-history-ideology-misinformation/). As a historian, Owen is provided an opportunity of a lifetime: set the record straight by going back and time to try and find the true story of Una Everlasting, by observing her life and actions and documenting them. But historic truth and building a national figurehead are two very different things, especially when it comes to governance and politics. In an ideal world, these two things will overlap, but in Dominion, Vivian Rolfe has other plans. It takes some time and distance for Owen to recognize the dire state of his adopted homeland: it's on its way to becoming a fascist state, and when he meets Rolfe for the first time, she talks about her desire to lock up protesters and that they've reached a crossroads: > "Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike– and I fear we've grown weak." The cause, she points out, is more dissent in the country, ewer people in churches and young people who've lost their direction. "We've forgotten– as a nation, as a people – who we are." Rolfe's motives aren't out of a desire to construct or unearth a historical record; but to weave a new one, sending a storyteller back in time to nudge the narrative in ways that are favorable towards the creation of the state that she so desperately wants to see. As a trope, time travel offers endless opportunities for thought experiments: what is the impact if you change something big (or innocuous) in the past? Ray Bradbury's short story "The Sound of Thunder" best described such a ripple effect when a time traveler accidentally steps on a butterfly, ultimately changing his future in an unexpected way. While plenty of time traveling stories have dealt with the unintended consequences, and where there's accidents, there can also be intention, as people realize that they can manipulate the past towards their own ends, as in Annalee Newitz's [*The Future of Another Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392114?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which a woman finds herself fighting against people looking to shape the past to control the lives of women in the present. Harrow's Rolfe doesn't quite have those specific goals in mind, but the world that she wants to establish is straight from the fascist 101 playbook. She recognizes that the stories we tell about ourselves are critical to controlling one's perceptions of the past, and by tinkering with the underlying source material, one can cement an ideology that's so ingrained in one's culture and history that it'll be all but impossible to mount any sort of opposition or counternarrative. This is why Harrow's book strikes such a chord. We're living in a time when the country is broadly cracking down on education and history, and where the president [speaks openly about his desire to reshape](https://www.npr.org/2025/08/20/nx-s1-5508134/trump-museums-smithsonian-woke-law?ref=andrewliptak.com) how museums and historical organizations present the past to the American people. Tools and actions such as widespread book banning, the [organized harassment of academics](https://cssh.northeastern.edu/for-mass-professors-on-charlie-kirks-watch-list-his-free-speech-legacy-rings-false/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and other academic challenges seek to reinforce a mythological view of the past, one where our founders were above reproach, and where the country's real and persistent problems are swept under the rug, leaving its citizens festering in systemic inequalities. Fortunately for Dominion, Owen doesn't remain a spineless academic for long, and as he travels back to the past over and over, he continually recognizes that the vision that Rolfe seeks to establish for the country is out of step with reality, even with the tweaks to the timeline that he's been helping to establish. The truth is often complicated, immutable, and stubborn: it's borne out of the character and actions of the people who make it, and even when we try and mold it to our liking. As Owen and Una fall in love over and over again, its these qualities and character that resists being tampered with, ultimately delivering a better world far in the future. Hopefully, our own timeline and understanding of the past will be just as stubborn. ### The art of desert warfare URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-the-storyboards-denis-villeneuve-concept-art-kickstarter/ Last updated: 2025-12-17T14:40:46.000Z I love Denis Villeneuve's two *Dune* films*.* I not only found them to be a solid adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, but they're gorgeous to behold, from sweeping shots of Arrakis's deserts to the elegant and alien designs of the spaceships, it's clear that he and his team have put a lot of effort into designing the world in which they've set their films. Already, we've had some good looks into how they've done this: [*The Art and Soul of Dune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647221553?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886630718?ref=andrewliptak.com) each provides some outstanding insights into each film's production and design, while [*Dune Part One: The Photography*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647228989?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Dune Part Two: The Photography*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337401515?ref=andrewliptak.com)gives us a glimpse into the filming for each installment. Now, there's another book that's coming that'll give us even more insights into how the film came together: *Dune: The Storyboards - Imagining the Dune Movies*, [which is now funding on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/legendarycomics/dune-storyboards-art-book/?ref=andrewliptak.com). This art book pulls together the concept art from not only the first two *Dune* films, but the upcoming adaptation of *Dune: Messiah. The art comes from* artist [Sam Hudecki](https://www.instagram.com/samhudecki/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com), and it'll be written by Simon Ward, who's written some other excellent books about film, including one of my favorites, [*Making Moon: A British Sci-Fi Cult Classic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789091007?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This is a Kickstarter, so there are a bunch of tiers with different rewards. The base is a digital edition for $39, which includes a PDF of the final product, while $75 will get you the hardcover and digital editions. After that, there's a retailer tier (5 copies for $188) and a limited portfolio edition at $199, which comes as a deluxe cloth-bound hardcover, a special case, signed cards, and some other perks. The project is currently being funded on Kickstarter, and it's blown past its initial $25,000 funding goal. Here's the kicker: it won't be released until 2027, after *Dune: Part Three* comes out – tentatively December 18th, 2026\. [](https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Niko+Tavernise&ref=andrewliptak.com)[ ](https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Chiabella+James+&ref=andrewliptak.com) I'm eager to take a look at this, because concept art is such a fascinating thing to look at: it's a window into a film's creative process, bridging the gap between the words on the page and the final product that you see on the screen. It should give us a good idea of how Villeneuve set about translating Herbert's epic novel into the films that we eventually got. ### Stories for the masses URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mass-market-paperback-novels-publishing-books/ Last updated: 2025-12-15T17:31:49.000Z I was never the biggest fan of the mass market paperback as a book format. I always felt that the spines creased a little too easily and that they'd fall apart after too many re-reads. I tended to gravitate towards the larger trade paperbacks and hardcovers when I started buying books: they were always a little more comfortable for me to read. That said, when I really started getting into science fiction and fantasy as a teenager, it was the mass markets books that I stockpiled. I snagged new Star Wars novels as they came out – often debuting directly as mass market paperbacks, and one of my favorite bookstores was the long-since-shuttered Yankee Paperback Exchange in Montpelier, a cramped little store whose shelves were loaded down with them, and as a bookseller at Walden Books, we swapped out plenty of them with newer one every week, tearing off the cover and tossing them into the dumpster. That was the appeal of the format: a hand-sized book that was easy to stash in a purse or pocket, all for around $5.99\. After decades, the format is apparently coming to an end: *Publishers Weekly* [reports](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99293-last-call-for-mass-market-paperbacks.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that as sales have plunged, the few remaining key distributors will no longer support them. It’s a loss for the reading public, because it means that it’ll be even harder for publishers to justify publishing new titles, and for authors to make a living. --- As a format, the paperback book was an enormous step forward for the advancement of literacy and the publishing industry in the 20th century. For centuries, books had been handcrafted, luxury items, requiring careful work to sew a binding. Writing in[*The Book: A Cover-to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324086352?ref=andrewliptak.com), Keith Houston notes that it was an innocuous patent filed by bookbinder William Hancock that changed everything: ”over the course of a day or two, a series of coats of ’caoutchouc,’ or rubber, dissolved in a solution of turpentine, were painted over the spine so they seeped into the microscopic crevices between pages and bound the whole thing together as they dried. The spine was finished with a strip of cloth stuck to the final coat of caoutchouc and the completed text block was pasted into a separate cover, or ‘case’ by its endpapers.” The paperback was born. But it’s not just the technology that led to this new style’s popularity: it was the work of publishers, such as George Routledge and later publisher Albatross Books, and Penguin Book’s Allen Lane, who popularized the format, recognizing that a cheap book would be appealing to travelers and commuters to pass the time while riding to and from work or other travels. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. In [*The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781554810741?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* Solveig C. Robinson notes that the paperback’s key selling point — its low price — meant that it had a wide appeal beyond the bookstore: Unlike traditional hardcover books, which continued to be sold mainly through bookstores, the new paperback imprints were offered in a wider range of venues, from rail stations to drug stores and grocery stores. Relatively inexpensive, the ship, and often issued and series, paperbacks quickly took their place on the store shelves besides magazines.” In the post-WWII era of mass-consumption, this widespread availability helped build the publishing industry we know today: publishers and imprints dedicated to specific genres such as crime, science fiction, romance, and westerns, sprang up to bring stories to readers across the United States, fueling fandoms and providing authors with enough income to etch out a career as a full time writer. This world took a hit in the 1970s when a key magazine distributor collapsed, taking with it access to those key store shelves from which so many people could find a cheap book. Robinson notes that in the aftermath, “some publishers decided to make a virtue of the fact that trade paperbacks featured the same size text but at a lower price than hardcover books, and they began to market these books as ‘quality’ paperbacks.” In [*Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780452297722?ref=andrewliptak.com), John B. Thompson dug into this point quoting an executive from the time: “The hardcover side was snobby, literary, pretentious, tweedy— all things that you would expect from the \[1960s\]. And the paperback business was sort of second class – we got the books a year later, we got no credit for the words, we were all about marketing, packaging, distributing, and selling books… While the paperback business was dependent on the hardcover business for product, the hardcover houses depended heavily on royalty income from paperback sales to run their businesses.” Fast forward to the 2000s, and mass market paperback sales continued to drop. The elimination of those key sales channels, the rise of new formats like eBooks and audiobooks, and the continued focus on hardcovers and trade paperbacks took their toll. It’s spelled real problems for authors: where they might before be able to depend on an initial hardcover release and subsequent mass market paperback release a year later— the hardcover sales fueled by libraries and dedicated readers and the greater paperback sales from more casual readers — the shrinking of the category has meant that those back-list sales were no longer as reliable. eBooks have taken up some of the slack, but it isn’t a perfect replacement. And as hardcover and trade paperback book costs have risen — now often in the $30-$45 range — the economic pressure for an author’s book to succeed is higher than ever. There’s a simple truth here that I feel the larger publishing industry has forgotten: if you make cheap books, you will bring in more readers. This is the real tragedy that the loss of the mass market paperbacks from store shelves means for the reading public: there are fewer opportunities to buy stories from new authors, and fewer places for people to encounter books in their everyday lives. Grocery stores will still sometimes stock some of the biggest titles — your John Grishams, James Pattersons, and Nora Roberts — but those spaces have continued to shrink, while the bookstores you find at airports, malls, and shopping centers largely devote all of their space to the more expensive trade paperbacks and hardcovers. eBooks can be cheaper, but they’re now a product with considerable friction to use: you need a smartphone or dedicated eBook reader, which are far more than an impulse buy at your local shop. All of this means a more challenging environment for authors, publishers, and readers, and it means that we’ll see fewer opportunities for authors to publish, for new voices to thrive, and for readers to be enriched. I have a sneaking feeling that there’s a reason why the larger Little Free Library movement has taken off, and why you see plenty used books piling up at library sales, thrift and discount stores, and other places: they’re places for people to find books cheaply, readers who’ve thrown up their hands at the costs that they see at indie and chain bookstores, and who’re essentially removing themselves from the marketplace. None of this, I feel, is healthy for the publishing industry as a whole: companies need to take a much larger and longer view of the state of reading culture is, and find ways to support it and the authors they publish. Otherwise, I fear that we’ll increasingly find ourselves in a world where only a small and select cohort make their way to bookstore shelves: the ones who’ve [gotten lucky with a debut novel](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) or [a trend](https://www.andrewliptak.com/romantasy-science-fiction-fantasy-books-publishing-sales/), the proven sellers who’ve dominated the field for decades, or the ones with connections and clout who’re already famous in other places. None of that is great for a diverse and thriving field, and I hope that this latest development isn’t the latest sign of a mass extinction event in the field. ### Return of the Mill Street Little Free Library URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/little-free-library-vermont-books/ Last updated: 2025-12-10T16:01:52.000Z After two years out of action, I've finally rebuilt and installed a Little Free Library at my home. This has been a long time coming: something delayed by life and depression and all the other things that make up life, and it's nice to finally have it back in action. I'd long wanted to have a Little Free Library on my street, and early in the Covid pandemic, [I decided it was as good a time as any to build one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-clone-wars-final-season-review/). I gathered up scraps of everything I needed around the house: random pieces of wood, paint, hardware from old cabinets, and put it together. I think the only thing that I ended up purchasing was the plexiglass for the door and the name plate. It served its time well, and it turned out to be an excellent way to get rid of ARCs and other books that I needed to get out of the house. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/image-6.png) Image: Andrew Liptak But in July 2023, ants infiltrated the post: I'd picked wood that hadn't been treated, so it didn't last long in the ground. I pulled it up to the top of my driveway, thinking that I'd get to it in due time. Due time turned out to be just over two years. 2023 was a bad fall for me, and I had zero motivation for a project like this. I should have brought it in, but it ended up sitting out in the weather for a while, and as a result, the roof and shingles rotted off, and I was beginning to think that I'd need to start over, which didn't motivate me to get it done. After months sitting at the top of my driveway, and while working on some other stuff around the back yard, I realized that I was tired of looking at and unscrewed the rotted out post, and finally took stock of whether or not it was salvageable. It was in rough shape: I'd leaned it up so that the door was facing up, so water had gotten into the box itself, as well as the plywood I'd used for the roof. I'd cut up a piece of siding to make shingles, and most of those had come off, the paint was peeling in places, but the rest of the box seemed okay. So, I set about with a scraper and got off as much paint as I could with some leftover stripper. The roof was a total loss, and I was afraid that the bottom was as well, but the rest was still in okay shape, with a bit of work. I'm loathe to spend money on something like this, especially when what I needed was so small: surely there'd be some scrap plywood or something out in the community, and as it turned out, my brother knew of some pieces that were headed to the dumpster on a construction site that he was working at. He grabbed them for me, and I got to work. The paint was the hardest part: two years of water and elements had battered it, but it was still a paint to take off: I used what paint stripper I had, and ended up buying a used power sander and some heavy grit sandpaper to take the rest of it off. The roof came off and I replaced it with the new wood (as it turned out, the bottom didn't need to be replaced), and screwed it into place. I consulted with my brother again – [he runs a house painting company](https://www.instagram.com/madriverpainting/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) – and he ended up giving me a high-grade primer and exterior paint that he swore by that was left over from a job, Over the next couple of days, I repainted the entire thing, reinstalled the door, plexiglass, and new hardware, and it was ready to go – except for a post. Weirdly, it was a post that held me up for so long: I didn't have anything around the house, and I hadn't really found anything suitable casually looking around. My family came to the rescue again: my dad happened to have a steel post that once held a satellite dish that he was getting rid of, and with a bit of work with a sander and drill, it did the trick. I was now running up against the clock: I was headed down to Pennsylvania for the Thanksgiving holiday early the next morning, and we were expecting snow in the near future. I ended up coming home from work, finished installing the flange to attach the box, and with night falling, I dug out a hole next to my driveway and set about getting it secured in the ground. After some more work with a drill and screws, I had it secured and loaded up with books. With one last pass with some spray paint on the post, it was open for business. I updated the record online with a new image and to get it back on the map, and by the time I'd gotten back from Thanksgiving, it was clear that there were already people using it: some of the books I'd placed in there were gone and replaced with some new titles. It's gratifying to see: I get a ton of review copies for my work on this newsletter, and I'm happy to have an outlet that lets me get them to people who'll check them out and enjoy them. This whole process reminded me of why these little boxes are so appealing. It's not (just) the whimsical and high-minded mindset about giving away free books and so on: it's that they're tangible reminders of community that you might not see otherwise. People share and take books, sometimes just to get rid of them, sometimes, because a particular title catches their eye, sometimes to resell, and sometimes because they want to make sure that a book has a future beyond a dumpster. But there's also the enthusiasm behind them: my neighbors were happy to see that it was back, while my family were more than happy to donate some of the materials that were needed to get it fixed up. When I encounter one, I always take a moment to check it out and see what it holds: not just to see if there's a book that I'd like to read, but to see what the people around me are reading. They're like tiny windows into the character of a community, from their construction to their contents, and I'm looking forward to seeing what folks will take out of mine in the months and years ahead. ### Table of Contents December 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-december-2025/ Last updated: 2026-01-07T16:13:08.000Z December is upon us, and that means one final batch of short stories from across the world of SF/F publishing. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-november-2025/), and prior installments of this series [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 151, October-December) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Cassandra and the Changeling" by R.J. Sterling (12/09/25) - "Involuntary Self" by Jim Horlock (12/11/25) - "Horse and Rider" by Christine Beres (12/16/25) ### Nonfiction - "More than Lighting: Speculative Noir" by Premee Mohamed (12/18/25) - Interview with Artist Natasa Illincic by Bradley Powers (12/04/25) --- ## [*Augur Magazine*](https://augursociety.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 8.3) Subscribe [here](https://augursociety.org/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Natural Desire](https://augursociety.org/natural-desire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelley Tai - "Observer Effect" by Morgan Cross - "Leave Your Skins by the Shore" by Natasha King - "Flame Weeding" by Colleen Coco Collins - "[Rocky Mountain Gothic](https://augursociety.org/rocky-mountain-gothic/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ev Datsyk - "Bonds of the Forest" by Ally R Colthoff - "Blueberry" by Jade Riordan - "On Fields of Purple Grass" by Ian Li - "Tapetum Lucidum" by U.M. Agoawike - "The Great Divide" by Meryem Yildiz - "[Chlorophilia](https://augursociety.org/chlorophilia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 447, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[A Good Brother](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-good-brother/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Wilkins - "[Vanya and the Dog Witch](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/vanya-and-the-dog-witch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Walter J. Wiese --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(Issue 231, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Tomorrow. Today](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ester%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.T. Ester - "[Imperfect Simulations](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jin%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michelle Z. Jin - "[The Cold Burns](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wilkins%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Wilkins - "[The Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/samsa%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ferenc Samsa - "[Between Here and Everywhere](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/reed%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Robert Reed - "[This Sepulchral Aegis](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/gillham%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rob Gillham - "[Home Grown](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vigneron%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Madeleine Vigneron ### Nonfiction - [Decoding Animal (and Alien?) Language](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dewinter%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gunnar De Winter - [Allegory and Worldbuilding: A Conversation with Simon Stålenhag](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/stalenhag%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Climate, Hope, and the Global Community: A Conversation with Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/finn-eschrich%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: The End of the Year](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F12%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 127, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Most Likely To . . . (Class of 1997)](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/most-likely-toclass-of-1997/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byA.C. Wise - "[Lustre Mining](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/lustre-mining/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byEliza Chan - "[Beneath the Duwak Tree](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/beneath-the-duwak-tree/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byJorja Osha - "[Measurements Expressed as Units of Separation](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/measurements-expressed-as-units-of-separation/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byM. L. Krishnan --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (Issue 47, December 2025) ### Fiction - "Bite" by David Sheskin - "A New Captain" by Griffith Pound - "Horror Business" by Jeff Seeman - "The Lost Sprites" by Mikel J. Wisler - "Every Blade Of Grass" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Flight 23" by Alec Wallin - "Riding Off Into A Sun That Does Not Set" by Cy Hill - "The Thing In Nacho Cave" by Anthony Neil Smith - "Finally, Doomsday!" by Bendix Vagle - "Watchdog" by Jaryd Porter --- ## [*Fantasy Magazine*](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 99, Winter 2025) ### Fiction - "More Than A Blank Parenthesis Equals God’s Forgetfulness" by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (poetry; online 12/5) - "The Matriarchs" by Malena Salazar Maciá (flash; online 12/12) - "A Cup of Forgetting" by Eleanor Glewwe (short story; online 12/19) - "Grove of Jealous Lovers" by Alex Jennings (poetry; online 12/19) - "When You Hit The Poison Ivy Thicket, You’ve Gone Too Far" by Cory Farrenkopf (flash; online 12/26) - Ichthyosis" by M. L. Krishnan (short story; online 1/2) ### Nonfiction - Unlikely Friends on a Quest: A Conversation with Kemi Ashing-Giwa" by Arley Sorg (interview; online 12/5) - Collective Action: A Conversation with Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older" by Arley Sorg (interview; online 12/12) - Marked for Destruction: A Conversation with Moniquill Blackgoose" by Arley Sorg (interview; online 12/26) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 147, December 2025) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Homonyms” by Laurence Klavan - “Ornithogonia, or Five Featherings” by M. R. Robinson - “Shedding the Weight” by Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu - “Reflexive Benevolence Imperative” by Matt Dovey - “Growing House” by Madison Ellingsworth, and - “Small Prayers for the God of Sow Thistle Hill” by Kate Francia --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (December 2025) ### Fiction - "[Bonum Certamen](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-bonum-certamen-martinez/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrés Martinez ### Nonfiction - [Can an AI Manage the “Beautiful Game](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/ai-alignment-sport-olukotun/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”? by Deji Bryce Olukotun --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 187, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Reality Check](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/reality-check/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nancy Kress (12/4) - "[You Always Told Her You’d Give Her the World](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/you-always-told-her-youd-give-her-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden (12/4) - "[Us, in Another Universe](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/us-in-another-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.C. Wise (12/11) - "[Crickets in Lost Light](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/crickets-in-lost-light/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jonathan Olfert (12/11) - "[The Hub Living Among the Stars](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-hub-living-among-the-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (12/18) - "[HagioClass](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/hagioclass/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by José Pablo Iriarte (12/18) - "[The Space Between Us](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-space-between-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P.A. Cornell (12/25) - "[Memories of the MindMine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/memories-of-the-mindmine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Marino (12/25) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: December 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-december-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Joseph Adams (12/4) - [Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-nancy-kress-7/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Delia Cullity (12/4) - [Book Review: *Sinister Societies: Six Novellas of Secrets and Horrors* edited by Linda Hartley](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-sinister-societies-six-novellas-of-secrets-and-horrors-edited-by-linda-hartley/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Melissa A Watkins (12/4) - [Author Spotlight: Jonathan Olfert](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-jonathan-olfert-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) byErik Grove (12/11) - [Book Review: *The Trident and The Pearl* by Sarah K.L. Wilson](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-trident-and-the-pearl-by-sarak-kl-wilson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (12/11) - [Author Spotlight: Oyedotun Damilola Muees](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-oyedotun-damilola-muees-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robin Jeffrey (12/18) - [Book Review: *These Bodies Ain’t Broken* edited by Madeline Dyer](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-these-bodies-aint-broken-edited-by-madeline-dyer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (12/18) - [Author Spotlight: David Marino](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-david-marino/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (12/25) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (Issue 064, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Fiction - "All Creatures" by Morgan Lockhart - "Trespassers" by Mina Ramirez - "Secrets of the Goblin Market" by Valerie Hunter - "Sunk Cost Fallacy" by M.J. Jones - "Magical Thinking" by J Amanda Ferry - "What Should We Do With the Body?" by Amelia Weissman - "Bussola" by Teresa Koeppel - "Vale of the Firefae" by Jalyn Renae Fiske - "The Museum of Lost Sound" by Vikki Stea - "Seedpod" by Ellen Parent - "Diving into the Wreck" by Sierra Bibi - "Gig Economy" by Ali MacLeod - "Winter Finds" by Heather D. Norton - "Attach" by Mikhaela Woodward - "The Smoldering Kittens in Her Wake" by Jo Weir - "Big Sister" by Jang Ami , translated by Joheun Lee - "The Weather Girl" by Summer Jewel Keown - "Bumblecat" by Johanna Ivy Levene --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 159, December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Short History of a Long-Forgotten, Ill-Fated Telenovela](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-short-history-of-a-long-forgotten-ill-fated-telenovela/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Dante Luiz - "[Shahmeran](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shahmeran/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Leyla Hamedi (12/17) - "[Blacula](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/blacula/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P.C. Verrone (12/24) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: December 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-december-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner - [Author Spotlight: Dante Luiz](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-dante-luiz/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm - [Review: *When the Baby Sleeps*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/review-when-the-baby-sleeps/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Lyndsie Manusos (12/10) - [The H Word: Double Dog Dare You](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word/the-h-word-double-dog-dare-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kristina Ten (12/10) - [Author Spotlight: Leyla Hamedi](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-leyla-hamedi-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (12/17) - [Media & Book Review: December 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/media-book-review-december-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam-Troy Castro (12/24) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(December 2025) ### Fiction - "[All That Means or Mourns](https://reactormag.com/all-that-means-or-mourns-ruthanna-emrys/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ruthanna Emrys --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 30, December 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Loving the Alien is the Easiest Thing in the World](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/loving-the-alien-is-the-easiest-thing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elijah J. Mears - "[Your Mom, The Space Sailor](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/your-mom-the-space-sailor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pam Yve Simon --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (December 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[I Wish You Died Laughing](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/i-wish-you-died-laughing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lio Abendan - "[Morning Shed](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/morning-shed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Namita Krishnamurthy](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/namita-krishnamurthy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Bloodless](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/bloodless/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Emily Woodworth](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/emily-woodworth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Poetry - "[Excerpt From the Memoirs of a Saint](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/excerpt-from-the-memoirs-of-a-saint/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jenna Le - "[Thalassophile After Visiting Exoplanet TOI 733 b](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/thalassophile-after-visiting-exoplanet-toi-733-b/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Colleen S. Harris - "[The World To Come](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-world-to-come/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Jennifer Hudak](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/jennifer-hudak/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[O ASHY WINGS STILL FLUTTERING](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/o-ashy-wings-still-fluttering/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Joemario Umana](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/50699-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[The ghosts of me are in your machine](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-ghosts-of-me-are-in-your-machine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [R.B. Lemberg](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/rb-lemberg/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Skull-God — A Broadcast from the Trenches](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/skull-god-a-broadcast-from-the-trenches/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Yucheng Tao](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/yucheng-tao/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Captain’s Lay Back](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/captains-lay-back/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Jeané D. Ridges](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/jeane-d-ridges/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Addendum to the Martian Social Studies Textbook, 5th Ed.](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/addendum-to-the-martian-social-studies-textbook-5th-ed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Maya Wristen](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/maya-wristen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Nonfiction - [For Your Consideration: Strange Horizons 2025 Award Eligibility](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/for-your-consideration-strange-horizons-2025-award-eligibility/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by the *Strange Horizons* staff - Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon by Ada Palmer and Charlie Jane Anders ### Reviews - Monday: [*Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air* by L. Timmel Duchamp](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/like-shards-of-rainbow-frolicking-in-the-air-by-l-timmel-duchamp/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw - Wednesday: [*The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre* by Philip Fracassi](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-autumn-springs-retirement-home-massacre-by-philip-fracassi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Lewis - Friday: [*Automatic Noodle* by Analee Newitz](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/automatic-noodle-by-annalee-newitz/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nileena Sunil - Monday: [*What A Fish Looks Like* by Syr Hayati Beker](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/what-a-fish-looks-like-by-syr-hayati-beker/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Wednesday: [Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/harmattan-season-by-tochi-onyebuchi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Duncan Lawie - Friday: [Startlement by Ada Limón](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/startlement-by-ada-limon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amy Nagopaleen - Monday: [*Slashed Beauties* by A. Rushby](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/slashed-beauties-by-a-rushby/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marisa Mercurio - Wednesday: [*The Deep Forest* by Sofía Rhei, translated by Kendal Simmons](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-deep-forest-by-sofia-rhei-translated-by-kendal-simmons/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seamus Sullivan - Friday: [*Hammajang Luck* by Makana Yamamoto](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/hammajang-luck-by-makana-yamamoto/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Safia H. Senhaji - Monday: [*Honeyeater* by Kathleen Jennings](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/honeyeater-by-kathleen-jennings/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Roseanna Pendlebury - Wednesday: [*Black Hole Heart and Other Stories* by K. A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/black-hole-heart-and-other-stories-by-k-a-teryna-translated-by-alex-shvartsman-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Cordasco - Friday: [*The Macabre* by Kosoko Jackson](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-macabre-by-kosoko-jackson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shannon Fay --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (December 2025) ### Fiction - "[Listener Supported](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/listener-supported?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Juan Martinez - "[A Skull in Reverse](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/a-skull-in-reverse?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephanie Feldman - [SMT 2025 Holiday Storyflod Part 1](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/smt-2025-holiday-storyflod-part-1?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [SMT 2025 Holiday Storyflod Part 2](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/smt-2025-holiday-storyflod-part-2?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 67, November / December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [To Speak in Silence](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/to-speak-in-silence/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Robinette Kowal - "[The Teleporting Disaster Fairy](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-teleporting-disaster-fairy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rati Mehrotra - "[Thicker](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/thicker/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanna Castroianni ### Poetry - "[Welkin Burials for Drones](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/welkin-burials-for-drones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hannan Khan - "[My Duende: in the Wall and in the Mirror](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/my-duende-in-the-wall-and-in-the-mirror/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angel Leal ### Nonfiction - [The Mistletoe Creeps for You or A Discussion of the Transformation of Xmas Horror from Societal to Fantastic](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mistletoe-creeps-for-you-or-a-discussion-of-the-transformation-of-xmas-horror-from-societal-to-fantastic/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jordan Shiveley - [The Stranger Next Door: The Domestic Fantastic in Classic Nordic Children’s Fantasy](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-stranger-next-door-the-domestic-fantastic-in-classic-nordic-childrens-fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marissa Lingen - [Interview: Eleanna Castroianni](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-eleanna-castroianni/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by [Caroline M. Yoachim](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/authors/caroline-m-yoachim/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- Remember to check back at the end of the month for updates as new stories come online, and to let me know in the comments what caught your eye! ### The idea is never the problem URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-interview-burlington-vermont-scifi-old-mans-war/ Last updated: 2025-12-03T16:59:00.000Z In September, John Scalzi was the headliner of the [Green Mountain Book Festival](https://www.greenmountainbookfestival.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Burlington, Vermont. It was a great day: this fall's festival was all about science fiction, and we had a great group of Vermont authors who joined us: Craig Alanson, William Alexander, M.T. Anderson, Emily Hamilton, Margot Harrison, Mike Luoma, and Brian Staveley, for a couple of panels to talk about the craft of writing genre fiction. I've interviewed Scalzi on a [couple](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-john-scalzi/) [of occasions](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/14934064/john-scalzi-the-collapsing-empire-old-mans-war-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com), and as part of the festival's day of programming, I sat down with Scalzi at the Fletcher Free Library to interview him about his career, writing, science fiction, and quite a bit more. It was a fun conversation, and you can watch the video of the interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2imGoQlOJUo&ref=andrewliptak.com), and I've transcribed it below for your reading pleasure. Scalzi has been publishing science fiction for more than two decades. He self-published his first two novels on his long-running blog *Whatever*, and from there, released his traditionally-published debut, *Old Man's War* with Tor Books in 2005\. Since then, he's published nearly 20 novels and a number of shorter works, including *Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain*, and most recently, *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* and *The Shattering Peace*. [Green Mountain Book Festival RecapAn excellent event![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-3.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/566228453_841623318423853_5542323165995304127_n-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-mountain-book-festival-recap/) *I'll note that it's not an exact version: I've edited down the ums and uhs and repeated words to make it a bit more readable, and worked to keep the voice and tone that that the interview took. I've used italics to note where he's emphasized a word in a particular way or <> to indicate a funny tone or noise one of us makes.* Here's my conversation with John Scalzi: ### First of all, thank you very much for coming to Vermont, we appreciate it. You're welcome. I was in San Francisco yesterday. That was quite a journey. I got in last night, I went to [Al's Fries](http://www.alsfrenchfrys.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and then went to sleep at 8:30\. So clearly, I have experienced the Burlington nightlife as it is meant to be experienced. ### So you haven't had your maple syrup shot yet. I have not – I told people I went to Al's, and they were like "did you have the maple creemee?" And I'm like, "No." And they're like *sigh* and I'm like, "guys, come on. I just got in. I don't know all the things yet." I know there's Champy, right? ### Champ. I went to the lake and he did not show up. I was a little angry about that. I was like, "I made the effort. Where's my crypted?" Did not arrive. I'm a little bitter, but I did see somebody with Champy on their hat. It was all very good. I'm sorry, I'm just like this. I don't know what he's going to ask, but I'm a little wired right now, so just be ready. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/IMG_7259.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### I've been soliciting some questions from friends and readers and the first question I have is: how dare you? That is fair, and I think that probably relates to my tendency to make you care about characters and then just get them out of the way. I think that is one of the things that I do quite a lot, not to the same extent as George R.R. Martin does, but who does that? Nobody does it like George does. I have a daughter who would not read most of my stuff when she was growing up because it was weird to read the books and these characters knowing that they came out of your dad's brain. There was a book I wrote with her mind called [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com). She had never read it, and while I was on book tour (I think this was 2014 or 2015) I didn't know she was reading it until I got this all caps, outraged text that said, "How could you do that to Enzo?" and I don't know if you know what happens to Enzo, but nothing good. And so I was like, "Oh, so this is how my I find out that my daughter has in fact read this book" and secondly, she had joined the legion of people who are angry with me for what I have done to their favorite characters. And the answer is why dare I? Becauuuuuusssssssse sometimes they gotta die. They just do. Sometimes that's where the story goes, and you're like, "oh, I love that character, but they got to die." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### *\[To a large, captive audience\]* So, is anyone here a reader of Scalzi's books? *\[To audience\]* Have you read my books? If you haven't read my books, why are you here? Is this a class assignment? Do you get a grade? Who's here for class? Is there anybody who's here for a class assignment? ### So we don't need to go through your entire backlog of of titles because that would take all night, but this year is the 20th anniversary of your breakout book, [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com) ... My first traditionally published novel. ### First traditionally published novel, yes, there's an asterisk there, actually. What a great complication that is. ### You initially self-published *Old Man's War* and now you've just released [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is the seventh book in the series. Have you been surprised by its longevity? 20 years is a long time. Thank you. \[laughter\] Tell us about your books, old man! Yes and no. The first is you have to understand that I didn't intend to be a novelist in the first place. I had started off in journalism and when I wrote *Old Man's War*, most of what I was doing was freelance, nonfiction writing. I was writing nonfiction books and I was doing work for financial services companies and tech companies and stuff like that. So I had this whole other life as a writer. I wrote the novels and then *Old Man's War* sold to Tor in 2002 for the incredibly immense sum of $6,500\. \[laughter\] Right, laugh now. I remember saying to Krissy, my wife, "look, what's going to happen is this will come out, it will do what it does, and then every three or four years, I will come out with another novel." I wasn't thinking like sequels, I just thought like different novels, and they'll come out and they'll pay me about the same, and then I'll go to these conventions and they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're that guy who wrote the thing, and that will be it." [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-341.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-8.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) So, I wasn't I wasn't expecting to be a novelist, period. When *Old Man's War* took off and they were like, "you have to write more novels." And I was like, "Do I?" They're like, "yes, here's money," and I was like, "I guess I do." And then off we were to the races. Now it's 20 years later and writing novels is what I do full-time. I did not expect to be in this position at all: you would have told 35 year-old me, "you'll be in Burlington in front of a room full of people." And I'm like, "What did I do? Are they judging me? Will there be tomatoes involved?" ### That comes later. That comes later. "Yes, now comes the pelting of the vegetables," as is tradition here in Burlington, and then Champy arrives. So I didn't expect that at all. So the idea that 20 years later, not only would I actually be a novelist, but that the there would be a series of these books because *Old Man's War* just came out as *a* book. I wasn't expecting to do a series until tour came to me and said, "You made money for us. Make another." Okay. And just kept going. So, yeah, it's absolutely completely a surprise. But having said that, *Old Man's War* is one of those weird books that sells exactly the same number of books every year it has been out, and a significantly large number, and that if all I ever did was *Old Man's War*, I would still be okay. Because of that, and because then that means that the books in the series have also sold reasonably well, it is not a surprise that when I put out the seventh book for the 20th anniversary (which I did plan), that there was still interest in it and people were still excited about it. I am gratified that our prediction of "let's put out the book for the 20th anniversary, people will like that," \[and\] "let's repackage the old books in the series in trade paperback with with thematic stuff that puts them all together so people will want to collect them all" was also a pretty cool idea. But ultimately, it goes back to no, this is all a surprise to me. \[I\] literally did not expect to be a novelist. It just happened, I just rolled with it, and now here I am in Burlington. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### One of the interesting things over that 20 years, there's a perception of science fiction writers just sort of churning out installment after installment after installment. You haven't done that with with this series and you've actually spoken about how you've resisted that "every year, new adventures of the same characters." So how do you determine what the bar is for adding a new book to the series? So this is a complicated question. The short answer is, I am in a fortunate place where I don't have to continue my series. I was – okay this is a first world problem for writers and particularly science fiction and fantasy writers – But we have this question and the question is, do my readers love me for me or do they love me for my series? I see the other writers in the back going, "Yep, that's a thing," and what that means is if I put out a book that is not in my most famous series, are \[readers\] still going to buy it or are you *just* going to buy the things that are in my series and \[so\] when I put something else out, it sells at a quarter or a fifth or a tenth of whatever it is my most famous series is. You wouldn't think that would matter because it's like you're getting paid, shut up, right? But it is a thing that we are concerned about. I have been very fortunate that in addition to the *Old Man's War* series, there have been other books that have other series that I've done that have been well received and that my standalone books like [*Starter Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250879394?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) or [*Redshirts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com)have done very well as well. So that means you like me for me, thank you. But that also means that I don't have to come back to a series in order to eat, and that is actually very important. So when I finished the *Old Man's War* series with the now inaptly named [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359568?ref=andrewliptak.com), I was like "I'm done with it and maybe I'll come back to it if I can think of something, but if not, then I will just go off and do other things." I did the [*Interdependency* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388902?ref=andrewliptak.com)series, I did another book in the *Lock In* series \[[*Head On*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250385529?ref=andrewliptak.com)\], I wrote all those standalones, and was going just fine. But eventually my brain wanted to come back to that universe to tell another story and came up with a story it wanted to tell in it. That's when we were like "well, let's schedule that for the 20th anniversary, because you had the idea," but the important thing was I had the idea and it was a story that I wanted to tell so I didn't have to feel obliged to come back to that universe; I could come back when it was interesting to me. This is a thing: Craig Alanson and I were talking on a [previous panel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3sqhlpmQ6w&t=1s&ref=andrewliptak.com) and we were just talking about how fundamentally, writing means that we have to be interested in the things that we are writing. We have to be amused with them. We have to be interested. We have to be intrigued because if we are bored with what we are writing, oh boy, you are going to feel it, right? So what that means for me with the series is do I feel obliged to come back to it or do I feel lucky that I get to come back to it? With *The Shattering Peace*, I felt very lucky to be able to come back to it when I did and in the manner I did. [Book review: John Scalzi’s Shattering PeaceJohn Scalzi’s return to his Old Man’s War series is a timely, optimistic story of unity in a violent universe![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-342.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7452-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-shattering-peace-scifi-book-review/) ### Without going into spoilers for the book, what are the types of things that you have gotten you excited about returning to in this particular world? Well, first off, the same amount of time has passed in that universe as has passed in the real world – 10 years. So that is more than enough time for plot ideas to ripen. If you think, "well, 10 years is not a lot of time," think about where we all were in 2015\. What has happened since then? Oh, *nothing*. So that's one thing. I like when I continue on in-universe to take a character that had been a supporting character or a side character and elevating them into the primary character. In this particular case, that was Gretchen Trillo, who had been a supporting character in *Zoe's Tale*, Zoe's best friend. I made them the main character because that allows for some continuity, while at the same time introducing a new story, characters, elements, and so on and so forth. That made me excited because I liked that character when I wrote her as a supporting character and to elevate her was cool to me. I also like the idea that there's this unknowable alien species called the Consu, who're technologically advanced. In all the previous books they're like, "Oh shit, Consu." This time, you get to spend time with them and you're like, "they're idiots just like us," except they have better technology, because I thought that was actually important to do. And so all of those things made it exciting to me. And there is the, and I won't lie that I knew that, like I was on tour for *Starter Villain* and people like, "what's coming up?" I was like, "well, the next book is going to be *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* and I'm going to turn the moon into cheese," and people like, "Okay, cool, well, that's Scalzi, that's very on brand for you." Then I would say, "and the book after that is going to be a new *Old Man's War* book." And they all went and literally they just looked like that. So the fact that people were so excited that there was an *Old Man's War* book coming out, I was like "this is my ace in the hole." If *Moon* flops, I'd be like "well, that didn't do great, but yada yada yada, here's this new *Old Man's War* book. Put it in your face." The good news is *Moon* did just fine, and *The Shattering Peace* has done very well as well, so all of that was exciting and the fact that internally for me as a person and as a writer, this was exciting to go back to the universe that I knew anecdotally that the interest was still there, right? That you guys were still excited about the *Old Man's War* universe. That was actually really cool. ### 20 years is a long time in publishing – we're going to keep that going 20 years is a long time period! ### So when you first published *Old Men's War*, you serialized it on your blog, this newish thing. Back when blogs were new! ### The publishing industry and technology has changed immensely, so what has been most consequential to you and your career when it come when to the actual publishing of books? When I sold *Old Man's War* in 2002, to give you some context, blogs indeed were still a new thing, not unlike, BookTok might have been a year ago (because it's now on a decline, who knows what's coming after that?) When I sold *Old Man's War*, eBooks didn't exist yet, audiobooks were a single shelf at the local bookstore and they were all Stephen King, John Grisham and Patricia Cornwall, right? So they weren't even a concern for us. And quite frankly, most of the science fiction writers still looked pretty much like me: straight white dude. It's a straight white dude genre. Now it's 20 years later and here's what's happened: eBooks are now a huge part of sales. There's a reason why *The New York Times* has a combined print and eBook list now, as well as their hardcover \[list\]. Audiobooks are a huge part of my sales. *Starter Villain* sold 1:1 in audiobook versus print and eBooks. That's partly because Audible treats me very well: they made a TV ad for *Starter Villain* and I knew about that because my mother called me up and was like, "I saw an ad!" And I'm like, "Okay, thanks, mom." So from that point of view, the opportunity to sell books has expanded immensely because some people wouldn't buy books, but they'll buy eBooks because they now they have space for them or they just prefer electronic. There's a whole audience that didn't read before they had audiobooks because they were commuting. The time that they would have spent reading was actually the time that they were in their car. They now read because they have audiobooks. There was a [stat that recently came out](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/well/reading-pleasure-decline-study.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that said the amount that people read these days is down like 40%. And people are like, "what does that mean for literacy?" It means nothing for literacy. No one has fucking time anymore, right? Think of everybody who's worried about their jobs, they have to get second jobs, they have to do all the stuff with their families and everything else that they're doing. Reading is a luxury item: you make time for it when you are done with everything else you do. And so all of a sudden you have audiobooks that co-occupy that time while you're driving or while you're jogging or while – don't read a book while you're jogging – ### Or when you're driving. Please don't. This is how you die and you might take someone with you. So this has been hugely consequential. Also consequential is the fact that science fiction doesn't just look like me anymore. The most consequential science fiction writer of my generation is not me. It's not even close: it's Nora Jemisin. Absolutely no argument there whatsoever. [When she won the MacArthur Genius grant](https://www.andrewliptak.com/n-k-jemisin-macarthur-fellow/), I was like, "Yep, that tracks." So many of the writers that are making their impact now are women, are people of color, are gay, lesbian, trans, and non-binary folks. All of these folks who weren't at the table 20 years ago or had just begun to sidle up are now the at table. There's lots that science fiction in particular – fantasy is way ahead of us on this – but science fiction is a much more diverse place than it was. We have lots to go until the playing field is completely even but it's such a very different thing. This is reflected because so many of the people who acquire science fiction right now are no longer people like me as well. Because when people are like "what happened to science fiction? Why did it stop doing all Heinlein all the time?" It's like, "well, because all the acquiring editors are bisexual women and they want very different things out of their science fiction and fantasy than you know than you do." Here's the thing: they acquired that science fiction and fantasy *and then it sold tons.* So from a purely economic point of view, by opening the field up to people who didn't look just like me, the field has prospered. There are still people who look like me. I sell well: this is not a problem. This is a "yes, and" as opposed to a "no, but." That was the big argument way back when when you had the Sad Puppies, who were like "there's no room for us anymore!" I'm like "I stand as a testament that this is not true. If you don't think there's room, it's because you are not playing the game as it is being played today." It's a skill issue, level up. ### Speaking of skills, can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? ### You've talked about how you have plenty of ideas, but how do you go about figuring out which idea has legs and then how do you go and then execute on it? So the way that I – you are correct, the idea is never the problem. I have way too many ideas, and the real question is how do you discriminate which ones are the good ideas and which are the ones that \[aren't\]? The way that I do it, which is not necessarily the way that anybody else does it – this is not *the* way – it is literally the way I do it because this is how my brain works. I'll come up with an idea and I'll be like, "that's a cool idea," and then I won't write it down. And then the next day, if I'm still thinking about that idea, I'm like, "cool," and then I don't write it down. And then a week later, if I'm still thinking about it, great. And then a month and then by the time it's been rolling around my brain for a year, other things, have accreted around it, the what's and how would this work and who would be the people that would be involved with this sort of thing. By then the idea has enough gravity that it drops and then it becomes an idea that I want to write. That's really what it is for me: there is a veritable Thunderdome (if you're Gen X, it's a Thunderdome, if you're a millennial, it's a hunger game) going on in my brain at any one time where all these ideas are floating around and eventually one of them drops and I'm like "that's the one that I want to do." Sometimes it's just not the right time to do it. For *When the Moon Hits Your Eye*, I had that idea like literally seven, eight, 10 years ago, something like that and then Neal Stephenson came out with [*Seveneaves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062334510?ref=andrewliptak.com), which has nothing to do with the moon turning to cheese, but has everything to do with the moon *for reasons*. I felt at the time that there was only room in the market for one "the moon for reasons" book, so I put it on the backburner and did other things. And now when I put it out this year, no one said "wow that really reminds me of the Neal Stephenson book" which is what would have happened if I had done that immediately. I had the same thing happen too: I had had a two book deal with Tor and we had this really cool idea that we didn't want to tell anybody else because someone would be like "this was a good idea" and steal it. So we were like, two book deal, it was called *The Big One: An Oral History of the First Interstellar War*. Sounds amazing, right? Signed the contract and literally two months later, [*World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307346612?ref=andrewliptak.com)\[by Max Brooks\] comes out and I remember sending my editor Patrick an email, and I was like, "is this going to be a problem?" and he was like, "I don't think it's going to do very well." So that book never got written, because there's no possible way. *World War Z* was such a big foot that there's no way that you could do an oral history and not have people compare them. I did finally do an oral history which was [*Unlocked: An Oral History of the Hayden Syndrome*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250307996?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* but it was a novella and it came out after the first book already hit *The New York Times* bestseller list, so it was it was excused. No one was like "oh we're stealing from Max Brooks I see." So that's how I do it: I let them roll around and eventually they will select themselves and then I tell Tor and they're like okay like what are you going to write? "Oh, I'm going to write about the moon turning into cheese." " Fine." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/image-4.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### How much consideration do you put into the market? You were talking about competing books, and you've got worldwide events going on. You've spoken about how you had started to write a book in 2020 and got bogged down and weren't having fun writing it. Can you talk about how you, rather than the straight-up creativity of writing, how do those things impact your writing? Generally speaking, and at the risk of sounding obnoxious, I'm at a point in my career where I don't worry too much about what other writers are doing or what the trends are because I have a large enough reader base and I know that whatever else is happening, there will still be people who want to buy my books. So, I don't spend too much time worrying about "am I going to catch– there's not going to be a romantasy from me, okay? There's just not. \[to person in front row who made a face\] I *know* it's heartbreaking, isn't it? You're like, but John, you would do really good with sex on dragons. No, no I would not. I might be able to do the dragons. You do not want a sex scene from me. There's a thing where people are like, "We think that John Scalzi and Chuck Tingle are the same guy." I'm like, "who are you people? Have you read my stuff? Have you read Chuck's stuff? No! There's no there's nothing that connects us." I finally met Chuck Tingle when I was in at New York Comic Con last week and we took a picture together and people are like, "you know, he's wearing a bag on his head. That could be anyone." I'm like, "come on, no one wears that bag on his head." So any event, no romantasy. But I am aware of like – I will be looking at things that are happening in the world and what that relates to. In 2020, I was writing this book that was a dark and gritty political thriller in space and it turns out that 2020 was a bad year for dark and gritty political thrillers. Because part of it was, I go into the into the world of my fiction and in some ways it's an escape to whatever's happening in the world. And that book was not an escape or what was going on in the world in 2020\. It really, really wasn't. I ended up not being able to finish that book and \[told\] my editor, "you'll have to pull that off the schedule." It was literally the first time I had ever failed to write a book. And he was like, "all right, we have already done the press release and the cover, but it's fine." I then literally went and took a shower and my brain, which had known all this time that I was never going to be able to finish this book, was like, "oh, while you were freaking out about that, I had had this second thought that was in my head." And here it is: Kaiju Preservation Society and it just literally just downloaded into my brain. I got out of the shower, toweled off and wrote an email to Patrick: "Hey, remember how I was freaking out and I wasn't going to have the book that was due on time? Give me six weeks and I will get you a book" and it was in five weeks. Yeah, sometimes the world affects you. The other thing is: the next book takes place in modern time in Ohio of all places, which is where I'm from. (Not originally, I'm from Southern California. I moved to Ohio and people were like, "Why would you move to Ohio?" And then I show them a picture of my spouse and they're like, "Oh, yeah, I would leave too.") But after that, until January 2029 at least, I'm going to space. 'cuz I don't want to deal with this planet right now, so, that's that's one of the things that I'm thinking about. ### So with this book that you didn't finish, is this some a case of I've locked it away and will never do anything with it or is it something to resurrect sometime when the conditions are right? Currently, I have PTSD about this book. Like, I think about it, and it drives me back to November 2020: you've been cooped up for 9 months, the world's on fire, the election hasn't happened yet and when it does happen, they'll be like, "Nuh uh, that's not the way it went." So yeah, I don't want to go back there, you can't make me go back, don't ask. There might be eventually come a time where I'm no longer feeling that and maybe I can approach that particular story, but that particular story, if I never visit again, it's okay because I have other stories that I want to tell, again, no shortage of ideas. There's lots of stuff to do, like turning the moon to cheese. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Speaking of that, one of the things that's fascinated me about your career is how you have played with form quite a bit. So, your *Old Man's War* books *The Human Division* and *The End of All Things* were serialized, and then with *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* – for those of you who haven't read it, it's 29 chapters, with each on a different lunar day and follows a string of different characters, mostly standing on their own*.* ### So you've played with form in some unconventional ways: how do you decide to tell a story in those ways? With *The Human Division* and *The End of All Things* particularly, this is fascinating stuff that is a great story. I had finished *Zoe's Tale,* and I had been thinking about going back into the *Old Man's War* series, but I just wanted to write some short stories in that universe. At the same time, Tor came to me and said that they wanted to start experimenting with selling shorter things and seeing what the appetite was and wanted to know if I'd be willing to do that. I'm like "well as it happens, I was planning just to write a whole bunch of short stories in the *Old Man's War* universe anyway, so let's go ahead and do that." So *The Human Division* and *The End of All Things* were literally research projects; they came out of the Macmillan's research budget. And they told me if they flop miserably, they wouldn't hold them against me because they were experiments, which is gold for an author. They were like, "Oh, that was miserable flop, but it's not your fault, here's another contract." So I was like, "Sure, let's go ahead and do this." And so, *The Human Division* had 13 stories, we released a story a week. Each of them actually got onto the *USA Today* bookseller list so I am now the owner of the strangest record of all, which is the largest number of sequential *USA Today* bestsellers ever, so go me. That and $5 will not get me a latte at Starbucks. And then for *The End of All Things,* they wanted novellas to see what they would do. They took all that information and crunched the numbers and used that as part of the rationale to create Tordotcom, which is publishing novellas. The information they gleaned off of *The Human Division* and *The End of All Things* is part of the reason why we have Martha Wells' *Murderbot* novellas. Now, you're welcome. I haven't told this to Martha because I think she would go, "Well, actually that's mostly due to me," and to be clear, she's not wrong. For when *When the Moon Hits Your Eye*, I knew I was going to turn the moon to cheese. I knew it was a thing that was going to happen to everybody because everybody looks up and sees the moon. There's no reason to have a linear narrative: I wanted to \[go day by day\] through the entire lunar cycle and I wanted to head hop. Now, as I was developing it, I had a big event happen halfway through, and so the first half and the second half are kind of mirrored, where some of the characters who show up in the first half also show up in the second half after that big event happened. So there was some revisiting and some mirroring, but the whole idea of being able to play with the narrative form intrigued me. The funny thing is that when people think of me as a writer, they don't tend to think of me as a particularly adventurous writer, because I typically write very conventional and very commercial narratives because that's my job. The reason that Tor has given me this ridiculously, stupidly long contract that will [have me writing books until 2040 at least](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-starter-villain-book-deal/), is that they know whatever I put out will sell, and that it will work to get people reading science fiction. They'll read one of my books if they've never read science fiction before be like "that's easy" and then they'll read more of me – great – and more of science fiction – even better. That said, as long as I adhere to the "here, you haven't read science fiction before, try this," rubric, I can do whatever I want. I can play with narrative form. I can do what I did with *Redshirts:* an examination into free will and what it means to be in charge of your own life and have a weird meta narrative that goes back and forth and in and out and all of that sort of stuff. It is structurally bizarre. It is a weird [Klein bottle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein%5Fbottle?ref=andrewliptak.com) pretzel and people don't think about it at all. That's kind of the weird magic that I think I get to have where I get to play with form and format and all that sort of stuff just as long as I make you laugh and you can give it to your uncle who's like "ugh, science fiction." ### Thinking of you as a sort of entry level science fiction author – where do you see the field going in the next couple of years? You obviously plan to have a role there, so what do you hope to see and think of the state of science fiction? I am the tick of science fiction! I have dug in and you can't get me out: try to burn me or put oil on me, I won't get out! ### I do remember you [saying that you aspired to be a cockroach](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/14934064/john-scalzi-the-collapsing-empire-old-mans-war-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com). This is what I said: there are three types of writersthere are dinosurs, there are mammals, and there are cockroaches. The dinosaurs are the people who have come up during a previous model of publishing, right? Like when when everything was just hard covers, and then all of a sudden, everything changes because ebooks come in and traditional publishing gets challenged by self-publishing and all that sort of stuff. Some people can't make the switch and they inevitably die off. Then you have the writers who are the mammals, who come up with whatever the new new form of publishing is and that's great, but eventually they become dinosaurs as well, because they can't adapt to the next thing. And then you have the cockroaches and those fuckers just keep going, right? What are we doing now? We're doing eBooks. Great. Oh, we're doing audiobooks now? Cool. Oh, we're serializing things? Sweet. They just keep doing it and they adapt and adjust to everything. So when I say I want to be a cockroach, that's kind of what I mean: hard to kill, continue to put stuff out. Where I see science fiction going: it's a very interesting time in publishing in general. I don't know if you've been keeping up with the news, but we have a bunch of censorious dickheads in charge right now, and problem with censorious dickheads, is anything they don't like, they try to expunge from the culture. So that's going to be a challenge for science fiction and fantasy in general because as as examples of imagination, they are innovative, frontier challenging, and rule-breaking. Not all – #notallsciencefiction. Some of it is extremely conventional, you will still have basically what we call stew fantasy where everybody meets up at the pub for a hearty bowl of stew before they go off adventuring and all that sort of stuff. There's nothing wrong with any of that sort of stuff, but there's a lot that is formally challenging in terms of structure and of narratives and who is getting to tell what stories and when. So in the immediate future, there's going to be a lot of challenges for the field in who gets to continue to tell stories and certainly adult science fiction and fantasy will feel that. But even more so is YA science fiction and fantasy: if you look at the books that are challenged over and over and over again, they are the books that are – they're not my books. I have never had a book challenged – but they are the books that service young people, that introduces them to new ideas and new concepts. The censorious dickheads quite correctly realize that if you can squash it there, then those people who have not had access to mind-expanding fiction, whether it's in science fiction or fantasy or anywhere else will not seek it out as readily when they're adults. So that is where the battle is going on right now. YA is absolutely part of science fiction and fantasy. If you look at the most successful YA books in the last two decades, they have been fantasy and science fiction. So this has implications for all of us. So I think for the next few years, writers, librarians, and book sellers are going to have to be dealing with the censorious dickheads, and it's going to be a challenge because we get tired but they don't right. It's hard to for people to understand the extent to which the censorious dickheads are true believers. They will never stop coming. All of us like "surely this is the battle that ends this." No: , life is not like fiction, there's not one grand battle and we are done and we declare victory and go home and have our happily ever after. We will fight this battle until we're dead and we will have trained our children to continue this fight when we're done. So this is a monumental battle that we will be fighting in science fiction and fantasy in particular for the next four years, along with everybody else who publishes books. It's easy for me to say as someone who writes adult science fiction who is a cis white straight male of of no uncertain means that "yes, I will fight this fight!" because there is very little consequence that will hit me. As I tell people, in this new regime there is a flood and I will be the last to drown. So it's very easy for me to say, "Yes, fight that fight. Do that fight. Make that fight happen" and it's very different for someone who is trans and a writer, who is black and a writer, who is a woman and a writer, or some combination thereof, any of these sorts of things, because the amount of scrutiny, the amount of power that is being brought to bear on them is so much higher and more significant than me, and the only things I can do is offer support and money and try to try to have their back as as much as possible. But it's absolutely true that I will not bear the brunt of most of this, someone else will. ### One of the things I find most frustrating in this this moment is that we see people talk a lot about how science fiction needs to be there to inspire and to instill an interest in science, but at the same time we are cutting back heavily on research even as we are seeing some pretty incredible things happen, like we're going to space more often, we're going back to the moon (in theory) in a couple of years. ### Are you worried at all about the state of science and research and exploration and how little support there is for that and how that could just translate into not as much interest in this genre that inspired so many people to enter it in the first place? Well, let's also let's be clear about something: there is a difference between the amount of enthusiasm for science and and the benefits of it among the general population, and among the people who are currently in charge. That's not even just me saying that, go look at the polling, it is absolutely there. So yes: the thing is is that we are in the very early stages of the governmental drawback from science or from health services or any of that sort of stuff and it's early enough that people still are not seeing the consequences. They will begin to feel them real soon; have you checked your ACA premiums? They're going to go up real soon. Once that happens, it will be interesting to see what the consequences of that are. But let's make a very clear division between you know this the anti-science dickheads who are current – I use dickheads a lot because there are so many other words I can use, but dickheads works – the dickheads who are currently in power and who are pulling the legs out from science because black people might be in there and and there are people in general who are like, "I would actually like to have my vaccines, thank yo." So there's that. I don't think that the urge for science fiction is going to go away. I do also think that a consequence of this is that – I don't want to overstate this and I don't want to make it sound more dramatic than it is, but the idea that science is rebellion is something that is actually going to happen. I went and I got my COVID vaccine before I went on tour, and as I was being jabbed in the shoulder for for my COVID vaccine, I absolutely said "Fuck you, RFK Jr.," because I know that's not what he wanted me to do. I don't want to overromanticize or overdramatize it. I don't think there will be roving bands of teenage scientists who are titrating against the system or anything like that. Let's be very clear what's not going to happen. But I do think that people are very much aware that there is a political reason for the anti-science thing for exact that correlates very highly for the political reason for censorship, that correlates very highly for anti-DEI sentiment. All of that correlates and all of it comes down to, in one form or another, white supremacy here in the United States, here in the United States, at least. I don't know why people want to live in a world where white people are in charge and yet science is trashed, global economic disparity is higher and half of our population is seen as the other, but that's where we are. That's where we are right now. White supremacy sucks. Speaking as a white man, don't do it, not even once. But I don't think it will affect the appetite for science fiction, because just like a bunch of extremely conservative people love Rage Against the Machine, even though for the same reason a lot of these dickheads really really love science fiction and they don't understand that a lot of it is antithetical to everything that they stand for. So science fiction and fantasy will be fine in this new regime, given the caveats that I've already said. And also, those of us who write should still be writing with the idea that we are inspiring people towards science towards tolerance, towards a world where everybody is valued for the gifts that they bring and not about whether their skin tone looks you know anywhere from rosé to milk. I'm sorry, I got political! I don't know if you knew this about me. They're coming for me one day. I'm wondering gulag will be. I'm hoping it will be be North Dakota. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/12/image-2.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ### You're going to be write several more books between now and 2040, so with that in mind and before we throw it to the audience for a couple questions, what do you have coming up next that we should be looking forward to? Well, immediately in November I have two things that are coming out which is a short story which if you already have Amazon Prime, you can already get, which is a a time travel story called "[3 days, 9 months, 27 years](https://www.amazon.com/Days-Months-Years-Travelers-Passport-ebook/dp/B0FHHY4S4K/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.NbUO3iP33zZ1KSCTJ8uzqUa3HnOgP1vQAIW6v0w9POTGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.fsicWoT1G1tC-DvhO5FkpPCXwNjkpvEBVuOLnz2RayY&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=3+days%2C+9+months%2C+27+years&qid=1764608697&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com)," that formally comes out for everybody on November 1st. Also, I have a novella called [*Constituent Service*](https://subterraneanpress.com/constituent-service-ebook/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which came out on Audible last year, but it's now going to be in print in eBook. The book that I am currently writing, the one that takes place in Ohio, I don't want to tell you too much about it right now, but suffice to say things get weird. That will come out next October or November. We'll see you all then, and then after that, who knows? Like I said, I plan to go to space. I have this vague idea of crime noir in a floating city, but we will see what happens with that. This is the weird thing: I just recently got a 10 book extension to the 13 book contract that I already had, and would you like to know what those 10 books are? *So would I*. This is, by the way, if you want a a real good example of privilege, that is privilege, where they're like, "Yeah, we'll give you 10 bucks." What are they going to be on? I guess we'll find out together. So, yeah, that's what I'm doing. Alright. We have time for a couple of questions. ### What are you reading? What am I reading? Not a whole lot because I'm writing a novel right now and I have to be very careful not to let someone else's style leak out of my fingertips. There's one time where I was writing a novel and I was reading \[China Miéville's\] *Perdido Street Station* and what came out of my fingers was weird as fuck. It was neither good Scalzi and certainly not good Miéville. So, when I'm writing I tend to read a lot of non-fiction or articles or stuff like that. When I'm not reading that, I'm reading books that they have asked me to blurb, so that means that I get to read the science fiction and fantasy that's coming out in a year or two years ahead of time. And sometimes I blurb them and sometimes I just don't have time. So that's mostly what I'm reading at this moment. ### How do you like fight against the You keep mentioning Amazon and we're in a library and they don't sell their eBooks or audio books to libraries. So, here's the funny thing, which is that I have a long-term contract with Audible, and they don't necessarily sell to libraries, until it comes out in brilliance audio and then a library can buy it in CD form. The thing about that is that everybody has to do their picking and choosing. I work with Audible because they have been extraordinarily good to me and they've done a very good job of marketing me and all that sort of stuff, and every single time they ask me, "so, what do you think we should be doing now?" I'm like, "Libraries." "Libraries are good." "Have you considered libraries?" "Do you know how much money you would make if you would service the libraries?" So I'm doing that. But that's such a huge institutional thing and you have to expect that any ship that is turning is going to turn very slowly. I do think and I can't explain why – I do think that there might be some people in Audible who are like "maybe we should be starting thinking about libraries" and that would be great if they do that but in the meantime, Tor still services the libraries and there's something to be said about how they do the eBooks and everything else like that. It's always very fraught. I worked with Audible before they had a solid library decision and so once I was locked in, there's no way to unlock unless I take them to court, and I'm not going to take them to court over libraries, I'm sorry, but again, especially since I can say to them over and over again, "have you considered libraries? Do you know they're good for business? They're extremely good. Librarians are lovely people. They will absolutely buy these things in audio if you let them." So we will see. ### What led you to start hosting dance parties at science fiction conventions? So, you wouldn't know it to look at me, but I took two years of jazz and modern and I can dance like you would not believe. In fact, my wife met me because she saw me dancing and said, "That one. That is the one I want and I will have him. Oh, yes, I will." It was not difficult for her to have me. She was like, "You." And I'm like, "Okay!" She literally came up to me and imagine I'm standing there and I've got my Coke and I'm like up against the wall and literally the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life comes towards me – Now, I was interviewing like movie stars at the time so, I had some basis of comparison – \[she\] literally comes up and says, "You and I have to dance sometime tonight," And I said, "Now is good." And we went out and we danced to The Cures' "Friday I'm in Love" and everything like that and it was very nice, and I gave her my card said, "Please call me." She waited three weeks and when she finally called we went out and we went dancing again. So we we danced all through our courtship. So many years later, I'm at Capricon, which is a convention in Chicago and they have an 80's dance and their DJ was 19 and he did not live in the 80s and you could tell because he was playing all the 80's hits no one liked. Like, they made it up the charts for some reason, but once they went down, they never came back out. I was like, "this sucks. This guy sucks. I could do better," and they're like, "Fine, come back next year. You can DJ." I'm like, "I will." I went back the next year and I DJed an ' 80s dance and of course, I nailed it, because remember, two years jazz and modern, met my wife dancing and when that happened and they were like, "Oh, wow, you actually can do this. Then a bunch of conventions started saying, "Hey, will you DJ our dance?" Because dancers at conventions were not ... *good*. Because they would get the DJs that didn't actually dance and didn't know what people wanted to dance to and all that sort of stuff. So I was like, "Well, cuz I dance all the time, so absolutely." I have a very specific philosophy at dancing for nerds, which is: play the hits. Like like nerds listen to weird shit, like "what is your discography?" "Well, I got the soundtrack to *Firefly* and I've got this Celtic saga and here's some filk that I got" and that's what they listen to. So when it comes to dancing, you play them the biggest hits from like the disco era onward. I basically tell people everything from "Staying Alive" to "Golden," these are the things that I'm going to play. And they'll be like, "Oh, I know that one," and you don't let them off the dance floor, right? They do it because they know I will do a good one, because I think that there's something inherently ridiculous about me, a middle-aged, pear-shaped guy being a decent DJ and also being the world's foremost Hugo winning-DJ. Do you think Kim Stanley Robinson could do this shit? You think David Brin knows how to do this yet? Nora \[Jemisin\] probably would kick my ass, *but!* she hasn't done it yet. So, as far as it goes, I think both the fact that I can do it and the inherent ridiculousness of it means that people will have me. It's really funny because people who have not ever seen me do my thing or be like, "You're going to DJ? Okay..." And then they come and they're like, "how are you a straight man?" ### Please tell me you go by DJ Hugo. DJ Hugo! No! That's that's a level of hubris that I that I want that I won't do. But it's fun and I have a great time. So, I do it at WorldCon, I'll do it at the next WorldCon, which is going to be in Anaheim. I do it at various conventions that I go to, I do it on the JoCo Cruise, which is a big nerd cruise that goes out every year. We have a nerd prom and it's a lot of fun. So yeah, I love to do it. Oh, the other reason is because they don't have to pay me, because I'll just show up. I was like, I got my DJ stuff, I'm ready to go, let's do it. ### I was wondering if you're talking about censorious bastards, if you're worried about self censorship by publishers because they're large corporations. So, my question is, are you concerned that like right now sure, N.K. Jemison isn't going to lose her contract. But are we going to miss out on the next N.K. Jemisin? So yeah, I think that's a very real question and I don't think it's even a question of they're thinking about it in terms of censoriousness, I think that they're start going to look at it as a question of economics, right? Are we going to be able to get this story into school libraries? Are we going to get this into bookstores? Are we going to get this into regular libraries? All that sort of stuff. That is a that is an economic consideration. Now, I don't think that the upper tier of writers is, as you point out, is pretty much immune. Nora is never going to have a problem selling. I'm never going tohave a problem selling. Brandon Sanderson is never going to have a problem selling. RF Kuang is never going to have a problem selling. But the people who are coming up always have to deal with the economic fallout. That is not just about this particular regime; it's about everything else. There's always winners and losers whatever economic era that we are in. But yes, this is a very serious thing. And what it means is there might be the case where writers of color or writers of alternative sexualities write in order to get their stories in have to start coding their stories or have to write more mainstream stories, all that sort of stuff for a time. That is a legitimate uh that is a legitimate effect of the of the problem with censorious dickheads. Now, I do think there will always be people like, "screw you. I'm going to tell the stories that I'm going to tell," and they will accept that they will have to spend some time in the economic wilderness to do it. And there will be publishers who will support them because these stories are important. It is vitally important that gay youth, that queer youth, that youth of color see themselves in the stories we are telling. So, I don't believe that they are going to go away. But is there going to be an economic impact to this? Absolutely 100%. ### What inspired you to [commission a soundtrack from Dessa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3BI4VRky8U&ref=andrewliptak.com) for *Starter Villain*? One of the things that I like to do because I think it's fun as a marketing thing and I also like supporting the artists that I like, is with a number of my books, I have asked musicians to write a theme song for it. For *Starter Villain,* it was Dessa who is a great singer. For *Redshirts*, Jonathan Colton wrote a song called "[Red Shirt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E90oZSY9M-s&ref=andrewliptak.com)". For *Fuzzy Nation*, Paul and Storm [wrote a thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-IoKMLmlZ8&ref=andrewliptak.com), for [*Lock-In*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGy0POAEUx8&ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Head-on*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P228fEpazE4&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* a musician named William Beckett, who is part of an emo band called The Academy is wrote songs for that as well. The reason I do it is because like I said because I think it's fun and other people haven't done it. I also like giving money to musicians for the work that they do. The way that I usually do it \[I go\] to them and am like, "hey, can I commission a song from you? Here's the deal, which is that you give me a non-exclusive license to use it for marketing, which means that I will make a little video for it and put it up and then you get everything else." I don't make a claim towards the copyright. I don't make a claim towards any other sort of distribution. It is literally I'm paying them for a license to write the song and then the license to not exclusively do it, which is a great deal for them because I'm literally asking for nothing other than a non-exclusive license and most of them are are happy to do it. So yeah, it's partly just marketing and partly because I have the money to give to people and I think it's cool to have songs that are based on my stuff. And I didn't tell Dessa any sort of brief, you don't have to write about anything in particular. I just gave her the book and was like "do what you want to do with it." Same with Jonathan Colton, and same with William Becket. I did say for Paul and Storm "make it sound like an 80s end credit-like ballad." And if you listen to the song that they did called "Fuzzy Man," it's ridiculous and awesome and it just sounds like you can see the credits rolling and all of that sort of stuff. I didn't have one for *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* simply because I ran out of time, I just didn't think about it, and I haven't done it generally for the Old Men's War series. But I think the new book that I'm writing right now, I will definitely have somebody do it. Probably a musician from Ohio because that's where it's going to take place in. ### 17 new sci-fi and fantasy books coming this December URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-december-2025/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T16:00:20.000Z December is usually a pretty dead month for new books: publishers want to get their new releases out ahead of the start of the holiday shopping season, and as we've seen this year, September, October, and November were *packed* with new releases. This year finds a December that also has a hefty pile of books hitting store shelves, and some of the year's more interesting-looking books, too, such as collections of optimistic visions for the future, collections from notable authors, art books, and some outstanding-looking novels. The holiday shopping season *is* in full swing now, and if you're looking for some good gift ideas, I published my annual Gift Guide last week, with a whole bunch of higher-end books, gadgets, and writing things that you might find to be a good gift for someone in your life. [Transfer Orbit’s 2025 Holiday Gift GuideA whole bunch of neat books, toys, and other items to gift the nerdy person in your life![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7798.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nerd-holiday-gift-guide-books-lego-games-scifi-2/) If you're looking for books, you can read through the book lists for the entire year over on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. There are lots of excellent ones to choose from! If you're looking for some specific recommendations, you can check out the [Reviews tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/reviews/) as well. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit.* This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you: your support helps keep this newsletter running smoothly. Okay, here are 17 new SF/F books to close out the year with: ### [*Hello Earth, Are You There?: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian Aldiss*](https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Earth-Are-You-There/dp/0008779619/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=1BDEATSZYGMMA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PnrgzdLJi-mN%5F4MmNjf1HA.e2Ldr1PNNf8W7oPNL4pEBrYr9ohC1HPmHKgHXHp7mic&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=978-0-00-877961-0&qid=1764597677&sprefix=%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian Aldiss (December 4th) The late Brian Aldiss is one of the genre's most influential science fiction authors, best known for his [*Hellionica* trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781504041379?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Helliconia* *Spring, Helliconia* *Summer and Helliconia* *Winter*) and for [*Super Toys Last All Summer Long*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780312280611?ref=andrewliptak.com), the basis for the film *A.I.: Artificial Intelligence*. To celebrate the centennial of his birth in 1925, Harper Voyager UK has pulled together 27 of his shorter stories in a new collection. It should be a good introduction for anyone looking to pick up his work. ### [T*he Tower and the Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324093886?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael D.C. Drout (December 2nd) There's no shortage of books about J.R.R. Tolkien's life out there, but this one looks particularly interesting: it's deep dive into how Tolkien created his Middle-earth legendarium, looking at the legends that inspired him from medieval literature, and how he utilized his knowledge of language, history, and storytelling to build the world in which *The Silmarillion, The Hobbit*, and *The Lord of the Rings*, are just a very small part. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-dc-drout/the-tower-and-the-ruin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "an ardent plea for Tolkien as a writer with a moral vision about friendship in the face of love and loss. ### *Stranger Things: The Complete Scripts* [Season 3](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984079?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Season 4](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984093?ref=andrewliptak.com) by The Duffer Brothers (December 9th) The fifth and final season of *Stranger Things* kicked off last week on Netflix, and as part of the leadup, the studio has begun releasing the scripts for each season in book form. The volumes for [Season 1](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984031?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Season 2](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984055?ref=andrewliptak.com) came out back in September, and now we've got the scripts for seasons 3 and 4 hitting shelves: something to pour over while we wait for the final two batches of episodes later this month. ### [*Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262553667?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn (December 2nd) Climate change has become a huge focus in certain segments of the science fiction world, and it often comes with an apocalyptic tinge. This new anthology takes a different path: edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, both of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, it's full of stories that take a more optimistic view, and how people might adapt and build in the face of huge challenges. This anthology boasts an impressive group of contributors from around the world, including Ken Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vandana Singh, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, and many others. ### [*Halo: Edge of Dawn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668017555?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Gay (December 16th) The *Halo* franchise has always been something of a mess: a main lineup of games, with a whole bunch of tie-in novels and comics that accompany it, but with some weird detours in canon. It's always seemed as though the series hasn't had quite the same level of purpose and direction as *Star Wars* (although that's debatable in and of itself), but I do appreciate that the books can bring in some additional stories and build on the world that the games have brought together. [Halo Infinite delivers on a long-standing promiseExploring the Zeta Halo ring![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-2.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/67CB45E7-D80A-4A0B-9D51-DFE232D274F6.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/halo-infinite-gameplay-open-world-review/) One of the biggest missed opportunities was the latest game, *Halo: Infinite*, which ends with something of a promise that there was quite a bit more to explore on the Zeta Halo, potentially through DLCs. But that hasn't happened: there's been plenty of shakeups at Microsoft and the game franchise feels a bit aimless, leaving that potential unfulfilled... until now. Kelly Gay's latest is set after the events of *Halo: Infinite*, picking up the story of Master Chief after he killed War Chief Escharum. The fight continues on Zeta Halo, and now accompanied by a new AI and pilot Fernando Esparza, the chief is seeking out the rest of the scattered UNSC forces, and has to rescue a medic who's been captured and tortured by the Banished for months, potentially leading to unlocking some new secrets to the mysterious ring, all while being hunter by Sangheiliblademaster Jega ‘Rdomnai, who's hellbent on exacting revenge. ### [*The Library of Fates*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781525804311?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Margot Harrison (December 2nd) Margot Harrison was a guest at [this year's Green Mountain Book Festival](https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-mountain-book-festival-recap/), and while there, she spoke a bit about her upcoming novel, *The Library of Fates*. The titular library contains a rare book called *The Book of Dark Nights*, which has a secret: when you write a confession in it, it'll send you a prediction for your future. Eleanor, an apprentice to the librarian, finds that the library helps her make sense of the world after a tragic childhood, but when her mentor is killed in an accident and the book goes missing, she has to leave the library to try and find it and the secrets that it holds. She teams up with the librarian's estranged son Daniel – with whom she once had a relationship, and they have to figure out how to trust one another as they travel the world looking for the book. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes that](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/margot-harrison/the-library-of-fates-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "while it contains an entertaining mystery, at heart this is a novel about the power of a good book and how that book can change a person’s life if it’s read at the right moment." ### [*Secrets of the First School* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250440914?ref=andrewliptak.com)by T.L. Huchu (December 2nd) I really enjoyed T.L. Huchu's urban fantasy world when I picked up the first novel in the series, [*The Library of the Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250767783?ref=andrewliptak.com)a couple of years ago. He's since followed it up with three additional installments ([*Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250767806?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883087?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Legacy of Arniston House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883117?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which follow failed magician Ropa Moyo as she makes her way through a climate-wrecked Scotland and the underground magical scene there. In this fifth and final installment, Ropa is now dead, banished to the Other Place by a reanimated spirit. It's not the end of the story for her though, and as the Cult of Dundas – who worship the spirit who killed her – is working to spread their influence to Scotland's magical schools. To stop them Ropa has to figure out how to escape and gather her friends and allies before it's too late. [Review: The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu’sA slick, urban fantasy mystery that kicks off a promising series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/54948818650_d4d892e6db_w-1.jpg)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/FL0jFSsXoAEZ5sY.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tl-huchu-library-of-the-dead-urban-fantasy-review/) ### [*This Brutal Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316463669?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bethany Jacobs (December 2nd) Bethany Jacobs brings her *Kindom* space opera trilogy to a close with This Brutal Moon, which follows [*These Burning Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316463324?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*On Vicious Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316463522?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which introduced readers to a thief named Jun Ironway who came across a secret that threatened the Kindom, which ruled the galaxy. Two Kindom clerics, Chono and Esek, were sent to track her down, and they're followed by a mysterious character known only as Six. In this conclusion, Jun and her companion Maser Hawks have ended up on an isolated colony called Treble, and it's now under threat, with a burgeoning revolution and enemies who're still after them. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls it a](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bethany-jacobs/this-brutal-moon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "reasonably rewarding and thought-provoking wrap-up," with an emphasis on exploring how characters deal with trauma and work to break the cycle of violence. ### [*We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668095959?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older (December 2nd) It seems to be the month for collections of optimistic visions of the future: Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older have put together a new anthology of essays, interviews, and stories about the state of social justice in the future, exploring how people will advocate on a wide range of topics, from disability to the environment to collective action. Some of the authors in the TOC include visionsaries such as N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias, just to name a few. ### [*The Price of Plenty: A History of Meat in America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781733192323?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maureen Ogle (November 4th) Years ago, I came across Maureen Ogle's outstanding history, [*Ambitious Brew: A History of American Beer*](https://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Brew-History-American-Revised/dp/1733192301/ref=sr%5F1%5F3?crid=16SZL9HP4PM4C&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Kv5b7o8BqRfQqqjIOCKvLJCtCHMzgAuHt7zEzpUDORZ4dbdAzD8R7bK2ompiSaSyoAZLvj5HEy4w-YXl%5FYXDkZnxhKCNccPvKX28ON5Jip1OLyLqKnWH0Ih0DUWE62qpJHT3RtE9%5F2730cugsT-Ozg.tHPZ-e4mvJgQUUaR7pTmicRt4yUnVN%5FCl2TJVT5lqWg&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=maureen+ogle&qid=1764599901&sprefix=maureen+ogle%2Caps%2C410&sr=8-3&ref=andrewliptak.com) and her follow-up, *In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America* (here's my [original review](https://gizmodo.com/this-is-why-you-are-eating-more-meat-1478099656?ref=andrewliptak.com) for it). Since its publication, she's been reworking and adding to it, resulting in a new book: [*The Price of Plenty: A History of Meat in America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781733192323?ref=andrewliptak.com), which looks at how the meat industry came together, from massive cattle drives, to factory farms to chicken nuggets, going all the way back to the earliest days of America. I can't say enough good things about Ogle's work and how it's personally shaped how I approach history. She's an outstanding researcher and storyteller, and this book should give anyone a better understanding of a huge part of our society and culture. ### [*Doug Chiang: The Cinematic Legacy & the Star Wars Legacy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419777752?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet (December 2nd) I love me a good *Star Wars* art book, and a massive, two-volume set that's all about Doug Chiang, the artist who helped define the look and feel of the prequel era with his astonishing artwork? Sign me up. This is a hefty release that runs 800 pages (and $275) that covers the breadth of Chiang's career, starting with his work on films like *Alien 3*, *Back to the Future Part II*, *Jumanji*, *The Mask*, *Spawn, T2: Judgment Day*, and many others, before diving into his work on the prequel trilogy and through projects such as the sequel trilogy, the standalone films, Galaxy's Edge, and *The Mandalorian.* ### [*Antarctica*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217092024?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Years of Rice and Salt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217091775?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kim Stanley Robinson (December 2nd) Two of Kim Stanley Robinson's novels are getting a re-release from Del Rey with some neat new covers: *Antarctica* and *The Years of Rice and Salt*. The former follows the icy continent as the international treaty that protects it is about to be taken apart, and explores how people might work to protect it. In the latter, set in the 14th century, the Black Death is coming, and unlike in the real world, it kills more than 99 percent of Europe's population, leading to a drastically different timeline. ### [*Tailored Realities*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250410481?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Brandon Sanderson (December 9th) Brandon Sanderson is an extremely prolific author, and somehow, he's fit in another book for the year: a collection called *Tailored Realties,* which includes ten short stories that includes everything from detective thrillers, space opera stories, superheroes, fantasy thrill rides and more. All of these stories stand on their own and many are in print for the first time. The folks at *Winter is Coming* [says](https://winteriscoming.net/book-review-tailored-realities-treat-for-die-hard-brandon-sanderson-fans?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "as a retrospective look back on the non-*Cosmere* side of Brandon Sanderson's career, *Tailored Realities* is a wonderful read." ### [*Stranger Things: One Way Or Another*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593973837?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caitlin Schneiderhan (December 2nd) The *Stranger Thing* scripts aren't the only releases for the supernatural franchise this month: Caitlin Schneiderhan has a new book about Nancy Wheeler, set in the aftermath of Season 4\. After the earthquake and Vecna's return to Earth, the people of Hawkins, Indiana are dealing with the aftermath, and Nancy has been obsessed with tracking down Vecna, to no avail. As she works her way through her final year of school, she's suspicious when one of her classmates begins acting strangely, and ends up tracking down a much bigger story that could threaten the town. ### [*Sunset at Zero Point*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668096413?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Simon Stålenhag (December 9th) I'm a huge fan of Simon Stålenhag's art books, and was thrilled to get his book *Swedish Machines* earlier this year after backing his [Kickstarter](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-kickstarter/). It's now getting a wider release as *Sunset at Zero Point*, and I found it to be a beautiful, heartbreaking read about strange science and a queer relationship. The story splits its time between 2024 and the early 2000s, following two kids who explore the grounds of an off-limits weapons lab and come to terms with their childhoods, leaving and returning home, and how they relate to one another. It's a masterful work. [Returning to memory laneSimon Stålenhag’s Swedish Machines is an engrossing, beautiful read about memories and queer love![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-222.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/39BE3DB0-BD31-4044-B49D-FCC18937652B-1-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-zero-point-scifi-book-review/) --- That's it for the year for these monthly book lists: thank you for checking them out over the course of 2025\. I genuinely hope that you found some books that you enjoyed: it's why I write this list, and I appreciate everyone who's commented here and elsewhere about them, what they picked up, suggested, and enjoyed. Let me know in the comments what you found. I'll share my "favorite reads" of the year in a couple of weeks, and this column will continue in 2026: I've already been populating out pages for the first six months and there are some excellent-looking books coming up. I hope that we'll discover some new reads together in the months ahead. ### Dragonian bargains URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/king-sorrow-joe-hill-fantasy-horror-dragons-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-11-30T01:03:15.000Z Dragons hold a central place in the world's mythologies and modern popular culture. In his introduction to the [*Penguin Book of Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135043?ref=andrewliptak.com), Scott G. Bruce writes that "our infatuation with these creatures is deeply rooted in the distant past," and that they've endured in all their forms because they are "the test against which we measure the limits of the heroes we venerate... \[persisting\] in our imagination both as flesh-and-blood monsters and as powerful metaphors for sin and other destructive forces." That's an apt way to describe Hill's wyrm, King Sorrow, and the epic he constructs around him: an awesome and powerful force of nature that serves both as a literal antagonist for his band of unlikely heroes and as a representation of the rage and problems that we're facing throughout the world. Hill kicks off this sprawling story in 1989, when a kid named Arthur Oakes visits his mother in prison. Incarcerated after a protest went wrong, she soon runs afoul of one of a fellow inmate, who directs her daughter to make sure things are straightened out. Threatening his mother, they force Arthur to make it up to them: steal some valuable books from his college's special collections, in the hopes that they can make a profit. Initially reluctant, Arthur ends up taking a handful of rare books from the collection, including one bound in human skin. He quickly realizes that his problems won't end with a paid-off debt: Jayne Nighswander is going to continue to squeeze him for as much as she can manage, because she holds that power over him. Once his friends – Colin Wren, Gwen Underfoot, Donna and Van McBride, and Allie Shiner – realize what's happening and after a night of supernatural speculation, they decide to take some drastic action to solve the problem: summon a dragon to take care of the problem, as one does. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Brought into the world, King Sorrow is a force to be reckoned with, and he's more than happy to help the group eliminate Jayne. King Sorrow isn't just looking for a human to cook and eat; he spends weeks appearing in his selected quarry's mind, ratcheting up the paranoia and fear and dread, seasoning them for when he eventually catches up with them at an abandoned drive-in movie theater and scorching them his fiery breath. But like the best dragons, King Sorrow isn't just a weapon to be turned out against the people hounding Arthur, and it isn't until long after they've entered into their bargain with him that they fully understand the weight of what they've done. He isn't content to just consume the one drug dealer and her boyfriend who crossed Arthur and his friends; he wants to be *fed* and long-term. Per their agreement, the group has to come up with a new person for Sorrow to kill, by Easter, or he'll eat one of them. Arthur's friends are an unlikely bunch: Colin's the nephew of a well-connected government spook who goes on to a lucrative career as a governmental contractor / tech bro, Donna and Van coming from a wealthy political family, and goes on to become a right-wing commentator and whimsical artist (respectively), Gwen is a townie who goes on to become an EMT, while Allie is a nervous, closeted alcoholic. Where a such a group of friends might drift apart with enough time and space, their summoning of King Sorrow keeps them locked together and in touch, forming relationships that none can quite shake, and which Hill's able to utilize when he wants to give the thumbscrews another twist. [Pedal to the floorJoe Hill on Full Throttle, Netflix Adaptations, and Working With His Dad![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-345.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8871.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/pedal-to-the-floor/) As they settle into a routine – one of them is to select someone to die each year – Hill sends his sprawling story into high gear and we follow the gang as they deal with this heavy task that they've brought upon themselves. Each of them approaches this burden differently. Gwen, in love with Arthur, finds out the hard way that you can't enter into a bargain with a dragon lightly, and ends up using her turns to spare the people who she's caring for a long and painful death from illness, starting with Colin's AIDS-infected uncle. Others are more willing to utilize Sorrow's powers: Colin approaches their duty with gusto, rising through the ranks of government and business through family connections, happily sends the dragon after terrorist threats to the country and eventually, his own interests, picking them off one by one with dragon fire. The others pick their own sides, often going along with Colin and his approach, or enduring it while they try and figure a way out: Arthur, the most academically-minded of the group, spends his life researching language and mythology, searching for a way to slay King Sorrow in order to get out of their pact and spare others from their horrifying fates. This is a big tome of a book, and as Hill jumps forward years and decades from adventure to adventure, he takes the time to really flesh each one of them out. We follow Allie and Van in 1995 when they board a flight to London to try and take out a violent Christian fundamentalist before the story takes on a paranoid spy tale when the government gets wind of *something* happening the world's worst people and Van and Donna are snatched off a street in 2000 to interrogate them. From there, we're off to England to follow Arthur and Colin in 2006 on a fantastic, tragic quest to try and find a mythical weapon to slay King Sorrow, and the US in 2016 when he brings everyone and their conflicting journeys, motivations, and flaws to a heartbreaking head before bringing everything to a close by 2022\. This is no small feat: in a lesser author's hands, *King Sorrow* could have been a muddled, meandering mess, but despite its girth and indulgence, it's a story that moves quickly. Throughout this round robin of characters and their exploits, Hill explores a central theme around dragons: bargaining with one is unwise and often exacts a heavy, often unexpected toll from those foolish enough to do so. He's not the first to do so: J.R.R. Tolkien's Smaug from *The Hobbit* is clearly a huge influence here, known for both his destruction and clever riddle-making under the Lonely Mountain, but I also couldn't help but think of Lev Grossman's *The Magician King* and his depictions of dragons as being this powerful forces that are so advanced that they're difficult for humans to really comprehend. If dragons are a test for the heroes who go up against them, King Sorrow proves to be a trial that puts Arthur and his friends through a pressure cooker. As they enter into their bargain as naive young adults, they think that they've stumbled upon a quick and easy solution to take care of the people who're threatening their wellbeing. What they find instead is that they're ill-equipped to handle the responsibility and toll that orchestrating murder year in and year out will take on their souls. Early on, they hope that they are doing the world a solid by trying to pick off humanity's worst offenders. That's not always the case, even when they do order the assassination of terrorist leaders or criminals: they find that there's no end to their task; there's always people that they'll miss or catch people in the crossfire. King Sorrow's bargain lays bear our frailties and short-sighted nature, and how susceptible we are to relying on the reality in front of us, even though we're fully capable of understanding the cost in the abstract. Hill plays out the cost of their decisions in particularly heartbreaking and tragic ways: their attempts to get out of the bargain backfire, their activities bring them unwanted attention from all directions, and they're ultimately forced to kill people, over and over again. But it's not all Faustian bargains all the time: it's what Hill's characters do with their circumstances that ultimately determines whether or not they survive, and it's here that we see their true natures emerge. Arthur – as his name suggests – turns out to have a heroic streak while Colin gives in to the temptation that this power grants him. I'm reminded a bit of a quote from *The Lord of the Rings*: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us," as each member of the group has to decide how to deal with the consequences of their bargain: making the best of things for the world, or themselves. Hill's dragon makes for a good mechanism to think about the state of the world and the decisions that we often find ourselves forced to make. None of them night be as drastic as selecting someone to kill each year on Easter, but there are plenty of destructive forces that we face in the world, some nearly as daunting as a fire-breathing dragon. ### Transfer Orbit's 2025 Holiday Gift Guide URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nerd-holiday-gift-guide-books-lego-games-scifi-2/ Last updated: 2025-11-26T17:25:17.000Z The annual holiday gift-buying season is upon us. As has become tradition here at Transfer Orbit, I've put together a special roundup of the various things that I think would make for a good gift this holiday season. I recommend a lot of books throughout the year, but this list one goes a bit beyond those roundups: I've included books that fall on more of the special / deluxe edition end of the spectrum than your regular trade editions, and there's other items that 've found personally useful in the last year that I'd recommend for you or the nerd-inclined person in your life. If you're looking for more ideas beyond what you find here, here are the lists from [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-secret-commonwealth-bn-scifi-and-a-gift-guide/), [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2020-transfer-orbit-holiday-gift-guide/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gift-guide-books-music-tech-2021/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-sci-fi-fantasy-gift-guide/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/transfer-orbit-2023-holiday-shopping-list/), and [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nerd-holiday-gift-guide-books-lego-games-scifi/). I've also got some more specific recommendations under the [Reviews](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/reviews/) tag, and if you're looking for ideas for books, hit up the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag as well. Here are my recommendations for the year: --- ## Home ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7763.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Calamity Ware "Things Could Be Worse" Travel Mug](https://calamityware.com/products/things-could-be-worse-travel-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com), $29 I've featured Calamity Ware's goods before: I have one of their coffee mugs and I love using it. The company has a whole range of drink and food wares, inspired by the classic Blue Willow China patterns with a bit of a speculative twist: there are monsters, castles, dinosaurs, robots, and all sorts of other creatures lurking around in the artwork. The latest addition to our cupboards is this travel mug, which fits nicely into a car's cupholder and which holds a bit more than the classic coffee mug. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7765.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [King Arthur Spice Measuring Spoons](https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/measuring-spice-spoons?ref=andrewliptak.com), $20 It’s always interesting when you see someone take a commonly-used item and look at it in a new way. Earlier this year, I picked up a set of measuring spoons from King Arthur Flour (headquartered here in Vermont!) The company [unveiled a new set of baking tools in 2024](https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2024/10/07/baking-tools?ref=andrewliptak.com), which they say have been redesigned by their bakers. I'm not entirely sure that narrow spoons like this are a real novel thing, but it's a neat change in design from your traditional rounder ones. In the last year, I've found them to be great to use in the kitchen. They fit nicely through the narrow mouth of spice bottles, which I appreciate, and they're very sold: I've had others bend and just feel kind of flimsy. These are kitchen tools that don’t feel as though they’re going to fall apart after a couple of years, and I’ve already replaced several sets of the cheaper ones that I’d been using. --- ## Reading ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7787.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Use of Weapons*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/use-of-weapons?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Folio Society Edition) by Iain M. Banks, $145 Over the last couple of years, The Folio Society has been repackaging Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, starting with *Consider Phlebas* and *Player of Games.* [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-207.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0832-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) The publishers has continued producing installments of the *Culture* series this year with the publication of the third book in the series, *Use of Weapons*. They've kept up with the same art style with artist Dániel Taylor. Like the other two books, it's a stunning edition, and I'm loving how this book looks alongside the others on the shelf. I recently re-read *Consider Phlebas*, and I've been itching to read more of the series: friends and fellow readers have told me that *Use of Weapons* is one of the best books in the series, following a man called Cheradenine Zakalwe who's recruited into the Culture by a Special Circumstances agent named Diziet Sma to help with less advanced civilizations. It's high on my to-read list. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781546159544?ref=andrewliptak.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7780.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063285767?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ursula K. Le Guin and Fred Fordham, $27 One of my favorite fantasy novels is Ursula K. Le Guin's *A Wizard of Earthsea*, a mindblowing coming-of-age tale of a boy named Sparrowhawk as he learns to become a wizard, and all the mistakes and trials that he encounters along the way. It's a phenomenal read, and earlier this year, Le Guin's estate released a graphic novel adaptation of it. This is a beautiful take on the book: artist and writer Fred Fordham did a wonderful job capturing the look and feel of Earthsea through his artwork and words. It's a great way to re-experience the story and world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7784.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Neuromancer*](https://store.gollancz.co.uk/products/neuromancer?variant=53500253340027&ref=andrewliptak.com)(40th Anniversary Edition) by William Gibson, £100 Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of William Gibson's seminal novel *Neuromancer.* I've had a handful of copies over the years, but I've always found the covers wanting, until I came across an exceptional edition published by UK publisher Gollancz. This is a limited edition hardcover with a stunning cover designed by Daniel Brown and with 25 interior illustrations by Marco Luna. It comes with the usual other bells and whistles: bookmark ribbon, sprayed edges, as well as nice paper and binding. There's a complication for buying this: it isn't available in a whole bunch of countries, including the United States. I ended up having a UK-based friend order and ship it for me. This wasn't the only anniversary edition out there: The Folio Society [also produced a nice-looking volume](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/neuromancer-william-gibson?ref=andrewliptak.com) that retails for $130 and which comes with art by Anna Mill. ### [*A Canticle for Leibowitz*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/a-canticle-for-leibowitz-core?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Walter J. Miller, $100 Another of The Folio Society's offerings this year is Walter J. Miller's classic post-apocalyptic novel *A Canticle for Leibowitz*. Set after a nuclear Armageddon, in what remains of the American southwest, it follows the monks in a monastery as they try and preserve what remains of humanity's knowledge. This edition looks spectacular: it features an introduction by noted critic Michael Dirda, and interior art by Elliot Lang, including 12 full-color illustrations, 3 part-title illustrations, and 30 illuminated drop-caps at the beginning of each chapter. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7783.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Frankenstein*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781454951575?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Deluxe Edition) by Mary Shelley,$40 One of my favorite films of the year so far has been Guillermo del Toro's *Frankenstein*, and while I had a copy of the novel, I was never a huge fan of the cover art, so I've been hunting for a new edition that. I ended up settling on Union Square & Co.'s 2023 edition of the novel. It features the 1818 text, as well as some great artwork by John Coulthart and a snazzy plastic dustjacket. As a bonus, it includes two other notable works connected to Frankenstein: John Polidori's *The Vampyre* and Lord Byron's "The Darkness", both of which were created during that fated evening party that the trio held in 1816, when they suggested that they all tell one another ghost stories, ultimately leading to *Frankenstein*'s conception and publication. [I've complained before](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/) about how some of these "deluxe" editions are essentially a repackaged version of the original trade edition, but in this case, the type, paper, binding, and whole package is great and I loved reading this edition this fall. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7781.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith* Deluxe Edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217090983?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Stover, $60 You know that saying that the book is better than the movie? That's not usually the case with movie novelizations, but when it came to writing the novelization for *Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith*, Matthew Stover was cooking with *something*. It's an extraordinary read. The novel elevates the film in so many ways, and to commemorate this year's 20th anniversary of the film, Random House Worlds has re-released it in deluxe edition form. Not only is the packaging on point: a great new cover, see-through dust jacket, and metallic red sprayed edges, they got Stover to go back in and annotate the text, adding a new depth and insights into the story. It's a great way to reexperience the story. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7775.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*The American Revolution: An Intimate History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525658672?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, $80 I'd be remiss if I didn't include some sort of regular history book here. Ken Burns and his collaborators recently released their latest big documentaries on PBS, *The American Revolution*, which explores the conflict over the course of 12 hours in great detail. The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence comes in 2026, so it's a good time to read up on the story of the nation's founding. Like his other documentaries, Burns has teamed up with historian Geoffrey C. Ward to produce a companion book, *The American Revolution: An Intimate History*. Like the documentary, it's a fascinating look at the conflict, providing a great overview of the war's origins, how it played out, and what the impact was. I loved reading along with the series as I watched: it's loaded with lots of artwork and maps, and it makes for a great fixture on one's coffee table. I'd also recommend their other companion books for [*The Civil War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780394562858?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Jazz*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780679445517?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307262837?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Vietnam War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307700254?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The National Parks*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307268969?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* --- ## Toys & Games ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7772.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Brick-Built *Star Wars* Logo](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/brick-built-star-wars-logo-75407?ref=andrewliptak.com), $60 There's a business case study to be written about how Lego has gone from beloved toy company to one that has shifted a lot of focus to the adult collectable market, with kits that are increasing in complexity, detail, and price. I've been puzzled by some of the kits that they've released in recent years, like [this one of the Marvel logo](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/marvel-logo-minifigures-76313?ref=andrewliptak.com): something to build, stick on a shelf, and let is sit. But that seems to be a big part of the collector's market: building elaborate display pieces (which I have to say, I've done myself, with a handful of sets). All of that said, I think this year's *Star Wars* logo kit is something that I'd happy pick up and build and display somewhere. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7769.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Split Fiction*](https://www.ea.com/en/games/split-fiction/split-fiction?ref=andrewliptak.com), $50 I picked this game up on the recommendation of a bunch of people earlier this year, and was immediately delighted with the premise: two authors (Mio, science fiction and Zoe, fantasy) arrive at a tech company to try out an experimental device that will allow them to experience their stories. Mio tries to back out and ends up getting stuck in Zoe's simulation bubble, causing the machine to glitch and sending the two polar-opposite characters crashing into their own worlds, where they'll now have to escape. My son and I played this through and it's a lot of fun as we raced through science fiction and fantasy levels. I have a lot of fond memories of playing games like *Breath of the Wild* and *Halo* with him when he was younger, and this game is entirely cooperative. It made for a nice bonding experience, one that I'm glad we were able to share. Plus, it's about authors fighting against giant tech companies trying to profit off of their IP. It's like it was made for me. --- ## Wearables & Accessories ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7793.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [2046 Print Shop's Black Hole 2.0 shirt](https://2046printshop.com/products/blackhole2?ref=andrewliptak.com), $32 A couple of years ago, I picked up one of 2046 Print Shop's shirts, [Starship](https://2046printshop.com/products/starship?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I've loved it. It's held up wonderfully in that time without fading or ripping, and I adore the design. For my birthday, my wife bought me their black hole graphic shirt, and I've been enjoying having that in the rotation. The company is something of a design studio and apparel shop that focuses on a whole range space and science-themed shirts, often with a great, minimalist design. They've subtly nerdy and are a nice departure from shirts with branded logos, weird memes, or dumb in-jokes. They have a bunch of others that I've got my eye on, such as [gravitational waves](https://2046printshop.com/products/gravitational-waves-2-0?ref=andrewliptak.com), [interstellar](https://2046printshop.com/products/subscription-tee-crew-cut-2024-08?ref=andrewliptak.com), [orbit](https://2046printshop.com/products/orbital?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [more](https://2046printshop.com/collections/t-shirts?ref=andrewliptak.com). They also sell a [monthly subscription](https://2046printshop.com/pages/tee-subscription?ref=andrewliptak.com), where you can get a new shirt each month. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7792.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### *Aftermath*'s "Destroy AI" shirt ([white](https://aftermath-shop.fourthwall.com/products/destroy-ai-t-shirt-natural?ref=andrewliptak.com)/[black](https://aftermath-shop.fourthwall.com/products/destroy-ai-t-shirt-black?ref=andrewliptak.com)), $30 I love the look of this shirt from the cooperatively-run gaming website *Aftermath*. It's got a simple message: Destroy AI, with some very cool artwork from [Kim Hu](https://kim-hu.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've accumulated a ton of shirts over the years, and I'm finding that I'm starting to gravitate towards ones that look different and go beyond the stock logo on a pocket or in the center, something that uses the entire surface as a canvas, and this really does it for me. I picked mine up earlier this year, and I love wearing it. The colors are great, and it's super comfortable. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7791.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Automatic Noodle Torso Cover](https://www.automaticnoodle.website/shop/p/torso-cover-1?ref=andrewliptak.com), $25 One of my [favorite reads of the year so far](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/) is Annalee Newitz's novella *Automatic Noodle*, a fun little adventure about a group of robots making their way in a dystopian San Francisco as they deal with the realities of building a business and dealing with online trolls. To complement the book, Newitz launched a store that mirrors its in-universe counterpart that sells merch for the store, Automatic Noodle. I had to pick up one of the shirts, which features their logo. It's super comfortable, and I love the minimalist and quirky logo. [Wearing your fandomAutomatic Noodle: The Shirt!, something that I think more authors should look into doing when they release a book![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-344.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5865-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-publishing-merchandise-shirts-design/) ### [Black Series Shoretrooper helmet](https://www.hasbropulse.com/product/star-wars-the-black-series-shoretrooper-electronic-helmet/G07035S01?srsltid=AfmBOopTAK46SkPx6RbvzCQc7SWM3gAJ0wK%5FHiMvAyuCHzjOpw%5FxWSWl&ref=andrewliptak.com), $110 One of my favorite trooper designs from Star Wars is the Imperial Shoretrooper, which first popped up in *Rogue One* which has since made appearances in *The Mandalorian* and *Andor*. Hasbro has added the helmet to its Black Series lineup, and it looks great: a solid wearable for a costume (although I imagine it would need some slight modifications to be eligible for 501st Legion membership)or just great display piece for one’s nerd cave. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7788.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Lochby Sidekick](https://www.lochby.com/collections/featured/products/sidekick?ref=andrewliptak.com), $29 Back in 2020, I came across a neat company called Lochby, run by a US Army veteran named Chris Elfering, who designed some waxed canvas accessories for writers. I ended up picking up their [Field Journal](https://www.lochby.com/collections/featured/products/field-journal?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Tool Roll](https://www.lochby.com/collections/featured/products/tool-roll?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I can honestly say that I've probably used them every day since and I've been impressed with how well they've held up in those five years. The company's released a handful of other items since, but earlier his year, they released something that I had a real need of: a wallet. I fell in love with this the moment I got it. It's about the size of my phone and is made from the same waxed canvas as my other two items. It all folds together neatly and compactly and I've got plenty of space for my cards and cash, but what clinched it for me is that the spine has a slot for a pen *and* there's a tiny corner slot that's the perfect size for an AirTag. I reviewed mine earlier this year, and since then, the company has released a second version, which has some minor improvements. [Lochby Sidekick: a practical wallet for writersLochby’s Sidekick is a practical and innovative wallet for writers![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-265.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2336-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lochby-sidekick-wallet-pen-edc-review/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7789.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Szanto Desert Sands Watch](https://szantotime.com/products/desert-sands/?ref=andrewliptak.com), $245 I featured the [Szanto Heritage Aviator watch](https://szantotime.com/products/heritage-aviator/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) back in 2021 for this list, and last Christmas, my wife gifted me a new one from the company: their Desert Sands Chronograph 4551\. When I bought that first one, it was a toss-up between it and this one, I'm glad that I've added this to my collection. I love look and feel of the black case, and the typeface (particularly the prominent 12 and 6), as well as the sturdy leather strap. I've been wearing it regularly in the last year, and it's something that fits nicely with my work wardrobe. --- ## Writing ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7768.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Blackwing 602 pencils, 12 count](https://blackwing602.com/products/blackwing-volume-746-set-of-12?ref=andrewliptak.com), $32 For years, I've used pens almost exclusively, but earlier this year, one of my coworkers turned me onto Blackwing. The company has a neat story: it was a coveted writing instrument that had vanished when the company making them went out of business. In 2008, a new company, California Cedar Products Company, [acquired the brand name and set about recreating it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8J%5FnYQge14&ref=andrewliptak.com), which is what this new product is. The ones that I picked up are a limited edition from their Volumes collection, #746: The Golden Gate Bridge Pencil. I've found that I love writing with them: the graphite flows smoothly across the paper (much better than the Dixon Ticonderoga pencils that I grew up using.) Unfortunately, they start off a little long to stick into the tool roll I use for pens to start, but after a little while, they eventually do fit neatly. As a bit of a bonus, I picked up a [Mobius & Ruppert Brass Round pencil sharpener](https://goldspot.com/products/mobius-ruppert-m-r-brass-artists-pencil-sharpener-choose-from-4-shapes-made-in-germany-finest-in-the-world-604-bullet-grenade?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I've got tucked away in my bag and which sharpens these pencils to a very nice point. ### [Lochby A5 Notepad (4 pack)](https://www.lochby.com/collections/notebooks/products/a5-notebooks-4-pack?ref=andrewliptak.com), $34 Years ago, I picked up Lochby's Field Journal, and it's one of those items that I use pretty regularly in my writing and work lives. It's a durable and excellent journal that holds a bunch of the company's notepads. Those notepads are excellent: ink doesn't stain through them and as I've been writing notes and other things longhand, I've found that these are outstanding notebooks for the task: my pens glide easily across them, and I've got no trouble filling them up with my scribbling. ### [Rhodia N° 16 Notebook](https://www.gouletpens.com/products/rhodia-no-16-top-wirebound-notebook-black-lined?ref=andrewliptak.com), $8 Also on the notebook front, I was gifted one of these notebooks last year, and I've put it to use. Because I'm left-handed, I tend to have trouble with notebooks that are spiral-bound on the left side, so I prefer the top-bound pads such as this one. The paper here is excellent, and it's a good size to stick into a pocket or my bag for writing notes from meetings or jotting down thoughts on the go. ### [Talking Out of Turn Jotter Pen](https://talkingoutofturn.com/products/individual-jotters?%5Fpos=6&%5Fsid=b9d7254f0&%5Fss=r&ref=andrewliptak.com), $3 While I've come to enjoy using fountain pens, I've also been on the hunt for some good, cheaper pens. I found those in the form of Talking Out of Turn's Jotter Pens, which I've found I like far more than your typical Pilot or Bic alternatives. They have some excellent ink that's super reliable and smooth, and they come in a wild range of colors (I picked up a navy blue and olive green). ## Meta ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/IMG_7778.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Liptak, $30 I'd be remiss if I didn't toss my own book onto the pile. This came out in 2022, and I'm still very proud of how this book turned out. Saga did a wonderful job with the design, and I've enjoyed using it as an excuse to talk about the field of cosplay and where it came from. I think this makes for a great gift: I envisioned it as a book that would appeal not only to dedicated cosplayers, but to readers who're interested in fandom and popular culture / science fiction history. The version on the market is a new printing: the cover is slightly different, and the binding is much better (the old one creased really badly), but the text is all the same, save for a couple of fixed typos. It's available through all major retailers, but I also have a stack of copies! If you'd like a personalized copy for you or someone you know, contact me directly. (I'm going to limit this to US shipping only: I don't have the bandwidth to process international orders at this time.) ### [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) edited by Andrew Liptak and Jaym Gates, $19 *Cosplay: A History* wasn't my first book. That honor goes to a project that Jaym Gates and I edited years ago: *War Stories: New Military Science Fiction.* It includes stories by authors like Ken Liu, Karin Lowachee, Linda Nagata, Maruice Broaddus, Joe Haldeman and more. I'm still proud of this anthology: we pulled together a nice collection of stories, ones that have held up well as the battlefield has changed since it came out. I don't have copies of this on hand, I'm afraid, but it's also available from major retailers. ### [Transfer Orbit subscription](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), $40/year Know someone who likes science fiction and fantasy and who wants to keep up to date on the state of the genres? Consider gifting them a membership to *Transfer Orbit*! Not only would you help support this publication, but you'll give them access to a small community of like-minded fans and readers. --- Thanks for reading: if you've got something to recommend, feel free to drop a link in the comments for your fellow readers! ### Cross-genre takeover URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/romantasy-science-fiction-fantasy-books-publishing-sales/ Last updated: 2025-11-22T17:15:28.000Z Last week, *The Bookseller*'s Alex Call [released an article](https://www.thebookseller.com/bestsellers/romantastic-romantic-fantasy-leads-sff-to-its-best-ever-year?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the state of book sales in 2025 with the following conclusion: speculative fiction as a sales category had its best year ever, thanks to the ongoing boom of romantasy fiction. Call examined a report from NielsenIQ BookData, which tracks book sales. It found that sales have been increasing dramatically. In 2023, the genre pulled in £59.4 million, and jumped 41% to £84 million in 2024\. The year isn't over yet, but revenue has reached £79 million and is projected to hit £100 million by year's end. That's a dramatic increase: the last best year for the category was 2007, with nearly £50 million in sales, £12 million of which came from the release of J.K. Rowling's *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows*. In the article, Call notes that we've seen a dramatic shift in the speculative fiction landscape: where authors like Rowling, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett, and J.R.R. Tolkien dominated sales between 2001 and 2019, 2025 paints a dramatically different picture: "the top slots are taken by the new darlings of the category: romantasy stars Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, and Stephanie Garber, and fantasy author R.F. Kuang." The article includes a chart that spells out the top 50 books by sales from 2025: Yarros, Maas, and SenLinYu, took up the top ten slots for the year, selling 11,361,216,834 copies between them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/11/image.png) Graphic: Nielsen The report notes that those stalwarts – Martin, Pratchett, Rowling, and Tolkien – are still selling well, with Nielsen's Total Consumer Market report putting Tolkien's sales at £2.1 million (with *The Hobbit* at #90), "Pratchett is 13th on the author list, Martin 28th and, with no new SFF publications since a reissue of *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone* in 2018, Rowling is 157th." (This graphic isn't drawn from the TCM list, and I'm guessing that they're pulling data in from two different sets of data – take that as you will.) Nielsen Book Data published a [report earlier this summer](https://www.book2look.com/book/3L5zmQz3qn&clickedBy=wall&wallid=slccu2cqkj&referurl=www.nielsenisbnstore.com?ref=andrewliptak.com) that digs into the field: "sales of romantasy books have more than quadrupled in the last five years," that the biggest drivers of this trend are platforms like TikTok, and that most buyers are women under 35\. In 2024, 78% of buyers were women, while they make up 54% of all book buyers. Those buyers are also frequent readers, and in a [companion blog post](https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/commentary/2025/bookdata-romantasy-blog/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Nielsen pointed out that while a good chunk of titles are being discovered in stores, "a third of romantasy purchases in 2023-24 were entirely planned for that book at that time." Buyers are discovering the books and making the time and energy to purchase them: "romantasy readers often know what they want when going into the shop." It's worth noting that this report is fairly limited in scope: it's only tracking UK consumers, and without data about the larger US market, I'm guessing that you'd see other authors on this list if you zoom out to include that, such as Matt Dinniman, Brandon Sanderson, and John Scalzi. I'd also imagine that there's some wiggle room with how they're classifying genres: Ian McEwan's *What We Can Know* came out in September and has hit bestseller lists, but his books aren't generally classified as speculative fiction, and I have to wonder how it might figure in if it was included in that particular set of data. Those caveats aside, However you cut it, fantasy – particularly romantic fantasy – has crushed science fiction sales: it's not until you get to the 28th entry on the list that science fiction shows up with Andy Weir's *Project Hail Mary*, and the only other SF novel comes in at #48, Frank Herbert's *Dune*. Call comes to a conclusion: science fiction "is now by far SFF's junior partner." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- I've seen some angst about what this means for the larger SFF world: some despair that science fiction is being neglected and that it's dying, while others have complained about how genre shelves are taken over by legions of brightly colored, romantasy tomes. This report tracks with what I've been seeing as a reviewer and writer who gets dozens of press releases for new books each week. Romantasy and adjacent books are the ones that publicists are pitching me by far. The harder science fiction stories haven't gone away, but there are certainly fewer titles coming to market and there isn't as much of a PR efforts behind when they do come my way. On an industrial level, it doesn't feel like there's as much of a push for it, and while there are still plenty of authors working in the field (writing everything from shorter fiction to big, long series), it doesn't feel like there's quite as much demand from readers. Nielsen points to one reason for that: female readers. They make up more than half of book buyers, and they predominantly prefer fantasy. Nielsen doesn't figure science fiction into its figures, and Call only mentions science fiction's diminished role in the category, but I think it's safe to make the assumption that as a genre, science fiction isn't as appealing to the readers who're driving those sales. [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-340.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) *Why* that's the case is a harder thing to assume*:* but I think there are numerous and interlocking factors at play. First, we've seen enormous, big-budget shows like *Game of Thrones* and *Outlander* that that have not only earned considerable acclaim and viewership numbers (and there were a lot of [think](https://www.wired.com/2013/06/women-game-of-thrones/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [pieces](https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/renata-sellitti-and-ginia-bellafante-review-game-of-thrones-it-s-past-time-to-stop-pretending-women-don-t-like-fantasy.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) [that](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2011/04/hbo-game-of-thrones-reviews/349712/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [challenged](https://gizmodo.com/the-new-york-times-misses-the-point-on-game-of-thrones-5898471?ref=andrewliptak.com) [the assumption](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/game-of-thrones-female-characters-legacy?srsltid=AfmBOoq1QzsWx-wIjyuyZar702WYUEhYWx6F-iHF4Kc%5FhvSUsTEqr0fS&ref=andrewliptak.com) that *GOT* only appealed to men), but which have also played out complicated, character-driven stories that aren't just male power fantasies. Additionally, we've seen the entry of a *ton* of great female authors and creators writing and upending a lot of the genre's longstanding tropes, from R.F. Kuang to N.K. Jemisin to Mary Robinette Kowal to Alix E. Harrow to Katherine Arden to Tilly Walden to an ever-lengthening list. There's nothing intrinsic to fantasy that appeals to female readers, anymore than there's something in science fiction that makes it more appealing to men. When I worked as a bookseller at Walden Books back in the day, we had one male customer who came in like clockwork to buy romance novels by the armload, and I know there are plenty of women who love digging into science fiction stories. Cultural assumptions only work until they don't, but I do see where they can have an undue influence, providing just enough fiction to nudge people in one direction or another. It's a genre-wide challenge that can't be undertaken passively, but needs to be consciously and actively addressed. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that as a genre, romance has been as widely appealing as it has been because it actually (broadly speaking) treats women like the complicated people they are. I asked a friend and romance author Amber Roberts about this, and she pointed out that the genre "helps remove stigma and shame around topics that were considered taboo (or still are) and focuses on women's desire and sense of worth, self and perceived." I have a feeling that as a genre, science fiction still has a lingering perception as being a male-dominated thing (especially if the authors that are reflexively recommended go by the names of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Herbert) and where women are often relegated to characters that are secondary to their male counterparts. Or maybe there's still the social stigma of being labeled a nerd if you've got a science fiction novel, or something in how the genre is broadly marketed. Or maybe it's the fact that we're living in a world where Elon Musk is the closest thing we have to a character from one of those stories and we don't like what we see. That SF is a boys-only thing not accurate: there are legions of outstanding authors who've specifically worked against that image, and science fiction has never been exclusively a boy's club: women have been part of it since the start. But perceptions can be hard to change once they're embedded in our cultural consciousness. From a publishing perspective, being the smallest part of the whole strikes me as a good starting point: you know there's a wide body of readers who're willing to propel the genre to these heights. If you can find the right authors and stories (easier said than done), you have the start to a path. There's no shortage of inspiration on that front: rocket launches are routine at this point, NASA's getting ready to land on the Moon at some point in the next decade (maybe?), we've got cool space missions headed to Mars and Europa, not to mention a lot of exciting work in climate science, medicine, technology, and so forth. But I suspect that there's a lot of cultural and social baggage that *still* needs to be overcome: the specific cultural infrastructure and community that produces science fiction isn't telling the stories that these readers are looking for, which harkens back to what Roberts mentioned: not centering, depicting, or including the characters, situations, and stories that are supportive of women's interests. There's nothing in science fiction that's inherently hostile to this: look no further than Mary Robinette Kowal's *Lady Astronauts* series, which did a fine job telling a story rooted in actual science, but which also centered the concerns her female characters – [concerns that are absolutely present in the real world](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- The boom in romantasy fiction is a good thing for publishers: a quadrupling in sales is always a good thing. But it also means that there are a lot of readers out there: more people reading and consuming books is *good*, not just for a publisher's bottom line, but as a beneficial thing for society as a whole. With that in mind, it's worth remembering that the publishing industry notoriously follows trends, and has a history of overloading the market to the bursting point. When one book or author breaks out from the pack (like say, the ones from Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros) publishers and editors take notice and comb through their back lists and submission piles for similar titles. New social tools like TikTok and Instagram are great for this sort of thing and have continued to direct attention to it, leading to all of this success. Romantasy has lead the SFF world to some incredible gains, and it's filled a lot of shelves in bookstores. It's a story that we've seen repeat itself and at some point, the genre will hit a breaking point. Readers will get their fill and move on or work their way through a saturated market. The bigger names will continue to sell well, but publishers will pull back on publishing newer titles, especially as other trends emerge and to replace it. I don't think that this will happen in the near-term: there's still a lot of momentum from publishers, booksellers, and readers for romantasy. [Romance is also is the largest genre in the publishing industry](https://www.circana.com/post/another-year-of-romance-with-a-dark-twist-circana-bookscan-reports?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it's a genre that can endlessly be carried over into other genres. Plus, sex sells. The books themselves are just a first step: Romantasy didn't blow up just because of the books: it's been so successful because it's attracted a huge audience of readers, and the connective tissue to bring them together and reinforce that interest. Some of that is luck and timing, but there's also some work that can go in to take advantage of that environment: it's up to publishers to continue to find ways to reach and market to that audience, and to continue to produce high-quality books for them to read. ### 11 new SF/F books to check out this November URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-november-2025/ Last updated: 2025-11-19T22:43:11.000Z November is somehow drawing to a close, and that means that we've got another stack of books hitting bookstores to check out, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday (or if you're elsewhere in the world, Thursday.) The holiday shopping season is about to arrive, and if you're been starting to think about gifts for the holiday season, these lists should be a good guide for you! You can see prior installments via the [book lists tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/), and if you missed the first list for November, you can find that here: [17 new science fiction and fantasy books to check out this NovemberLots of sequels, continuations, and fantastical adventures![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-338.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7446-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-recommendations-november-2025/) Okay, here are 11 new SF/F titles that you should check out. --- ### [*The King Must Die*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668061015?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (November 4th) The planet Newearth is collapsing: gifted by advanced aliens, the terraforming has failed to take hold, and it's slowly becoming uninhabitable. Fen, a mercenary and bodyguard to a local magistrate, has seen her life intertwined with politics, and when her fathers are killed by the Sovereign, she realizes that she's next. She escapes and sets off on a quest to try and find the remaining rebels and the movement that her parents were a part of, only to find that they might be even more dangerous. There, she meets the Sovereign's heir, a brutal man named Alekhai, who might be the world's only hope for survival. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kemi-ashing-giwa/the-king-must-die/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "a bold and refreshing new SF adventure from one of this generation’s writers to watch." ### [*Exo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798895150528?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Colin Brush (November 18th) Humanity has been ejected from Earth, and those survivors have been exiled to a network of lunar colonies and space stations, hoping to return someday. Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, its oceans transformed into a strange, liquid entity called the Caul, which entices living beings into it, consuming them. Scientists have been working to try and figure out the nature of the Caul, including Mae Jameson, a former Service agent who had returned to Earth to try and track down her missing partner. She after she encounters a mute girl named Siofra, they discover that her father has been murdered, and that he left a trail of journals and notes behind about his research, prompting Mae to pick up where he left off, and to try and figure out why someone would want to murder him. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798895150528?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Brush keeps the pages turning with twisty conspiracy theories and exciting scenes of Mae wielding her survival skills with cinematic flourish, surrounded by the Caul’s “inter-dimensional” quantum foam." ### [*Outlaw Planet*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316595469?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.R. Carey (November 18th) Set in the distant future, we follow an outlaw named Bess and the sentient gun she carried, Wakeful Slim. She's a canine-human hybrid who escaped a life of luxury and headed for the frontier where she found work as a teacher. When her partner Martha is killed, she takes her gun and heads off on a mission of vengeance. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316595469?ref=andrewliptak.com): "told in a twangy voice and studded with wild worldbuilding details, this cinematic saga has nary a dull moment." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*God’s Junk Drawer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798874830878?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter Clines(November 11th) Four decades ago, the entire Gather family vanished on a whitewater rafting trip. Five years later, one of the children, Billy, returned, recounting how the family hadn't tied, but had come across a valley that was loaded with impossible creatures: dinosaurs, aliens, robots, and so forth. Ridiculed for his story, he vanished from public life and restarted as Noah Barnes, an astronomy professor. When he takes his group of graduate students on an expedition into the mountains, they end up finding the valley, and he thinks that he knows how to get everyone home. But the valley holds some other secrets, and they might not be able to make it home alive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798874830878?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Clines maintains a light tone and brisk pace through all the zany chaos and smuggles in some real heart. It’s a twisty and satisfying epic." ### [*Creating Worlds: The Disney and 20th Century Studios Cinematic Art of Dylan Cole*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798337400020?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Dylan Cole (November 18th) I've followed concept artist Dylan Cole on Instagram for a while now, and I've always really loved the work that he's posted, images that eventually became *Avatar: The Way of Water*, *Lord of the Rings*, and quite a few more. This book brings together his work for Disney, where he's overseeing the art for the *Avatar* franchise (James Cameron provides a foreword), as well as films like *Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End*, *Alice in Wonderland*, *Maleficent*, and a whole bunch of others. I like art books like these: they provide a really good window into how a scene, world, and film come together. ### [*Back to the Drawing Board - The Art of Kenner Toy Design*](https://bluemilk.shop/products/back-to-the-drawing-board-the-art-of-kenner-toy-design?variant=44625209196744&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Effler (November 28th) This could be an excellent gift for the toy collector that you might have in your life: a coffee table book by Kenner designer Tim Effler, who looks over his contributions to the toy lines for franchises like *Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park,* and quite a few more. It looks like it'll be an excellent look at how Kenner became a huge toy company in the 1970s-1980s, and it's chalk full of photographs and illustrations. As always, this newsletter runs because of the support of your fellow readers. It's free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. This series of book lists involves a lot of time to research what's coming out, track down reviews, read bits and pieces of each, and to write up blurbs for what catches my eye. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting it by: \- [****Signing up as a supporting subscriber**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40 a year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4 a month. \- Supporting the newsletter with a [****one-time tip**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-recommendations-november-2025/#/portal/support). \- Purchasing a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### [*This Is How You Lose the Time War* (Deluxe Edition)](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668204160?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (November 18th) *This Is How You Lose the Time War* was a runaway hit when it was first released back in 2019\. It's now getting the special edition treatment with a new cover, three-color stenciled edges, endpapers, and a snazzy slipcase. ### [*The Tower of the Tyrant*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781625678034?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.T. Greathouse (November 6th) Fola is exiled from the City of the Wise, and sets out on a quest of her own: figuring out the barriers between life, death, and undeath. It's a subject that's fascinated her for years, and when she learns the kingdom of Parwys has been dealing with spirits and hauntings, she heads out to figure out what's going on. The city is dealing with rumors that their king has been driven mad, and when Fola arrives, she has to figure out the dealings and royal court rivalries, all of which is being complicated by the threat of an invasion. ### [*The Villa, Once Beloved*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661382?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Victor Manibo (November 25th) When the patriarch of Villa Sepulveda, a historic colonial manor in the Philippines, dies, his family is recalled to the home. Adrian brings along his girlfriend Sophie, who's interested in learning about her own Filipino heritage, and while there, finds that there's more to the family that meets the eye. They're grieving, but also dealing with a curse on the family that their elders remain stubbornly silent about. When they're trapped in the villa, secrets going back to the country's colonization and history begin to reveal themselves, threatening to tear the family apart. ### [*Slow Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316586306?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Claire North (November 18th) In this standalone space opera, we follow Mawukana na-Vdnaze a worker in an oppressive society who is arrested and thrown into a labor camp amidst a planetary crisis: a messenger from space has arrived at the planet to warn its inhabitants that they have a century before a deadly supernova arrives and wipes out everything. Maw decides to volunteer for a risky job as a ship pilot. Interfacing with the ship often kills the pilot, and when a jump goes bad, everyone onboard but Maw is killed, but he's changed: he's a copy of himself, and transformed, he decides to try and change all of their fates. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/claire-north/slow-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "The best kind of science fiction: mind-blowing and wildly thought-provoking." ### [*Daredevil: An Illustrated History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886639209?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Segura (November 4th) I've long been a casual fan of the *Daredevil* comics: something about the character just clicks for me. I've been excited to see that Marvel has released a new guide to the character, written by comics author and novelist Alex Segura (whose book [*Secret Identity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250801760?ref=andrewliptak.com) I really dug), which digs into the character's eight decades in comic books, featuring interviews, art, and quite a bit more. It'll be a good a good tee-up to Segura's next novel, [*Daredevil: Enemy of My Enemy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781368095365?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is out next year. --- As always, let me know in the comments what catches your eye and what you've got on your TBR! ### Amazon has ordered a new Stargate series URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-stargate-sg1-franchise-revival-martin-gero-streaming/ Last updated: 2025-11-20T16:51:45.000Z Amazon's MGM studios [has announced](https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/new-stargate-tv-series-amazon-martin-gero-1236585606/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's bringing back the *Stargate* franchise. It's ordered a new series from creator Martin Gero, who worked extensively on the prior installments of the franchise, *Stargate SG-1, Atlantis*, and *Universe*, as well as on shows like *Dark Matter, The L.A. Complex,* and as showrunner for *Blindspot* and the recent *Quantum Leap* revival. Prime Video released an announcement video: Roland Emmerichdirected the original film, *Stargate,* in 1994, in which archeologists discovered a mysterious ring buried in a ruin in Egypt. Decades later, they've discovered that it's a teleportation portal created by an advanced civilization of aliens, and after they figure out how to activate it, the military sends a team of special forces operatives through to find another, habitable planet, where the figures from Egyptian mythology are real – they're aliens from an advanced civilization. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Showtime spun the film off into a television show starting in 1997, where it ran for five seasons before transferring over to the SCI FI channel, running for another five years. The series followed some of the same characters from the film – officer Jack O'Neill and archeologist Daniel Jackson, and introduced some new ones: airwoman / scientist Samantha Carter and Goa'uld defector T'ealc, as they formed a recon team that explored new planets to research the civilizations on them, and potentially acquire new technologies for Earth to use. Earth and Stargate Command becomes a formattable presence in the galaxy as they help various planets fight against the Goa'uld – a race of parasitic aliens who take over bodies – and while there's a "planet of the week" vibe to the show, they also explored everything from government conspiracies, grey goo aliens and artificial intelligence, revolutions, and various threats to the planet. It's got a lot in it. SCI Fi eventually greenlit a sequel / companion series, *Stargate Atlantis*, setting up a expedition to another galaxy, where a new set of heroes fight against another alien threat. It ran for five seasons, starting in 2004 until 2009\. A third series arrived in 2009, *Stargate Universe*, in which a group of humans are forced to flee on to an ship built by a civilization known as the Ancients, where they're trapped. That series came to an end in 2011 after two seasons, bringing an end to the franchise. The series was notable because of how interconnected it became, long before the MCU or *Arrowverse* did the same things: the shows often crossed over and shared characters, building out a durable and vibrant world. In the years since *Universe* came to an end, there's been a handful of attempts to revitalize the show: When [Amazon acquired MGM studios in 2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-mgm-stargate-sg1-atlantis-universe-scifi-franchise/), there was the hope that with that catalog of content, they'd see the franchise as something worth reviving. Over the years, there was the [occasional](https://www.andrewliptak.com/in-development-stargate-revival-might-include-another-core-team-member/) [word](https://www.andrewliptak.com/looks-like-a-stargate-revival-might-include-daniel-jackson/) that there were projects being pitched or people being approached for it, but nothing ever really seemed to come of it, until now. According to *Variety*, MGM didn't reveal any details about the series, but it's notable that Brad Wright and Joseph Mallozzi, who oversaw the television franchise, will be involved. On his blog, Mallozzi [provided some details](https://josephmallozzi.com/2025/11/19/stargate-returns/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "it's not a reboot or a wholesale reimagining that will wipe the slate clean on 17 seasons and some 350 hours of Stargate history," he explained, "It’s a new series that will be the perfect jumping-on point for first-time viewers while, at the same time, honoring the existing past." This is *excellent* news, in my view: over the course of its run, *Stargate* amassed a truly impressive body of stories – enough to power an [entire, dedicated streaming service and community platform](https://www.andrewliptak.com/stargate-centric-streaming-service-stargate-command-is-shutting-down/)! That volume of episodes and characters lent itself to a number of well-developed characters, world, and canon that rivals that of better-known science fiction franchises like *Star Trek* or *Star Wars*. Throwing that all out the window for a reboot or restart for the concept felt like it would really be counterproductive, even if the franchise was in need of something over an overhaul as viewer habits and story styles changed with the streaming era. It'll be a while before this happens: Mallozzi pointed out that there's a pilot script and plans for the first season (and beyond), but the next steps will be for "the writers room \[to\] be assembled, stories need to be spun, scripts written, prep started, crew hired, actors cast and, eventually, a new Stargate series produced." My read here is that this this'll be a return to the same world as the prior three shows, but with a new cast and situation. The concept is an enduring one: explore new worlds with a small core of characters, and there'd be some room for the old guard to make some cameo appearances here and there, while handing the story off to a new generation. There's a lot of possibilities for that, and it'll be interesting to see what Gero and his team comes up with, especially in an era where television shows have shrunk down to 8-10 episodes and feature a more serialized story. Hopefully, it'll be as exciting as the originals. ### N.K. Jemisin has been named a SFWA Grandmaster URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nk-jemisin-sfwa-grandmaster-scifi-fantasy-award/ Last updated: 2025-11-17T00:26:15.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has [announced](https://www.sfwa.org/2025/11/16/press-release-november-16-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award: fantasy author N.K. Jemisin. The award is one of the genre's highest honors and recognizes a lifetime of achievement within the SF/F world. It was first awarded 50 years ago in 1975, to Robert Heinlein. Its ranks include some of the genre's best-known authors, ranging from Isaac Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke to [C.J. Cherryh](https://www.andrewliptak.com/c-j-cherryh-science-fiction-grandmaster-sfwa/) to [Robin McKinley](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-robin-mckinley-grand-master/) and [Nicola Griffith](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nicola-griffith-sfwa-science-fiction-grandmaster/). In a statement, SFWA President Kate Ristau said: > *"We don’t write in a vacuum. We write in a world of complexity and trauma. Jemisin helps us hold a mirror up to our darkest fears and our deepest desires. We want to live in a better world, but if we don’t, what stories will we tell? How will we confront history and our possible futures with authenticity and possibility? Jemisin shows us that storytelling is not just an escape—it’s a powerful tool for engagement in our own reality."* The award is well-deserved for Jemisin, who published her debut novel, *The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms* in 2010, and has earned considerable acclaim in the years since. In 2015, she published her acclaimed novel *The Fifth Season, set* on a planet with periodic apocalyptic events that forces humanity to bunker down in sheltered communities. It, and its sequels *The Obelisk Gate* and *The Stone Sky* earned Jemisin considerable acclaim in the form of three successive Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 2016, 2017, and 2018, the first time that had ever happened. Since then, she's published a handful of other books: a collection of her short fiction, *How Long 'til Black Future Month?*, a *Mass Effect* novel*, Andromeda Initiation*, *Far Sector* (a run of *Green Lantern* comics), and *The City We Became* and *The World We Make*. [N. K. Jemisin has been named a MacArthur FellowA well-deserved honor![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-326.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/nkjemison.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/n-k-jemisin-macarthur-fellow/) In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, an exceedingly great honor for those working in the creative fields, and held by very few authors working in the speculative fiction field (notable prior winners include Octavia Butler, Karen Russell, and Kelly Link). This has always felt like a "when, not if" situation to me: I've wondered before when Jemisin would get the title, given her monumental success in the field. It's a testament to the work that she's produced since she began writing, and I hope that it'll stand as an encouragement and model for others to be principled and daring in their storytelling. The award will be bestowed upon Jemisin at next year's Nebula Conference, which will be held in Chicago in June. [Registration is now open](https://membership.sfwa.org/event-6219606?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fighting for peace URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-shattering-peace-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-11-15T20:41:11.000Z Earlier this year, John Scalzi celebrated the 20th anniversary of his debut novel [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com), a military science fiction novel that follows a 75 year old name John Perry who enlists in humanity's interstellar armed forces, the Colonial Union Defense Force. He's given a new body with superhuman abilities, and is sent off into the depths of space to fight on behalf of humanity for territory in a crowded and violent universe. Over the years, Scalzi has sparingly added to the series – first with more traditional continuations [*The Ghost Brigades*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359551?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Last Colony*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359537?ref=andrewliptak.com), and then with increasingly experimental books like the YA [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com) and serialized [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359544?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359568?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's frequently noted that he's happy to add to the series when he has something to say, and a decade after the release of the last installment, he's returned with a new one: [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com). After years of playing with stories told in unconventional ways (his *other* 2025 novel, [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) [is certainly that](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/)), this is almost a refreshing, straight-forward novel that takes the series and world into new territory. It's a fast, fun adventure that feels like it's running in the same circles as *Babylon 5*, sketching out an optimistic tone for humanity's future in the cosmos. [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-323.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-7.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) In the *Old Man's War* universe, humanity became an interstellar species and promptly ran into problems: we were just one of many civilizations out there, and everyone was fighting over the habitable planets available to colonize. Those spacefaring humans set up the Colonial Union to protect Earth, and goes on the offensive, using genetic engineering, advanced weapons, and scientific innovation to get an edge, and rely on aging humans from Earth to keep their numbers up. After centuries of brutal warfare, Earth eventually wises up to the Colonial Union's tactics and the true nature of the threat against humanity. They end up forcing a deal with the larger collective of alien civilizations, the Conclave, which puts a halt to the rampant colonization efforts that have been fueled the ongoing warfare, and for nearly a decade, the galaxy has been at some form of peace. *Spoilers ahead for* The Shattering Peace. Scalzi picks up this story at that point with a new development: in an effort to further interspecies cooperation, humans and another species, the Obin, have set up a covert experiment, Unity. It's a hollowed-out asteroid with a city constructed in it, populated by a number of representatives of different civilizations. If it works, it could be a model to ensure a long-lasting peace for everyone, and if it doesn't, well, it's a secret project. Everything seems to be going well until the station abruptly vanishes. Enter Gretchen Trujillo, who appeared in *Zoe's Tale* as the best friend of the book's titular character. She's advanced through the ranks of the Colonial Union's State Department as an analyst on the Obin desk, helping to work through diplomacy to advance humanity's interests. She's called in to a secretive meeting with the officials in charge of the Unity project, where she's briefed and assigned to a mission to try and figure out what happened to it. One of the challenges when you engage in a long-running series is that to maintain continuity, authors and creators are increasingly hemmed in by the choices they made in earlier installments. *Old Man's War* is no exception, and Scalzi ends up mining some of the earlier installments for inspiration. He finds that in the form of the Consu, an enormously advanced alien civilization that John Perry ended up running into in *Old Man's War*. The Consu "so far advanced from everyone else in the neighborhood that comparing ourselves to them was like comparing Cro-Magnons to spacefaring humans," and they've taken to experimenting and fighting other civilizations in various ways. The Obin were one such experiment: when the Consu discovered the their animal-like predecessors on a moon, they "uplifted \[them\] into sentience, *without consciousness,* just to see what would happen." Gretchen soon learns that the Consu, who usually keep to themselves, have been taking an outsized interest in the Obin and humanity. By the time they reach the place where Unity station orbited, they find that it's completely gone: there's no debris to suggest that it was destroyed, no exhaust plumes that would indicate that it was pushed out of orbit, nothing. After a bit of searching, they find something weird: a cloaked object, and when they bring it onboard, they find a single Consu onboard. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. It's uncooperative, telling them that they've interfered with its noble death, and that now that they've pulled it from hiding, the rest of its civilization know that it's still alive. If they can keep it alive during the attack that soon follows, it'll tell them what happened to the colony. They do, and it does: it had been experimenting with Skip Drives – Scalzi's handwavy technology for faster than light travel – and it had taken the entire colony and skipped it out to a very different parallel universe. That isn't supposed to be possible: skipping involves jumping a ship from one universe to another, near-identical alternate universe in order to travel vast distances across space. Skipping to another universe that goes beyond that universe-thats-the-same-but-with-one-miniscule-difference range is immensely difficult to accomplish, and somehow, this particular Consu (which Gretchen nicknamed Kitty) figured out, and he ends up taking them there, where they find that the station is safe, but running out of supplies. As it turns out, the Consu have come to a civilization-wide moment of decision. As a sort of elder species, they've taken it upon themselves to try and advance the younger civilizations: instigating wars, experimenting with them, and generally setting up a galactic-wide trial by fire to make sure everyone who survives is tough and worthy. Action ensues as Gretchen, her Obin assistant Ran, and other members of her mission work to figure out how to get back to their home universe and stave off the two factions of the Consu, one that wants to turn up the heat on humanity and Conclave – a surefire way to test anyone's mettle – and the one that wants to let things play out a bit more smoothly. In a lot of ways, *The Shattering Peace* reminded me quite a bit of the setup to J. Michael Straczynski's ambitious classic series *Babylon 5*, in which after a devastating interstellar war, humanity sets up a diplomatic outpost that's designed as a sort of neutral ground for the various civilizations to work out their differences, all while a couple of the super ancient races, the Shadows and the Vorlons, are manipulating them to their own ends to ensure that whomever survives will be strong enough to inherit the galaxy. [Babylon 5’s strength lay in its fierce antifascist storyA series that remains more relevant than ever![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-324.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/CFjbzhVTR7w7rjec4K8JL8.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-antifascism-j-michael-straczynski/) The theme of cooperation as a means of survival is a common trope in science fiction – shows like *The Expanse* and various iterations of *Star Trek* and *Stargate* has also played with these ideas – and it's one that feels like a welcome distraction in a world that feels increasingly chaotic, grim, and mean. It's also a nice evolution for Scalzi's series, which started out as a take on Robert Heinlein's militaristic *Starship Troopers,* and which could have easily followed the path of so many other imitators: the next battle and campaign for the heroes as they fight their way to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity. While the *Old Man's War* series has started out in that mode, Scalzi's increasingly shifted away from it, taking on a Theodore Roosevelt-like ethos of "Talk softly and carry a big stick." Military force is on the table in the form of the CDF and their skilled operatives, but his characters are largely more interested in talking things out and finding some sort of middle ground where everyone can find a way to get along. As in all of his other novels, his characters are smart, fast-talking, and sarcastic people who're often finding ways to avoid conflicts with one another. There's a telling moment midway through the book that exemplifies this: Gretchen, Ran, and their companion Magdy are confronted by a group of xenophobic Unity residents who're more than willing to throw down. Gretchen puts one in a painful hold when she's shoved, and tells him that she's more than willing to break fingers if they keep at it. When they're confronted again, Gretchen talks them down, reasoning that they're not really willing to fight, and that if they do come to blows, they have no hope of winning. Their would-be assailants relent. Scalzi's chatty characters and rapid, back-and-forth dialogue can wear thin after successive books, but there is something comforting about watching as well-intentioned, competent people go about their jobs. It's why shows like *The West Wing* have long maintained their appeal: it's comforting to think that there are smart, motivated people leading us, even if we know there's a lot more to the story. In doing so, Scalzi brings us to a new chapter for his series and world: humanity's now aware of the Consu's intentions and our place in it, and there's any number of places that he could take it from there: some larger threat lurking out in the depths of the galaxy? The looming threat of renewed, interstellar war? Either way, there are a ton of exciting possibilities, and given that Scalzi [signed another major deal](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-starter-villain-book-deal/) with Tor last year for another decade of novels, I'm sure that we'll see where he takes the story at some point in the not-too-distant future. Regardless of where it goes, I can appreciate a story that focuses on people taking taking the difficult, let's-solve-this-problem-with-our-words type of approach rather than going in guns blazing to take care of whatever new problem that the heroes need to face. As evolutions go, it's a positive, optimistic, and idealistic direction, and that's something I think we sorely need in the present. ### RIP Star Wars Insider URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-insider-magazine-cancelled/ Last updated: 2025-11-12T15:19:08.000Z Here's some unfortunate news from the world of *Star Wars* fandom: the long-running magazine *Star Wars Insider* is [shutting down after a decades-long run](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-insider?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm sad to see it. As a younger science fiction and *Star Wars* fan growing up in Vermont, there were only a couple of ways to keep up to date on those communities. While hubs TheForce.net's Jedi Council Forums were huge for me, another was a couple of magazine subscriptions that helped shape my fandom: *Asimov's Science Fiction* and *Star Wars Insider*. I eagerly awaited copies of *Insider* when they arrived, digging into the short stories that often came in each issue, but also the articles and behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing Prequel Trilogy, and the eventual successor projects. Over the years, my subscriptions would lapse, but I often pick up copies when I see them on magazine racks at my local Barnes & Noble. But more than that, *Insider* helped show that there was a much larger fan community out there. While I was constantly online on the TFN forums, I was often sequestered away in the books section. The magazine showed off a far more vibrant world of fans who were dressing up, making their own art, writing letters, meeting up, and so forth. It's where I first learned about a group called the 501st Legion – pictures of the group's members popped up every now and again, and that knowledge eventually steered me toward inviting the group to a band concert in my senior year, something that ultimately led to my joining the group later that year. This was an era of movie making where the production wasn't quite so paranoid about spoilers – I remember an official webcam streaming the production as it happened (I think?) and where magazines such as this provided some real news and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the films while they were in production. They provided fans with interviews conducted with a whole range of people involved in the franchise, from actors to authors to crew to artists, to short stories, photos, profiles, and quite a bit more. Looking back, I think that the magazine was also instrumental in my own career as a writer. I never wrote for it, although it was always a sort of bucket-list item (and I got sort of close at one point), but it sort of demonstrated that there were people out there writing about this thing that I loved. When I started writing for fan-run sites like *The Unofficial Clone Wars Site,* I was pouring through back issues to check out the articles and stories for new glimpses of that particular era of the franchise, and that early work blogging would lead me to a career doing the same thing. The magazine has bounced around a bit: I remember a period around the summer of 2000 (Issue #50 came in July, then there was a break until #51 in January 2001) where its future was uncertain following Sir Alec Guiness's death (although looking back, I suspect that had more to do with switching publishers.) The magazine went from Wizards of the Coast to Paizo Publishing to IDG Entertainment before finally landing at Titan Magazines in 2007\. I still have all of my copies: they've been neatly boxed up and stored in my basement. I pull them out more often than I'd ever expected to: sometimes to track down an obscure story or bit of background on something to do with the franchise while writing an article such as this. There's something nice about being able to do that, given how easy it is for something written for Starwars.com to fall off the website. In its announcement, Lucasfilm notes that the magazine will come to an end with issue #237, and editor Christopher Cooper notes that the world of magazine publishing has immensely changed since *Insider* was first published. That's a bit of an understatement. Fandom's desire for every little update about the franchise hasn't changed much over the magazine's decades-long run, but the environment has certainly changed. When I first started subscribing, there were only a handful of sites dedicated to the franchise, in addition to TOS – The Official Site. Now, there's a plethora of not just fan sites (TFN is still hanging in there), but YouTube channels, social media pages, and even trade publications, which breathlessly publish every rumor and hint of a rumor that rears its head. While I haven't been a dedicated subscriber to the magazine (and thus am part of the problem), I do miss that slower era of news, where it didn't feel all consuming. In a lot of ways, the magazine's closure feels a bit like an end of that time – one that we're not likely to see again. ### Hand to a hot stove URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/atomic-bomb-garrett-graff-devil-reached-toward-the-sky-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-11-10T14:00:05.000Z August 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of first use of nuclear weapons in warfare, unlocking a frightening new era of warfare that has persisted ever since. Tied to the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks came a new book: [*The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668092392?ref=andrewliptak.com), by Garrett M. Graff. It's a gripping, in-depth look at how the United States stood up its atomic bomb program and how it was the product of a massive, nation-wide effort, while also presenting a disturbing picture of its consequences. Earlier this year, I interviewed Graff on conjunction with a book that he edited for my day job, edited [*Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*](https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-history-covid-19-life-became-very-blurry-garrett-graff?ref=andrewliptak.com). He pointed out something about his approach to history that has stuck with me since: > One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time. [Interview with Garrett M. GraffHow you take 100 oral histories and distill them down into a single book![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-316.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2908-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/) Our collective knowledge of the Second World War goes something like this: the war began overseas, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, we invaded Europe, then we dropped a pair of atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war. It's a clean and clear-cut retelling, one that ignores the complicated nature of any conflict, but also largely ignores that the war's outcome was far from certain for a very long time. War is always complicated: whether it's piecing together the individual movements taken on a battle or figuring out how a complicated strategic plan came together, there's a wealth of decisions that people make in the moment that shape the direction of a conflict. Graff's book is an examination of that complexity, charting the development of the atomic bomb in granular and exhaustive detail. The story of the atomic bomb is one that long predates the advent of the Second World War, and Graff briefly sets the stage with citations from philosophers dating back to antiquity, musing about the nature and fabric of reality before diving into the advances made in particle physics in the late 1800s and early 1900s as scientists such as Pierre and Marie Curie began to recognize and discover the properties of radiation and the energy that's locked away on the atomic level. But where Graff really starts this story is in the cluster of European physicists who began to understand that fascism was encroaching on their homes, and began to make plans to escape to the United States, taking their knowledge and expertise with them. It's this collection of scientists, Graff points out, who understood the awesome potential that unlocking the atom could unleash under the right conditions. "For the still-tiny circle of scientists who understood the potential of fission," he writes, "the leap from the theoretical to the potential of an atomic bomb came quickly and with fierce urgency given how many had fled Nazism and the creep of authoritarian regimes of Europe." This small collection of scientists saw the writing on the wall: Adolf Hitler and his regime had momentum behind them to take over the continent, and he likely wouldn't be content with dominating just Europe. At some point, the US would have to intervene. While their research progressed in their new homes, they worried about what advances Germany might make with the scientists who remained, like Werner Heisenberg. They also quickly realized that with a small amount of fissile material, they could theoretically create a bomb with untold destructive power. By the time the U.S. entered the war after the December 7th, 1941, there were several efforts already underway to study the feasibility of major research and engineering projects, including nuclear weapons, but it wasn't until August 1942 that the Manhattan Project was officially underway. From there, Graff follows the growth of the project as its personnel were given extraordinary resources to follow through on their task: develop a functional atomic bomb, as quickly as possible. This was no small task, as the scientists faced the enormous challenge of tackling never-before-attempted engineering and physics problems. They had to figure out the mechanics of creating a nuclear chain reaction and then the engineering to kick off a chain reaction. While those aspects of the project are the most visible – look no further than Christopher Nolan's *Oppenheimer* – Graff explains that there's far more hiding under the surface: there was the monumental task of enriching the uranium required for such a reaction at facilities such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Richland in Washington, engineering the individual components that the bomb would require, and training the pilots and crews who would eventually be tasked with transporting and deploying the weapons to their targets. As Graff explores through his entries, these were incredibly difficult problems to overcome: not just on an engineering and scientific level, but on an organizational and legal one. The U.S. government took over enormous parcel of land and created entire cities and support industries to ensure that they were livable, all under immense secrecy. In many ways, this is one of the most astonishing parts of this story: the speed at which officials were able to establish and run a project of this scale and size is unthinkable, and speaks to the urgency that scientists first urged the government to heed in 1940\. Graff recounts stories from the women who were tasked with enriching the uranium – without ever knowing what they were doing – to the workers who were hired to build these hidden cities to the scientists who were constantly worried about falling behind German nuclear efforts and the consequences should they fail. [Mushroom Clouds on the Future HorizonScience fiction was born in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-289.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_30decfbc-ca0e-46ac-b83e-4c320e2565a6_956x577-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mushroom-clouds-on-the-future-horizon-science-fiction-was-born-in-the-fires-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/) By the summer of 1945, the project yielded its first successes: Oppenheimer's scientists determined how to detonate such a device – using shaped explosives to implode and compress the enriched uranium, and they prepared for their first test. But circumstances were beginning to change: following the Allied forces invasion of Europe in June 1944, Germany had been steadily pushed back until it surrendered on May 8th, 1945, leaving the U.S. to press on in the Pacific theater. Graff highlights that beating their German counterparts – and as it turned out, German officials never really committed to their own nuclear program, thinking that it wouldn't significantly contribute to their efforts – was an enormous motivating factor for many of the scientists engaged in the project, and that with Germany's surrender, a number of scientists began to contemplate the role that they were playing in the war effort, the implications that such a weapon would bring with it, and how they might demonstrate this technology to the world. They stood up a committee to look at the big picture and explore the next steps, ultimately deciding that they'd use the bomb against Japan, and they'd do so without warning. It's these moments that makes a project such as this so useful to students of history. While it's worth noting that Graff is essentially showing what little of an iceberg sticks above the water (he explained in a talk that he started with a document that ran into the thousands of pages), surfacing these details – the doubts and concerns that scientists had, the deliberations they made in committees, and the way that they arrived at their decisions shows that while the war effort had a considerable amount of momentum behind it, there was a wealth of arguments, discussion, and planning that drove the program forward day by day. The resulting bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't the product of inevitability, but of deliberation and decision. --- Once the Trinity test took place on July 16th, 1945, Graff turns his attention to the war in the Pacific. After a couple of years of bloody, devastating fighting, the U.S. had steadily pushed Japanese forces back island by island at unthinkable cost before turning to a bombing campaign that burned numerous Japanese cities to the ground. Like the prior sections, he explores the leadup to the attacks in grim detail: the efforts that Boeing undertook to develop the B-29 and customize bombers to carry the atomic bombs, the efforts that various bombardment groups to train for deploying such a weapon, and the horrifying, minute-by-minute journey of each mission that led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These stories again show just how much human decision-making went into each attack, from the minute steps that carried the bomb forward to the heart-wrenching realization that Nagasaki wasn't the primary target for that second attack: that was the city Kokura, which was saved only by grace of a thick fog and smoke cover from nearby bombings. Graff doesn't use this book to opine on the morality of the bombings, but instead opts to just show the results, bringing out first-hand accounts from the survivors. > **Yamaoka Michiko**: I felt colors. It wasn't heat. You can't really say it was yello, and it wasn't blue. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don't know how far I was blown. > **Futabe Kitayama**: I do not know how to describe that light. I wondered if a fire had been set in my eyes. It was something like an ominous purple-like color of sparks caused by a streetcar at night – only some billion times stronger. I don't remember which came first– the flash of light or the sound of an explosion that roared down to my belly. > **Hiromu Morishita, ninth grader**: It was like being thrown into an iron melting pot. My face was burned and I jumped into the river. One of my friends found me and asked how his face looked. The skin was hanging down from his face like a rag. I was too scared to ask him about my own face. It's impossible to look away in the minutes, days, weeks, and months that follow, as people succumb to their horrific injuries and realize that the impact of the bombings weren't contained to those two August days: the radiation and fallout from the attacks continued to claim lives in horrifying ways. In the 80 years since our introduction to nuclear warfare, and there's been no shortage of takes and examinations of everything that's come in those decades, everything from other books like Frank Close's [*Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781541605893?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Pellegrino Charles' [*Ghosts of Hiroshima*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228309890?ref=andrewliptak.com)to films like Kathleen Bigalow's [*A House of Dynamite*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kathryn-bigelow-house-of-dynamite-trailer-watch-nuclear-war/). *The Devil Reached Toward the Sky* particularly stands out because Graff allows the story to play out in the words of the people who made that complicated chain of decisions that began as a serious thought experiment in the 1930s and which resulted in less than a decade later in the horrifying deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In many ways, this is a story that's simultaneously straightforward and complicated, a cautionary tale that explores how we can advance hypotheticals and theories until it's too late and the consequences become readily and horrifyingly apparent. It's a story for which we're still living the consequences, not just of what the hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the Manhattan Project accomplished, but also the recognition of how quickly our best-intended efforts, knowledge, and motivations can change the world. But that's a realization that comes only after the fact, once the hypothetical became reality. I don't know – and this book holds no answers for how things *might* have turned out in different circumstances, but for all of the decisions and choices that we made along the way, I can't help but think that we had to find all of this out the hard way – that we had to touch our hand to a hot stove to truly realize the consequences. Books such as this serve to remind us of the terrible cost of that understanding. Hopefully, it's a lesson that we'll continue to remember. ### Table of Contents November 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-november-2025/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T21:01:25.000Z Here's the latest installment of Table of Contents, which rounds up the latest short fiction releases for November 2025\. You can check out the list of stories from October [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-septe/https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-october-2025/) (which has been updated with new links!) and past installments of this series [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 151, October-December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["Liecraft" by Anita Moskát, translated by Austin Wagner](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/liecraft?ref=andrewliptak.com) - ["Ghosts of Summer" by Catherine Tavares](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/ghosts-in-summer?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Code Green](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/code-green?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rebecca Johnson (11/04/25) - "[We Used to Wake to Song](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/we-used-to-wake-to-song?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Leah Ning (11/18/25) - "The Horrible Conceit of Death and Night" by J.A. Prentice (12/02/25) - [Excerpt from *ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction* — "The Water Runner" by Eugen Bacon](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/excerpt-from-eco24-the-years-best-speculative-ecofiction-%E2%80%94-the-water-runner-by-eugen-bacon?ref=andrewliptak.com) - ["The Fate You Choose" by Nadia Radovich](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-fate-you-choose?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[FAQ on My Vagina Dentata](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/faq-on-my-vagina-dentata?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jarune Uwujaren (11/11/25) - "Cassandra and the Changeling" by R.J. Sterling (12/09/25) - "[Before, After, and the Space Between](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/before-after-and-the-space-between?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kel Coleman (11/25/25) - ["Come Here, Ofelia" by Cynthia Gómez](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/come-here-ofelia?ref=andrewliptak.com) - ["Exuviae" by Mari Harrison](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/exuviae?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Don't Hide from the Mirror](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/dont-hide-from-the-mirror?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nico Martinez Nocito (11/13/25) - "Involuntary Self" by Jim Horlock (12/11/25) - "Horse and Rider" by Christine Beres (12/16/25) ### Nonfiction - [Musings from Maryland by Lesley Conner](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-151?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Dust, Stars, and Shadows: How Western Genre Literature Helped Shape Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/dust-stars-and-shadows-how-western-genre-literature-helped-shape-fantasy-science-fiction-and-horror?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Knost (11/06/25) - "More than Lighting: Speculative Noir" by Premee Mohamed (12/18/25) - ["Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review" by A.C. Wise](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/words-for-thought-short-fiction-review-151?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Interview with Author Anita Moskát and Translator Austin Wagner by Marissa van Uden](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-anita-moskat-and-translator-austin-wagner?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Interview with Author Leah Ning](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-leah-ning?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marissa van Uden (11/13/25) - Interview with Artist Natasa Illincic by Bradley Powers (12/04/25) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Vol. XCV No. 11 & 12*, November/December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Aleyara’s Flight" by Christopher L. Bennett - "The Dancing Bear" by Joyce & Stanley Schmidt - "Faith" by Kate Maruyama - "One Step Away" by Lance Robinson - "Pirates Of Pan" by James Dick - "The Starworthy Slip" by A.c. Koch - "With Lanterns Borne Aloft" by Mark W. Tiedemann - "Termina" by Subodhana Wijeyeratne - "One Peek" by Lilian Garratt-smithson - "The Wi-fi Womb," by Avi Burton - "And Every Galatea Shaped Anew" by Marissa Lingen - "People Of The Consortium Worlds V. Rax, God Of Misery" by Leonard Richardson - "Mammoth" by C.l. Schacht - "The Riches We Take" by Sam W. Pisciotta - "Earth’s Last Library" by James Van Pelt - "Cobalt Plate Special" by Jon Hansen - "The Underappreciation Of Danny White" by David Ebenbach - "Chalice" by James L. Cambias - "The Mountain At The Heart Of The Labyrinth" by Deborah L. Davitt ### Poetry - "Constructs" by Thomas Belton - "Irrational Faith" by Richard Schiffman ### Nonfiction - Out Of “some Warm Little Pond,” Part Ii: Bios And The Last Universal Common Ancestor by Kelly Lagor - Guest Editorial: A Matrix And (At Least Three) Curves by Howard V. Hendrix - Unknowns: Noble Guesses by Alec Nevala-lee - The Alternate View by John G. Cramer - In Times To Come - The Reference Library by Rosemary Claire Smith - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*Vol. 49 Nos. 11 & 12*, November/December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Spare Parts for the Mind" by Greg Egan - "Because It’s There" by Susan Shwartz - "Lagrange Point 5" by Sean McMullen - "Solemnity" by Mark D. Jacobsen - "Miiracle" by Tegan Moore - "Mudfoots" by Eric Del Carlo - "The Recovery of Lemuria 7" by Allen M. Steele - "Within God" by Garrett Ashley - "Can You Outrun a T-Rex?" by Sean Monaghan - "Catch a Tiger in the Snow" by Ray Nayler ### Poetry - "Good Dogs" by Leslie J. Anderson - "Inheritance Haiku" by Bruce Boston - "My Flintstones Thermos, 1962" by Rob Loughran - "Field Note from an Outlier Physicist" by Robert Frazier - "What We Learn from Quantum Mechanics" by Fred D. White - "Almost Immortal" by Bruce Boston - "The Paper Swift" by Ciarán Parkes ### Nonfiction - Editorial: 39th Annual Readers’ Awards’ Results by Sheila Williams - Reflections: Science Fiction Predicts the Future by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Coverage by James Patrick Kelly - On Books by Peter Heck --- ## [*Augur Magazine*](https://augursociety.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (8.2) Subscribe [here](https://augursociety.org/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Liminal Spaces](https://augursociety.org/liminal-spaces/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Azure Arther - "[Four Elements of the Affair](https://augursociety.org/four-elements-of-the-affair/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Britt Gillman - "Unrepeat: an incantation" by Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal - "What's Mine" by Lulu Kadhim - "Mother Tree's Idols" by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga - "Of Seagrass Fins and Slippery Fingers" by A.J. Van Belle - "For Godzilla" by Qurat Dar - "The Thunder Boy" by Cathy Smith - "[Mother Tongue](https://augursociety.org/mother-ton/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pooja Joshi - "Detritivore" by Binoy Zuzarte - "Of Blood and Pomegranates" by Saad Omar Khan - "Red Cliff" by Eva Haas - "The Event Horizon of Honey" by Braydon Beaulieu --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 445 and 446, November 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Crow’s Second Tale](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-crows-second-tale/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen - "[The Loaf in the Woods](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-loaf-in-the-woods/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Marino - "[The Unmasking Of Fioha Dubhan](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-unmasking-of-fioha-dubhan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Samuel Chapman - "[Little Thief and the Martyr’s Head](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/little-thief-and-the-martyrs-head/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.A. Prentice --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(Issue 230, November 2025) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Stone Played at Tengen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wesley%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.H. Wesley - "[Jade Fighter](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/spires%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires - "[The Apologists](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tade Thompson - "[Trees at Night](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sanchiz%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ramiro Sanchiz, translated by Sue Burke - "[Prerequisites for the Creation of a Possible Predicted World](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/umeh%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chisom Umeh - "[Ratlines](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/baldwin%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brent Baldwin ### Nonfiction - [What is the Retirement Age of a Jedi?](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/de%5Fmagalhaes%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by João Pedro de Magalhães - [Breaking Bones: A Conversation with K.A. Teryna](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/teryna%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Needing to Make Sense of the World: A Conversation with R.T. Ester](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ester%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: Four from our Readers](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 126, November 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Totensonntag](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/totensonntag/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byBrian Evenson - "[The Window at My Mother’s Back, the Door in My Belly](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-window-at-my-mothers-back-the-door-in-my-belly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byA. W. Prihandita - "[Tragedia dell’Arte](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/tragedia-dellarte/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byTJ Cimfel - " [Twilight Tide](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/twilight-tide/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySamir Sirk Morató --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (Issue 46, November 2026) ### Fiction - "Only Time Will Tell" by Alice Baburek - "Passerine" by Melanie Hamon - "Red Hunger" by Kidron Grifter - "Sap Of Eternal Satisfaction" by Daniela Tabrea - "Dead Of Night: Tool" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "To Quell A Phoenix" by Nicholas Samuel Stember - "Toll Road" by Sylke Lesinski - "Our Discontent" by Paul Cesarini - "The Mask Maker’s Imagination" by Hayden Kanicki - "Watchdog" by Jaryd Porter --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 40, Fall 2025) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Last Minute Before the Rooster Crows](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/the-last-minute-before-the-rooster-crows/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Malena Salazar Maciá (fiction; online 10/20) - "[Amanita Season](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/amanita-season/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Belle Biscotti (poetry; online 10/23) - "[Hamaka, Leave Me Alone](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/hamaka-leave-me-alone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Testimony Odey (fiction; online 10/27) - "[I had a dream and in the dream I knew I was dreaming so I believed I could change things](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/i-had-a-dream/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shana Ross (poetry; online 10/30) - "[The Destruction of All That is Good and Holy, Otherwise Known as Green Beans](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/the-destruction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Erin Ulm (fiction; online 11/3) - "[The Ritual](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/the-ritual/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew Wollin (nonfic; online 11/6) - "[The Ghost of Cerrera Orbital Station Makes Herself Known](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/the-ghost-of-cerrera-orbital-station/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Laila Amado (fiction; online 11/10) - "[The Pretendian](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/the-pretendian/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jason Pearce (fiction; online 11/13) - "[Bay nakht afn altn mark: A rehearsal](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/bay-nakht-afn-altn-mark-a-rehearsal/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.B. Lemberg (poetry; online 11/17) - "[Punks Don’t Die](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/punks-dont-die/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kat Sedia (fiction; online 11/20) - "[Not a Bird](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/not-a-bird/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ellen Romano (poetry; online 11/24) - "[Liminalities of the Second Contraction](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-40/liminalities-of-the-second-contraction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Scott Payne (fiction; online 11/27) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 146, November 2025) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Ursula](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/ursula/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by E.M. Linden - “[The Last Oftun in Orbit](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-last-ofuton-in-orbit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mizuki Yamagen - “[A Proper Mother, Unhexed](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-proper-mother-unhexed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ashlee Lhamon - “[Unfinished Conversations Package](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/unfinished-conversations-package/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Chris Baker - “[The Tao of Thorstein Codbiter](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-tao-of-thorstein-codbiter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Kate Horsley - “[Loxley Is One Thousand Bats](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/loxley-is-one-thousand-bats/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Camsyn Clair - “[Gifts from On High](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/gifts-from-on-high/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by V.H. Chen, and - “[Hope Is the Thing with Circuits and Steel](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/hope-is-the-thing-with-circuits-and-steel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”” by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (November 2026) ### Fiction - "[Coser y Cantar](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/coser-y-cantar-gabriela-damian-miravete/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gabriela Damián Miravete ### Nonfiction - "[Workers’ Hands Tell a Story. What If We Listened?](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/labor-ai-alice-driver/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alice Driver --- ## [*Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Fall 2025) Subscribe [here](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Lost and Found" by Charlene Adhiambo - "Sundown Town" by Zig Zag Claybourne - "Left Hand Torment" by R.J. Joseph - "Take me to the Water" by Sarah A. Macklin - "A City Called Heaven" by Danian Darrell Jerry - "Hide Me in the Shadows of your Wings" by Christopher Caldwell - "Grandfather's Drum" by Cosmata Lindie - "Birds" by Zin E. Rocklyn - "Penny Candy Lady" by Dedren Snead - "Common Grounds and Various Teas" by Sherin Nicole ### Poetry - "Sis’ Bouki: the Hyena Gifts" by Rob Cameron - "Great Dismal Speaks" by Audrey T. Williams - "Bottling Up De Evil" by Linda D. Addison - "Conjure of Original Wholeness (Homecoming Ceremony)" by Joy tabernacle KMT-Battle - "Word Worlds" by Christina Springer --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(November 2026) ### Nonfiction - [GNS Back on Pause Until January 2026](https://giganotosaurus.org/2025/11/01/gns-back-on-pause-until-january-2026/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by LaShawn M. Wanak, Editor --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 186, November 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Thaw](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/thaw/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*" by* [An Owomoyela](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/authors/an-owomoyela/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Drosera regina](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/drosera-regina/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*" by* [A.L. Goldfuss](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/authors/a-l-goldfuss/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[How to Set Up Your Mourning Robot](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/how-to-set-up-your-mourning-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu (11/6) - "[In the Zone](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/in-the-zone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lisa M. Bradley (11/6) - "[Elegy for Zephyr One](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/elegy-for-zephyr-one/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gene Doucette (11/13) - "[Beneath the Umdlebe Tree; or, A Vegetable Love Story](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/beneath-the-umdlebe-tree-or-a-vegetable-love-story/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Modupeoluwa Shelle (11/13) - "[Visible Damage](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/visible-damage/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (11/20) - "[How to Build a Homecoming Queen: A Guide by a Bad Asian Girl](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/how-to-build-a-homecoming-queen-a-guide-by-a-bad-asian-girl/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tina S. Zhu (11/20) - "[Operation: Grapevine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/operation-grapevine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joel W. D. Buxton (11/27) - "[The Cold Burning Light of Her](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-burning-light-of-her/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam W. Pisciotta (11/27) ### Nonfiction - [Book Review: *The Lost Reliquary* by Lyndsay Ely](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-lost-reliquary-by-lyndsay-ely/?ref=andrewliptak.com)byChris Kluwe - [Author Spotlight: Lisa M. Bradley](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-lisa-m-bradley/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alex Puncekar (11/6) - [Book Review: *The King Must Die* by Kemi Ashing-Giwa](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-king-must-die-by-kemi-ashing-giwa/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg and Melissa A Watkins (11/6) - [Book Review: *Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World* by Cullen Bunn](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-bones-of-our-stars-blood-of-our-world-by-cullen-bunn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (11/13) - [Author Spotlight: Nina Kiriki Hoffman](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-nina-kiriki-hoffman-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (11/20) - [Author Spotlight: Tina S. Zhu](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-tina-s-zhu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A Humphrey Lanham (11/20) - [Book Review: *Saltcrop* by Yume Kitasei](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-saltcrop-by-yume-kitasei/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Wendy N. Wagner (11/20) - [Author Spotlight: Joel W. D. Buxton](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-joel-buxton/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erik Grove (11/27) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 158, November 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Make of Your Chest a Place for Birds](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/make-of-your-chest-a-place-for-birds/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James L. Sutter (11/5) - "[Primordium](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/primordium/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Erica Ruppert (11/12) - "[Bleed for Me, Bro](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/bleed-for-me-bro/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sharang Biswas (11/19) ### Poetry - "[Futakuchi onna speaks of the Kamaitachi](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/futakuchi-onna-speaks-of-the-kamaitachi/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Betsy Aoki (11/26) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: November 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial/editorial-november-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (11/5) - [Author Spotlight: James L. Sutter](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-james-l-sutter-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Finch (11/5) - [The H Word: The Forest’s Quiet Hunger for Your Soul](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-the-forests-quiet-hunger-for-your-soul/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Samuel Peters (11/12) - [Author Spotlight: Sharang Biswas](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-sharang-biswas-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Clay Vermulm (11/19) - [Plumbing the Depths: When Scientists Go Mad—Ghost-Hunting and Horror](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/plumbing-the-depths-when-scientists-go-mad-ghost-hunting-and-horror/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lisa Morton (11/26) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(November 2025) ### Fiction - "[Barnacle](https://reactormag.com/barnacle-kate-elliott/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Elliott - "[The Belle of the Ball](https://reactormag.com/the-belle-of-the-ball-stephen-graham-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen Graham Jones - "[Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way](https://reactormag.com/regarding-the-childhood-of-morrigan-benjamin-rosenbaum/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Rosenbaum --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 29, November 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Pink Witches](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/pink-witches/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melissa Jornd --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (November 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Palimpsest](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/palimpsest-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melissa A Watkins - "[Heart Fallout](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/heart-fallout/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jess Peng ### Poetry - "[wani gari](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/wani-gari/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi - "[sijo from a spaceship escaping a dying planet](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/sijo-from-a-spaceship-escaping-a-dying-planet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Annie Bolger - "[The Patience of the Equator](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-patience-of-the-equator/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brishbhanu Baruah - "[618 Days in Longsleep](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/618-days-in-longsleep/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mahaila Smith - "[Mrs. Magalina Hoopensteimer Wallenheimer Hogan Bogan’s Wedding Toast](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/mrs-magalina-hoopensteimer-wallenheimer-hogan-bogans-wedding-toast/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jessy Randall - "[The Face Stealer Tells Me What Emptiness Feels Like](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-face-stealer-tells-me-what-emptiness-feels-like/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sean Glatch - "[A Song from Kulara](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-song-from-kulara/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jayasri Sridhar - "[Strands of Feelings](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/strands-of-feelings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. A. Ademola ### Nonfiction - [Photon Torpedoes Break the Space Muqarnas: SFF Audiovisuals and Anti-Muslim Violence](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/photon-torpedoes-break-the-space-muqarnas-sff-audiovisuals-and-anti-muslim-violence/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tanvir Ahmed - [Old Enough to Become the Villain: Contemporary Narratives Around Growing Up](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/old-enough-to-become-the-villain-contemporary-narratives-around-growing-up/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by P.H. Low - [Stories From The Radio: The Revolt of the Worms](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/stories-from-the-radio-the-revolt-of-the-worms/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kuzhali Manickavel ### Reviews - Monday: [*Eat the Ones you Love* by Sarah Maria Griffin](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/eat-the-ones-you-love-by-sarah-maria-griffin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nileena Sunil - Wednesday: [*The Demon* by Victory Witherkeigh](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-demon-by-victory-witherkeigh/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by ubham Rai - Friday: [*Field Of Frights* by Christian Hagmann](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/field-of-frights-by-christina-hagmann/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Racheal Chie - Monday: [*Colourfields* by Paul Kincaid](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/colourfields-by-paul-kincaid/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shinjini Dey - Wednesday: [*Making History* by K. J. Parker](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/making-history-by-k-j-parker/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Miguel - Friday: [*Esperance* by Adam Oyebanji](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/esperance-by-adam-oyebanji/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric Hendel - Monday: [*The Curators* by Maggie Nye](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-curators-by-maggie-nye/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Roy Salzman-Cohen - Wednesday: [*Dementia* 21 volumes 1 and 2 by Shintaro Kago](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dementia-21-volumes-1-and-2-by-shintaro-kago/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shannon Fay - Friday: [*We Like It Cherry* by Jacy Morris](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/we-like-it-cherry-by-jacy-morris/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ian J. Simpson - Monday: [*The Everlasting* by Alix E. Harrow](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-everlasting-by-alix-e-harrow/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nick Hubble - Wednesday: [*A Granite Silence* by Nina Allan](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/a-granite-silence-by-nina-allan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Hebblethwaite - Friday: [*Talamasca: The Secret Order*](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/talamasca-the-secret-order/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by AJ Odasso --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (November 2025) ### Fiction - "[Here at the Freezing End](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/here-at-the-freezing-end?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Kinney - "[The Hodges Meteorite](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-hodges-meteorite?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andy Duncan - "[An Invitation from the BildungsEssen Restaurant Group](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/an-invitation-from-the-bildungsessen?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelly Lagor - "[Flower and Root](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/flower-and-root?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by J.R. Dawson --- ## [*Three-Lobed Burning Eye*](https://www.3lobedmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 46, November 2025) Support them [here](https://www.3lobedmag.com/support.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Belly Full of Eyes](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory1.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K.S. Walker - "[The Subject](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory2.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brian Evenson - "[Untitled #5](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory3.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nadia Bulkin - "[For When the Night is Behind You and the Depths are Ahead](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory4.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Corey Farrenkopf - "[Songs Never Sung](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory5.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Premee Mohamed - "[The Somnambulist](https://www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe46%5Fstory6.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katie McIvor --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 67, November/December 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Millay Illusion](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Pinsker - "[Anémona](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/anemona/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ana Hurtado - "[And on Their Graves a Fall of Angels](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/and-on-their-graves-a-fall-of-angels/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Natalia Theodoridou - "[Who Are You Wearing?](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/who-are-you-wearing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Russell Nichols ### Poetry - "[Prayer for Winter](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/prayer-for-winter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Romie Stott - "[Call Us Boy.](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/call-us-boy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Somto Ihezue ### Nonfiction - [The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-62/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Thank You, Patreon Supporters!](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/thank-you-patreon-supporters-48/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [I Am Insecure About My Character(s)](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/i-am-insecure-about-my-characters/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Javier Grillo–Marxuach - [Portrayals of Disability in *The Wheel of Time*, Sony Pictures/Amazon Studios](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/portrayals-of-disability-in-the-wheel-of-time-sony-pictures-amazon-studios/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mari Ness - [Interview: Natalia Theodoridou](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-natalia-theodoridou-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim --- Check back at the end of the month: I'll update the links to the stories that haven't come out at the time of publication. As always, let me and your fellow readers know in the comments what stories stood out for you! ### 17 new science fiction and fantasy books to check out this November URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-recommendations-november-2025/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T18:19:32.000Z We’re barreling into the last couple of months of 2025, and after a super busy couple of months for new books, we get a \* *slight*\* reprieve in November and December. There are still a whole bunch of books hitting stores, mind, but now we’re about to hit the prime holiday shopping season. I’ve always found that books make for good gifts: they’re a prime opportunity to demonstrate the thought that you put into selecting something for them, and there’s certainly no shortage of choices. Here's my usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. This series of book lists involves a lot of time to research what's coming out, track down reviews, read bits and pieces of each, and to write up blurbs for what catches my eye. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting it by: \- [****Signing up as a supporting subscriber**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40 a year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4 a month. \- Supporting the newsletter with a [****one-time tip**](#/portal/support). \- Purchasing a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are 17 new books to check out during the first half of November. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. --- ### [*The Time Traveler's Passport*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN8CHTQD?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by John Joseph Adams (November 1st) John Joseph Adams has put together a short anthology for Amazon Original Stories, packages of short fiction packaged together along a central theme. This one is all about time travel, and includes six stories by authors Olivie Blake, Kaliane Bradley, P. Djèlí Clark, R.F. Kuang, John Scalzi, and Peng Shepherd. ### [*Brigands & Breadknives*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250334886?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Travis Baldree (November 11th) Travis Baldree is back with another cozy fantasy, following [*Legends & Lattes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250886088?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Bookshops & Bonedust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250886101?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a third installment: *Brigands & Breadknives*. Fern has been working as a bookseller for decades, and needing a change of scenery, decides to relocate to the city of Thune to join her friend Viv and her coffee shop. But relocating proves to be more challenging than expected, and after a night of drinking, she stows away on an adventurer's wagon, owned by an elf warrior who's working to bring an orc to justice. Fern decides to stay with the adventurer while she tries and figures out why she's so discontented with her life. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250334886?ref=andrewliptak.com) "while this road trip romp is more action-packed than previous installments, Baldree still conjures up the sense of cozy intimacy the series is known for." ### [*Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780691224794?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Blair (November 11th) A couple of years ago, a new historic marker went up in the town of Manchester, Vermont, about a local woman who was believed to be a vampire. There's a lot of that here in New England, and this new book by looks like a fascinating exploration of the phenomenon where communities have gone out and accused their neighbors of being vampires. Blair goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia and up to the modern day to examine this, exploring how these "vampire epidemics" have popped up across the world, drawing on archeological and anthropological examples, as well as vampire lore to look at the forces that drive these events. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-691-22479-4?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This meticulous account sheds horrifying light on the constancy with which women have been made to pay, even in death, for society’s larger anxieties." ### [*Pluto*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250296658?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ben Bova and Les Johnson (November 4th) Legendary SF author and editor Ben Bova passed away [five years ago in 2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-author-ben-bova-obituary/), but his explorations of the solar system via his Grand Tour series was left incomplete with his passing (*Neptune* was published in 2021). The series (and *Outer Planets* sub trilogy) has finally reached the last (dwarf) planet in our solar system with *Pluto*, co-authored by Les Johnson. Major Larry Randall heads off to Pluto to recover a scientist named Dr. Aaron Mikelson, who's now part AI after an accident. The former human is reluctant to leave, having just discovered an alien artifact on the planet's surface, and once they get their hands on it, they can't figure out what it is or where it came from. While looking, they awaken something under the frozen surface of Charon, Pluto's moon, something that will threaten all of humanity. ### [*Star Wars: Master of Evil*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874738?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Christopher (November 11th) I was really impressed with Adam Christopher’s *Star Wars* novel [*Shadow of the Sith*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593358627?ref=andrewliptak.com) when it came out a couple of years ago, which filled in some vital time between *Return of the Jedi* and *The Force Awakens*, and helping to set the stage for the events of the sequel trilogy. Christopher is now back with a new novel, this time picking up the story of one of the franchise’s biggest villains: Darth Vader. Set during the earliest days of the Empire, *Master of Evil* follows Vader as he becomes part of the Imperial system, all while grappling with the promises that the Dark Side of the Force and Emperor Palpatine made when he lured away from the Jed Order. As he builds his lightsaber, he's given a glimpse into the potential that the Force might provide, and he begins to pursue that vision, even if it puts him at odds with his Master. ### [*The Nameless Land*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250338648?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kate Elliott (November 4th) Kate Elliott follows up [*The Witch Roads*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250338617?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, in which* Elen, a child slave-turned courier, has been leading an arrogant prince entourage after they entered the haunted Spires of Orledder Halt. In this adventure, Elen, Prince Gevulin, and others have reached the edge of the Tranquil Empire and have encountered the misty Far Boundary Pall, which steals lives and shrouds the northern lands. When the party is forced to flee into it and reach the other side. There, they need to rely on the prince's diplomatic skills to try and bring together a coalition of allies to help save their lands, all while Elen comes face to face with a past that she thought she left behind. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250338648?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Elliott skillfully expands her series’ fascinating worldbuilding, contrasting the highly structured Tranquil Empire with the squalid and chaotic nameless land and digging into its nonhuman cultures and complex history." ### [*The Ganymedan*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837863365?ref=andrewliptak.com) by R.T. Ester (November 4th) Verden Dotnet had been a mixologist for the man who created all of the sentient technology in the galaxy, Archer Lenox-Pileser, right up to the point where he killed him. He made sure that he got all of his backups. Now on the run, Verdan missed a ship to Ganymede and ends up convincing a sentient ship, TR-8901 for a ride. The ship begins hearing rumors that its creator has been killed, and is suspicious of its new passenger, but it's going to do its duty. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-83786-336-5?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "with meticulous technical detail, abundant local color on various space stations and Martian locales, and sharply drawn characters, this sprawling novel will appeal to both hard sci-fi fans and readers looking for thought-provoking insights into an all too possible future where humans and AI must find an effective symbiosis if both are to survive." ### [*Coldwire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781665960137?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Chloe Gong (November 4th) In a bleak future fraught with rising tides due to climate change and endless epidemics, most of society lives in virtual reality spaces (upcountry), while those who can't afford it make due with life downcountry. For all of its appeal, upcountry has its own problems: a war between two nations, Medaluo and Atahua. An Medan orphan named Eirale was forced to join the Nile Military Academy and recently graduated, joining NileCorp’s downcountry privave military force. When she's framed by an anarchist for an assassination, she's forced to cooperate with him, helping him track down a dangerous program, or be arrested for treason. At the same time, Lia has been studying at Nile and is determined to beat her nemesis and graduate at the top of her class. When they're assigned to infiltrade Medaluo and find a traitor, everything goes sideways. The two are operating in different worlds, but soon realize that they're part of a shared conspiracy, and have to figure out who's behind it all. ### [*Letters from an Imaginary Country*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964405?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Theodora Goss (November 11th) Theodora Goss is a phenomenal fantasy writer: her novels [*The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481466516?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481466547?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534427884?ref=andrewliptak.com) are great reimaginings of some of our classic literary monsters, and she has published a wealth of shorter stories over the course of her career. Some of those stories are now being brought together into a new collection, *Letters from an Imaginary Country*, she brings together some of those characters again, brings out some others to fight against a dictator, revisits the land of Oz, and quite a bit more. ### [*The Strength of the Few*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982141233?ref=andrewliptak.com)by James Islington (November 11th) James Islington follows up his novel [*The Will of the Many*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982141189?ref=andrewliptak.com) with *The Strength of the Few*. In that first installment, we're introduced to a prince named Vis Solum, who's orphaned when the Hierarchy kills his family. Forced to go into hiding, he infiltrates an academy and refuses to cede his Will – a magical power that the Hierarchy uses to function. Vis won the Iudicium and has been replicated across three different worlds – Obiteum, Luceum, and Res, and he has to figure out what happened to him and how to stop a coming Cataclysm before it's too late. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781982141233?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Islington's evocative prose and nuanced ruminations on the nature of power and sacrifice enhance Islington’s complex multiverse worldbuilding." ### [*Daughters of Nicnevin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781805520207?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shona Kinsella (November 11th) Set in 1745, Shona Kinsella introduces us to Mairead and Constance, who meet during the Jacobite uprising. The men of their village have been called away for a war, and to help protect themselves, they enlist the help of a fae queen, Nicnevin, to help them by creating men made of earth. ### [*Opposite World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589605?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Anne Martins (November 11th) When she was young, Pip's mother mysteriously died after falling into a deep, unexplainable sleep. In the aftermath, her father abandoned the outside world and they moved to an isolated cabin in the mountains. Years later, Pip returns to the real world and finds a technology called The Reverie Cloud, a program that helps merge one's subconscious mind with a virtual world, allowing patients to overcome their trauma, explore their desires, and more. Pip finds herself locked inside the program and has to figure out how to escape, and to confront her own past before it's too late. ### [*There Is No Antimemetics Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593983751?ref=andrewliptak.com) by qntm (November 11th) I've really enjoyed qntm's (the pen name for Sam Hughes) short fiction and I've been fascinated by his take on technology and the future. He originally serialized it online starting in 2015, self-published it as a novel in 2021, and Ballantine Books recently picked it up for the republishing treatment. It follows a mysterious organization known as The Antimemetics Division, which protects humanity from antimemes – ideas that attack reality and which we're unable to think about. There's an invisible invasion underway, and the members of the division have to wage a war that they not only can't see, but can't remember, either. ### [*Constituent Service*](https://subterraneanpress.com/scalzi-cs/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Scalzi (November) John Scalzi's *third* book of the year (After [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com)) is *Constituent Service*, which was originally published as an audiobook through Audible. He's now turned to Subterranean Press for the print edition, which comes as a limited edition hardcover. The story follows Ashley Perrin, who gets a job in the Third District, an alien-majority neighborhood. Her job is to connect with her diverse community and figure out how to best solve their problems, which range from mundane noise complaints to a missing chicken to some more dire problems. I read it last year, and it's a fun one. ### [*Stars Like Us*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589650?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen K. Stanford (November 4th) Stephen K. Stanford follows up last year's [*Jubilee*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787588844?ref=andrewliptak.com), picking up the story of Col Perolo, the security chief for the artificial mini-world of JUBILEE. His quiet life is turned upside down after an attack and in order to save his new family, he flees with a crew that includes his ex-wife, Sana. When he arrives at a League base, he finds that it's been infiltrated, and as he flees again, he's forced to confront some of his own personal demons. ### [*The War Beyond*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564830?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrea Stewart (November 4th) Andrea Stewart returns to the world she created in her novel *The Gods Below*, set in a world where a war left humanity in ruins. The survivors struck a deal with a god named Kluehnn: he's restore the world, but humanity would be indebted to him, and a woman named Hakara gave up everything to find the sister Rasha, who she abandoned when they fled to a neighboring kingdom. She found her sister but lost her again, and now, along with her allies, she's on the hunt for a shapeshifter named Lithuas. Killing her would cause Kluehnn plenty of problems. Meanwhile, Rasha is proudly on Kluehnn's side as a Godkiller, even though she has some doubts about his teachings. When she's dispatched to kill her sister and friends, she has to figure out whose side she's really on. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-stewart/the-war-beyond/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the sheer amount of jaw-dropping plot twists and bombshell revelations make this a must-read for fans of grand-scale fantasy." ### [*The American Revolution: An Intimate History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525658672?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (November 11th) One of the reasons that I’m a historian is Ken Burns’ epic documentary series *The Civil War*, which delved deep into the conflict to explore its origins, battles, and lingering impact to present a complicated and detailed overview of how the American Civil War played out. Ever since, I’ve looked forward to his longer projects, such as *Jazz, National Parks, The Vietnam War, The War*, and others. This year, ahead of the 250th US semiquincentennial, he’s releasing another lengthy project: *The American Revolution*. I’m eager to watch the series when it premieres on November 16th on PBS, but I’ve been equally excited to check out the companion book that accompanies it. Burns and his frequent collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward produce a hefty coffee table-sized tome that accompanies each of his bigger series, and this one is another enticing overview of the conflict, with tons of paintings, maps, illustrations, and detail about how the American Revolution played out. *Publishers Weekly* [says that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525658672?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the bulk of the volume is comprised of Ward’s lucid prose and exquisitely rendered details." and that "Ward doesn’t shy away from the subject’s darker currents, including the great paradox at its center: How could men pursuing liberty be comfortable with slavery?" --- Thanks as always for reading. Let me know in the comments what you‘re reading now and what catches your eye on this list. I’ll have another list for the second half of the month in a couple of weeks. ### Principled prophet URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/positive-obsession-octavia-butler-biography-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-10-30T16:01:49.000Z There's a detail in Octavia Butler's 1998 novel [*Parable of the Talents*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781609807207?ref=andrewliptak.com) that caught a lot of attention [during and after the 2016 US presidential election](https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again?ref=andrewliptak.com): a right-wing, Christian nationalist politician who used the phrase "Make America Great Again." Butler, who died in 2006, probably wouldn't have guessed that it was a real estate developer-turned reality television star that picked up the slogan for his campaign for the White House a decade later, but she likely wouldn't have been surprised at the broader, rightward shift the country has undertaken. After all, she had long imagined the country moving in that direction, lending books such as [*Parable of the Sower*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781609807191?ref=andrewliptak.com) a reputation for being [uncannily accurate](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-parable-of-the-sower-book-review/) in their depictions of the future. In her new biography of the late author, Susana M. Morris, explores Butler's life and career with an eye towards uncovering why her stories continue to resonate with audiences. The book, [*Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com), mines Butler's journals and stories, paints a portrait of a lonely woman who's determined to make an impact in a world that's hostile to her entire existence, and how she used that outsider status to hone her understanding of people and how they operate. Butler was born on June 22nd, 1947, in Pasadena, California in a working class family. Her father died not long after she was born, and her mother supported the two of them through a series of odd jobs. Morris describes her as a bright kid who struggled in school – she was later diagnosed with dyslexia – and was an awkward kid: an African American girl who towered over her classmates and was often the target of bullies. From an early age, she turned to books and storytelling as a refuge. "Stories were her earliest companions," Morris writes, "Once she learned to write, stories were among her first scribbles when she was four years old." She discovered science fiction as a teenager, picking up magazines like *Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, and others, and working her way through her local library's stacks, reading up on the classics. She was moved to write stories of her own in 1959 when she watched a film called [*Devil Girl from Mars*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXMm8TclN6Y&ref=andrewliptak.com) and realized she could do better, and began writing stories of her own. After graduating from Pasadena City College with an associates degree and began working odd jobs to support herself while she continued to write. This period was fruitful: she had begun the seeds of what would eventually become her [*Patternist*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538751480?ref=andrewliptak.com) series, as well as [*Kindred*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780807006924?ref=andrewliptak.com), and in 1970, at the urging of Harlan Ellison, enrolled in the Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop, which helped her begin selling stories. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/image-6.png) Morris emphasizes a couple of things in Butler's life at this point: her steadfast commitment to not only writing, but to be successful at it. She recounts how she wrote affirmations in her journal, writing out her goals and aspirations. She rejected advice from her mother to try and find more steady work, opting instead to work part time and temporary jobs in order to have the time to write in the mornings and evenings. She also highlights that Butler was deeply tied into the lower-middle class, and from that vantage point became a keen observer of the people around her. Her daily rides on the city bus to jobs and classes gave her a first-hand view of *people*, and for her entire life, she was a fierce advocate of public libraries, where she spent much of her time reading, researching, and watching. Butler didn't have to use her imagination to draw vivid, three-dimensional characters, and I think that's one reason why her books stand the test of time. These aren't people who're based on conjecture, imagination, or stereotypes, and as such, she was able to bring in a rich layer of fidelity to the worlds she was dreaming up. Butler's work can't be extracted from her life. Growing up impoverished and scraping by instilled in her a recognition for the importance of government programs: everything from public transportation to public libraries, she recognized that supporting one's neighbors and communities was essential for a healthy society. Morris pays close attention to Butler's reactions to President Ronald Reagan's election and the actions that his administration took to dismantle many of those public programs that supported people throughout the country. She channeled that anger and frustration into her books, looking at how ideological conflicts can break down society and how people can work together to ensure that they're living in a just and equitable world. Taken together, and you have a recipe for books that are deeply observant about the state of the world, and Morris's biography explains just why they seem so prophetic. Butler isn't using any secret tricks or techniques: she just paid close attention to the world around her and recognized the direction that the political, economic, and social trends could take us. It takes deep observations, understanding of history, and a sense of empathy to conceptualize the present moment and how the actions that policymakers and influential figures lay the groundwork for what comes next, and it's these skills that Butler put to work in her fiction. In many ways, Butler's affirmations, belief in herself, and her principled view of the world paid off for her: while she struggled to gain a foothold in the publishing industry and in fandom early on, her work eventually gained more and more attention. *Kindred* became an enormously influential and important novel in the canon of American literature, while her *Patternist* and [*Xenogenesis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538182?ref=andrewliptak.com) stories have continually found new audiences and reappraisal. And of course, she was recognized in 1995 with a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship – the first science fiction writer to earn the award. Reading Morris's book in 2025, I couldn't help but come away with a sense of immense loss and tragedy. She recounts how in the late 1990s, she hit a stumbling block: her books were the most popular that they'd been in her entire career, but she had incredible difficulty putting words to the page; a combination of the medications she was on for various health issues and writer's block. She struggled to figure out how to continue the story she had begun in *Parable of the Sower* and continued in *Parable of the Talents*. It wasn't until the early 2000s when she found her stride by writing something completely different: a vampire novel called [*Fledgling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538724583?ref=andrewliptak.com), which she published in 2005\. It her last novel: Butler tragically died on February 24th, 2006 at the far-too-young age of 58\. She would have been 78 in 2025, and I can't help but wonder what we might have seen her write had she lived through the last two decades – a period where we saw the United States continue its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, elect its first Black president, endure considerable racial tensions following high-profile shootings of Black men and women, and the rise of the MAGA movement that feels eerily similar to the future she envisioned. I can't help but think that she wouldn't be surprised by the direction the country has taken, and that she would have approached the moment with a range of emotions. It's impossible to know. Morris's biography is a stellar sketch of Butler's life, not just recounting the critical moments and high points, but by seeking to understand how she looked at the world and how her observations shaped the work she produced. It's a book that not only explores her role in science fiction, but how she took her deeply-held principles and imbued them into her storytelling, how she grounded her characters and stories in the real world, and how she worked for years to perfect her craft and ensure that her voice would be heard, despite every barrier along the way. They're all lessons worth learning as we move forward into more, uncertain futures. ### Finding one's self on the road to hell URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/rf-kuang-katabasis-fantasy-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-10-27T13:00:38.000Z In a [recent profile in *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/25/the-otherworldly-ambitions-of-r-f-kuang?ref=andrewliptak.com), Hua Hsu describes author R.F. Kuang as someone who appears to be trying to reinvent herself with every book she writes, noting that she's written in "an unpredictable range of styles and genres during the past ten years," jumping from epic fantasy with [*The Poppy War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063413573?ref=andrewliptak.com) to dark academia with [*Babel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021433?ref=andrewliptak.com) to literary intrigue with [*Yellowface*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250833?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. "*I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kuang told Hsu, and that "there is no attraction, for me, to being the most competent or well-read person in the room, because then there’s nowhere to go." Her latest book is [*Karabasis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063446243?ref=andrewliptak.com), a sprawling, ambitious, philosophical, and thought-provoking read about what drives us through life while exploring academia's power struggles and personality cults. She introduces us to Alice Law, an anxious, driven graduate student studying at Cambridge University under Professor Jacob Grimes. In the opening pages, we find that something terrible has happened: when attempting a spell, something went wrong and Grimes was torn apart and sent to the eight circles of Hell. Alice recognizes that her future relies on the enormous stature that the professor had in the field: a recommendation letter from him would guarantee success in any career path she might choose, so she decides to follow him back down to Hell and bring him back. After spending time in the archives and library studying what scholars like Dante, T.S. Elliot, or Orpheus have observed on their own trips, she pulls together some supplies and sets about getting ready to make the trip for herself, when she's joined by fellow Grimes student and her rival, Peter Murdoch, who's also decided to retrieve the late professor from the underworld. What follows is a grim quest for the two students: they figure out how to travel to hell, and face the monumental task of *finding* Grimes. Once down there, there's any number of places he could be, from various circles like Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, and the others, in which they encounter scholars trapped in an endless academic existence, researching problems without solutions, or in their worldly desires and instincts that brought them there in the first place. Along the way, they encounter others who've come to hell for their own purposes: Nick and Magnolia Kripke, twisted magicians who were on their own quest to discover a true contradiction, divine beings with their own malicious riddles and traps, and one of Grimes' former students who had committed suicide. Alice and Peter realize that getting into Hell wasn't the hard part: getting out is more difficult, and they have to work through their resentments and assumptions to figure out how to survive and trust one another to figure out how to accomplish their task and return to the world of the living. Kuang [has said](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/11/28/r-f-kuang-friendship-anti-colonialism-magic-brattle-theatre-babel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the idea for the book came to her as a "cute, silly adventure novel about like, ‘Haha, academia is hell,'" only to realize that the world of academia can be hellish: students endure tyrannical professors who'll stop at nothing to remain at the top of their fields, trapped in studies that have little relevance or interest to the real world, and who use the power their positions afford them to prey on those under them. Alice is driven to succeed in her studies and is willing to do anything to achieve that goal, and anyone who's worked in academia or who's paid attention to the Me Too movement will recognize the challenges that she's had to endure. Grimes retaliates against her after his advances on her fail, he pits his students against one another to motivate their work (and for them to do his work), and he belittles them when they don't reach his sky-high standards. Alice's relationship with her professor feels almost like she's a hostage or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, in that she's entirely reliant on this one person, something he's all too willing to exploit. At the same time, Kuang spins out a tale that feels a bit like Michael Shur's excellent TV series *The Good Place,* in which she, through Alice and Peter, takes readers through different philosophies and logical frameworks as they embark on their quest, wielding their magic through contradictions in logic and language to try and find their professor. It makes for a fascinating, brainy book, one that takes us through the field of logic and reasoning while exploring question of free will and our very existence. It's never dull; Kuang slowly unspools Alice and Peter's stories, teasing out their respective lives, motivations, and relationship to ultimately force them to reckon with how they've ended up in their predicament. At the core of the book is a simple question: what drives and motivates us through life? Alice and Peter each have to eventually confront this query: why are we putting ourselves through this ordeal? Alice can become the best student she can and rise to the top of her field, but is this something that she really wants to do, or is she just following a path because it's set down before her? There's times when it feels a little overwrought, as though she's never sat down and contemplated her life and goals beyond accomplishing the next step in the path of academia, but life does have a way running away from you on autopilot if you aren't careful. Kuang brings these various components together neatly, forcing her characters to reckon with their assumptions, motivations, and their very existence. In a lot of ways, this book feels like it's a deeply personal story, one that's reflective on the path that she's taken so far. Her characters might have set out on a quest to ostensibly save their professor – as it turns out, there's quite a bit more to Alice's intentions here – but as they make their way through the underworld, they experience what others who've made the journey have ultimately discovered: it's a journey that forces one to confront who they are at their core. They experience trials that tests them while the journey lays bare their truths and flaws, ultimately pushing them to reinterpret, reinvent, or reexamine their priorities and motivations as they try and figure out how to get back on the right path before it's too late and their end catches up to them. ### Disney axed a Star Wars film about the redemption of Ben Solo URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-hunt-for-ben-solo-adam-driver-steven-soderbergh-disney/ Last updated: 2025-10-26T19:35:31.000Z File this under a bit of unexpected news: speaking with the *Associated Press* last week, actor Adam Driver [revealed](https://apnews.com/article/adam-driver-star-wars-soderbergh-jarmusch-4e08164d0419759f1b5b50d69864975d?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he had been working with director Steven Soderbergh on a new *Star Wars* film called *The Hunt for Ben Solo.* It would have put a new spin on his sequel trilogy character Kylo Ren, appears to have been on the verge of entering production, only to be canceled by Disney. Driver told the *AP* that he "always was interested in doing another ‘Star Wars,’” and that Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy began talking with him about the possibility of a return in 2021, a couple of years after the studio released *The Rise of Skywalker*. Driver had worked with Soderbergh in 2016's *Logan Lucky* and brought the idea of a post-*ROTS* film to him, with the idea that they could build a new story that gave him a better ending. This is one of those posts that started as a couple of lines in the roundup email that I send out to members, only for me to realize that this is a story that would benefit from a bit more context and commentary, so it turned into its own piece that supporting subscribers get. If you'd like to get these directly, or support more of these types of pieces and commentaries, consider signing up as a supporting subscriber today: [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) [According to Soderbergh](https://bsky.app/profile/bitchuation.bsky.social/post/3m3sqkb27ms25?ref=andrewliptak.com) this wasn't a it was a finished script that appears as though it was ready to go into production before it was killed. *The Playlist* [reports](https://theplaylist.net/the-hunt-for-ben-solo-steven-soderbergh-adam-drivers-secret-star-wars-movie-was-greenlit-before-disney-pulled-the-plug-exclusive-20251024/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Lucasfilm had greenlit the film and had been working on getting it prepared for production when it was canceled: "Kennedy and the 'Star Wars' Story Group waited until the project was 'ready to shoot' before they presented it to Disney." Driver appeared in all three of the sequel trilogy films as Kylo Ren, who we learn in *The Force Awakens* that he's really the fallen son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. In *The Last Jedi,* we learned that he had been training with his uncle, Luke Skywalker, and that Luke had almost killed him after realizing the extent of his powers and that he'd been communicating with Supreme Leader Snoke. Ben fell to the Dark Side and adopted the mantle of Kylo Ren, destroying Luke's academy, and then went on to help the First Order begin its takeover of the galaxy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/image-4.png) Image: Lucasfilm Kylo kills Han in *The Force Awakens,* and struggles with a strange bond that he forms with Rey, who's met up with the Resistance. He tries to tempt her to his side, and they ultimately kill Snoke and destroy a good part of the First Order fleet, only for Kylo to turn on her rather than turn his back on the Dark Side and First Order, and ends up trying to kill Luke. The sequel trilogy had a convoluted production: J.J. Abrams directed *The Force Awakens*, and Rian Johnson picked up from where he left off with *The Last Jedi.* But there doesn't appear to have been any overarching direction or destination for the trilogy and its characters, and Johnson he took the story in his own direction, upending fan expectations. Colin Trevorrow was tapped to conclude the trilogy with Episode 9 (titled [*Duel of the Fates*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star%5FWars:%5FDuel%5Fof%5Fthe%5FFates?ref=andrewliptak.com#Plot)), but dropped out late over creative differences, prompting Abrams to step back in and take over, starting the film over from scratch. The film ultimately sees Kylo Ren turning his back on the dark side and becoming Ben Solo once again, and ends up aiding her when she tracks down the clone of Emperor Palpatine and saves her life at the cost of his own. It's a jarring transition, because Abrams goes back on a bunch of things that Johnson left off with, and as a result, the legacy of the sequel trilogy, this enormous film project that should have capped off nearly a half-century of filmmaking and storytelling, feels really uneven, in no small part because nobody seems to have really figured out how to give their characters satisfying arcs after building them up for two films. The *AP* notes that Driver was unsatisfied with how Kylo's arc turned out after that process (something that plenty of fans and reviewers also noted) and this new project was designed to give a better sense of closure for the character. Soderbergh and his wife Jules Asner (who writes under the name Rebecca Blunt), produced a concept, pitched it to Lucasfilm and its various creatives, then hired screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote *The Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion,* and provided rewrites for the script for *Rogue One*) to write the screenplay, before taking it to to Lucasfilm, who reportedly loved it. Driver also was apparently thrilled with the concept. When Lucasfilm brought it to Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Co-chairman Alan Bergman, they nixed it, apparently because they didn't see how Ben Solo could be brought back, something that *The Playlist* notes took Lucasfilm by surprise, because the film explains it. (Never mind that Palpatine returned from the dead for *Rise of Skywalker*) There's not a lot that we know about the timing of all of this, and I have to wonder (and I'm just guessing/extrapolating here) that it's less Disney executives being unable to wrap their heads around a dead character returning to life but more the state of the film industry. If work on the film started in 2021 and ran for two years, that would put it right in the midst of the time that streaming was just starting to falter and where Bob Iger returned to Disney after the company dismissed his replacement/predecessor, Bob Chapek. *The Playlist* report, if it's accurate, suggests that some think film was killed because of company politics. Changes on the executive level can often kill films that have been in the works under previous administrations, and I wonder if Disney was still at that point betting on streaming being a priority over theatrical films. There are also a lot of moving parts in the post-sequel era for the franchise: the Rey film was announced in 2023 (so presumably there had been some work on it while the Ben Solo film was in the works), and it feels plausible to me that this could be an instance where the executives simply decided to move ahead on one project over another. The project appears to be completely dead, and Lucasfilm has since greenlight a couple of other scripts (*The Mandalorian and Grogu* is coming out next year, and *Star Wars: Starfighter* is due out in 2027), while they're also developing a handful of other projects: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's post-sequel Rey film, Simon Kinsburg's post-sequel trilogy, as well as film projects by Taika Waititi, James Mangold, and Patty Jenkins. I'm sure there are others as well that haven't been reported on. What's also frustrating is that for years, Lucasfilm had been announcing projects at some pretty early stages, only to have them killed. I don't think that word of this project had leaked before, so it's refreshing to see that the studio was getting everything lined up and ready to go before saying something about it. Hopefully that's the approach moving forward. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/image-5.png) It's obviously difficult to say whether or not this film would have worked out well for Disney had it gone into production. Frustratingly, Driver told the *AP* that they were trying to put together a cheaper film: "we wanted to be judicial about how to spend money and be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven." Considering that the sequel trilogy installments ranged from $300 million (*The Last Jedi*) to more than $400 million (*The Rise of Skywalker*), economical might not mean much, but given how expensive blockbuster films are and how that's raised the bar for these sorts of films to be improbably successful in theaters, it's a welcome approach. But it's also a story that would have come at the tail end of the sequel trilogy, which (as noted above), had an uneven reception amongst fans and critics alike. I tend to sit on the wait-and-see fence when it comes to a film's legacy – 25 years after it was released, the prequel trilogy has been enjoying this delightful renaissance and reevaluation amongst fans, and I have little doubt that with the same distance, we'll see the sequel trilogy enjoy a similar reception, especially when additional stories told through books, comics, games, and TV shows come together to shore up the weaker points and to fill in plot holes. Even now, a dedicated segment of fandom that's focused on the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren (Reylos), have been clamoring for additional stories about the two characters, and this certainly feels like a project that they would have embraced. At the same time, there's a feeling in the air that Lucasfilm is trying to put some of the experiences of the sequel trilogy behind them, and have set their sights on stories that'll continue the franchise beyond the Skywalker storyline, with the idea being that there are other parts of the world to explore: the immediate years after *Rise of Skywalker* saw the release of shows like *Ahsoka, Andor, The Mandalorian* and *Skeleton Crew*, none of which really connect to the sequel trilogy (although there are points where they do appear to be setting the stage for it), and while one of the upcoming films is set in the post-sequel world, it seems like it's designed for a fresh start. *Star Wars* can do both of those things, but I think the impulse to try and see what other stories they can tell in this world is probably a better one. Most of Disney's entries in the franchise really feel like they're looking backward: *Solo* was an origin story that few were asking for, *Ahsoka* was a streaming series that picked up the characters featured in the animated series *Rebels,* and *Rogue One* told the story in the days before *A New Hope.* There are good entries in there – [look no further than *Andor*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/)and *Rogue One*, which really changed what I thought *Star Wars* could do*,* but while I liked *Solo* a great deal, these aren't projects that really feel as though they're expanding the world and doing anything other than retreading over old ground. I can't know without seeing the script, but I have a hard time seeing what *The Hunt for Ben Solo* could do to the larger world in that light: it's another project that's designed to shore up the existing stories. It's certainly possible that it could have been something that would have drastically reevaluated what a Star Wars film could be, like Johnson's *The Last Jedi* or Tony Gilroy's *Andor* did for me, but it could have easily also just been another *Solo* or *Ahsoka*; projects that ultimately ended up feeling like they were designed for and catered to a specific subset of *Star Wars* fandom, rather than being a good story worthy of being shot because it was a good story. I don't actually think it would be quite that drastic: Soderbergh is an excellent director, but it's one of those things that's impossible to tell. This entire saga has been fascinating to watch since it popped up last week: I can't think of a time when we've seen creatives go out and talk about a killed project like this, and it's interesting because it pulls the curtain back a little on the process to get one of these films made. It's certainly generated quite a bit of attention from fans, [who hired a plane](https://collider.com/star-wars-adam-driver-movie-fan-protest-save-the-hunt-for-ben-solo-movie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to fly around Disney's headquarters with a message pleading for the film to be saved. I don't think that'll work and I think that the film is probably never going to happen, but who knows? Stranger things have happened. ### Green Mountain Book Festival Recap URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-mountain-book-festival-recap/ Last updated: 2025-10-23T13:00:38.000Z When I joined the board of the Green Mountain Book Festival back in 2024, the goal was to put on a traditional book festival: a couple of big-name authors as headliners, panels about various elements of literature and writing, and a general celebration of the arts. Last year's festival went off pretty well, but we ended up having to do some soul-searching after some bigger changes: we lost our executive director, as well as a couple of board members who'd been involved for a while and who had some other things going on. On top of that, the arts are facing a rough time here in the US: the federal support and grants that a lot of these sorts of organizations have relied on has been wiped out, and there's newfound pressure on individuals who can support these types of initiatives. So, as a board, we began to work on figuring out what the next steps were: what would a festival look like when we as a board would have to handle the logistics? Could we hold a festival at all? How do we exist in this environment? We ended up having some bigger discussions about what a festival would look like, and came up with something that would look a little different: invite a headlining author, and hang the rest of the programming around whatever genre they were writing in. Vermont is awash in writers, and if we could get a big name in, we could shine a spotlight on the work that local authors are doing. As it turned out, John Scalzi had gone on tour earlier in the spring for his book [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/), and would do so again this fall with another novel, [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [latest installment of his *Old Man's War* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/). We reached out to his publicists at Tor Books to gauge interest, and when we got an affirmation that they could include a stop in Burlington for this tour, we realized we had our theme: science fiction. I know plenty of authors from my days running the now-defunct blog Geek Mountain State, and began reaching out to some of the authors and friends that I'd worked with back then, as well as some of the newer names that have popped up on the scene since. We had a good response: Craig Alanson ([*Expeditionary Force*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798347023615?ref=andrewliptak.com)), William Alexander ([*Sunward*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668058053?ref=andrewliptak.com)), M.T. Anderson ([*Nicked*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593688007?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Emily Hamilton ([*The Stars Too Fondly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320819?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Margot Harrison ([*The Midnight Club*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781525809880?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Mike Luoma ([*The Star Seeds of Earth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781716965760?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and Brian Staveley ([*Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765336439?ref=andrewliptak.com)) all agreed to come and attend, and we began building programming around them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/image-3.png) Image: Andrew Liptak We decided to run a workshop and two panels about the craft of writing. The morning workshop with Scalzi was capped to just 10 writers, who could ask questions about the professional side of writing. We figured that there's no shortages of writing workshops about the *craft* of writing, but fewer opportunities to learn about the publishing, PR, and sales side of the craft, something that Scalzi has written about extensively. We had a lot of good questions: everything from writing after one's book failed to one's social media presence, to a handful of other topics. The first afternoon panel was about worldbuilding in science fiction, based on the idea that science fiction's often known for its fantastic worlds. I'm a big fan of Staveley's books and the fantasy world that he put together for them, but we wanted to make sure that we'd have other authors with different types of stories to bring in their perspectives, so William Alexander and Margot Harrison fit in nicely there. They had a great, free-ranging conversation about the elements that went into constructing their worlds, from maps and geography to figuring out how the worlds they were creating figured into their storytelling. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/image-2.png) Image: Andrew Liptak The next panel was all about humor: Alanson suggested that Scalzi's books were infused with it, and it was a good counterpoint to the grim, dystopian nature that science fiction is sometimes associated with. In addition to Alanson, M.T. Anderson, Emily Hamilton, and Mike Luoma sat in on the panel, and they were joined by Scalzi at the last minute. Their conversation was also far-reaching: talking about the types of stories that lent themselves well to humor and comedy, but also dissecting how authors can use humor and how to find funny moments in serious situations. The final event of the evening was a Q&A with Scalzi at the Fletcher Free Library, which the board voluntold me to do, given that I'd suggested Scalzi and had written quite a bit about him over the years. This was a fun challenge, because I wanted to make sure that we were going beyond the "How do you get your ideas" questions that drive authors nuts, but also make sure that my questions aren't so down in the weeds that anyone attending wouldn't be able to follow (or frankly, care about them.) We ended up talking about a good range of things: the long-running nature of the *Old Man's War* series, writing and publishing in 2025, how he's played with structure and form in his stories, and the nature of science fiction in the larger publishing world. (As soon as the video's up, I'll put together a transcription and publish it here.) --- All in all, it was really good event, one that went off without any hitches. We had folks come up from all over New England, and I think the conversations in the panels and Q&A were interesting and entertaining. There's always small tweaks to make: I think we'll be a little more proactive with communications ahead of time and the single-genre had some folks confused about what we were intending – we had a handful of people pointedly ask why we weren't holding any poetry sessions. But as a test and experiment for an ongoing literature event, I think this is a model that will work well moving forward: one of the things I noticed from the 2024 session was that we'd have folks come in for one panel, but not really stay for the rest, which was a little frustrating to see. This time, we had a lot of folks stay for more than one panel, and I think that the focus on a single genre really helped there. Another positive thing was that we kept it to a single day. Adding another day of programming feels like it makes for an exponentially greater amount of work for all involved, and keeping it all contained to one day of programming means that you don't have to burn up your entire weekend, as a guest or as a volunteer, to attend. And the nice thing about genres is that there's a lot of them: we've started talking about what else we'll be covering in the future. We have some thoughts on more speculative fiction in the future (with some exciting authors that we're talking to!) but it'll be nice to jump around to cover everything from mysteries to climate and nature writing to more literary topics and yes, poetry. Stay tuned. If you're in the area, I'd definitely recommend [signing up for our newsletter](https://www.greenmountainbookfestival.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to get updates as we have them. I would say: let me know if you did attend: I'd love to hear your thoughts on your experience! ### 20 new SF/F books to close out October with URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-october-butler-danielewski-okorafor/ Last updated: 2025-10-23T00:37:45.000Z October has been packed with books, and we're almost to the end. I've been working my way through Joe Hill's cat killer-class tome, [*King Sorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200600?ref=andrewliptak.com), which has been a delight to read: an engrossing and intriguing read, one that I'll likely be reviewing once I collect my thoughts on it. There's a handful of others from the month that I've got my eyes on as well: Ken Liu's [*All That We See Or Seem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083178?ref=andrewliptak.com) and Daniel H. Wilson's [*Hole in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385551113?ref=andrewliptak.com), among others on the TBR. In case you missed it, [here's the first list for the month](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-october-2025/), and [here's the second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-october-2025-book-list-joe-hill-ken-liu-pierce-brown/). As always, you can find other installments in this series via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. [14 more sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to check out this OctoberMore books to add to your TBR this October![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-308.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7184.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-october-2025-book-list-joe-hill-ken-liu-pierce-brown/) Here are 20 more new SF/F books to check out this month. ### [*Cathedral of the Drowned*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250347688?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nathan Ballingrud (October 21st) Nathan Ballingrud continues the story he began in [*Crypt of the Moon Spider*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250291738?ref=andrewliptak.com), a horror story set in 1923 when a woman named Veronica Brinkley arrives at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy on the Moon, where they implant a spider silk from a massive spider whose silk grants its worshippers new mental powers. In this novella, Ballingrud takes readers to Jupiter's moon of Io, where one half of Charlie Duchamp's brain is located. The other is in his body, hosting eggs from the spider and filled with anger and rage. On Io, a crashed ship contains a centipede known as the Bishop, who's taken control of a dead astronaut. As both halves of Charlie converge on the site, another generation of Moon Spiders are about to be born. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/cathedral-of-the-drowned-9781250347688?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Ballingrud combines body horror with the creepiest gothic setting for this story that offers a gory version of space travel and exploration. The alternate gothic setting will appeal to readers of Westside by W. M. Akers, while the body transformations will enmesh readers of body horror in its web." ### [*The Changeling Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661733?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kimberly Bea (October 28th) Inspired by Robert Burns' famous poem "[Ballad of Tam Lin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam%5FLin?ref=andrewliptak.com)," a pregnant woman named Janet rescues Tam Lin from the Wild Hunt, but incurs the wrath of the Faery Queen, and they fight over his fate. The Queen was once a changeling daughter of a midwife named Bess, and for a long time believed that she had no place in the world before finding a home with the illegitimate son of a noble, Thomas Shepherd. She used her knowledge and powers to attract the attention of an elf Lord, Amadan, and let her into the Faery realm, where she fights to keep her heart and destiny together. ### [*Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538182?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Octavia E. Butler (October 14th) Library Of America has released a new collection of Octavia Butler's novels: *Lilith's Brood*, also known as the *Xenogenesis* trilogy, which includes the novels *Dawn*, *Adulthood Rites*, and *Imago*, about a young woman named Lilith who's been abducted by aliens after a nuclear apocalypse, and who's been selected because of her cancer – something that her captors, the Oankali, are keenly interested in. This isn't the first round for Butler at LoA: the publisher released [*Octavia Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598536751?ref=andrewliptak.com) back in 2021\. ### [*Tall is her Body*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645662020?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert de le Chevotière (October 28th) A boy named Fidel is orphaned after his mother is killed, knowing only the island of Guadeloupe as his home before he's shipped off to Dominica and a series of relatives. As he moves from home to home, he begins to learn a bit more about his family's story and the secrets and divisions that make up their past. It's a complicated story, one that folds in the catholic church, the impact of colonialism on the island's indigenous population, conveyed through family members, real and in spirit form, all helping him figure out his future and his complicated relationship with home. ### [*Tom's Crossing*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524747718?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mark Z. Danielewski (October 28th) Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for the classic horror novel [*House of Leaves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780375703768?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* He's back with a new novel, *Tom's Crossing*, in which two kids, Kalin March and his classmate Tom Gatestone are growing up in the town of Orvop, Utah in 1982\. Tom is terminally ill, and the two boys decide to free a pair of horses who're destined for the slaughterhouse. Kalin works to keep his promise to free the horses, embarking on a journey through the mountains that'll take them on a strange adventure. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mark-z-danielewski/toms-crossing/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "With echoes of *The Iliad* and a body count to rival *Blood Meridian*, morphing from Western to horror to police procedural and back again, Danielewski’s yarn is carefully plotted and imaginatively written." ### [*Dead Hand Rule*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250290366?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Max Gladstone (October 28th) Max Gladstone concludes his *Craft Wars* trilogy (preceded by [*Dead Country*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395917?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Wicked Problems*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395931?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and which in turn follows the *Craft Sequence,* [*Three Parts Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333117?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Two Serpents Rise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333131?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Full Fathom Five*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765335760?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Last First Snow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765379412?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Four Roads Cross*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250813459?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Ruin of Angels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395894?ref=andrewliptak.com)). In the *Craft Wars* sequence, Gladstone follows Tara Abernathy, who returned home and ended up saving a girl and ends up changing the course of the world with an apocalypse. A new god is being born, and its arrival is shaking the world and dark forces are threatening to destroy anything that stands in their way. In Alt Coulomb, the world's great powers have come together to try and save the world, and they have to figure out how only how to save it, but who they're saving it for. ### [*The Everlasting*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799081?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alix E. Harrow (October 28th) It follows a knight named Sir Una Everlasting, who was Dominion’s greatest hero: she rose from poverty to become a knight and ended up dying for her queen, but who’s story lived on in legend. Centuries later a scholar named Owen Mallory becomes obsessed with her story and begins researching it, and ends up slipping into the past himself, entangling himself in her story. I’m looking forward to this one: I’ve really enjoyed Harrow’s books over the years ([*Ten Thousand Doors of January*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421973?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a phenomenal read) and this looks like it’ll be just as interesting. ### [*Simultaneous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250384294?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eric Heisserer (October 28th) Heisserer is the screenwriter behind films like *Arrival* and *Bird Box*, and he’s now written a novel. It follows a federal agent who works for a unit in the Department of Homeland Security, Predictive Analytics. There, he and his fellow agents sort through tips trying to stop terrorist attacks before they happen. One call about an explosion in New York leads him to Mexico, where me meets a therapist who recently uncovered a strange phenomenon, and together, they uncover a plot that stretches across the country, timelines, and consciousnesses. ### [*God Emperor of Dune*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/god-emperor-of-dune?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Frank Herbert (October 21st) The Folio Society is continuing their run of Frank Herbert's *Dune* novels with *God Emperor of Dune*, set thousands of years after the events of *Children of Dune*. It's where the series really gets weird, and it includes art from Grace Aldrich, who previously illustrated the publisher's edition of *Childhood's End*. [The Folio Society is publishing Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of DuneThe Dune saga continues![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-294.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/GED-Dune-Hub-Hero-Binding-1-1.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-frank-herbert-god-emperor-of-dune/) ### [*Blood for the Undying Throne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250895363?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur (October 28th) In this sequel to *Blood of the Old Kings*, we're introduced to an Empire that runs on necromancy: it relies on dead sorcerers who're drained of their magic to further its expansion across the world. The Empire has made a fragile peace by conquering their enemies with massive war machines, they've created a breeding ground for revolutionaries. In the Imperial capitol, Emere is a politician with little power, and when someone tries to assassinate him, he discovers a greater plot at the center of the Empire. Meanwhile, Arienne has been on a journey to uncover more information about a weapon that destroyed the nation of Mersia, and finds more than she bargained for in the ruins. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/blood-for-the-undying-throne-9781250895363?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This sequel adds incredible amounts of depth to Kim’s world, weaving history and lore through three gripping narratives, making this a must-read series for epic fantasy lovers." ### [*Red Star Hustle / Apprehension*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/red-star-hustle-apprehension-mary-robinette-kowal/cb6cd35db194d9c0?ean=9781668099155&next=t&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mary Robinette Kowal / Sam J. Miller (October 21st) In *Red Star Hustle*, an escort named Aran is framed for the murder of his client and is forced to go on the run after a bounty hunter with her own secrets pick up his trail. Along the way, he encounters the handsome clone of a murderous royal and has to figure out how to keep from falling for him. Flip the book over and you've got *Apprehension*, in which a family vacation goes awry when Bonniejean's grandson is kidnapped by a terrorist organization looking to sway a global election, thinking that she was given the secret to their operation by a dying double agent. As it turns out, it was something of a misunderstanding 30 years ago, and now she has to go save her grandson. ### [*Star Wars: The Last Order*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781368065610?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kwame Mbalia (October 21st) One of the biggest missed opportunities in the *Star Wars* sequel trilogy was Finn, the stormtrooper who broke through his programming and joined the Resistance. He's finally getting some new adventures in the form of a new YA novel by Kwame Mbalia, *The Last Order.* Set after the end of *The Rise of Skywalker*, Resistance forces rescue a ship full of children who were kidnapped by the First Order, and Finn and Jannah are tasked with finding the officer behind it, before he can kidnap more children, all while they reckon with their own pasts as Stormtroopers. ### [*The Essential Patricia A. McKillip*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964481?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Patricia A. McKillip (October 28th) Patricia A. McKillip is one of the fantasy genre's best-known authors, having written books like *Harpist in the Wind*, *The Forgotten Beasts of Eld*, and *The Book of Atrix Wolfe.* This volume is a career-spanning retrospective that includes some of her best-known stories, and comes with an introduction by editor Ellen Kusnher. ### [*Batman: Revolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871935?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Jackson Miller (October 21st) In this followup to last year's [*Batman: Resurrection*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871904?ref=andrewliptak.com) John Jackson Miller revisits the world of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton's 1989 *Batman* for another adventure. The city of Gotham has put the Joker's rampage behind them, and mayor Max Shreck has been working to put together a major Independence Day celebration for the city. But Gotham is still plagued with crime and Batman has been waging a low-level war against the city's gangs and criminals, while the people of the city have been protesting against the city's excesses. Norman Pinkus has been working away at the Gotham Globe as their mastermind behind the Riddle Me This word puzzle, and has been using his intellect to sold crimes by calling in tips to the police line. He reaches a breaking point as Batman gets the credit for solving the city's problems, and devises a plan with some dangerous friends to draw the caped crusader into a game of riddles that could bring danger to the already fragile city. ### [*On a Mission: The Smithsonian History of US Women Astronauts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781588347763?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Valerie Neal (October 28th) This seems like a must-read for anyone who was a fan of Mary Robinette Kowal's *Lady Astronaut* novels: an overarching biography of the 61 American women who became astronauts, written by Valerie Neal, the emerita curator in the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. In it, she looks at the challenges they faced and their experiences in the space program. ### [The *Binti* Trilogy](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-binti-trilogy?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor (October 21st) This was a pleasant surprise: Nnedi Okorafor's Africanfuturist *Binti* trilogy is a wonderful set of novellas, following an African woman named Binti, who leaves her home and family to study at an interstellar university called Oomza Uni. While she's headed off to school, her ship is attacked by jelly fish-like aliens called the Meduse, and after her fellow passengers are killed, she's able to neigotiate with them and set up a peace agreement with them. This edition comes with art from David Palumbo, and it looks like a really stunning edition. The [complete trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756416935?ref=andrewliptak.com) is also available from DAW books. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781487012663?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Book of Dust: The Rose Field*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593306635?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Philip Pullman (October 23rd) After years and years of work, Philip Pullman has finally completed *The Book of Dust*, a companion trilogy to his *His Dark Materials* trilogy ([*The Golden Compass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418320?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Subtle Knife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418337?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Amber Spyglass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418566?ref=andrewliptak.com)). Preceded by [*La Belle Sauvage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553510744?ref=andrewliptak.com)(set prior to the events of *The Golden Compass*) and [*The Secret Commonwealth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553510706?ref=andrewliptak.com)(set after *The Amber Spyglass*), the trilogy has followed Lyra's story and continues to expand the relationship between the Magisterium and its control of Dust, a fundamental particle that's related to consciousness. [A Journey into the History of Philip Pullman’s His Dark MaterialsA journey into the history of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-307.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8877-1-3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-pullman-golden-compass-his-dark-materials-hbo/) In *The Secret Commonwealth,* Lyra has been on a journey to find her daemon Pan, and was left alone in a series of ruins known as the Blue Hotel, where lost daemons had gathered. She's followed by Malcolm Polstead, who had saved her as a child, as they search for a mysterious rose that might hold the secret of Dust. Also on their tail is the Magisterium's forces, as well as a number of others. It's a journey that will strain everything they believe in. ### [*The Isle in the Silver Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316595087?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by* Tasha Suri (October 21st) There have long been stories of a knight and a witch who're destined to meet and fall in love, only to bring about one another's downfall. It's a tale that's been told over and over and over again, in a version of England that's been enchanted by the Eternal Queen, held together by stories. If the story isn't told, everything will vanish. A knight and a witch, Vina and Simran are caught in the cycle, and the two women fall for one another, and try and find a way to break out and find a better story that allows them to escape their fates. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tasha-suri/the-isle-in-the-silver-sea/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Previous Suri works have featured unique, fascinating magical systems, and this book continues in that vein. It’s one of the more innovative and thoughtful uses of fantasy to explore colonialism and the potential poison of assimilation, popular genre themes in recent years." ### [*Spiderlight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250371980?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (October 28th) Adrian Tchaikovsky first came to my attention when Tordotcom published his novel *Spiderlight* in 2016, and it's been one of those books that I've had lingering on my to-read list ever since. The book is getting a new edition, and it looks like a fun ride: a fantasy quest about a band of misfits who've been prophesized to bring about the end of Dark Lord Darvezian, and armed with an artifact that they stole from the Spider Queen. ### [*Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gabrielle Zevin (October 21st) One of my [favorite novels of 2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-best-sci-fi-fantasy-books/) was Gabrielle Zevin's *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*: it's a heartbreaking novel about two friends who work in the game industry: Sam Masur and Sadie Green, who rekindle their friendship after a chance meeting in Boston. The two begin work on an innovative new game, Ichigo, and as they find success beyond their wildest dreams, their friendship is tested and could undermine everything they've worked toward. The Folio Society has added the book to its collection, with art from Manshen Lo and a new introduction by Zevin. --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know what you've got on your TBR and what's caught your eye this month. [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781961341456?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770468054?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781640097773?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Kim Stanley Robinson's papers are headed to the Huntington URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/kim-stanley-robinson-papers-the-huntington/ Last updated: 2025-10-22T15:20:29.000Z [The Huntington](https://www.huntington.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a California research institution and library [has announced](https://www.huntington.org/news/huntington-acquires-archive-and-library-award-winning-science-fiction-writer-kim-stanley?utm%5Fsource=The+Huntington&utm%5Fcampaign=77753d71a2-this-week-at-the-huntington-2025-10-21&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fterm=0%5F-3f876b141d-227996293&goal=0%5Ff3661894cf-77753d71a2-227996293&mc%5Fcid=77753d71a2&mc%5Feid=063e3dc1a2&fbclid=IwdGRjcANlDH5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHs1YtSpDmYMX7n9PgnMPjR7vH4uqX4HMfJhwZ9ML9oAAEZzC7YgMmCMmfopf%5Faem%5F6Q94J3zA730P0EIH-OmNXw) that it has acquired the papers and personal library of renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, joining its collection of 12+ million items that date back centuries. Robinson is one of the science fiction genre's leading minds, and is the author of such books as [*Red Mars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593358825?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Aurora*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316526999?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*New York 2140*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316262316?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Ministry for the Future*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316300148?ref=andrewliptak.com), often examining the role that humanity plays in the universe, and how we've affected the climate and health of our planet. [Hiking the sands of MarsAn interview with Kim Stanley Robinson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-306.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3137.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kim-stanley-robinson-mars-novels-science-fiction-interview/) Over the course of his career as a writer and scholar (he earned his PhD in literature, focusing on the works of Philip K. Dick), he's amassed a large library and collection of papers that'll now be preserved for scholars in the field. According to the Huntington, the entire collection is 50 linear feet of papers and photographs, as well as digital files. It includes drafts of "nearly all of Robinson’s novels, with extensive revisions that reveal his writing process and evolving ideas," his research notes and materials that went into those books, letters and correspondence with authors, policy experts, and scientists, his personal notebooks and journals, photographs, and annotated editions of the books that he was influenced by. According to The Huntington's senior curator of literary collections, Karla Nielsen, the collection represents an exhaustive view into his work: "A personal reading and research library is especially important for understanding a writer like Robinson whose fictions move so widely and variably in time and space, with one novel set in Ice Age caves to another on a multigenerational starship.” > “The notebooks he kept consistently for decades document his wide-ranging reading and include notes to self, research from books and interviews, drafts of scenes. The archive also includes large pieces of paper on which he outlined the chapters of many of his novels. These materials show how Robinson’s research and networks informed well-plotted speculative fiction that aims to give readers ways to think about urgent real-world concerns.” I've written a lot about science fiction's history and now work in an institution that's dedicated to preserving history: this sort of preservation method is not only wonderful to see, but it's an essential part of preserving this genre's history. Literature is often in some sort of conversation with the world around us, and that's undoubtably so when it comes to Robinson and his body of work: he's been an engaged figure in exploring the ramifications of climate change, deeply researching the world to figure out how we'll potentially live in the future. Literature is also often subjective: it's easy to fall into a trap of "this author wrote about *this*, so therefore, they must mean *that*," when in reality the truth is far more nuanced. Having an author's personal correspondence, journals, and papers allows scholars to better understand what their subjects were thinking at the time, allowing them to get more accurate insights into their lives and work. The Huntington is also home to a number of authors, including the likes of Jack London, Hilary Mantel, and Octavia E. Butler, and also hosts fellowships, visiting scholars, and programming that helps bring the library's collection of documents to the public. Recently, Susana M. Morris published [*Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com), and drew extensively on the papers and journals that the archive now holds. I'm planning on reviewing it soon, but I think it's safe to say that without this preservation, Morris wouldn't have been able to make as deep a dive into Butler's life and yielded the excellent portrait that she put together. I have little doubt that someone down the road will do the same for Robinson, as well as countless papers, dissertations, and other research that'll put his work in context and work to understand how his novels and imagination have influenced not just science fiction, but our broader understanding of how we've reacted to climate change as a society. ### The Martian is getting a Deluxe Edition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-weir-the-martian-deluxe-limited-edition-books-publishing/ Last updated: 2025-10-20T17:47:59.000Z The wave of special and deluxe editions doesn't seem to be abating. What started in specialty presses and book clubs has become something of an almost regular thing for books: deluxe editions with some additional bells and whistles, usually slipcases, sprayed edges and endpapers, and similar things. Over the weekend at the Green Mountain Book Festival, I was speaking with one of our authors about this phenomenon, and noted that while it's become popular, it often falls into two categories: perks for folks who're buying the book right away (like R.F. Kuang's *Katabasis*), or for books that have an established track record, like James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* or Ann Leckie's *Ancillary Justice* (See [Orbit's special anniversary treatments](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/)) or recently, Pierce Brown's [*Red Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871522?ref=andrewliptak.com). Now, a new classic SF book is getting the treatment: Andy Weir's [*The Martian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217300556?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-305.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) Penguin Random House posted about the new edition [today on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DQCNJ5cjfzc/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it looks like a nice one: it comes with some sprayed edges with a neat design, new cover art, illustrated endpapers, and a slipcase. It'll retail for $38 and is slated to be released on May 26th, 2026\. This isn't the first time that *The Martian* has gotten this sort of special treatment: back in 2015, [Subterranean Press released](https://subterraneanpress.com/martian/?ref=andrewliptak.com) a limited edition with art by Daniel Dociu (you can still find copies for a [pretty penny on eBay](https://www.ebay.com/itm/295633727968?ref=andrewliptak.com)), while more recently, specialty publisher Curious King [is publishing its own edition](https://curiousking.co.uk/book-release-the-martian/?ref=andrewliptak.com) with art by Eason Zhang. Those seem to be sold out, and they're going for a lot on the secondary market. This new edition from Random House will be a lot easier (and cheaper) to get than those other two editions. But if it's anything like the *Red Rising* edition I got my hands on, it's not likely going to be anywhere near the same class of books that you see from those specialty publishers. Places like Subterranean Press or The Folio Society really redesign the book from the ground up: they source high-quality paper and bindings, reset the type and layout, and really put together a nice-looking volume. A number of the other recent deluxe editions that I've looked over don't quite have the same level of attention and detail. For example: the 10th Anniversary edition of *Ancillary Justice* has the same type and layout: aside from the cover and introduction, it's identical to the original paperback edition. The recent deluxe edition of *Red Rising* credits a number of Adobe stock illustrations on its copyright page, with the map dating back to 2014 (and an updated map credited to Elwira Pawlikowska in 2025.) It's not hard to see why: publishers have recognized that they can release a copy of a book that sells at a premium rate. And books like *The Martian, Red Rising, The Expanse, Ancillary Justice*, and others are well-regarded and highly successful books: they don't really need a sales pitch. But these don't feel like they're really *deluxe* editions: this just feels like a bit more of a souped-up cover image refresh, one perfectly designed for the holiday gift-giving season, or for that dedicated fan of a particular author or title. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/10/Question--1-.png) Image: Random House / [Tetiana Grypachevska](https://unsplash.com/@tetiana%5Fgrypachevska?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-and-black-abstract-painting-%5FA0FcwFh7DE?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText) A good counterpoint to these examples is the recent deluxe edition of Matthew Stover's *Revenge of the Sith*. It has a lot of those bells and whistles, but Random House Worlds also went above and beyond to insert nearly 200 annotations for the text: in a [recent episode](https://thisdadreads.captivate.fm/episode/revenge-deluxe/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of *This Dad Reads*, Random House editorial director Tom Hoeler spoke about the work that went into this particular edition. He spoke about their desire to put out a cool edition of the book with something special for readers who'd already read it. "What if we got Mr. Stover to come and annotate the book? And that's where this came from. And that combined with the idea of putting together all these special bells and whistles for the book package itself really came together in the perfect marriage of saying 'wow this is going to be something really special.'" [Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Deluxe Edition Conversation - This Dad ReadsJason discusses the brand new Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith deluxe edition of Matthew Stover’s novelization.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/small-artwork.jpg)This Dad Reads![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/qROdn6iGy_oBRIXy6Rjfv7Cq-facebook.png)](https://thisdadreads.captivate.fm/episode/revenge-deluxe/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Over the rest of the episode, Hoeler goes into a good amount of detail about the work that he and his team put into this particular edition, from the design of the packaging to the types of art that they were including in it. There's a lot of work that went into this edition, and while it looks a little like the other special editions out there, it's clear this is a bit of the exception in this trend. None of this is to say that the deluxe and limited editions that we're seeing a bit more widely are *bad,* but I feel like if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a special edition of a classic title, really put the effort into it: there's no shortage of excellent artists looking for commissions, folks who can redesign the text to make it stand out, and even give the book an upgrade with a slightly heavier paper stock and cover. Readers are already paying a bit more for these editions (and honestly, a hardcover novel is already hitting the $30-$40 price point), so why not make it actually something that's a premium product, and not one that's dressed up like one? ### 14 more sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to check out this October URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-october-2025-book-list-joe-hill-ken-liu-pierce-brown/ Last updated: 2025-10-14T18:27:14.000Z As I noted last week, October is packed with books, including some of the ones that I've been really looking forward to this year. One of the books on the list is Joe Hill's *King Sorrow*, which I've been engrossed in: it's a really fun romp about promises, murder, and one particularly cunning dragon. I'll also throw in a plug for an event that I'm helping to run in Burlington this weekend: The Green Mountain Book Festival, which'll feature John Scalzi as our headliner and an excellent lineup of local SF/F authors: Craig Alanson ([*Expeditionary Force*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798347023615?ref=andrewliptak.com)), William Alexander ([*Sunward*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668058053?ref=andrewliptak.com)), M.T. Anderson ([*Nicked*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593688007?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Emily Hamilton ([*The Stars Too Fondly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320819?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Margot Harrison ([*The Midnight Club*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781525809880?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Mike Luoma ([*The Star Seeds of Earth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781716965760?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and Brian Staveley ([*Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765336439?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and myself! I'll be interviewing Scalzi at 7:00PM at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. If you're in the area, you should come! [Green Mountain Book Festival 2025Join me in Burlington to talk about science fiction with John Scalzi!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-304.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Green-Mountain-Book-Festival-2025--2--1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-mountain-book-festival-2025/) In case you missed it, [here's the first October book list](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-october-2025/), and as always, you can check out the other book lists [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). Here's my usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. A book list like this involves a lot of time to research what's coming out and work to put together. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting it by: \- [****Sign up as a supporting subscriber**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40 a year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4 a month! \- Support TO with a [****one-time tip**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-september-2025-dinniman-witcher/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are 14 new SF/F books hitting stores this week and next: ### [*Extremity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250373847?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicholas Binge (October 14th) In the nearish future, a detective comes out of retirement to investigate the murder if a billionaire she once worked with, only to find that there’s two identical bodies. She works to track down the killer, who’s been going after London’s elite and finds a secret world of secrets about the future and stumbles on a strange time travel conspiracy that could spell the end of humanity. [Writing for *SFF World*](https://www.sffworld.com/2025/09/extremity-by-nicholas-binge/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Mark Yon says that *Extremity* "manages to make you feel for these characters very quickly and ground the SF stuff into something that feels quite ordinary. As a result, I think that it’s another book that might persuade those who don’t normally read SF to do so." ### [*Red Rising* (Deluxe Slipcase Edition)](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871522?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Pierce Brown (October 14th) Pierce Brown's *Red Rising* is one of those recent classics that I've heard a lot about, but I've never gotten around to picking it up, despite the hype. That might change with a new edition: it's getting the deluxe slipcase treatment, with new covers, a slipcase, a fold-out poster, and full-color illustrated endpapers with a new map. The novel is about Darrow, a member of Mars' lowest population caste, the Reds, and he and his family believe that they're hard at work making the planet survivable for humans. But he soon learns they've been betrayed, and he works to infiltrate the Institute, where the planet's elite fight for power. [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-124.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) ### [*The Works of Vermin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250811219?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hiron Ennes (October 14th) The city of Tiliard is carved into an ancient tree, where the wealthy live in the heights of the canopy, while exterminators search for a mythical giant worm that is said to have an appetite for beauty. Guy Moulène has a singular goal: keep his sister out of debt, and to that end, he's willing to take on any job, including as an exterminator. He's now after a massive, dangerous centipede, and as it consumes beauty, it's reshaping Tiliard. ### [*Local Heavens*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781964721552?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K. M. Fajardo (October 14th) K.M. Fajardo retells *The Great Gatsby* a couple of decades in the future. Nick Carraway has just moved to New York City in a fractured America, where he finds a nation that's fragmented along class lines. When he meets Jay Gatsby, he falls for his charisma, even through in this brave new world, there's plenty of secrets in the tech-enhanced bodies of the ultra-rich. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781964721552?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Fajardo expertly transfers the themes of exploitative capitalism, mysterious and possibly illegal wealth, and complicated desires haunted by loss and queerness to a dystopian setting. The result is an evocative and powerful reworking of an American classic." ### [*King Sorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200600?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe Hill (October 21st) I've been a huge fan of Joe Hill's novels, from [*Horns*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061147968?ref=andrewliptak.com)to [*NOS4A2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200587?ref=andrewliptak.com), to [*The Fireman*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200648?ref=andrewliptak.com), and his collections of shorter works, like [*20th Century Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063374935?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Full Throttle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200693?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's back with his first novel in a number of years, *King Sorrow*, and I've really been enjoying it so far. It follows Arthur Oakes and his friends. When a local drug dealer and her partner threatens his imprisoned mother, he begins stealing books from the Rackham College's rare books collections to pay off a debt. To try and escape, he and his friends make a daring move: they summon a dragon through a spell they find in a journal bound with human skin, and get it to do their bidding. But King Sorrow is a proper dragon and deals with dragons aren't to be undertaken lightly. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joe-hill/king-sorrow/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls...at turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood." ### [*When They Burned the Butterfly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250369451?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wen-yi Lee (October 21st) In 1972 in Singapore, a group of Chinese criminals some of the last connections to their ancestors gods, practicing their magic in the shadows and out of sight of the modern world. A schoolgirl named Adeline Siow has powers of her own: she can create fire from her fingertips, and when her mother is killed in a housefire and she finds the symbol of a butterfly burned into her skin, she begins to track down those responsible, finding an underworld of magic and that her mother had a connection to it. With her mother now dead, Adeline is the last living connection to a goddess, and she becomes entangled in the ensuing power struggle and with one of the gang's members, Ang Tian. Chris Kluwe, [writing in *Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-when-they-burned-the-butterfly-by-wen-yi-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com), says "The writing is exquisite, the pacing is near perfect, and the slow burn of Adeline’s discovery of herself, as well as the uncovering of the various mysteries surrounding her mother lead to the nearly impossible task of trying to put the book down instead of reading one more chapter." ### [*All That We See or Seem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668083178?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ken Liu (October 14th) It's been a while since we've gotten a Ken Liu novel, and I'm really excited for this one. It follows Julia Z, a young woman who became known as the "orphan hacker" and who has tried to keep a low profile in Boston. Her life is upended when she decides to come to the aid of a lawyer named Piers after his wife Elli is kidnapped. Elli is an artist who specializes in working with dreams in a shared virtual reality space, and happened to connect to the head of a criminal organization, and he's demanding the return of his dreams before she's returned. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668083178?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Liu has a rare ability to flesh out sci-fi concepts—like Elli’s dream art and Julia’s talent for AI communication—with just a few words, and his pacing is pitch-perfect." ### [*Red City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250885678?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marie Lu (October 14th) The world's criminal organizations have harnessed the power of alchemy into a drug that they can market to the world's elites, who use it to create more perfect versions of themselves. The world's two criminal syndicates, the Grand Central and the Lumines, have managed to exist in a delicate balance, a balance that's upended when two friends find themselves in the middle of the trouble. Sam has been working for years to work her way up the ranks in Grand Central to get out of poverty, while Ari was taken as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice and has a promising future there. The two are now facing off in a growing conflict that threatens to transform the world. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marie-lu/red-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "both heartbreaking and action-packed: an immense achievement." ### [*Beings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639737000?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ilana Masad (September 23rd) Ilana Masad takes inspiration from one of the first UFO abduction incidents in the US: in 1961, an interracial couple were driving through New Hampshire when they believed that they were taken by aliens. Masad takes us through the aftermath through three stories: through the couple, through the letters of a science fiction writer named Phyliss and in the modern day with an archivist who's trying to figure out an experience from their childhood, while obsessing over other abduction stories. In the years that follows, Phyliss tries to figure out her identity and sexuality, the couple tries to keep track of the narrative of the story they've unleashed, and the archivist tries to figure out the truth between them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ilana-masad/beings/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Masad makes this dense braid of stories easy to follow, elegantly blending serpentine sentences, endearing and intimately observed characters, natural dialogue, and playful, generous asides to keep the reader in enthralled suspense." ### [*As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781487012663?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Terese Mason Pierre (October 14th) Terese Mason Pierre brings together this new anthology of short fiction that showcases Canada's Black writers. It's got a great TOC that includes Trynne Delaney, francesca ekwuyasi, Whitney French, Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Chimedum Ohaegbu, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Chinelo Onwualu, Lue Palmer, Terese Mason Pierre, and Zalika Reid-Benta, who recount stories about newly-discovered families, memories, safety, and one's perceptions of reality. It looks like a great way to catch up on some great authors. ### [*Psychopomp & Circumstance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250330963?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eden Royce (October 21st) In the Reconstruction after the American Civil War, Phee St. Margaret has been raised by a family of Black business owners in New Charleston. Phee is desperate to escape from her family's coddling and over-mothering to pick her own direction in life. When an estranged relative passes away, Phee decides to step up and take over the role of pomp for the family: the rite of planning her funeral service. When she travels to her late aunt's home, she finds that there are plenty of secrets lurking below the surface. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/psychopomp-and-circumstance?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "this Southern gothic historical fantasy is a coming-of-age story set in the magical, semi-mythical towns of New Charleston and Horizon, amid a post-Reconstruction free Black social order that will delight readers of Leslye Penelope, Nekesa Afia, and C. L. Polk." ### [*Dracula* (Penguin Speculative Fiction Special)](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143138990?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bram Stoker (October 14th) Just in time for Halloween: Penguin Classics is adding some vampire novels to its Clothbound Classics lineup (it's joined by [*The Vampyre* and ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143139003?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Carmilla*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143139003?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Polidori and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and [*The Gilda Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143138921?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jewelle Gomez). There are a whole bunch of editions of this out there, but this looks like a really handsome one. This edition of Dracula comes with a foreword by noted film director Robert Eggers. ### [*Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith* Deluxe Edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217090983?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Stover (October 14th) One of the best novels in the *Star Wars* EU was Matthew Stover's novelization of *Episode III: Revenge of the Sith*. Stover is an astonishingly good author, and this is a book that has no right to be as good as it is. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the film's release, and to celebrate, we're getting a deluxe edition, with some fancy endpapers, sprayed edges, \~170 annotations from Stover, and a neat slipcase. ### [*Black Hole Heart*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880296?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K.A. Teryna and translated by Alex Shvartsman (October 14th) Teryna is an author for Russia, and this collection brings together her stories that've been appearing in places like *Reactor*, *Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, and more. It looks like a really fascinating read. --- That's it for today, thanks for reading! ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221570?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Green Mountain Book Festival 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-mountain-book-festival-2025/ Last updated: 2025-10-11T13:00:26.000Z This is something that I've been working on for part of the past year: On October 18th, the Green Mountain Book Festival will welcome John Scalzi and a number of Vermont's speculative fiction writers to Burlington, Vermont for a one-day event all about science fiction! Other authors will include Craig Alanson (*Expeditionary Force*), William Alexander (*Sunward*), M.T. Anderson (*Nicked*), Emily Hamilton (*The Stars Too Fondly*), Margot Harrison (*The Midnight Club*), Mike Luoma (*The Star Seeds of Earth*), and Brian Staveley (*Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne*), and myself! The event will consist of a day of programming: - **11:00AM, Writers Round Table with John Scalzi, Phoenix Books.** $25\. Proceeds will be donated to the Fletcher Free Library. Seats available to the first ten people who register. This program is for writers only and will focus on professional development and publishing. Purchase tickets [here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writers-talk-with-john-scalzi-tickets-1788576403169?aff=oddtdtcreator&ref=andrewliptak.com). - **1:00PM Panel: World Building, , Phoenix Books**. Speculative fiction is known for its fantastic worlds and locations. Join William Alexander, Margot Harrison, and Brian Staveley as they talk about what it takes to build a such settings, and what details, considerations, and things you need to keep in mind while writing. [$5 ticket](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/green-mountian-book-festival-panels-tickets-1788327227879?aff=oddtdtcreator&ref=andrewliptak.com) (can go toward a book purchase at Phoenix Books) - **7:00PM -** **A conversation with John Scalzi, Fletcher Free Library.** Join John Scalzi and Andrew Liptak for a wide-ranging conversation about science fiction, publishing, writing, and quite a bit more. Free to the public. We'll have signings with the authors between those sessions as well. I'm really looking forward to this event: it feels like a bit of a throwback to my days writing the now-defunct Geek Mountain State blog, where I ran a series of author events featuring local authors. The big change to this festival from years past is that we've slimmed it down quite a bit: this one, and future ones will be a single-day event, with a headlining author and programming designed around their book or genre. I'm excited to see how this works this year: it's a bit of a change, but if it works well, we'll be able to run this a couple of times a year, spotlighting different authors and genres as we go. If you're in Vermont or nearby, consider this your invitation: it should be a good day of panels and discussion. ### I sold a short story! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-story-sale-military-science-fiction-future-tense/ Last updated: 2025-10-10T13:21:59.000Z I have some very good news: I've just sold a short story to Arizona State University’s [Center for Science and the Imagination](https://csi.asu.edu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [*Future Tense Fiction*](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) series, tentatively titled "Deficiency Agent"! I've written about the program and *Future Tense* before: they've been using art and literature to explore the connections between science and science fiction, working to imagine new futures to look forward to. For several years now, the program has been publishing short fiction under the Future Tense series, originally with [*Slate*](https://slate.com/technology/future-tense?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now with [*Issues in Science and Technology*](https://issues.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and ASU. The program also published the [occasional anthology](https://www.andrewliptak.com/arizona-state-university-solarpunk-cities-of-light-bacigalupi-divya-olukotun-free/), and in 2019, rounded up some of the best stories in the series for an anthology, [*Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781944700959?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which is *excellent* reading. I really like the stories in this series: I've found them to be thoughtful and interesting explorations of the near future, by an incredible group of authors, including [Charlie Jane Anders](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-the-minnesota-diet-charlie-jane-anders/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Madeline Ashby](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-domestic-violence-madeline-ashby/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Premee Mohammad](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-all-that-burns-unseen-premee-mohamed/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Linda Nagata](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-ride-linda-nagata/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Annalee Newitz](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-when-robot-and-crow-saved-east-st-louis-annalee-newitz/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Malka Older](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-actually-naneen-malka-older/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a number of others. The stories are accompanied by a companion essay by an expert about whatever topic the story is exploring, which adds a bit of depth to the story. I previously worked with them for a group project to imagine a future without nuclear weapons, which ultimately resulted in a digital anthology, [*Far Futures*](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which includes a short story that I wrote, "[Embers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/embers/)". I also [contributed an essay](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-science-fiction-robotics-drones-trust/) for Justina Ireland's short story "[Collateral Damage](https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/collateral-damage-justina-ireland-short-story-robot-war.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" back in 2021\. This is all to say that I'm very, very pleased about this, because this particular story is one that I've been rolling around in my head for probably the better part of a decade. A couple of years ago, I started jotting it down by hand in a notebook, and was pleased with the direction it was going, and ended up pitching it to the fine folks at ACU, who liked it and decided to include it in their series. The goal is to have the story out for their December issue. It's loosely inspired by a long ride home from Pennsylvania, where my wife and I had to contend with a particularly annoying route that Google Maps was trying to direct us to. That kernel of an idea, mixed up with the spooky nature of artificial intelligence and the problem of fog of war on a battlefield has stuck with me ever since. I'm looking forward to getting this one out into the world: I've been feeling like I need to spend more time writing creatively, and this was a good push to get it finished. ### 15 new SF/F books to check out this October 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-october-2025/ Last updated: 2025-10-07T16:00:47.000Z Remember how September was overloaded with new books so I ended up splitting the list into three parts? Well guess what: October is *also* packed with books, so to make things a bit more manageable, I'm doing the same thing: one for this week, next week, and one more for the last couple of weeks. If you're a reader, you really are spoiled for choice this year: there are so many excellent reads hitting stores. Here's my usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. A book list like this involves a lot of time to research what's coming out and work to put together. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting it by: \- [****Sign up as a supporting subscriber**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40 a year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4 a month! \- Support TO with a [****one-time tip**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-september-2025-dinniman-witcher/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are 15 new books to check out this week. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. ### [*Herculine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668087862?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Grace Byron (October 7th) The narrator of Grace Byron's novel *Herculine* has been dealing with demons her whole life, something she's had to deal with on top of all the other issues that come with being a trans woman. When she realizes that she's being stalked by something in New York City, she flees to an all-female trans commune in Indiana, hoping that it'll be a refuge from her problems. When she arrives, she realizes that something's wrong there too: she's met with suspicion, everyone seems to be keeping secrets, and it seems that the demons she's frightened of aren't so easily shaken off. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668087862?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying Byron "brings enough humor to the proceedings to prevent the horror from becoming too all-consuming while keeping the pages flying with a thrilling plot and a moving examination of loneliness, desire, and hope in the wake of trauma ### [*Catching Fire: Illustrated Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781546159544?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suzanne Collins (October 7th) Last year, Suzanne Collins released an illustrated edition of her classic YA novel [*The Hunger Games*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781339030609?ref=andrewliptak.com), and this year, the second book in her trilogy is getting the same treatment. I've picked up the first one in stores, and it's a nice edition with art by [Nico Delort](https://www.nicolasdelort.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it should make for a nice addition to the shelf for a fan of the books. It's the same size and style as the fantastic illustrated editions of Philip Pullman's [*His Dark Materials trilogy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593377710?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I really loved, and you can read up on Delort's approach [here](https://people.com/artist-nico-delort-talks-illustrating-the-new-illustrated-hunger-games-exclusive-8720345?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*Physics for Cats*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770468054?ref=andrewliptak.com) By Tom Gauld (October 1st) I love Tom Gauld's cartoons: they're smart and nerdy and cover everything from science to science fiction. This is his second collection that's specifically featuring the cartoons he drew for the magazine *New Scientist*, following up[*Department of Mind-Blowing Theories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770463752?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* [ ](https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Tom+Gauld&ref=andrewliptak.com) [Here's an interview](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/14/16303910/tom-gauld-baking-with-kafka-cartooning-science-fiction-humor-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com) I conducted with him a number of years ago about his work. ### [*Alchemy of Secrets*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250789150?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephanie Garber (October 7th) Holland St. James is enrolled in a course called Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban Myths, led by a mysterious teacher known as the Professor. While most of her classmates think that the stories she's teaching them are just folklore, Holland isn't sure, and when she tracks down a local figure known as the Watch Man, she realizes that magic is deal, and he's just told her that she's slated to die the next day, unless she can find an object called the Alchemical Heart. Holland strikes out on a quest into LA's magical underworld to find the object, and comes across a mysterious stranger who says that he's been sent to protect her. As they continue their search, she realizes that she can't trust anyone, and that the object she's been sent to find might not be enough to save her. ### [*Final Orbit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316581684?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Hadfield (October 7th) Astronaut Chris Hadfield adds to his *Apollo Murders* series (preceded by [*The Apollo Murders*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316264631?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Defector*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565028?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with the story of a joint US-USSR mission in orbit in 1975\. As the two crews are preparing to dock, NASA Flight Controller Kaz Zemeckis listens as an error results in disaster: the Russian spacecraft is destroyed, and two astronauts and a cosmonaut are killed. As they divert their orbit to NASA's Skylab, they arrive in time to discover a Chinese crew stealing a piece of equipment that had been left behind on a prior mission, setting everyone up for a geopolitical showdown. Publishers Weekly says "Hadfield maintains steady momentum from the book’s opening pages, and the crackling finale is well worth the wait." ### [*The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964467?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe R. Lansdale (October 7th) Joe Landsdale is one of speculative fiction's best-known authors, and Tachyon Publications has pulled together a new collection of his best horror fiction in all of its flavors, with stories ranging from horrific crime, Gothic, mystery, fantasy, and science-fiction. This one comes with an introduction from Joe Hill. ### [*Vampires at Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781951971229?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lindsay Merbaum (October 7th) Two immortal vampires, Rebekah and Hugh, have taken off on a vacation. They don't suck on human blood, but feed off of human emotions, and end up on a queer, Black Sea Cruise where they're looking to have a bit of fun while taking in their fellow passengers' emotions. When Hugh ends up meeting and falls for an influencer named Heaven, Rebekah doesn't take it well and their entire relationship and existence is upended. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781951971229?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The result is an undeniable vampiric romp that gently pokes fun at elements of queer polyamorous culture," and that "those looking for a brisk and steamy supernatural excursion will find plenty to enjoy." ### [*Ensorcelled*](https://store.eliotpeper.com/products/ensorcelled?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Eliot Peper (October 8th) I'm a big fan of Eliot Peper's novels, and this new one is something a little different from him: it's a super-slim fantasy about a kid named Tam who's excited to play an upcoming video game. When his parents instead take him off on a camping trip, he discovers that the mountains that they've visited have a magic of their own, they ask for everything in return. ### [*The Door on the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837863785?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caskey Russell (October 7th) This indigenous fantasy is being described as the Tlingit peoples of Northwest Canada's version of J.R.R. Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings.* It follows a boy named Elān who traps a fish-stealing raven in his house. The raven offers him a trade: if Elān will let him go, he'll provide him with a secret that'll save his community from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders that have been raiding their shores. The Koosh have lost a powerful weapon, and the raven happens to know where it ended up. Elān sets out with some unlikely companions: a human bear-cousin, a wolf, and the raven, and as they embark on their quest, they encounter all manners of strange creatures and conditions as they work to find a way to save their home. ### [*The Salvage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781963108477?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anbara Salam (October 7th) At the height of the Cold War in 1962, marine archaeologist Marta Khoury is investigating a newly-discovered shipwreck off the coast of Scotland, which might hold the remains of its famous captain and whatever treasures he might have discovered. But while she's making her first dive down to the wreckage, she thinks she sees a dark figure hiding in the wreck. The Cuban Missile Crisis keeps everyone stranded on the island, and Marta uses the time to form a relationship with Elise, a local woman working on the island's hotel, and when artifacts from the ship begin to go missing, the two begin to look for them, trying to figure out what's behind the thefts and what has been haunting her imagination since she arrived. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143138990?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*We Are Legion (We Are Bob)*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668221570?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Dennis E. Taylor (October 7th) Dennis E. Taylor's novel has been out for a number of years as a self-published book (it kicks off his *Bobiverse* series), but it's been picked up for a traditional press publication by Saga Press. It’s about a guy named Bob who has just retired, and who’s decided to have his head cryogenically frozen to be reawakened later. Then he gets killed crossing the street. Revived a century later, he finds that the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: he finds that as a frozen head, he doesn’t have any rights. The government gives him an ultimatum: get uploaded into an AI and get shot off into space to look for habitable planets. Or get shut off. ### [*The Glass Slide World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662530500?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Vaughn (October 7th) In this sequel to her 2024 novel [*The Naturalist Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662519031?ref=andrewliptak.com), Carrie Vaughn picks up the story of scientist Ava Stanley, daughter of a pair of magical scientists called Arcane Taxonomists. She has limited magical abilities – where her parents could call the natural world's larger creatures for their powers, she can only do so with microscopic ones. It's useful for studying diseases, but her powers are also miniscule. When she sets off on a ship to Nassau to continue her research, she finds her plans upended when pirates take over the ship, forcing her to contend with her abilities and what she can truly accomplish. ### [*Queen Demon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826916?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (October 7th) Martha Wells returns with a sequel to her 2023 novel [*Witch King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826817?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* in which demon Witch King Kai-Enna is murdered, but his consciousness persists. He's reawakened when he discovers a mage trying to use his own powers, and has to figure out the circumstances of his death and the state of the new world he finds himself in. In this book, Dahin is a member of the Witch King's circle, and thinks that he knows where the Hierarchs' Well is located. The Witch King Kai and his companions Ziede and Tahren know that there's something that he isn't letting on, but accompany him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may also be on track to discovering the Well. It'll be up to Kai to stop the rise of a new Hierarch and he has to figure out how to trust his companions. ### [*Hole in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385551113?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel H. Wilson (October 7th) Daniel H. Wilson is the author of [*Robopocalypse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307740809?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Andromeda Evolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062473295?ref=andrewliptak.com), and his next is an intriguing-looking take on first contact. It's set in the Cherokee Nation when a man named Jim Hardgray witnesses a weird atmospheric disturbance, while at the same time, a NASA astrophysicist named Dr. Mikayla Johnson discovers that something has interacted with the Voyager 1 spacecraft and realizes that something is on its way to Earth. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780385551113?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Wilson neatly entangles the most modern tech, like quantum computers that accurately foretell the future, with ancient beliefs that retain enough power to motivate contemporary folks. Like the best *X-Files* episodes, this story uses the alien character to bring out the human elements in vivid detail." --- As always, let me know in the comments what catches your eye and what you're currently reading! Subscribers, you should expect the next list in a week, as well as a couple of other things. ### Speaking for the trees URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/forests-trees-nature-writing-christopher-brown-ethan-tapper-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-10-06T13:00:41.000Z Years ago, I came across a video on some random website that curates the random videos that catch their editor's eyes. It was of a somewhat new piece of equipment, mounted on a skidder crane that an operator would clamp around the trunk of a tree. From there, it would cut the base, and drop it, then run up to the top, slicing the log up into manageable lengths while also cutting off the branches. It was a video that chilled me: it looked like some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare, full of gears and blades, one designed to reduce a forest to products on an industrial scale quickly and efficiently. I came away with a thought that's lived rent-free in my head ever since: "why do we hate trees so much?" I grew up in the woods: my parents owned a nice swath of a mountain in Central Vermont and I have an endless stream of memories exploring and playing between the trees. As I've grown older, I've gravitated towards forests, trying to spend time walking and hiking through them, taking in their towering figures and observing the ecosystems that they support. In the last year, I've gravitated toward a pair of books that examines our relationship with the natural world. The first was Christopher Brown's [*A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643265223?ref=andrewliptak.com), (which comes out in trade paperback today, October 7th) and Ethan Tapper's [*How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798889830559?ref=andrewliptak.com). Both books are engrossing works of nature writing and tackle the delicate moment in which we're currently living: in a moment where we're finally forced to grapple with the role that humanity has played in changing our planet's climate, but also how we can find better to live in some sort of balance with the natural world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/IMG_6205.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak For years now, I've been a fan of Brown's excellent newsletter, [*Field Notes*](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he investigates what he calls the edgelands – the natural spaces that bump up against human spaces. It's an optimistic look at the world (and I can't recommend it highly enough), showing that nature will often find ways to to claw back its territory. In a blend of memoir and observation, Brown recounts how he came to build his unique home in Austin, Texas – [Edgeland House](https://www.bcarc.com/residential/edgeland-house?ref=andrewliptak.com), constructed on a reclaimed brownfield and designed to emulate an indigenous pit house that at the same time pays homage to the site's industrial space. It's good focal point that neatly sums his view of the changing world: pay close attention to the natural world and find alternatives ways to coexist with it. [Interview: Christopher Brown on fiction and climate changeChristopher Brown on climate change, apocalyptic narratives, and eco-fiction![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-298.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1970-3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/christopher-brown-climate-change-science-fiction-interview/) The book, like the newsletter that inspires it, shows plenty of those observations: glimpses of the predators that he sees in game cameras evade fences and artificial lines that define our property, the ways that the sod roof of his home invites plenty of insects and reptiles into his spaces, and how urban development has changed the land around him. Brown muses about the unnatural structures that we've imposed on the land: the buildings, roads, bridges, but especially the underlying property laws that underpin it all. These boundaries slice up the land and provide us with the legal reckoning to say what's mine or yours, and how they've been used to exploit that land in detrimental ways. It's this legal infrastructure that largely stands in the way of real environmental reform. Yet, the natural world is generally happy to ignore those invisible lines that we've surrounded ourselves. We might have plowed down forests and grasslands to replace them with buildings, roads, and "natural" spaces filled with invasive species, but life finds ways of going around or infiltrating them in their own ways. Animals adapt to our presence, sometimes thriving, sometimes hiding, and often treating the slightest sign of neglect as an invitation to put down roots and find ways to grow in the cracks and fissures of the abandoned lots. That resiliency means that we can't bulldoze over everything and just put up a parking lot and expect that to be the end of the story. If we can't control nature or the spaces that we occupy, we should find ways instead to work with the flora and fauna that surrounds us: finding better ways to build homes and communities that make it easier for them to thrive. It's a book that is quietly radical: one in which Brown shows that this isn't a situation where it's all or nothing; nature or people. Our future can be one of cohabitation, and that the sins we've inflicted upon the world are maybe not entirely reversable, but something that we can change moving forward. But to do so means taking incredible will and effort to fix the underlying systems that have allowed us to run amok across the planet. But even as we figure that out, we can take smaller steps, finding ways to allow nature to thrive in the wild spaces between our homes, roads, and buildings in order to build a more resilient and healthier world for all of us. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/IMG_6204.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Behind the museum where I work is a hill and wooded park. I try and take walks up the half-mile to the tower at the top, enjoying the sun filtering through the trees and the occasional animal or bird that I catch sight of as I do so. Recently, the forest has been changing: foresters have been going through and flagging trees with orange tape, and for a week or so, the trails were closed off as they set about doing their work, cutting down clumps of trees, opening up the canopy to the brilliant sun. Ethan Tapper's book sheds some light on this practice. He's a consulting forester here in Vermont who purchased a plot of land in Richmond and realized that he had to do something unthinkable: in order to save his little forest, he has to bring in loggers and pesticides to destroy parts of it. It's hard to believe, but in the 19th and early 20th century, Vermont's green mountains were almost completely deforested: settlers tapped the state's old growth forests for lumber and clear-cut large portions to make way for their herds of cows and sheep. As the state's population aged and moved away – and as the early environmental movement began to advocate for the value of forests – the forests began to return, taking over those formerly clear spaces. Vermont is now nearly 80% forested, but the forests that returned are a far cry from the old-growth groves that once covered the state. Tapper uses his time and pages to recount how he came to realize and understand that these forests are deeply unnatural: forests that are at times deeply unhealthy because they are so young. Old growth forests, he explains, are complicated spaces, ones that feature great depth to their canopies and ecosystems. A forest shouldn't be the pristine, clean stands of trees that we've shaped to our preferences: these types of forests don't make for good habitats for the migratory birds and animals that had long adapted to the forests we chopped down, and thus, the chains of life that made for a healthy environment have been broken. He cites one noteworthy example: the demise of the passenger pigeon. These birds were said to have flocked in such numbers that they blackened the sky – their population is thought to have been in the *billions*. They left enormous amounts of excrement and broken branches in their wake and as a result played critical roles in the health of the forest: helping with fires, spreading seeds, and helped build the resilient and rich forests that existed when settlers arrived to the Americas in the 1500s. In another, he points to the arrival of the emerald ash borer to Vermont; an invasive insect that's slowly been killing off the state's ash trees, which will join the elm and chestnuts in relative extinction here, furthering the permanent changes that we've inflicted to the natural world. Tapper weaves all of this together to explain how he's come to tend to his forest: finding the places where it's unhealthy and bringing in loggers to open the canopy up for sun to filter down, to return nutrients to the soil, while also identifying the invasive plants that threaten to choke out the native ones. These small steps, he reasons, might seem counterintuitive and are hard to stomach, but will hopefully turn this one small plot of land into a more resilient and healthy forest. --- Both *How to Love a Forest* and *A Natural History of Empty Lots* feel as though they're in conversation with a central idea: that while humanity has inflicted enormous damage to our ecosystem, nature can be a resilient force and that we can change and adapt our ways to prevent further damage. Each looks as how our artificial constructs of property lines and built spaces have played a role in fueling this damage, and that reforming them would help with this process: rethinking how we exist alongside the modern world will help us figure out how to survive in a future that's fraught with massive and destructive natural disasters like wildfires or hurricanes, and how to withstand the slow-moving ones like drought and ecological collapse. These are works that recognize that the damage has been done, but are optimistic that we can find creative solutions to change how we live moving forward. They're books that have rekindled and reinvigorated my love of the forests that surround me, and force me to look closely at the fingerprints that we've left behind: in the form of cracked pavement to unhealthy forests. Hopefully, they'll serve as catalysts, books that quietly radicalize their readers into recognizing our problematic relationship with the world around us, and pushing us to make better choices for our future. ### Table of Contents October 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-fiction-october-2025/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T21:09:12.000Z Here's the latest installment of Table of Contents, which rounds up this month's short fiction releases. You can check out the list of stories from September [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-septe/) (which I've updated with new links) and past installments of this series [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 442, 443 and 444) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Last of Atlantis](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-last-of-atlantis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by James Morrow - "[The Thirteenth Time](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-thirteenth-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Patrick Samphire - "[The Third Movement of Time](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-third-movement-of-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by RJ Taylor - "[Pools of Light at the Center of the World](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/pools-of-light-at-the-center-of-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Will McMahon - "[A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-random-walk-through-the-goblin-library/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Willrich - "[My Sincere Apologies For the Demon](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/my-sincere-apologies-for-the-demon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adrian Ward - "[The Angel Azrael Visits the Trading Post at the End of the World a Final Time](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-angel-azrael-visits-the-trading-post-at-the-end-of-the-world-a-final-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Peter Darbyshire - "[A Librarian’s Resolution In The Land Of Demons](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-librarians-resolution-in-the-land-of-demons/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(October 2025, Issue 229) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Wire Mother](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim - [The Cancer Wolves](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fiona Moore - [Crabs Don't Scream](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/pak%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by H.H. Pak - [Understudies](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/egan%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Greg Egan - [Giant Grandmother](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Liu Maijia, translated by Blake Stone-Banks - [The Job Interview](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vaughn%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn - [In Luck's Panoply Clad, I Stand](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/barton%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Phoebe Barton - "[The Fire Burns Anyway](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ashing-giwa%5F11%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kemi Ashing-Giwa ### Nonfiction - [Space Bears and Engineering the Next Generation of Astronauts](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/de%5Fwinter%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gunnar De Winter - [Memory, Loss, and Memory Loss: A Conversation with Rich Larson](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/larson%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Technology as a Language: A Conversation with Ken Liu](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: Nineteen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F10%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025, Issue 125) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Island at the End of the World](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-island-at-the-end-of-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byS.L. Harris - "[Through the Woods, Due West](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/through-the-woods-due-west/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byAngela Slatter - "[Enselfening](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/enselfening/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byNM Whitley - "[Down to the Roots](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/down-to-the-roots/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byNeil Williamson --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (October 2025, Issue 45) ### Fiction - "The Twisted Tale Of Prancess: A Modern Fairy Tale" by Jennifer Foxhoven - "One Last Time For Marti" by Steven Roisum - "Say All Before" by Mack W. Mani - "The Swamp Devil" by Jim Wright - "The Devil Drives A ‘66" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Swarm" by David Castlewitz - "The Gram Directive" by Mike Scofield - "The Invalid And The Cave" by Ginevra House - "The Poison Dwarf’s Comeuppance" by George Larson - "The Highest Court" by Jarek Tomszak --- ## [*Fantasy Magazine*](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Autumn 2025, Issue 98) ### Fiction - "[All of Our Mothers are Dead](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/all-of-our-mothers-are-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanor Ball (9/26) - "[The Memory Breach](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/the-memory-breach/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christian Emecheta (10/3) - "[The Dragon and the Bog](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/the-dragon-and-the-bog/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sunwoo Jeong (10/10) - "[Fear is a Dagger](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/fear-is-a-dagger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mateo Perez Lara (10/17) - "[Knife Plus](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/knife-plus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tracie McBride (10/24) - "[They Return](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-98/they-return/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanna Castroianni (10/31) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025, Issue 145) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“To Breach a Citadel”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/to-breach-a-citadel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeannie Marschall - [“A Touch of the Wild”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-touch-of-the-wild/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anne Wilkins - [“Mushroom Aesthetic”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/mushroom-aesthetic/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aggie Novak - [“Woodsong”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/woodsong/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arthur H. Manners - [“This Is What Mouths Are For”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/this-is-what-mouths-are-for/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Parker M. O’Neill ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: Mother Nature Can Be a Bitch](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/editorial-mother-nature-can-be-a-bitch/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by C.R. Langille --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(October 2025) ### Fiction - "[A Good King](https://giganotosaurus.org/2025/10/01/a-good-king/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah McGill --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Autumn 2025) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“Singularities”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/singularities-by-cressida-roe?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Cressida Roe - [“The Little Deaths of Autumn”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/the-little-deaths-of-autumn-by-j-a-prentice?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.A. Prentice - [“The Nine Crashes of Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/the-nine-crashes-of-flight-lieutenant-hilla-quinn-by-louise-hughes?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Louise Hughes - [“The Beekeeper’s Daughter”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/the-beekeepers-daughter-by-neil-willcox?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Willcox - [“Follow My Instructions, I Promise This Won’t Hurt”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/follow-my-instructions-i-promise-this-wont-hurt-by-akis-linardos?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akis Linardos - [“What Am I This Time?”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/what-am-i-this-time-by-scott-edelman?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Scott Edelman - [“The Hunting of the Phoenix”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/the-hunting-of-the-phoenix-by-s-l-harris?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.L. Harris - [“Godling, Runner, Thief”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/godling-runner-thief-by-avra-margariti?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Avra Margariti - [“My Collectors”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/my-collectors-by-shaenon-k-garrity?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shaenon K. Garrity - [“What a Big Heart You Have”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/what-a-big-heart-you-have-by-marissa-lingen?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marissa Lingen - [“The Violin/ist or The Madrigal”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/the-violin-ist-or-the-madrigal-by-katie-r-yen?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katie R. Yen - [“Wilayat in Seven Saints”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/wilayat-in-seven-saints-by-tanvir-ahmed?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tanvir Ahmed **POETRY** - [“Eldritch Democracy”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/eldritch-democracy-by-chris-clemens?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Clemens - [“Shapeshifters’ Local”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/shapeshifters-local-by-rick-hollon?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rick Hollon - [“Lacus Solitudinis”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/lacus-solitudinis-by-josh-pearce?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Pearce - [“I have been to the market”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/i-have-been-to-the-market-by-shana-ross?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shana Ross - [“Atomic”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/atomic-by-jennifer-crow?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jennifer Crow - [“Bedazzled”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/bedazzled-by-robert-borski?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Borski - [“Bestla”](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/bestla-by-james-joseph-brown?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James Joseph Brown --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025, Issue 185) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[O Mechfighter, O Starsinger](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/o-mechfighter-o-starsinger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (10/9) - "[At the Bottom of the Bonfire](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/at-the-bottom-of-the-bonfire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Martin Cahill (10/9) - "[The Porniest Porn in Porntown](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-porniest-porn-in-porntown/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen Graham Jones (10/16) - "[Dirge and Gleam](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dirge-and-gleam/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Micah Dean Hicks (10/16) - "[Everyone Hates the Auditor](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/everyone-hates-the-auditor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Megan Chee (10/23) - "[Dating Fortune](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dating-fortune/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sean McMullen (10/23) - "[Thaw](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/thaw/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by An Owomoyela (10/30) - "[Drosera regina](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/drosera-regina/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.L. Goldfuss (10/30) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: October 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-october-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (10/9) - [Author Spotlight: Osahon Ize-Iyamu](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-osahon-ize-iyamu-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (10/9) - [Author Spotlight: Micah Dean Hicks](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-micah-dean-hicks-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (10/16) - [Book Review: *All That We See or Seem* by Ken Liu](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-all-that-we-see-or-seem-by-ken-liu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (10/16) - [Book Review: *Signos: A Fiction Anthology of Filipino Supernatural* by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, and Kristine Ong Muslim, eds.](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-signos-a-fiction-anthology-of-filipino-supernatural-by-tilde-acuna-john-bengan-daryll-delgado-amado-anthony-g-mendoza-iii-and-kristine-ong-muslim-eds/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (10/23) - [Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-an-owomoyela-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mayookh Barua (10/30) - [Author Spotlight: A.L. Goldfuss](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-a-l-goldfuss-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (10/30) - [Book Review: *The Lost Reliquary*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-lost-reliquary-by-lyndsay-ely/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Lyndsay Ely by Chris Kluwe (10/30) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025, Issue 157) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/courtney-lovecrafts-book-of-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam J. Miller (10/8) - "[Stillborn](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/podcast/stillborn/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shantell Powell (10/15) - "[Body? Glass](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/body-glass/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (10/22) - "[The Versions of Yourself That You’re Better Off Without](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-versions-of-yourself-that-youre-better-off-without/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden (10/29) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: September 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-october-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (10/8) - [Author Spotlight: Sam J. Miller](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-sam-j-miller-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (10/8) - [The H Word: Horror Needs Hoodoo](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-horror-needs-hoodoo/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Beatrice Winifred Iker (10/15) - [Author Spotlight: Osahon Ize-Iyamu](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-osahon-ize-iyamu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (10/22) - [Interview: Carson Faust](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-carson-faust/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (10/29) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(October 2025) ### Fiction - "[Model Collapse](https://reactormag.com/model-collapse-matthew-kressel/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew Kressel - "[Where the Hell Is Nirvana?](https://reactormag.com/where-the-hell-is-nirvana-champ-wongsatayanont/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Champ Wongsatayanont - "[Phantom View](https://reactormag.com/phantom-view-john-wiswell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Wiswell - "[Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves](https://reactormag.com/timelike-curves-spacelike-curves-p-h-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P H Lee --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 28, October 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Oleander](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/oleander/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Montanna Rayne Harling - "[You’re Dead & I’m Safe & Still I Dream Of You](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/youre-dead-im-safe-still-i-dream-of-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S.M. Hallow - "[Birthmarks](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/birthmarks/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gordon Brown - "[Scoop](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/scoop/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rebecca E. Treasure - "[Personals Ad](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/personals-ad/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amanda Mitzel - "[Like Sunlight, Like Poison](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/like-sunlight-like-poison/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stacie Turner - "[Ink Reviews](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/ink-reviews/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rachel Gutin - "[An Aging AI Tries to Remember Its Life](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/an-aging-ai-tries-to-remember-its-life/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Casey Aimer - "[The Poltergeist of Fastini Crater](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-poltergeist-of-fastini-crater/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Karl G. Dandenell --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Orchard Village Catalog](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-orchard-village-catalog/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Parker Peevyhouse - "[Bullet Time at the Kink Party](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/bullet-time-at-the-kink-party/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by miriam ### Poetry - [pigwitch ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/pigwitch/?ref=andrewliptak.com)By: Rupkatha - [My Love Wails in the Mending](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/my-love-wails-in-the-mending/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lora Gray - [Ogress (The Incredible Shrinking Woman)](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/ogress-the-incredible-shrinking-woman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shana Ross - [Welcome to the Horror Opposition Association!](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/welcome-to-the-horror-opposition-association/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bree Wernicke - [ERROR 404: Expiation Not Found](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/error-404-expiation-not-found/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by CP Nwankwo - [Holy Days](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/holy-days/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanor Ball ### Nonfiction - [Welcome New Fiction Editor - Joyce Wolf Chng!](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/new-fiction-editor/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Reviews - Monday: [*When There Are Wolves Again* by E.J. Swift](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-there-are-wolves-again-by-e-j-swift/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul March-Russell - Wednesday: [*The Witch Roads* by Kate Elliott](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-witch-roads-by-kate-elliott/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Electra Pritchett - Friday: [*It’s Not a Cult* by Joey Batey](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/its-not-a-cult-by-joey-batey/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hana Carolina - Monday: [*The Wax Child* by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-wax-child-by-olga-ravn-translated-by-martin-aitken/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akankshya Abismruta - Wednesday: [*Inner Space* by Jakub Szamalek, translated by Kasia Bedford](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/inner-space-by-jakub-szamalek-translated-by-kasia-bedford/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Macdonald - Friday: [*Blood of the Old Kings (The Bleeding Empire Volume 1)* by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/blood-of-the-old-kings-the-bleeding-empire-volume-1-by-sung-il-kim-translated-by-anton-hur/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Cordasco - Monday: [*The Man of Middling Height* by Fadi Zaghmout, translated by Wasan Abdelhaq](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-man-of-middling-height-by-fadi-zaghmout-translated-by-wasan-abdelhaq/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kyle R. Garton - Wednesday: [*Seed Beetle: Poems* by Mahaila Smith](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/seed-beetle-poems-by-mahaila-smith/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Vivian Wagner - Friday: [*Psychopomp & Circumstance* by Eden Royce ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/psychopomp-circumstance-by-eden-royce/?ref=andrewliptak.com)By: Tristan Beiter --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (October 2025) ### Fiction - "[Changeling](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/changeling?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by William Alexander - "[Two Bikes, One Red, One Silver](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/two-bikes-one-red-one-silver?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.D. Sui - "[Darwin’s Rocket](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/darwins-rocket?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alan Smale - "[Excerpts from The Unauthorized Autobiography of Benjamin Brick](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/excerpts-from-the-unauthorized-autobiography?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Murphy --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 66, September / October 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/seven-minutes-in-heaven-with-the-electric-seraphim/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Juliet Kahn (10/7) - "[Wend-Way-Go](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/wend-way-go/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tim Pratt (10/7) - "[The Shadow on the Nest](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-shadow-on-the-nest/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alaya Dawn Johnson (10/7) - "[Caesar Says, Earthquakes Aren’t So Manifest From Space](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/caesar-says-earthquakes-arent-so-manifest-from-space/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jasmine Leng (10/7) - "[Dear Saturn](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/dear-saturn/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," by Susan L. Lin ### Nonfiction - [Interview: Juliet Kahn](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-juliet-kahn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (10/7) - [The Evolution of the Vampire Image, from Nosferatu to Sinners](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-evolution-of-the-vampire-image-from-nosferatu-to-sinners/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Del Sandeen (10/7) - [Solace in Fantasy Monster Romances and My Trans Body](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/solace-in-fantasy-monster-romances-and-my-trans-body/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Theo Kane (10/7) --- Check back at the end of the month: I'll update the links to the stories that haven't come out at the time of publication. ### 17 more sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to close out September with URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-september-2025-dinniman-witcher/ Last updated: 2025-09-30T16:20:00.000Z We just ticked over into fall, and with it comes the vibrant foliage here in Vermont. I always like this time of year, watching the leaves turn into shades of red, yellow, and orange, even if it means my days of heading out into the backyard with a couple of books are coming to a close. September is just about over, but the flood of books sure isn't. This month has been packed, and these last couple of weeks bring an even bigger stack. (In case you missed it, here’s the [first](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-book-list-september-2025/) and [second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-history-book-list/) lists for the month.) Here's my usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. A book list like this involves a lot of time to research what's coming out and work to put together. Here's my process: At the beginning of the year, I set up 12 empty container posts and begin adding in titles from anticipated lists, author and publisher announcements, and then over the course of the year, I'll scroll through resources like product pages on Barnes & Noble, Edelweiss, and ISFDB for new releases, field pitches from publicists, and generally look for what catches my eye. I'll whittle that list down, poke through the books and see if I like what I see, move books around as release dates slip or shift, then read through descriptions, reviews on **Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, Locus,* and others to get a sense of the plot, then write up the blurbs that go into the newsletter. Then I round up what books I've gotten in the mail, photograph them, proof read it, and hit send. Then I go about publicizing the list on social media, notify the publicists and authors, and start again, either for the next month or the second half of a month. It's a lot, but I really enjoy doing it. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting it by: \- [****Sign up as a supporting subscriber**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40 a year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4 a month! \- Support TO with a [****one-time tip**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-scifi-fantasy-books-anders-hill-kuang-scalzi/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Okay, here are 17 more books to check out to close out the month: ### [*The Captive*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781641297288?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kit Burgoyne (September 30th) Luke and the revolutionary group he's part of have been planning for ages to kidnap a woman named Adeline Woolsaw, in the hopes of exposing the misdeeds of her parent's company, the Woolsaw Group. The company is extremely large but anonymous, running military bases and hospitals, prisons, and quite a bit more. As they're kidnapping her, she goes into labor and as it turns out, she's trying to get her and her new baby away from her parents. What's more, said baby seems to have some particular powers: he's able to whip up inclement weather and pests, and it seems that he's been engineered in a pact with a dark, ancient evil with some grim ulterior motives. ### [*Fate’s Bane*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250293145?ref=andrewliptak.com) by C.L. Clark (September 30th) In this novella from C.L. Clark, a group of fen clans have been at peace, thanks to Agnir, a hostage that keeps everyone in check. She's been living with her captors for years, and she's grown up alongside their children. When she falls for the chieftain's daughter, they accidentally awaken a magic that could bring the clans together, or tear them apart. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-250-29314-5?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Clark’s skill for Viking saga-craft and her clear affection for her sapphic warrior heroines combine into an unforgettable doomed love story." ### [*The Sovereign*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316542883?ref=andrewliptak.com) by C.L. Clark (September 30th) Fate’s Bane isn’t the only book by C.L. Clark hitting stores on September 30th: there’s also the latest book in their *Magic of the Lost* series, *The Sovereign*. (It’s preceded by [*The Unbroken*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316542753?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Faithless*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316542760?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Luca is now the queen of Balladaire after dealing with a traitorous uncle in the royal court, all while a plague has been sweeping across the nation, threatening her newfound rule. Meanthile, Touraine has become Luca's general and has begun to work on keeping their fragile rule intact, maintaining a delicate balance with Qazal while their neighbors seek out any weakness they can exploit. ### [*This Inevitable Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798217190041?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (September 23rd) Matt Dinniman continues his Dungeon Crawler Carl series [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* and [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*)*, in which Earth has been destroyed by aliens in a twisted game, with Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat (and a whole bunch of friends made along the way) have been working their way through various levels. They've hit the ninth floor: Faction Wars, where nine armies from across the galaxy assemble and fight against one another, holding a castle in the center of the battlefield. The crawlers have their own army of newly-awakened NPCs, and they're now put to the test – one that could split them apart for good. ### [*Spread Me*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250387332?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Gailey (September 23rd) Kinsey is the team lead for a scientific organization at a remote research facility in the middle of a desert. When she and her team discovers a strange organism in the sand, she breaks their quarantine and brings it in. However, it begins to have a weird effect on her team, disrupting their carefully-scheduled lives and tempting them in unexpected ways. What they soon begin to realize is that the creature is looking for a new host, and that one of their numbers might make a good one. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250387332?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the creeping terror of things not being what they seem and people not being who they say they are keeps the suspense simmering. It’s a fun, modern take on first encounter horror." ### [*Saltcrop*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250380968?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Yume Kitasei (September 30th) It's set in the near future when sea levels have risen and consumed the world's coastal cities. A sailor named Skipper earns a living by recovering plastic from the ocean, while caring for her ill grandmother. Years ago, her her older sister Nora left home to try and find a solution to save the world's failing crops, and when Skipper receives a strange call for help, she and her other sister Carmen have to put aside their differences to find her. As they set out, they learn more about the work that Nora was undertaking, and more about the motives of the companies underwriting that work. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250380968?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Kitasei pays as much attention to her protagonist’s nuanced inner life as to the page-turning apocalyptic plotline, creating a tale that feels both intimate and expansive." ### [*The Hunger We Pass Down*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645662808?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jen Sookfong Lee (September 30th) A woman named Alice Chow is struggling with the demands of life: her online cloth diaper store is booming, but her children, Luna and Luca are making it difficult to get everything done before the end of the day. One day, she wakes up to find that everything has been finished: the house is clean, her orders are packed and ready to go, and she doesn't know how it happened. Someone did it for her. It should be a source of concern, but she takes the time to reconnect with her kids and her mother, and it isn't long before the things unseen will become impossible to ignore. [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781988964492?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Wax Child*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780811238830?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Olga Ravn and translated by Martin Aitken (September 23rd) Set in 17th century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow is an unmarried noblewoman who's accused of witchcraft by the head of her household, Anne Bille. She and others are believed to have been possessed by the devil who's given them strange powers. Christenze flees, taking a wax doll (who serves as the book's narrator), with her to a neighboring town to start over, where she meets other women with similar issues, only to be accused again and is thrown in prison. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded it a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/olga-ravn/the-wax-child/?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style." ### *The Revelation Space Collection* [*Volume 1*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781399611916?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Volume 2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781399611961?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alastair Reynolds (September 23rd) Alastair Reynolds's breakout hit was his 2000's debut space opera, [*Revelation Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462440?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* He followed it up with some additional novels:[*Chasm City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462471?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Redemption Ark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462495?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Absolution Gap*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462631?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Aurora Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462587?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Elysium Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316555678?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Machine Vendetta*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462846?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* He's also written a bunch of shorter stories set in the same universe, which he's now collected into two volumes, including such acclaimed titles as "Great Wall of Mars," "Diamond Dogs," "Turquoise Days*,"* and more. ### [*The Heist of Hollow London*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250372062?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eddie Robson (September 30th) Two clones, Arlo and Drienne, face a grim future. Their entire existence is to serve as spare parts for high-level corporate executives, and they're often put to work to pay off the debt that they incur for their very existence. That's before they're chopped up for their organs in case the people they're cloned from need them. When the company that owns them goes under, they're given a unique opportunity: they'll be given their lives, their debt erased, and enough cash to last for the rest of their lives. But first, they're going to need to pull off a heist: infiltrate a secure facility in dead London, where they'll need to steal a data drive. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250372062?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "explorations of identity, commodification, and exploitation run throughout the narrative, which toggles between the crew’s multiple perspectives as they scheme their way toward victory." ### [*Slashed Beauties*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593954645?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. Rushby (September 23rd) In present-day Seoul, an antique dealer named Alys has been working to collect a trio of wax figures, part of an anatomical Venus that were made in the 18th century to teach medical students about anatomy. Stories arose that the figures at one point were cursed and came to life and murdered the men who operated on them, and the Alys has to figure out how to figure out the nature of the curse to sever it. In the 1763 London, two women, Eleanor and Emily have been taken in by Elizabeth, one of the city's courtesans. But the more she learns about her, Eleanor realizes that Elizabeth might not be as generous a savior as they thought. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rushby/slashed-beauties/?ref=andrewliptak.com) a "ferociously feminist body horror with a sentimental heart." ### [*Crossroads of Ravens*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316597739?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrzej Sapkowski (September 30th) Andrzej Sapkowski's *The Witcher* series ([*The Last Wish*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452465?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Sword of Destiny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452564?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Blood of Elves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452663?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Time of Contempt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452762?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Baptism of Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452861?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Tower of Swallows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452960?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Lady of the Lake*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316453066?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Season of Storms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316453165?ref=andrewliptak.com)) has become incredibly popular in recent years, thanks to word of mouth, a massively-popular video game, and a recent streaming series on Netflix. We've now got a new adventure for its hero, monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, in which Sapkowski goes back to the beginning when Geralt was a graduate of Kaer Morhen and first stepping into the world. He makes a mistake: an act of heroism that goes sideways and which he's almost hanged. He's saved by a witcher named Preston Holt, who takes Geralt under his wing and how to protect the world and survive, even if it incurs a terrible cost. Mark Yon of *SFF World* [says](https://www.sffworld.com/2025/09/crossroads-of-ravens-by-andrzej-sapkowski/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's a great place to start if you haven't read the series, and that “What I was most surprised by was that in these days of stories where fights can take place over pages, Sapkowski is surprisingly unembellished. Killings may take place with one or two well-crafted sentences. I found it rather refreshing to read such an unambiguous novel." ### [*Alchemised*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593972700?ref=andrewliptak.com) by SenLinYu (September 23rd) This is probably one of the most hyped books of the year: it's gotten some major coverage already, which have dissected its origins as a Harry Potter fan fiction that SenLinYu rewrote as its own, standalone story. Helena Marino was once an alchemist who was a member of a resistance movement, and who was captured after her companions were killed. She's been imprisoned by Paladia's ruling class of necromancers, who used their abilities to take control of the country. Helena has lost her memory and her captors think that she was just a low-level healer, but they're beginning to think that she might have some knowledge of the resistance movement's activities locked away in her memories. She's sent off to the High Reeve, one of Paladia's most powerful necromancers, and he goes to work on her. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/senlinyu/alchemised/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read." ### [*Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668205099?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Becky Siegel Spratford (September 23rd) Becky Siegel Spratford brings together a whole bunch of notable horror authors to explore the appeal of the terrifying, including Tananarive Due, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Paul Tremblay and others. This looks like it'll be an excellent peek into how the genre works and why we keep going back to it. ### [*The October Film Haunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250333698?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Wehunt (September 30th) A decade ago, Jorie Stroud was one of three horror fans who made up the October Film Haunt: they'd go out to the filming locations of their favorite films and blog about it. But one fateful night, when they visited the graveyard from a film called *Proof of Demons*, everything fell apart. A decade later and Jorie has moved to Vermont with her son, trying to put the night, their viral post, and her love of horror behind them. When a VHS tape arrives in the mail, she thinks that it might be from a fan obsessed with Proof of Demon's director, but it seems as though the director himself has taken an interest in their story, one that puts Jorie in the crosshairs. ### [*A Philosophy of Thieves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661948?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Fran Wilde (September 30th) I like Fran's writing a lot. This kicks off a new series from her, and it follows a group of thieves known as the Canarviers, who use acrobatics, misdirection, stunts to wow their patrons. The children within the group have since grown up, and they've butted heads and aren't sure where they fit into life. When King Canarvier vanishes, the children have to come back together before their father is disappeared forever, pushing aside their differences to take on a grand heist with high stakes that could ruin them if they fail. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fran-wilde/a-philosophy-of-thieves/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "ultimately about family and what we can risk for one other, this story pushes its characters to reckon with legacy, built and given, and how to choose between the comfort of what they know or striving to be better. The novel’s simple prose gives way to such complex and richly imagined worldbuilding that you’ll forget you’re reading about fabricated nutrition and clothing that listens." --- ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964429?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639738762?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593733400?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063423954?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://www.edelweiss.plus/?ref=andrewliptak.com#sku=1250388279) ### Obsession and reality URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/life-on-mars-the-martians-david-baron-book-review/ Last updated: 2026-01-03T16:15:43.000Z For eons, Mars has captivated watchers from afar, and we've often imagined what Martian life would be like and wondered if it did harbor life at some point. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a widespread belief that not only was there life on the red planet but that it was home to a vibrant, intelligent civilization. David Baron's latest history is an examination of that period: [*The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324090663?ref=andrewliptak.com) is an engrossing and gripping story of obsession and speculation that entranced the nation for a brief period, with echoes and lessons that we can learn from in 2025\. Scientists and philosophers have long speculated about the nature of life on other worlds, and in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made what appeared to be a ground-shaking discovery: as he conducted a series of observations of Mars, he created detailed illustrations of its surface features, including a series of lines that he called canali – channels – which was reported out in English publications a couple of years later as "canals." [Destination: MarsHow we imagined the Red Planet![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-292.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/51897858204_c5754685a2_b-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mars-history-science-fiction/) Thumbnail histories of Mars often treat this discovery as a sort of first order logic: Schiaparelli's "canals" led to a belief that Mars was home to alien life, but Baron notes that wasn't quite the case. Other astronomers made similar observations, but weren't sure what to make of them, but didn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that they were artificial in nature. As one California observatory director wrote, "every true astronomer has been very sorry to see all this haberdash that some of the newspapers have been printing about Mars being inhabited and our seeing canals on the surface and all that other rot and nonsense." But they did raise new questions about the nature of the planet and gave space for some wild speculation. At the time, science as a field was in something of a transition: men of means were often at the forefront of their respective topics, and approached their collections and observations with more enthusiasm than expertise, often putting them at odds with their more professional counterparts as those fields matured. It's in this intersection that the belief that Mars was inhabited took hold: Baron follows the story of Percival Lowell, a Boston-born businessman from who developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1892, he set up the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and used it to further his own obsession with his own study of Mars and its canals. What followed was a fascinating episode in the history of science. Fueled by a media environment that relied on breathless sensationalism and which played fast and loose with the facts, Lowell and others rallied behind the belief that Mars was inhabited and speculated wildly about what that life might look like and how we might contact them. Their fervent belief was underpinned by their observations of lines that they were seeing on the planet's surface, and pointed to their shifting nature as proof that *something* was moving them. They worked to figure out the nature of the people who could be building them, making educated guesses about how the Martian temperatures might have guided their biology and culture, spinning out wild theories that left their impressions on authors ranging from H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury. The Martian craze fizzled out relatively quickly. Lowell and his adherents drew the ire of many in the rapidly-professionalizing field of astronomy. As Mars made itself available for viewing, they conducted their own observations and experiments. They began to utilize more powerful telescopes and incorporate photography, they found that the "canals" that Schiaparelli, Lowell, and others were observing were the product of an optical illusion: their low-resolution telescopes tricked their viewer into seeing lines from fields of spots. These observations yielded better alternatives: the structures that they thought might be moving were really the product of changing surface features like sifting sands and ridgelines, or natural features like canyons. Additional studies provided more evidence that Mars couldn't host intelligent life: the place was too cold, too dry, and too airless. Yet, Baron explains, Lowell was stubborn in his beliefs, pushing back hard on critics who picked away at his arguments, and even doubled down on his ideas. ![](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/content/images/2025/09/51897858204_c5754685a2_b.jpeg) ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Towards the end of his book, Baron makes an interesting observation: throughout history, we've often had moments where we collectively believe something that isn't true: "we all comprehend the world through concentric layers of trust. No single individual can master every domain of knowledge, so we must rely on others to shape our own ideas of what is right, what is factual," and that "mass delusions require no hoax to begin, no spur of greed to accelerate." In many cases, people believe what they believe because they want to believe, and that that desire can help them move past inconvenient facts, whether the practice of alchemy, the next promised technological revolution, that there's life on Mars, or that vaccines cause autism. In his epilogue, Baron writes "I thought I set out to a story of human folly, about how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing things simply because we wish them to be true. That is, of course, one lesson of the tale, but I discovered another, perhaps more powerful, takeaway: Human imagination is a force so potent that it can *change* what is true." Lowell believed that there was life on Mars because he wanted to believe; a belief that was reinforced by fame and adoration from a public that looked to him for knowledge. That's a powerful drug, and a good motivation to be skeptical of alternative ideas. In many ways, Lowell wasn't driven by a science outlook on the world – he wouldn't and couldn't accept alternatives to his theories, even as belief in Martians waned as the scientific community provided more rational and fact-based alternatives. This book comes at a curious time: just earlier this week, we witnessed a press conference from the Trump administration in which the president [told the American public that pregnant women shouldn't take Tylenol](https://apnews.com/article/tylenol-cause-autism-trump-kennedy-0847ee76eedecbd5e9baa6888b567d66?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it was a factor in the rising autism rates in the country – [a belief that has largely been discredited](https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/what-the-research-says-about-autism-and-tylenol-use-during-pregnancy/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Baron doesn't link the modern cesspool of online conspiracy theories to Lowell's belief in life on Mars, but there are parallels. Both situations emerge out of rampant, half-formed speculation that rests on arguments that can feel plausible. Lowell, he notes, wasn't out to trick the public: he really did believe that Mars was home to aliens. But that belief was wrapped up in the rush of celebrity, Lowell's own troubles with what appears to be bipolar disorder, and a personality and upbringing that left him no small amount of insecurity. The elements that helped shape Lowell's environment still exist a century and a half later: people cling to fringe ideas, whether we've been visited by intelligent life, that the Earth is flat, that school shootings are orchestrated, that there are secretive organizations ruling the planet, and so forth, often pushed along by not only malevolent actors, but by people who really do believe in those realities and who can't back down from them because of the communities that they're part of out of not wanting to be seen as a fool, as well as a media ecosystem that's more than willing to bend the truth for clicks. It feels very much like the mindset that drove Lowell drives many of our policymakers and their followers: they've accepted a version of reality that they really want to believe, and thus believe it, even as there are plenty of facts and studies that contradict them and their worldviews. Baron shows that Lowell and others believed in their theories because of what their eyes told them, but they didn't consider whether or not what they were seeing could be inaccurate. But while they clung to those beliefs, they were eventually overcome by reality itself. They might have burrowed in or at times put their heads in the sand, but the truth – that Mars wasn't inhabited by an intelligent civilization – became clearer and clearer as technology made it easier to observe the place. That process is still ongoing: while scientists might have disproven the existence of a network of Martian canals, each new probe and lander brings new discoveries every day, including the best indication of life yet, in the form of potential fossilized biosignatures. It might not be the vast civilization that Lowell envisioned, but I have a feeling that it's a discovery that he would have been pleased to learn about. Hopefully, the same thing will happen in our lifetimes: that truth and facts about the world around us will slowly grind away the misinformation and beliefs, leaving us with a clearer picture of the world. ### Here's the first trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-first-trailer-watch-disney-plus/ Last updated: 2025-09-22T21:29:29.000Z We finally have a first (well, aside from a teaser screened at a convention) look at the next Star Wars film to hit theaters: Lucasfilm has released the first trailer for *The Mandalorian and Grogu*, which hits theaters on May 22nd, 2026\. It's ... something. On one hand, I'm digging the prospect of a new *Star Wars* film in theaters, and this looks like it's leaning into the things that made the streaming series fun: lots of action and humor, creatures, ships, set pieces, and so forth. On the other, it looks like an episode – maybe a supersized one – of the series, and I'm not sure how well that'll translate to the big screen in the way that we expect when we see a *Star Wars* film in theaters. Here's the trailer: The film is a continuation of *The Mandalorian*, the streaming series that launched on Disney+ back in 2019: it introduced audiences to Din Djarin, a lone Mandalorian who's tasked with tracking down a diminutive alien (Grogu, née Baby Yoda) for a former Imperial officer. As it turns out, Grogu is Force-sensitive, and when Djarin realizes what his employers have in mind for the child, he ends up taking him under his wing and goes on the run. Over the three seasons that the show has run, it's introduced audiences to the wild west influences of the *Star Wars* franchise: the Empire has fallen, but the New Republic hasn't quite taken hold throughout the galaxy, so we're in a period of chaos in the outer rim: there are pirates, former Imperial forces, settlers, and criminals all trying to make their way in the galaxy, and a whole bunch are trying to get their hands on Grogu. Along the way, Djarin learns more about his heritage as a Mandalorian, helps out plenty of settlers and encounters plenty of strange creatures and characters. Looking back, Disney fumbled how it revitalized the Star Wars *brand* when it released the sequel trilogy starting in 2015 with *The Force Awakens*: it didn't have much of a direction or end-goal, and the results were divisive, diverging too far from expectations tonally and thematically. When it was released, *The Mandalorian* felt like like something of a restart: it set a new-yet-familiar tone for the world, introduced just enough references to other parts of the franchise, and was a compelling story set between *The Return of the Jedi* and *The Force Awakens*. Its star has dimmed somewhat since then: in its rush for content, Disney opted for quantity over quality, and while the show's first two seasons are stellar, its first spinoff series *The Book of Boba Fett* was a misfire, and the third season felt somewhat aimless, undercutting the second season's ending. Another spinoff show, *Ahsoka*, came with a lot of baggage and homework to really stand on its own, while the YA-themed *Skeleton Crew* captured a lot of the fun, but maybe stood a little too much on its own. Another spinoff, *Rangers of the New Republic* was iced after its star was [summarily booted](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mandalorian-gina-carano-fired/) for some of her online comments during the COVID-19 pandemic. (She's since sued and settled with Lucasfilm, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see her return at some point.) [Nostalgia’s limitsThe Book of Boba Fett was a nice bit of worldbuilding, but that’s about it![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-286.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Boba-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-book-of-boba-fett-season-1-review/) Since the Star Destroyer filled screens in the opening moments of *Star Wars* in 1977, the franchise has always been a big theatrical experience, bringing spectacle and action to viewers, something that Disney continued with the relaunch of the franchise in 2015\. While feelings towards the sequel trilogy have been mixed, it hasn't been for lack of trying to see how we'd return to the Galaxy Far, Far Away in theaters: plenty of directors have been tackling that challenge, but while Lucasfilm found a good amount of success on the small screen, nothing's made it through the pipeline until now. All of that brings us to this new film. The streaming world has cooled significantly since *The Mandalorian* debuted, and while a fourth season of the series is written, the studio opted to shift focus back to theaters, and is putting its two biggest characters front and center for the franchise's return. That's good in some ways: Baby Yoda has become a ubiquitous part of the *Star Wars* franchise, and that's not a bad thing when you're looking to relaunch a theatrical franchise. In the first two seasons, director Jon Favreau and [Lucasfilm VP Dave Filoni](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-dave-filoni-storytelling/) demonstrated that they know how to construct a *Star Wars* story that plays well to fans. Filoni is well-versed in the ins and outs of the franchise's lore and I have little doubt that this'll be a film that'll look and feel like a part of the world. But can they tell a story that's consequential to that world – or to its characters? One of the things that I liked about the show was that it felt like a smaller story within the larger galaxy, one that didn't need to be bigger than it was, until Favreau and Filoni started building it out further, drawing connections to the animated prequel series *Clone Wars* and *Rebels,* and doing a bit of set-up for the world that we'd see in the sequel trilogy. This isn't a problem unique to *The Mandalorian*: look no further than [the middling years of the Star Wars Expanded Universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/) when Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie were involved in "Imperial baddie of the week coming back to cause problems." It's easy to lean into what fans want – more adventures with their favorite characters – and overstay their welcome. That's what I feel happened here: *The Mandalorian* 's second season ended with Mando handing off Grogu to Luke Skywalker, seemingly fulfilling his duties to keep the little guy safe. But Grogu was too popular to just hand off and abandon, so his coming back into Mando's care in *Book of Boba Fett* now seems inevitable, even as it undermined what would have been a good bow on that particular story, with whatever came next focused on testing the show's titular character in new ways. Now, we have a big screen adventure for the two of them. The real question here is: what will *The Mandalorian and Grogu* bring to the character's story? Clearly lots of excitement, which should be fun to see on the big screen: we've got a pitched AT-AT battle, monsters, starships flying this way and that, and more. But a good story requires growth and change, a storytelling practice that isn't exactly a strength of an episodic television series, and we've seen these characters reset for more of the same already. So: will the events in this film actually push and change them into different characters than when the film started, or is this just another outgrowth of Disney's drive for content: a standalone episode with a beefier budget, one that ends on the right note that keeps the door open for more adventures down the road, depending on the box office growth? We'll find out when it hits theaters next year. ### 14 more SF/F books to check out this September URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-history-book-list/ Last updated: 2025-09-17T13:05:21.000Z September is turning out to be a busy month, in no small part because I've been on the other side of launching a book: *Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont* by Jeffrey L. Amestoy. I've written a bit about it already (and there's more below), but I have to say that this is the part of my job that I enjoy the most. It's a good book: I read the manuscript, but recently read the finished product, and it's an engrossing read (and I'm saying that as a reader, not the person pushing it.) Amestoy packs a *lot* into this slim book: and as I was reading it, I was thinking about how well he unspools the story and covers a lot of ground without being distracted. From the publicity and sales side, I've been working on reaching out to local press for reviews and coverage, local organizations for events, and bookstores to carry it. For big publishers, some of that is taken care of through companies like Ingram, but I essentially have to go door to door with cold call after cold call to try and get stores to pick it up. It's not something that I'd really done before this job, and it's been a good skill to pick up. It seems to be working, too: the book has sold faster than anything we've sold in the past. Having the term "severed head" in the title doesn't hurt, I'm sure. That's just one book coming out this month: there are 13 more hitting stores this week and next that you should check out as well, and as always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. In case you missed it, here's the first list for September: [13 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read September 2025Title Wave!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-278.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6208.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-book-list-september-2025/) Here's the usual subscription plug: we're living through a period of online clutter, with tons of mindless listicles and even [AI-generated book lists that spit out fake books](https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai?ref=andrewliptak.com). I work to carefully curate the book lists here on TO: I flip through advance copies, read reviews, research prior books in series, and put together a list of books that catch my eye and think that you should check out too. I'll never use AI to write this list, or any post you see on TO. This is all free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. If you've found a book that you like, please consider chipping in to help make it happen. You can: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- [Support TO with a one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-scifi-fantasy-books-anders-hill-kuang-scalzi/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- Tell your friends and fellow readers about it by sharing on social media or forwarding this to them. Thank you so much! [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/account/plans) --- ### [*Sunward*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668058053?ref=andrewliptak.com)by William Alexander (September 16th) Set in the distant future, Captain Tova Lir decided to forgo her family's business of politics and become a courier, ferrying messages across the galaxy. Her friends encourage her to raise some baby bots: young AIs who're growing up and who need to be taught how to integrate into society. Her latest ward is Agatha Panza von Sparkles, and on a run, they come across an abandoned spaceship with an assassin onboard who chases them across the solar system. Tova and Agatha's retreat impacts Agetha's development and Tova has to rely on her former pupils to help, bringing her family together across the solar system before they're captured. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/sunward-by-william-alexander-sff-pick-of-the-month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Recommend to readers who enjoy mercantile empire space opera, sapphic frenemy romances, found-family stories, and narratives where robots and artificial intelligences save the day." (As a bonus, William is a fellow Vermonter!) ### [*Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/winters-time-a-secret-pledge-a-severed-head-and-the-murder-that-brought-america-s-most-famous-lawyer-to-vermont/1500?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeffrey L. Amestoy (September 16th) *Winters' Time* is the latest book from the Vermont Historical Society, written by Jeffrey Amestoy, the former Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. [I designed the cover](https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-cover-design-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-vermont-history/)! This is something a little different from what we usually release at VHS: it's a history of the time that Clarence Darrow (one of the country's most famous defense attorneys: you might know his names from the Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution in 1925) came to Vermont to help litigate a criminal appeal before the supreme court. It's a slim book, but it packs a punch, covering everything from Vermont's industrial history to a sensational criminal case to true-crime mystery. In November 1926, a woman named Cecelia Gullivan, an executive for the Cone Automatic Manufacturing company in Windsor was brutally murdered in her home. The local cops quickly arrested a fellow employee with a record, John Winters, and charged him for the crime. Despite maintaining his denial that he committed the crime, he was convicted in a sensational trial. But the twist came from something that happened in Norwich, Vermont years earlier: a man accidentally killed a child in a tragic accident, and promised the grieving family that if there was anything they could do in the future, they'd do it. That man was Clarence Darrow's son, and the mother of the Child was Winters' aunt. After his conviction, they called in the favor, and Darrow came to Vermont to take on the case. [Uncovering Vermont’s most notorious murder trialAn interview with Jeffrey L. Amestoy, author of Winters’ Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-285.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-Modern-Travel-City-Vlog-Photo-Collage-YouTube-Thumbnail-2.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-clarence-darrow-book-interview/) I recently read and finished this, and I enjoyed it: Amestoy is an engaging writer, and while short (this clocks in at 122 pages, including footnotes), he packs a *lot* in: commentary about the 1920s, Vermont's history of capitol punishment, and a lot more. ### [*Audition For The Fox*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964443?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martin Cahill (September 16th) Nesi has the blood gods and is desperate to get a patron from one of the 99 Pillars of Heaven. If she can’t, she’ll never be allowed to leave home and after dozens of failed auditions, she’s about to take a big risk: audition before the Fox of Tricks, T’sidaan. Stories portray the Fox as a lovable trickster, but Nesi ends up getting sent back in time centuries during a brutal period of their history, and has to figure out how to survive and take a fortress from a disgraced Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Exiles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593851630?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mason Coile (September 16th) Humanity dispatched a trio of robots to establish a habitat on Mars, and when the first human crew arrives to set up a major colony, they find it half-destroyed. The robots have gone rogue and formed alliances and are generally being uncooperative – and one has gone missing. The crew needs to figure out who's telling the truth and what happened, or the entire endeavor will be doomed. [Writing in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/books/review/exiles-mason-coile.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Emily C. Hughes says that "Coile wields genre conventions with a practiced and confident hand" and that "he’s particularly good at exploring how the mind plays tricks and conjures outlandish possibilities under extreme stress, and uses that skill to maintain the ambiguity of what’s really happening outside the base, teasing out the tension until the final pages." ### *Stranger Things: The Complete Scripts* [Season 1](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984031?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Season 2](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984055?ref=andrewliptak.com) by The Duffer Brothers (September 2nd) This is pretty interesting: with the final season of Netflix's *Stranger Things* coming out later this year, Random House Worlds is publishing the scripts for each season as individual volumes, starting this month with seasons 1 and 2\. Each book will bring together the scripts for all eight episodes of each season, along with introductions written by both Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as character, dialogue, and scene directions, as well as some additional commentary that provides new insights into the show and its creation. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643756639?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Uncertain Sons and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781988964492?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Thomas Ha (September 16th) Thomas Ha entered the SF/F scene in 2020 and has been extremely prolific ever since: he's written dozens of stories for publications such as *Crossmass Infinities,* *Lightspeed Magazine*, *Beneath Ceaseless Skies*, Clarkesworld Magazine, and many others. This is his debut collection. ### [*The Lottery and Other Dark Tales*](https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/the-lottery-and-other-dark-tales-core?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shirley Jackson (September 16th) The Folio Society unveiled its Fall Collection last month, and one of the books included is a collection of Shirley Jackson's short fiction: *The Lottery and Other Dark Tales*. This book was originally released as a limited edition, and it's now coming out as a core edition from the publisher. It includes 20 of Jackson's stories, including her best-known classic, "The Lottery." This volume also includes an introduction by her biographer, Ruth Franklin, and art by Angie Hoffmeister. ### [*Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781960988799?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nick Mamatas (September 23rd) Nick Mamatas turns to Shakespeare for inspiration for his latest novel, reimagining *The Tempest* through a science fictional lens. In this read, Kalivas lives off the coast of San Francisco on the Farallon Islands. He's the last free-range human and when the Master and his daughter arrive, they press him into service for a variety of tasks. That new order is upended when a storm washes across the island, providing Kalivas a choice: he can free himself and his home from his new overseers, or commit to remaining in their service. ### [*A Canticle for Leibowitz*](https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/a-canticle-for-leibowitz-core?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Walter M. Miller Jr. (September 16th) Another addition to The Folio Society's Fall Collection is Walter M. Miller Jr.'s classic novel *A Canticle for Leibowitz*. This was also originally released as a limited edition in 2024, and it features an introduction by critic Michael Dirda and art by Elliot Lang. ### [*The Summer War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593984703?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Novik (September 16th) When her brother Argent leaves home, Celia discovers that she has a talent for magic. She's angry and hurt, believing that he's abandoned her, and accidentally curses him in a fit of rage. Now Argent wanders the world, looking for fame and glory rather than love and a home, while Celia desperately tries to figure out how to undo the curse she leveled against him. When she discovers the truth behind a long-running war between her people and the immortal summerlings, she might have found a solution to her mistake and to her people's suffering. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593984703?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Novik’s fans will be pleased by the canny twists and turns of the plot, as well as the sweet queer romance between Argent and the Summer Prince at its center." ### [*Who Will You Save?*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803368658?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Gareth L. Powell (September 16th) Gareth L. Powell is a prolific writer, and his latest book is a new collection of his short fiction. This volume contains 32 of his short stories, spanning his entire career with a table of contents that includes some of his best-known stories and some previously unpublished ones that bring readers back to some of his best-known worlds. ### [*To Clutch a Razor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855503?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Veronica Roth (September 16th) Last year, Veronica Roth released [*When Among Crows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855480?ref=andrewliptak.com), an excellent novella about a knight named Dymitr, who’s trying to track down the legendary witch known as Baba Jaga. Along the way, he meets Ala, a creature known as a zmora whose bloodline has been cursed. The two agree to help one another, and the secrets they hold almost destroy the two of them. In this sequel, Dymitr is called back to his ancestral homelands for a funeral rite, and he uses the opportunity to take a family relic: a book of curses that might be able to take care of the debt he owes to Baba Jaga. But first, he needs to survive his family. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250855503?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying “Roth’s darker sequel maintains the seamless worldbuilding of the previous book while giving each member of the main trio a distinct and well-developed character arc; probing themes of intergenerational trauma, familial duty, and morality; and setting the stage for the finale.” ### [*Among the Burning Flowers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639738762?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Samantha Shannon (September 16th) Back in 2019, Samantha Shannon released [*The Priory of the Orange Tree*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781635570304?ref=andrewliptak.com), a sprawling epic fantasy and in 2023, released[*A Day of Fallen Night*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639732999?ref=andrewliptak.com), a prequel. Now, she has a new prequel out, *Among the Burning Flowers*, which takes the story back even further. The land of Yscalin has experienced centuries of peace after the Draconic Army almost destroyed humanity. Not all is well: King Sigoso controls his daughter, Marosa Vetalda, imprisoning her in their home, while she’s promised to Aubrecht Lievelyn, who rules Mentendon. Across the world, a dragon hunter named Estina Melaugo is working to track down the sleeping dragons, and one of them, Fýredel is about to wake up. When he does, Yscalin is sure to fall. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/samantha-shannon/among-the-burning-flowers/?ref=andrewliptak.com) “Devoted series fans will appreciate the added pieces to this expansive narrative puzzle.” --- Thanks as always for reading. Let me know in the comments what catches your eye and what you have on your TBR! I'll have one more book list for September coming in a couple of weeks: there's still a lot more headed our way. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668205099?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Powder keg URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/kathryn-bigelow-house-of-dynamite-trailer-watch-nuclear-war/ Last updated: 2025-09-14T13:00:19.000Z It feels like the advent of nuclear war is becoming the next big prestige thing for directors to tackle. Christopher Nolan rightly earned his accolades for *Oppenheimer* two years ago, while Denis Villeneuve [signed on to develop](https://deadline.com/2024/04/nuclear-war-movie-denis-villeneuve-legendary-dune-part-two-bestselling-book-1235876114/?ref=andrewliptak.com) an adaptation of Annie Jacobsen's chilling moment-by-moment novel [*Nuclear War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476093?ref=andrewliptak.com) (although he seems to have put that aside, and his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's *Rendezvous with Rama in favor of Dune: Part 3)* and James Cameron [has said](https://deadline.com/2025/06/james-cameron-interview-ghosts-of-hiroshima-movie-a-bomb-japan-1236444510/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that *Ghosts of Hiroshima* is next on his docket after *Avatar: Fire and Ash* comes out in December. Kathryn Bigelow (*K-19: The Widow Maker, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty*) is beating them to the punch with her next film, *A House of Dynamite*, which will briefly hit theaters in October before streaming on Netflix at the end of the month. The streaming service just unveiled a first look at the film, which features a chilling narration from Carl Sagan about life existing on a pale blue dot. The film is written by Noah Oppenheim and it follows a crisis that arises when the US detects a single missile headed towards the country. The film recently premiered at the Venice film festival, and *Deadline*'s Pete Hammond has a [rundown of the film's plot](https://deadline.com/2025/09/a-house-of-dynamite-review-kathryn-bigelows-urgent-warning-1236503258/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in his review: it follows officials in the White House Situation Room, STRATCOM, and the US President (played by Idris Elba) as they have just minutes to figure out who fired the missile and how to retaliate. This feels very much like two books that I've read: Jacobsen's, which plays with a similar premise and follows the story minute by minute (it's good until it goes a bit off the rails) and Jeffrey Lewis's [*The 2020 Commission Report On The North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The U.S.: A Speculative Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328573919?ref=andrewliptak.com), which recounts a nuclear strike against the US by the North Koreans in a similar fashion. [Book review: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie JacobsenA scary, flawed warning about the dangers posed by our nuclear arsenal![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-283.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8460.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/) Lewis is a leading figure in the world of nuclear proliferation: he's the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and writes a blog, [*Arms Control Wonk*](https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I interviewed him about [his book came out in 2018](https://web.archive.org/web/20191217203159/https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/8/17649588/north-korea-nuclear-attack-2020-commission-report-jeffrey-lewis-book-interview), where he noted that he had been writing a lot about North Korea's nuclear program and how the US's own strategic stance could break down in the event of an attack. Essentially, he uses the book to highlight how quickly a nuclear war can escalate: an ICBM equipped with a nuclear weapon can reach its target around the world in a frighteningly short amount of time, and because the US and USSR had adopted a strategy of hitting back, working one's way down the decision tree to figure out one's next steps takes place in a very, very small window of time. [Front lines in the Cold WarThe Green Mountain State was once home to a pair of missile silos armed with ICBMs![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-284.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/370184708_10223385802729371_607590677793796548_n-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-atlas-missiles-cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis/) A big part of the issue here is the sheer size of the stockpile of nuclear warheads that we're amassed over the course of the cold war, slowly building up our reserves to counter the Soviet Union's arsenal. As the nuclear club has grown bigger (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the UK, and Pakistan have all developed nuclear weapons)[\[1\]](#fn1), so too has the threat of escalation into a global conflict that devastates the war in a matter of hours. Lewis made an interesting point when I interviewed him: > The way that I treated that historical and structural baggage kind of pins down the people who have to make the decisions, and they’re not really free in an important sense to make any decisions. They’re stuck in a really specific circumstance that puts them in a particular direction. What I care about is how these factors constrained someone like a chief of staff, who can see that this is going a bad way. But because of those structural factors, they can’t figure out how to get out of the rut. In a lot of ways, we've boxed ourselves into a corner with these decisions already, and if a nuclear warhead is launched, it's a pretty sure thing that it won't be the last on that day. --- 1. South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus all had nuclear weapons, but gave them up. [↩︎](#fnref1) From the looks of things, Bigelow is playing with a similar idea: if the U.S. detects a nuclear weapon headed our way, the opportunity to realistically mitigate the threat has long since passed because it's so baked into a system that moves quicker than a leader can really process. The real chance to reduce the threat to the world is to cut down on the stockpiles of nuclear weapons: something that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons sought to accomplish when it went into force in 1970 (and extended indefinitely in 1995), while Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons seeks to eliminate them completely (none of the nuclear-armed countries have signed onto it.) This type of diplomatic work is difficult and requires long-term commitment from parties around the world, and it's not always effective. In 2019, President Donald Trump pulled the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that the US and USSR had signed in 1987, which limited both countries from producing or using missiles that could travel between \~300 to \~3000 miles. And of course, there's the ongoing issue with Iran's own nuclear ambitions and the back-and-forth on its efforts to create a nuclear bomb. This is really the nightmare scenario, cued in by Sagan's narration. Our collective nuclear stockpile means that our existence – beyond national borders and civilization – as a species, is put in a more perilous position, one that can change because of decisions made by a very, very small handful of people. There's a limit to what art can practically do here beyond raise awareness, but I don't think enough people truly recognize the situation we've put ourselves in, and shining a spotlight on it seems to be Bigelow's goal. [Speaking in Venice during the premiere of the film](https://deadline.com/2025/09/kathryn-bigelow-netflix-a-house-of-dynamite-venice-1236503879/?ref=andrewliptak.com), she noted that she hoped that "the film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons," and that "hope against hope maybe we reduce the global stockpile someday, but in the meantime we are really living in a house of dynamite." ### Technical challenges, creative solutions URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/aidan-moher-fight-magic-items-jrpg-book-history-review/ Last updated: 2025-09-11T15:05:13.000Z I'm [biased](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com), but I'm a big fan of nonfiction that explores the state of genre fiction. Give me a [biography of](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com) [a science fiction author](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062571953?ref=andrewliptak.com), [histories of the repositories](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781541603721?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [stores](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593299920?ref=andrewliptak.com) or the [films that stick with us](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827074?ref=andrewliptak.com) any day and I'll be a very happy reader. These works examine the fabric that makes up popular culture, and which work to understand the complicated creative elements that inspire fans, gamers, readers, and viewers that ultimately connect us to one another in our shared passions. For that reason, I've had Aidan Moher's book [*Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780762479634?ref=andrewliptak.com)on my to-read shelf for far too long: and I'm glad that I finally got to it. It's an in-depth exploration of a genre that I know little about, and having read it, it fills in a little bit of the map of the pop culture world that had been cloudy for me while also reminding me of the power that storytellers wield. I've known Aidan for years – I was an avid reader of his Hugo Award-winning blog [*A Dribble of Ink*](https://aidanmoher.com/blog/?ref=andrewliptak.com) when blogs were ascendant in the SFF ecosystem, and he published a couple of pieces of mine during its run (You should also check out his latest effort, his newsletter [*Astrolabe*](https://astrolabe.aidanmoher.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)) – and I've long admired his enthusiasm for storytelling, epic fantasy fiction, and his obsession with pixelated games of the 1980s and 1990s. We're of a similar generation and temperament, and where I steered off into the depths of *Star Wars* fandom during my formative years, he took a different path: epic fantasy and video games, particularly the Japanese titles like *Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest,* and *Chronotrigger.* I've never been much of a gamer – the [one game I really played during my childhood](https://web.archive.org/web/20170304163243/https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/4/14783860/the-legend-of-zelda-links-awakening-gameboy-color) was *Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening*, before getting a bit more exposure to the gaming world while I was in high school and college – so the entire world of Japanese roleplaying games is something I never experienced and to be honest, the plethora of games and lore that surrounds it has been something of an imposing obstacle. *Fight, Magic, Items* isn't exactly a guide to *Final Fantasy*: I didn't come away from the book with more than the basics of what each of the titles are about, but that's not what this book is designed to do: it's a work that contextualizes how this particular style of gaming went from a niche product produced by very small teams of developers to become a domineering forces in the gaming world. Moher expertly traces through the work of passionate visionaries who wanted to push console hardware to their limits to tell vivid and memorable stories for players around the world, going far beyond the linear stories that were available at the time. By giving players choices and options, they unlocked the ability to do what storytelling can do best: build up their characters, worlds, emotions, and challenges in ways that were previously only really tellable in fat doorstop epic fantasies. A critical element of this is hardware, and Moher explores how the technological advances between console generations helped developers further realize the potential at their fingertips, but also how the limitations that they frequently butted up against pushed their creative juices. At one point, he recounts how artists, working with limited pixel resolutions, brought characters to life in minute detail – finding ways to make them as expressive as possible and thus better connect to players. As the resolution increased, they found new ways to design and utilize their characters and environments. Another anecdote explored how the PlayStation's improved graphics capabilities allowed for better water effects, prompting one developer to add as many ponds and water scenes as they could get away with. Those better graphics and capabilities allowed for developers to get closer and closer to producing more elaborate and detailed games, but it also came with pitfalls: as time went on, they had to deal with fandoms that came to each game with certain expectations and demands, prompting them to balance that nostalgia against the adventures and worlds they set out to make. Moher does his research, dredging up interviews and speaking with other gamers and journalists covering the field to explore that progression and in doing so, explores how this entire industry came to dominate popular culture today, to the point where an entire generation of creators cite these types of stories as being formative to their own stories. *This* is where this sort of genre nonfiction excels, and *Fight, Magic, Items* proves to be a memorable example: Moher uses this book to go beyond recounting chronology and get to the heart of this segment of popular culture. This is an enthusiastic exploration of not just how these stories are produced, but their impact; how their existence has shaped culture and fandom to explain the world that we live in today. Years ago, in speaking with the late David Hartwell, he recounted that at one point, science fiction fandom was small enough that someone could keep abreast of the entire field: all you had to do was read 30 or so books or magazines each month, and you'd consume the entire output of the field. Science fiction has long since grown past that point; it's become a galaxy of choices, so much so that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. As we retreat to our own familiar fandoms and walled gardens, we miss out on how all of these different strains of genre fiction, whether it's a *Star Wars* story, installment of *Final Fantasy*, story in the latest issue of *Asimovs',* or latest hit novel, interact with one another in a plethora of ways, colliding and combining to inform the shape of pop culture in the present, and guiding the creative impulses of the next generation of artists, creators, fans, and writers. *Fight, Magic, Items* is a solid reminder that creative movements are the unique vision of an individual creator's influences and interests, and while they can start out small, through trial and error, hardware limits, language barriers, and industry trends, they can become the next domineering force that entrances the entertainable. I'm still not likely going to become a *Final Fantasy* fan after reading this, or go out and start investing my time and money into old consoles and games. But I do have a Super Nintendo Mini, and it does have *Final Fantasy III* and *Secret of Mana* on it: this might be the push I need to at least see what I missed out on all those years ago. [ ](https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Aidan+Moher&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### 13 new SF/F books to check out in September 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-book-list-september-2025/ Last updated: 2025-09-09T17:41:34.000Z September marks the start of the really busy book-buying season, and a quirk of the calendar means that there are five Tuesdays in the month this year. With some rare exceptions, Tuesdays are the days that new books are released. I've seen a bunch of reasons for this: it's timed to coincide with how bestseller lists are compiled, they're slower sales days, it frees up Monday for publishers to prepare the day before, and so forth. Whatever the reason, it means we've got five weeks of new books to look forward to this month. September 2025? It's jam-packed (I count nearly 50 titles!), so I'm going to do something I've never done before: split the list into three batches. I'll have one for the first two weeks, another for the middle of the month, and another for the last couple of weeks. Okay, here are 13 new books to check out this month. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Angel Maker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780986373572?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Bear (September 2nd) Elizabeth Bear's bringing out her second book of the year: *Angel Maker*. It's a steampunk novel and is the sequel to 2016's [*Karen Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765375254?ref=andrewliptak.com) and her 2018 novella [*Stone Mad*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250163837?ref=andrewliptak.com). She opted to go the self-publishing route for this one, and it picks up the story of frontier woman Karen Memery and her companion Priya, who've found work on a motion picture about a rogue robot called Cowboy in the wild west. Mid-production, she finds the horse of her dreams: Angel Maker, and she hatches a plan to rescue him from the production's deadly stunts. Her plans are derailed when two men are murdered and Priya and Cowboy are arrested for the crime, and it's up to Karen to clear their names and save her new beloved horse. ### [*One Last Game*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880340?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T.A Chan (September 9th) In the 22nd century, the world has figured out a new way to wage war: violent wargames. This book follows the players of the Atlantic Archipelago Nation's Battle Team, and its star player, Niko Vandes wants to quit. He can't though: the games they play are critical to the ongoing war, and the stakes are incredibly high. Niko's only escape will be to play until he dies, or escapes. ### [*Gnomes of Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250388278?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Cornell (September 9th) Paul Cornell brings his *Witches of Lychford* ([*Witches of Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765385239?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Lost Child of Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389770?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*A Long Day in Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765393180?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Lights Go Out in Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250249470?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Last Stand in Lychford*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250752130?ref=andrewliptak.com)) series to a close with *Gnomes of Lychford*. A new threat has presented itself to the town of Lychford: gnomes. Some modern design has run up against an ancient prophecy and now the people of the town have to figure out how to save their community before King Greg, the leader of the gnomes calls in the terms of a promise made long ago. ### [*An Unbreakable World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837865796?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ren Hutchings (September 9th) Ren Hutchings' latest is set in the same world as her 2022 novel [*Under Fortunate Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781786185938?ref=andrewliptak.com), but it stands on its own. It follows a thief named Page Found, who's unaware of her past: she's been working hard to survive on an isolated outpost, and ends up getting kidnapped by the people she's trying to rob. The kidnappers are Zhak and Maelle, who plan to use her as decoy monk to try and get onboard a ship that's loaded down with treasure. If Page can play along, they'll cut her in for her troubles. As they plot, they realize that everyone has their own secrets and motivations: Maelle has her own loyalties and is conflicted, while Page isn't sure if she can trust either – something they'll have to learn in order to survive. ### [*The Macabre*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063450868?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kosoko Jackson (September 9th) A painter named Lewis Dixon is surprised when the British Museum shows interest in his art. He's often felt a powerful pull to put his art to canvas, particularly a painting that he made that's a surreal and horrific reimagining of one his great-grandfather produced more than a century ago. Despite his reservations, he accepts the museum's invitation and it turns out that they have a particular interest in what he does: to see if the state he enters when he’s painting is actually magic and connected to the strange paintings his great-grandfather produced decades ago, paintings that tap into a deep eldritch power and which now have people seeking them – and now, seeking Lewis's abilities for their own purposes. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063394469?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying it's "a page-turning, continent-spanning adventure that combines elements of psychological horror and gore with dark humor and a queer romance between Lewis and Noah, whose businesslike demeanor hides a complex and tragic past." ### [*Changelog*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880333?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Rich Larson (September 2nd) I really like Rich Larson's short fiction (I published a story by him in my anthology [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and he's a pretty prolific guy. He published a collection back in 2018 called [*Tomorrow Factory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781945863400?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now he's brought together some more of his short stories in *Changelog*, ranging from biopunk stories set in West Africa all the way to a generation ship in the depths of space. ### [*The Maiden and her Monster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250367754?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maddie Martinez (September 9th) Malka is the daughter of a healer, and has long watched how the forest surrounding her small village has caused problems for her family. The Ozmini Church hasn't helped: it only collects its dues, but doesn't protect them, and when one of the church's girls wanders into the forest and vanishes, they accuse Malka's mother of her murder. Malka strikes a bargain with them: if she can bring out the monsters and show them, they'll spare her mother. But when she goes into the forest, she finds that the monsters aren't what she's imagined: it's a disgraced golem who agrees to help her, but only if she'll help her find the rabbi who created her. ### [*Making History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250835789?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K. J. Parker (September 2nd) The ruler of Aelia has been itching for war against a neighboring country, and to justify his actions, he gathers a group of professors for a talk. His goal is to get them to rewrite history in such a way that glorifies his nation's story, and if they don't go along with it, they'll be imprisoned. To further the ruse, they have to oversee a massive, fake ancient city that'll provide "evidence" for their claims. Writing for *Grimdark Magazine*, Adrian Collins [says](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-making-history-by-k-j-parker/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "is an almost perfect modern dark fantasy novella. It’s insightful, holds a mirror up to our society, and is such a fun way to spend a few short hours reading." ### [*Coffin Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593733400?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Keith Rosson (September 9th) A Portland bartender has his life upended when he encounters a vampire. Duane Minor is home after a stint in Vietnam in 1975, and when he accidentally encounters John Varley, Varley murders his wife, Heidi. Stricken with grief and vengeance, Duane and his niece Julia work their way through the Pacific Northwest looking for the killer, encountering a grim underworld as they do so. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/coffin-moon-1817647?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it "has a wide focus and will be a delight for anyone who has even the inkling of interest in a fantastically told vampire revenge tale." ### [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Scalzi (September 16th) The 7th installment of Scalzi's *Old Man's War* series comes as the [first novel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) turns 20 years old in 2025\. Set after the events of [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), where humanity had figured out a peace settlement with the Conclave, a consortium of alien civilizations that had been competing for galactic real estate. A decade into that peace, a new threat has emerged: the Consu, an advanced civilization (who we first encountered in *Old Man's War*) have descended into a jarring civil war, a conflict that threatens to drag the Colonial Union, Earth, and the Conclave into it. A former Colonial Union diplomat, Gretchen Trujillio (a familiar name from [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)), is called in to assist with a diplomatic mission that could forever upend the balance of power in the galaxy. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-scalzi/the-shattering-peace/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Scalzi enjoys constructing intricate puzzle-box crises that somehow the protagonist is just the right person at the right time with the right amount of smarts to defuse, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds," and that it was "classic Scalzi space opera at its wisecracking, politically pointed, and, somehow, fiercely optimistic finest." [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-91.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) ### [*A Ruin, Great and Free*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781094175904?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cadwell Turnbull (September 16th) I've been a big fan of Cadwell Turnbull's writing, and with this book, he brings his *Convergence Saga* (preceded by [*No Gods, No Monsters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200834419?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*We Are the Crisis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212877169?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which the real world is confronted by the emergences of a number of supernatural creatures, upending society. Two years after the US was rocked by violent, anti-monster riots, the inhabitants of Moon have established a hidden home where they've been able to find some measure of peace, even as the rest of the world becomes more chaotic. But they soon face new challenges as people hunting after them are coming closer, and as cults want to use them as a proxy for their own fight. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/a-ruin-great-and-free?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "stunning in its emotional depth while still appealing to readers looking for an action-filled fantasy." ### [*You Weren't Meant to Be Human*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668038079?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Joseph White (September 9th) A strange entity has made its home in the depths of Appalachia: "the hive" is made up of malevolent worms that have gathered up a cult around it: in exchange for their loyalty and dead bodies, they offer up salvation to those who join them. A trans man named Crane has joined their numbers, hoping for a new start. There, he meets Levi, an ex-Marine and murdered who at first seems to treat him well, but when he's impregnated by his abusive partner, the hive demands their child, and pressured into carrying the baby to term, he threatens to break apart the entire community. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668038079?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Stomach-churning gore pairs with quieter but equally disturbing moments of psychological horror as Crane fights for the bodily autonomy that others are trying to strip away from him. The result is both a brilliant, page-turning piece of trans splatterpunk body horror and an earnest, heart-rending tragedy." ### [*Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! Interviews with Science Fiction Legends*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964429?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Richard Wolinsky (September 2nd) How did the modern science fiction genre come to be? In this volume, Richard Wolinsky compiles more than 50 radio interviews with authors ranging from Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and many others. It looks like a fascinating exploration of the genre. --- ### Iterate, iterate, iterate URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-cover-design-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-vermont-history/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T13:00:35.000Z Last month, [I published an interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-clarence-darrow-book-interview/) I conducted with Jeffrey Amestoy, the author of the next book from the Vermont Historical Society: [*Winters Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/winters-time-a-secret-pledge-a-severed-head-and-the-murder-that-brought-america-s-most-famous-lawyer-to-vermont/1500?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false&ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm excited about this one: we're releasing it on September 16th, and it's something a little different from the books that we've published in the recent past: it falls a bit more into the true crime and legal thriller category. It's nonfiction, but it's a slick and well-written narrative that reads a bit like a novel. In what's becoming something of a series, I've been jotting down notes for the last couple of months as I helped design the cover for it. Last fall, I wrote about how the [design process for our book *Ira Allen: A Biography*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-biography-publishing-cover/) played out, and [again this spring when we released *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-historical-society-covid-19-garrett-graff-book-cover/). [Uncovering Vermont’s most notorious murder trialAn interview with Jeffrey L. Amestoy, author of Winters’ Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-275.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-Modern-Travel-City-Vlog-Photo-Collage-YouTube-Thumbnail-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-clarence-darrow-book-interview/) Going into this particular project, I realized that this was going to be a very different sort of book than the others. I've been describing it as a true crime and legal history that explores a particularly dramatic episode of Vermont's history – a far cry from the "Dad history" that is *Ira Allen: A Biography* and the in-the-moment nonfiction document that is *Life Became Very Blurry*. Both of those books needed covers that conveyed different things: the subject for *Ira Allen* and a stark image for *Blurry*. *Winters' Time* would need something a little different. Because this cover has to accomplish some different things, I started looking through Amazon and Bookshop for "historical true crime" to see what types of covers popped up. There are a lot of different variations for that, but something that jumped out at me wasn't a book, but a podcast cover for [*Dark Down East: New England True Crime*](https://darkdowneast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/image-2.png) What I liked about this cover is the big, bold type. It wouldn't exactly work for our book, because the words that make up our title and subtitle are long, but I liked the vibes it gave off. For my starting point, I went back to *Blurry* and swapped out some images of Windsor, where the crime in question took place. I also decided to fiddle with the subtitle a bit to get a feel for what worked. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--3-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--2-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--1-.png) The first couple of attempts that I made, with images based on the town of Windsor, where the murder took place. Those first versions were... not great: the images aren't the most inspiring and where for *Blurry* we had a central object in the middle, this layout meant that there was a big hole in the middle. And these images don't really *convey* anything about true crime. So, into the trash can they went. Doing some googling, I came across a very lucky break: Darrow was [actually photographed](https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:5x21tk42j?ref=andrewliptak.com) during the trial that the book is all about. It's a good image, too: stark and historical, which I thought suited this sort of book nicely. And, with Darrow in the center, it let me keep roughly the same structure: title on top, subtitle, and author's byline at the bottom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--1-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--3--2.png) A trio of early covers featuring Clarence Darrow I played around with a handful of variations on the title and subtitle: this version felt a bit more historical than true crime, but I liked the overall look. My wife's response to all of these were: "these are boring" and "why on earth would you remove the words 'severed head' from the subtitle?" "Severed head" went back in. I took a break from this project to focus on some other things, but as the production date moved closer, we returned to it in earnest over the summer. This is where we brought in Amestoy, who liked the image of Darrow. With a couple of months to mull it over, I decided to put together some alternatives. I started with the same elements, but with something a little more formal, based loosely on the cover for [*Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America*](https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/starkweather/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Harry N. MacLean: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--30-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--29-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--28-.png) One of the issues that I began to find was that there were three big blocks of text that we needed: the title itself (two words of differing length), a longish subtitle, and the byline and its subtitle. Placing those in a way that made sense was proving to be troublesome, especially with a subject right in the middle. I tried a couple of alternatives: one with the title off to the side, another in the middle, and another with some graphics providing some needed negative space. They all give the right vibe, and I like the change in font: it feels al little more refined and historical, and less sensational. But this is a book that touches on legal history and true crime and I was starting to find this version is a little dull: when I sent a batch of covers to some friends that I've used as a sounding board, these versions didn't really stand out all that much. So I went back to scanning through other books for inspiration, and liked what the designers did for Michelle McNamara's [*I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer*](https://www.amazon.com/Ill-Be-Gone-Dark-Obsessive-ebook/dp/B07HF88TL7?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Daniel Sweren-Becker's [*Kill Show: A True Crime Novel*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/kill-show-daniel-sweren-becker?variant=41366121054242&ref=andrewliptak.com), featuring big, bold text for the title. Those were dramatic and looked good, but didn't have a central subject: the covers convey what they're about with the image and text for a vibe. So for this round, I decided to add in some other images, on the off chance that we couldn't license the image of Darrow. I searched through [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for "Vermont" and found [these](https://unsplash.com/photos/an-aerial-view-of-a-small-town-surrounded-by-mountains-byQcJBVrLp8?ref=andrewliptak.com) [two](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-mountain-with-trees-and-bushes-RQoyyz1O3QM?ref=andrewliptak.com) photographs that I thought would work well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--33--1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--35--1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--31-.png) I decided to change up the text for this round, splitting the title and sticking the subtitle in the middle to see how that looked. I liked parts of it: The bigger font size helped distinguish the title, while the subtitle and byline worked pretty well in between the two. But my colleagues weren't a huge fan of that split title, so inverted it: I put the title in the middle, the subtitle at the top, and the byline at the bottom. I also ditched the foliage image: it didn't convey the right feeling to me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--34-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--36-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/Copy-of-Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--38-.png) The image with the town really popped with this layout: it neatly telegraphs Vermont without feeling too boring. I also wanted to see how it would look with the Darrow image as well, so I came up with a pair of versions: one with the title dead in the center, and another with the title offset to the left a bit. It still feels very "true crime" but historical at the same time. My sounding board and colleagues also keyed in to the first image as well. We had found our cover! Except we didn't. We ended up rejecting it: Amestoy wanted to retain a more historical and accurate image (the image is of Stowe, not Windsor), and while I found a similar image of Windsor that we could likely figure out how to use, we quickly realized that this more contemporary image leaned more into the true crime vibe than it did historical legal story that we were looking for. So: back to the drawing board. After a little back and forth, we decided to rewind and go back to the Darrow image, and I secured permission to use it. With at least the image locked in, we could figure out how to place the words around its subject. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--3--4-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--3--8--1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/Winter-s-Time-prototype-cover--3--9--1.png) Amestoy liked one of the original title configurations, so I redid it, adjusting the colors and layout a bit, and came up with a new version: the title with the subtitle tucked into it, with Amestoy's name at the bottom. I also toyed with some of the other things that I liked with the town version: the title in the middle, but it became pretty apparent that we needed the middle uncluttered with text. On a whim, I wanted to see what it would look like with a bit of color: white on a black and white image felt very stark to me, and running through a bunch of different colors, a rich yellow-gold really worked for us. The color looked good, but we wanted some variation to differentiate the title and subtitle, so we decided to keep the subtitles white while keeping the title and byline yellow. From there, we handed everything over to Jim Brisson, our designer, who whipped it into shape: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/Winters-Time-Large-Version-2.jpg) Image: Vermont Historical Society I'm pleased with how this came out: it feels historical and captures the feeling of this book without coming off as overly sensational or dramatic (the subtitle carries that dramatic weight nicely.) What I appreciate about this particular cover was the iterative process: we went through a lot of different ideas to get to this final one, trying out a whole bunch of different directions before landing on the final version. Ultimately, I think we went through 20-30 different versions before landing on this one. It's a good reminder that sometimes, these things take time to sort out the kinks and issues, and that it's good to take that time. That final version was close to one of the earlier prototypes that I put together, and while we ultimately circled back to it, I found the entire process to be useful: taking in our author's input, and the input from a wider range of book-minded friends, booksellers, and colleagues, and figuring out which elements worked well with the image, and which didn't. Looking at the final version, I can see the lessons that we learned along the way embedded in there: how the title and subtitle work together and how the image conveys the subject and vibe for the whole package. And, while I still really like the version with the town in it, I can appreciate how switching out the image can change the tone of the entire book, which will ultimately shape how people will approach it when they pick it up off a bookstore shelf. And who knows? Maybe we'll return to a variation on that at some point. The book will hit stores next week, and I'm pretty pleased with how the final version looks. Moreover, I'm excited to see what people think about it when they pick it up. And soon, we'll move onto the next one, which I'm super excited about and already have some ideas for what that might look like. Stay tuned. ### Table of Contents: September 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/table-of-contents-septe/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T19:51:31.000Z Here's the latest installment of Table of Contents, which rounds up this month's short fiction releases. You can check out the list of stories from August [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-fiction-asimovs-analog-clarkesworld-uncanny/) (which I've updated with new links) and past installments of this series [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July-September, Issue 150) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Changeling](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/changeling?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Frey Lylark (9/9) (Flash) - "[Mother Sun](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/mother-sun?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amy Nagopaleen (9/23) ### Nonfiction "[Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/words-for-thought-short-fiction-review-3?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by AC Wise (9/30) "[Review of *The Inescapable March* by Hana Carolina](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/book-review-hana-carolinas-the-inescapable-march?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rebecca E. Treasure (9/4) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**September / October 2025** *Vol., XCV No. 9 & 10* ) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Suspended Animation" by Jay Werkheiser & Julian Michael Carver - "Not in My Valley" by M.L. Clark - "In a Desolate Garden" by Auston Habershaw - "Donacon" by Paul E. Franz - "Elector" by Stephen Case - "Rust" by David D. Levine - Ontario Lacus" by Pauline Barmby - "You are Hearby Notified That You Are the Future of Art" by Anya Markov - "Scarecrow" by Timothy Quinn - "Boys and Girls Together" by Larry Niven - "Genius, Borrowed and Brief" by Julia Darcy - "Analog Equivalent Foodstuffs" by Kate Macleod - "A Shot in the Dark" by Avery Parks - "Temple in the Night" by Louis Evans - "Seedling" by Al Onia - "Carried on the Wind" by Steven Mohan, Jr. - "The New People" by David McGillveray - "A Simple Martian Burial" by Tom Jolly - "Girl With the Tattooed Soul" by Mark W. Tiedemann - "Music of the Spheres" by Jim Murdoch - "Looking Back" by Arthur H. Manners ### Nonfiction - Drycanes and Wasps, Kevin Walsh - Guest Editorial: The Blind Men and the Hurricane, Stanley Schmidt - The Alternate View by John G. Cramer - In Times to Come - Guest Alternate View: The Solar Storm That Nearly Created Armageddon by Richard A. Lovett - The Reference Library by Sean CW Korsgaard - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**September / October 2025** *Vol. 49 Nos. 9 & 10*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Ghost" by John Kessel - "The Signal and the Idler" by Ted Kosmatka - "A Tide of Paper" by Leah Cypess - "The Last of Operation Shroud" by Alexander Jablokov - "Tenth Contact" by Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo - "Strays" by Scott William Carter - "The Expurgator" by Shiwei Zhou - "The Night Heron Rescue" by Alice Towey - "Lolo’s Last Run" by E.M. Kerkman - "Frankenstein’s Book Launch" by Karen Heuler ### Poetry - "Lover Lost" by Richard Schiffman - "Eating With the Dead #2" by Mary Soon Lee - "History" by Vonnie Winslow Crist - "Fine Print" by Ursula Whitcher - "Ten Indicators of Time Drift" by Robert Frazier - "The Last Gods" by David C. Kopaska-Merkel ### Nonfiction - Editorial: 500 by Sheila Williams - Reflections: History as Blip by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Car Talk by James Patrick Kelly - Thought Experiment: The Shining and the Shining and the Shining by Kelly Lagor - On Books by Kelly Jennings --- ## [*Augur Magazine*](https://augursociety.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 8.1) Subscribe [here](https://augursociety.org/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Fateful Reinventions](https://augursociety.org/fateful-reinventions/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Toria Liao - "[Orders](https://augursociety.org/orders/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Grace Seybold - "Beachside Sundays" by Ash Wahking - "If gender is a performance, then all the world’s a stage. Either we should get season tickets, or go on a whim" by Jonathan Bessette - "Strange Children of the Sour Gas" by EC Dorgan - Phi Nang Lum" by P.W. Jarungpiterah - The Belly of The Rock" by Busayo Akinmoju - [Welcome to Spruceway](https://augursociety.org/welcome-to-spruceway/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brianne Battye - Elegy with Transformation Myth" by Sarah Hilton - The Epitaph of Antigone" by Fatima Shafiq - Letter from Distant Star to the Earth" by Jesse Holth - Dark Night Suffused with Stars" by Huijia Li --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Sept. 4th / Sept 18th, Issue 440/441) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Nature of Spells, the Nature of Children](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-nature-of-spells-the-nature-of-children/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden - "[Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/holly-on-the-mantel-blood-on-the-hearth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Francia - "[The Good Life and the Gaze of Staivash](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-good-life-and-the-gaze-of-staivash/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jonathan Olfert - "[Compass Rose, Running](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/compass-rose-running/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Julie Reeser --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(September 2025, Issue 228) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures and Attraction Is When I Do It for You](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - "[Wireworks](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singerling%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sheri Singerling - "[Four People I Need You to Kill Before the Dance Begins](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hall%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Inglis Hall - "[Aperture](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jablokov%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alexander Jablokov - "[The Fury of the Glowmen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/mcgillveray%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David McGillveray - "[Five Impossible Things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dae%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Koji A. Dae - "[A World of Their Own](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/falco%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Robert Falco ### Nonfiction - [What A Cup of Coffee Can Teach Us About Science](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dluzen%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Douglas F. Dluzen - [Brutality and Whimsy: A Conversation with Martin Cahill](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cahill%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Fear, Indecision, and Doubt: A Conversation with Thomas Ha](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: Aftermath of a Worldcon](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F09%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025, Issue 124) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[The Light Over the Lake](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-light-over-the-lake/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Malena Salazar Maciá - “[The Witch Trap](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-witch-trap/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Hudak (reprint) - “[The Toddler](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-toddler/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sanni Omodolapo - “[Prairie Teeth](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/prairie-teeth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by EC Dorgan (reprint) --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (September 2025, Issue 44) ### Fiction - "Angles on an Obscure Plane" by M. M. Valencia - "Dead People Problems" by Simon Berry - "Astyanax and the Red Spider" by Travis Flatt - "Mr. Rumple's Revenge" by George Larson - "The Big Empty" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Passing the Torch" by Thomas Drake - "The Smell" by Ethan Cordeta - "The Replacement" by David Lewis - "The Haze" by Kate Bergquist - "Yellow Eyes" by Jordan Miller[](javascript:void%280%29) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025, Issue 144) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [“Silence, in the Doorway, with the Gun”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/silence-in-the-doorway-with-the-gun/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nadia Radovich - [“The Last Items of the Forgotten Hero or The Grandchild’s First Dragon”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-last-items-of-the-forgotten-hero-or-the-grandchilds-first-dragon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Guan Un - [“Yet Another Unforgettable Luncheon”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/yet-another-unforgettable-luncheon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leo Rein - [“Out of Print”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/out-of-print/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wen Wen Yang - [“Emerald Gears”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/emerald-gears/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Beth Goder - [“The Things You Bought for the Robot”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-things-you-bought-for-the-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stefan Alcalá Slater - [“The Forest Through the Teas”](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-forest-through-the-teas/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy Nikel --- ## [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**Volume 5, Issue 3**) Subscribe [here](https://www.khoreomag.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Closed Doors](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/closed-doors/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Miseon Wu - "[Island Getaway](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/island-getaway/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sonia Focke - "[Toothpaste Feelings](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/toothpaste-feelings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sharang Biswas - "[The Moon’s Forests Burn All Your Life](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-moons-forests-burn-all-your-life/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by brandon brown - "[Symbiote](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/symbiote/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by T. Chiu-Chu - "[Deep Down Inside: Parasitism and Symbiosis](https://www.khoreomag.com/non-fiction/deep-down-inside-parasitism-and-symbiosis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Premee Mohamed --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025) ### Fiction - "[The Way Out](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/the-way-out-pippa-goldschmidt/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pippa Goldschmidt ### Nonfiction - "[The Disaster Flaneur](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/disaster-gambling-kate-gordon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kate Gordon --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025, Issue) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Last Meal Aboard the Awassa](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/last-meal-aboard-the-awassa/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Kel Coleman (9/4) - "[Beginning Before and After The End](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/beginning-before-and-after-the-end/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Jake Stein (9/4) - "[The Place I Came To](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-place-i-came-to/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (9/7) - "[Apeiron](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/apeiron/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cadwell Turnbull (9/11) - "[The Girlfriend Experience](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-girlfriend-experience/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byC.Z. Tacks (9/18) - "[On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/on-an-unusual-kind-of-spatially-distributed-haunting/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byBogi Takács (9/18) - "[City of One](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/city-of-one/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen S. Power (9/25) - "[Human Voices](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/human-voices/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim (9/25) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: September 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-september-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (9/4) - [Book Review: *Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon* by Mizuki Tsujimura](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-lost-souls-meet-under-a-full-moon-by-mizuki-tsujimura-translated-by-yuki-teijima/?ref=andrewliptak.com), translated by Yuki Teijimaby Chris Kluwe (9/4) - [Author Spotlight: Kel Coleman](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-kel-coleman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alex Puncekar (9/7) - [Author Spotlight: Cadwell Turnbull](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-cadwell-turnbull-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mayookh Barua (9/11) - [Book Review: *Novic* by Eugen Bacon](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-novic-by-eugen-bacon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (9/11) - [Author Spotlight: C.Z. Tacks](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-c-z-tacks/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (9/18) - [Book Review: *Where Are You Really From* by Elaine Hsieh Chou](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-where-are-you-really-from-by-elaine-hsieh-chou/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (9/18) - [Author Spotlight: Isabel J. Kim](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-isabel-j-kim-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (9/25) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (September 2025, Issue 063) Subscribe [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Fiction - "Daisies for Going Out, Pansies to Return Home" by Amy Power Jansen - "Going to sea, mother" by Luscha Makortoff - "Underhill Wines" by Tanya Pond - "The Accidental" by K.M. Veohongs - "Top Five Places to Worship Him, Most Terrible" by L. Fox - "To the Moon, Not Back" by Emma Francois - "Grandma and the Krampus" by Teresa Milbrodt - "For Love and Country" by Yelena Crane - "The Price of Gold" by Sanya Dimova - "Women of Nowhere" by Lyra Bird - "Conveyance" by Isobel Mackenzie - "HeartsEase" by Brittany Hague - "The Three Songs" by Gio Clairval - "Where the Wind Sleeps" by Emmie Christie - "Terra" by Laura Stone - "Self-Portrait as ChatGPT" by Sarah Chin - "The Penitent" by M. J. Klimmek - "A Spell for Summer" by Robin Cassini - "The Visitor" by Frances Koziar --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025, Issue 156) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Autogas Ferryman](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/autogas-ferryman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*" by* Champ Wongsatayanont - "[Finishing Touches](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/finishing-touches/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*"* by Adam-Troy Castro (9/10) - "[Safe Face](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/safe-face/?ref=andrewliptak.com)"by Ash Huang (9/17) - "[Blood-Orange](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/blood-orange/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byL.M. Harris (9/24) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: September 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-september-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner - [Author Spotlight: Champ Wongsatayanont](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-champ-wongsatayanont/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar - [The H Word: On Tod Browning’s Undead Memes](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-on-tod-brownings-undead-memes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dan Chaon (9/10) - [Author Spotlight: Ash Huang](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-ash-huang/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (9/17) - [Reviews: September 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/reviews-september-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam-Troy Castro (9/24) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(September 2025) ### Fiction - "[If a Digitized Tree Falls](https://reactormag.com/if-a-digitized-tree-falls-caroline-m-yoachim-ken-liu/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ken Liu and Caroline M. Yoachim - "[Laurie on the Radio](https://reactormag.com/laurie-on-the-radio-sam-davis/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam Davis - "[Freediver](https://reactormag.com/freediver-isabel-j-kim/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025, Issue 27) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Gifted and Talented](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/gifted-and-talented/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marika Bailey - "[Cutting the Cord](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/cutting-the-cord/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Brennan - "[An Insect Who Dreamt She Was a Woman](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/an-insect-who-dreamt-she-was-a-woman/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melanie Mulrooney - "[Five Hundred Defects](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/five-hundred-defects/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Zahniser - "[ACCESS DENIED](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/access-denied/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lydian Kind - "[The Last Sentinels](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-last-sentinels/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dawn Lloyd - "[Princess Lilaclaire and the Witch’s Frog Faire](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/princess-lilaclaire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Indigo Rue - "[Dr. Hypha’s Laboratory](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/dr-hyphas-laboratory/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brian U. Garrison - "[Bee Kept](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/bee-kept/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jordan Hirsch --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Heartbreak Hotel on Plutonic Planet](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-heartbreak-hotel-on-plutonic-planet/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carolyn Zhao - "[The Path Continues](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/the-path-continues/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joyce Chng ### Poetry - "[Graft Versus Host](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/graft-versus-host/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S. Chaudhuri-Perelló - "[Lake Monster Fishing in the South](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/lake-monster-fishing-in-the-south/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Charles Richard Livesay - "[Watching Migrations](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/watching-migrations/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Keyan Bowes - "[The Black Death](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-black-death/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Kozma - "[I Love You like an Apple Tree in Full Bloom](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/i-love-you-like-an-apple-tree-in-full-bloom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Niina Tsuyuki Dubik - "[the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-jacarandas-are-unimpressed-by-your-show-of-force/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gwynne Garfinkle - "[Promised Detonations](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/promised-detonations/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Christopher Morgan - "[Pterosaur](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/pterosaur/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. Frost ### Nonfiction - [Rebooting The Future: On Perry Rhodan, Perry Rhodan NEO, and Two Plots Alike in Dignity](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/rebooting-the-future-on-perry-rhodan-perry-rhodan-neo-and-two-plots-alike-in-dignity/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kyle Tam ### Reviews - Monday: [Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dont-sleep-with-the-dead-by-nghi-vo/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenny Hamilton - Wednesday: [If the Stars Are Lit by Sara K. Ellis](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/if-the-stars-are-lit-by-sara-k-ellis/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Redfern Jon Barrett - Friday: [Supergiants by Kyle Flemmer](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/supergiants-by-kyle-flemmer/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dawn Macdonald - Monday: [There are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/there-are-reasons-for-this-by-nini-berndt/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by E. C. Barrett - Wednesday: [Orphan Planet by Madeehah Reza](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/orphan-planet-by-madeehah-reza/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nileena Sunil - Friday: [Memories From The Jungle by Tristan Garcia, translated by Christopher Beach](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/memories-from-the-jungle-by-tristan-garcia-translated-by-christopher-beach/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Will Emmons - Monday: [Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/uncertain-sons-and-other-stories-by-thomas-ha/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw - Wednesday: [Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology: Issue V edited by Olivia Kidula & Somto Ihezue](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/will-this-be-a-problem-the-anthology-issue-v-edited-by-olivia-kidula-somto-ihezue/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amritesh Mukherjee - Friday: [Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/gifted-talented-by-olivie-blake/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Subham Rai - Monday: [Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/mapping-the-interior-by-stephen-graham-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoenix Scholz - Wednesday: [Menacing Environments by Benjamin Bigelow](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/menacing-environments-by-benjamin-bigelow/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Friday: [The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-afterlife-project-by-tim-weed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jacqueline Nyathi --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September 2025) ### Fiction - "[Large Emotional Models](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/large-emotional-models?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cecilia Tan - "[The Forest Final](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-forest-final?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brenda Cooper - "[A Fallen Angel Rings the Doorbell](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/a-fallen-angel-rings-the-doorbell?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jennifer Hudak - "[Ino’s Hideaway](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/inos-hideaway?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mari Ness --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (September / October 2025, Issue 66) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Whale Fall of Yours](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/whale-fall-of-yours/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. M. Olivas - "[The Caravan](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-caravan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by AnaMaria Curtis - "[The Lure of Stone](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-lure-of-stone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - "[Brooklyn Beijing](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/brooklyn-beijing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Hannah Yang ### Poetry - "[Dreamscape with the Devil](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/dreamscape-with-the-devil/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Taylor Byas - "[The Mourning Robot](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mourning-robot/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu ### Nonfiction - [The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-61/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Cat Physics, Deconstruction, and the Shape of Love](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/cat-physics-deconstruction-and-the-shape-of-love/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by LaShawn M. Wanak - [Dream Journals](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/dream-journals/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Senaa Ahmad - [Thank You, Patreon Supporters!](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/thank-you-patreon-supporters-47/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Thank You, Year 11 Kickstarter Backers!](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/thank-you-year-11-kickstarter-backers/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas --- Check back at the end of the month: I'll update the links to the stories that haven't come out at the time of publication. ### Triple, triple toil and trouble URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/betwitching-silvia-moreno-garcia-witches-horror-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-08-29T19:09:37.000Z One of the delights that Silvia Moreno-Garcia brings with her fiction is an aversion to being pigeonholed into one genre or another. She explored horror in books like [*Mexican Gothic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525620808?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Certain Dark Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250785589?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Silver Nitrate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355381?ref=andrewliptak.com), science fiction in [*The Daughter of Doctor Moreau*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355350?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* noirish thrillers with [*Velvet Was the Night*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593356845?ref=andrewliptak.com), and fantasy in [*Gods of Jade and Shadow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525620778?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* But even those broad descriptions are barely adequate descriptions: those stories rarely adhere to strict genre boundaries, and that's what makes her latest, [*The Bewitching*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874325?ref=andrewliptak.com), such a delight. It's a wonderful blend of the fantastic, pulling in everything from from the types of New England horror imagined by Stephen King to Mexican folklore, academic intrigue, and more. Maybe genre isn't the best way to describe this book. A better way might be to describe it as a story that explores greed and power, wrapped up in a speculative wrapper. Moreno-Garcia sets her story across three periods. In 1908, we meet a young woman named Alba who lives on a remote and declining farm in Mexico. In 1934, we follow a trio of women: Carolyn, Virginia, and Beatrice, all of whom are studying at a women's college called Stoneridge, and Minerva, an introverted Mexican student at Stoneridge in 1998, who's working towards her PhD. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *Some spoilers ahead.* Her subject is Beatrice Tremblay (an homage to fellow horror writer Paul Tremblay, one of several easter eggs that Moreno-Garcia mentions throughout the book), who went on to become a copywriter and minor horror writer later in life. Minerva is a horror fan turned academic at a time before academia began to take genre fiction seriously, and she's been struggling to get her studies moving in the right direction when a couple of events line up for her. One of the students in the dorm she oversees, Thomas Murphy, has abruptly vanished, seemingly overwhelmed with his studies and conflicts with his roommate, while she also encounters Noah Yates, the grandson of Carolyn. Carolyn, as it turns out, is still around, heading up a foundation that sponsors promising students at the university. She also held onto some of Beatrice's journals and papers, including an unpublished manuscript that details the leadup to Virginia's disappearance, a moment that inspired the late author's only horror novel, *The Vanishing*, now the subject of Minerva's research. After some convincing, Carolyn reluctantly allows Minerva to begin looking at the papers, and as she does so, she begins to tease out the complicated relationship the three women shared: Beatrice had a thing for Virginia, while blue-blooded Carolyn wasn't a fan of Virginia's free-spirited and new-money vibes. Beatrice's manuscript and journal reveals that Virginia had begun to experience some strange things: she heard sounds and felt someone watching her, and she begins to believe that something – or someone – is hunting her, and as she learns more, Minerva is reminded of the stories that her great-grandmother Alba recounted to her: her brother goes missing and she too begins to hear and see things, and comes to believe that something has placed a curse on her family. Sinking further into the story, Minerva realizes that she too has begun to experience strange things, hearing people walking behind her, finding her adopted stray cat has been strangled, and other strange happenings. As Moreno-Garcia plays out each story, each of the characters comes to the same realization: they're each being hunted. In Mexico, Alba finds herself at multiple crossroads: her urbanite uncle has returned to their small farm after her father died, and she's gripped between wanting to seek out a more modern lifestyle and adhering to the country's older folklore and ways of life. Virginia communes with spirits and uses what she hears as a sort of guide for her art, and Minerva is drawn to the art of horror. Each are gifted in their own ways, and it seems that that their spark or talent has brought them to the attention of a malevolent entity – a witch, who seeks to tap into the power that they possess, whether it's to further their status or to build or extend their lives and what power they've amassed over the course of their lifetimes. It feels as though witches have in the spotlight lately, from Alix E. Harrow's [*The Once And Future Witches*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316422017?ref=andrewliptak.com) to Charlie Jane Anders' [*Lessons in Magic and Disaster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867322?ref=andrewliptak.com)to Madeline Miller's [*Circe*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316556323?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I think that's because they provide an ideal framework to explore the intersection of femininity and power, dredging up the injustices and misconceptions that have plagued women for centuries. I don't want to spoil the twists that come, but Moreno-Garcia puts her own spin on witches, portraying them not as misunderstood women but as powerful and skillful hunters who wear down their prey with their powers. It's a study in manipulation and greed, showing the terrifying lengths that people will take to grasp power, and how sometimes, the people we think we know aren't to be trusted. It's a timely read in 2025 as we watch leaders across the country given immense power to reshape the country, and how we've seen their greed on full display as they scramble for more. Moreno-Garcia shows that it's a hunger that can never be sated, and that the only way to end it is to find a way to use that greed and lust against them, trapping them with the thing that they're so desperate to get their hands on. Real life rarely plays out like a story in a book, but it's a lesson that rings true to me: sometimes, the downfall of a monster comes down to their own blindness. But first, we have to recognize the nature of the danger that surrounds us and figure out how to lay the trap. Until then, the hunter will remain on the prowl, seeking out its next victim. ### Star Wars: Starfighter is now in production URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-starfighter-production-news/ Last updated: 2025-08-28T17:05:40.000Z The next *Star Wars* film is now officially in production: Lucasfilm has [announced](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-starfighter-cast?ref=andrewliptak.com) that *Star Wars: Starfighter* has set its cast and cameras are rolling in England. It's directed by Shawn Levy and will star Ryan Gosling in the lead, along with Flynn Gray, Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, Simon Bird, Jamael Westman, Daniel Ings, and Amy Adams. The studio [revealed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-familiar-galaxy-far-far-away/) the film back in April at Star Wars Celebration Japan, along with Gosling's casting. The film will be "an entirely original, "standalone story set around five years after the sequel trilogy, and it's slated to be released on May 28th, 2027, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the franchise. The announcement doesn't reveal anything beyond platitudes from Levy about joining the franchise. [A familiar galaxy, far, far awayThe immediate future of Star Wars looks like one thing: comfortable![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-270.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/imago492708327-scaled-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-familiar-galaxy-far-far-away/) This isn't the next *Star Wars* film: *The Mandalorian & Grogu* will hit theaters on May 22th next year, a continuation of the streaming series that launched with Disney+ back in 2019\. A trailer screened at Celebration for the film, and given that we're under a year before that hits, I imagine we'll see a trailer for it at some point in the near future: *Tron: Ares* (October) seems like a good bet for a teaser, and I'd be shocked if we don't get another for *Avatar: Fire and Ash* when that's out in December. Between these two films, we've seen a shift in priorities from Disney: the rush to load up its streaming service with content has subsided, with only a second season for *Ahsoka* in the works. With more attention placed on profitability rather than growth and subscriber numbers, huge, expensive shows like *Andor* just aren't as attractive to the studios and their shareholders, while theaters deliver more tangible deliverables. Disney has even gone as far as taking projects that were intended as streaming shows and transformed them into films, like *Moana 2* and the upcoming *Zootopia 2\.* With *Moana 2*, that bet paid off. *Mandalorian* Jon Favreau had written a [fourth season of the series](https://www.cinemablend.com/star-wars/jon-favreau-confirms-hes-working-on-the-mandalorian-season-4-while-opening-up-about-star-wars-crossover-opportunities?ref=andrewliptak.com), but with the shift, they changed things up and went forward with a movie. It seems like this isn't the basis for the upcoming film: back in January 2024, *The Hollywood Reporter* noted that the series could be converted into another film, provided *Mandalorian & Grogu* does well in theaters. [Will we ever get to see another show like Andor?The streaming world of 2019 is vastly different from that of 2025![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-271.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/star-wars-andor-season-2-first-look-07_b9d644eb-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/) In the meantime, *Starfighter* will have an interesting job to do when it comes out: figuring out the next direction for the franchise. It'll be the first out of the gate without the streaming baggage, and it'll come after the events of *Rise of Skywalker,* effectively giving Levy a blank canvas: they have a starting point with some familiar characters and the state of the world, but they're not really working to tie up any loose ends. I imagine that this film will set the stage for whatever's to come, tone, story, and character-wise, and it's a period that will likely get cluttered up quickly: Simon Kinberg is [working on a post-*Rise of Skywalker* trilogy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-trilogy-simon-kinsberg-news/), while Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is directing a Rey-centric film that's gone through a bunch of drafts. Beyond that, James Mangold is also working on a super-prequel "origins of the Jedi" film on the other end of the chronology. Taika Waititi and Dave Filoni are also supposed to be working on films, but we'll see if those pan out. As I noted back in April, this feels like a very safe bet for Lucasfilm: Levy's got a very proven track record with blockbusters: his recent run of films like *Free Guy, The Adam Project*, and *Deadpool & Wolverine* shows that he's capable of balancing genre, humor, and references, all of which figure quite a bit into these types of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. And of course, there's the half-century anniversary that's going to be hanging over this project from now until it releases. While I want to see Lucasfilm take on more [serious projects like *Andor*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-empire-fascism/), there's also the need to ease into a new era or reboot, much like *The Force Awakens* was both familiar and different when it kicked off the sequel trilogy. Hopefully, it'll be a fun ride that lives up our collective expectations. We'll find out in 2027\. ### Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is getting a special edition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time-scifi-special-edition/ Last updated: 2025-08-23T03:32:46.000Z One of the best space opera novels of recent years is getting a snazzy new edition: Adrian Tchaikovsky *Children of Time*, just in time for its 10th anniversary. *(h/t to Mark W. for the heads up!)* This edition looks like a very nice volume: it comes with a slipcase with art by Donato Giancola, gilded edges, endpaper art, foil-stamped fabric cover, bookmark ribbon, and some additional bonus scenes. The copies will also come signed by Tchaikovsky. It'll be released October 14th, and [will be available only through Orbit](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-tchaikovsky/children-of-time/9780316575690/campaign/?lens=orbit&ref=andrewliptak.com). It'll cost $70, with a 20% discount on preorders (which knocks the price down to $56), which feels pretty reasonable for an edition like this. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/image-1.png) Image: Orbit Books I'm a big fan of this novel. It's set in the distant future, where humanity has been working to send out colonial ships and terraforming missions to various plants in the cosmos. One such mission is headed up by Dr. Avrana Kern, who's putting the finishing touches on a newly-terraformed planet that they've taken to calling "Kern's World". As part of the process, they're sending down a population of monkeys to the surface, accompanied by a specially-devised nanovirus to infect them: it's designed to accelerate their evolution. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Set against the backdrop here is a brewing conflict between anti-technology revolutionaries and those in power back home. One faction has infiltrated Kern's group, and sabotages the experiment: the monkeys perish, and the nanovirus infects a different population: spiders. Back on Earth, the worst happens: war breaks out and devastates the planet, and a pulse is sent out that wrecks most of the colonial infrastructure that the humans have set up. [Spiders! In! Space!Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-266.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time/) Without guidance, Tchaikovsky takes us up through the spider's evolution into an intelligent species that takes over the planet with their own civilization, cutting back to a new human mission that crawls out of the ashes from the wrecked Earth, the *Gilgamesh*, whose passengers are hoping that some of those terraformed worlds are available for colonization. It's a fantastic read, one in which Tchaikovsky explores how societies evolve and fight amongst themselves, but which is ultimately a pretty optimistic read about the future. Tchaikovsky originally published the book in June 2015, and it earned the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. In 2017, [Lionsgate optioned the book for a film adaptation](https://variety.com/2017/film/news/children-of-time-lionsgate-colby-day-1202587725/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but nothing seems to have come of it as of yet. He eventually followed it up with two sequels: [*Children of Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452533?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2019 and [*Children of Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316466516?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2022\. A fourth installment, [*Children of Strife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316598965?ref=andrewliptak.com), is due out in March 2026\. Collectively, the series earned the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023, which Tchaikovsky [later walked back](https://adriantchaikovsky.com/hugo-2023-statement.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), citing the [the controversies over the awards that year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/). This new edition is part of Orbit's [Gold Editions](https://orbitgoldeditions.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which are higher-end re-releases of some of the publishers' best-known works, such as [Fonda Lee's *Green Bone Saga*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fonda-lee-jade-city-green-bone-saga-orbit-gold-edition/), [N.K. Jemisin's *Broken Earth* trilogy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-nk-jemisin-broken-earth-fifth-season-deluxe-edition/) and [Hannah Whitten's *The Wilderwood* duology](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-whitten/the-wilderwood-duology/9780316571982/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). Orbit has also published some special anniversary editions for Ann Leckie's [*Ancillary Justice* and James S.A. Corey's *Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/)*.* [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-267.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) These books are part of a much larger trend in the publishing industry: high-end and special editions of existing books, largely aimed at existing readers and fans who want something that goes beyond the regular trade edition. While these types of editions have been the boon of publishers like Subterranean Press and The Folio Society for decades, regular trade publishers have increasingly gotten in on the game, thanks to the prevalence of influencers on social media and readers looking for something a little different to display, gift, or display. These editions can come with everything from special endpapers, slipcases, original artwork, sprayed edges, and unique covers. ### One of my favorite space operas is coming back to print URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/allen-steele-coyote-sci-fi-space-opera-reprint/ Last updated: 2025-08-22T16:00:19.000Z This is a delightful bit of news: Allen M. Steele [announced on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KxWh43b53/?mibextid=wwXIfr) that his *Coyote* novels are coming back to print, thanks to Open Road Media. The science fiction series is made up of eight installments: an initial trilogy (*Coyote*, *Coyote Rising,* and *Coyote Frontier*), followed by a two-book arc (*Coyote Horizon* and *Coyote Destiny*), followed by three standalone books set in the same world *(Spindrift, Galaxy Blues*, and *Hex*.) He also published a handful of additional short stories set in the world. In his post, Steele explained that the books have been out of print for a while (they have been [available as audiobooks](https://www.audible.com/pd/Coyote-Audiobook/B002V02P3C?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Audible) and that Open Road will release series with new artwork by William W. Connors. *Coyote*, *Coyote Rising,* and *Coyote Frontier* will be released on December 16th, with *Coyote Horizon and Coyote Destiny* arriving on January 20th, 2026, and *Spindrift, Galaxy Blues*, and *Hex* coming on February 17th. In an email, Steele confirmed that the books would come out in both digital and paperback editions. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/coyote-header-1.jpg) The new covers for the first three installments. Art: William W. Connors *Coyote* begins in 2070, where the United States is ruled by an fascist, right-wing regime that came to power after the "Second American Revolution." In an attempt to show off their technical prowess and to take their ideology beyond Earth, the government builds an interstellar starship, the URSS *Alabama*, which will transport colonists to the 47 Ursae Majoris system, about 45.3 light-years from Earth. As the mission is preparing to leave, its captain, Robert E. Lee, upends their plans: he and his allies replaced the vetted colonists with political dissidents and hijacks the ship, hoping to escape the oppression. The ship takes around 230 years to head out to the system, which is home to a gas giant named Bear with a habitable moon: Coyote. The passengers are put into suspended animation, and midway through the journey, one of them, Leslie Gillis, is awakened and endures a solidary existence for the rest of his life, writing a children's book on the walls and observing an alien spacecraft at one point. When the crew arrives in 2300, they find that Gillis's awakening has severely depleted their supplies, and they have to accelerate their plans to set up a colony on the moon, which proves to be a challenging time, and they have to contend not only with the Coyote's seasons and weather, but the lifeforms that are already living there. In the following novels, Steele explores the development of the colony and their own struggles to form a new society and government, as well as the arrival of a new wave of colonists from Earth who come with a very different ideology, worldview, and intentions for Coyote. [Voyaging to Allen M. Steele’s CoyoteA stellar book about interstellar colonization![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-261.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0138.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/coyote-allen-steele-science-fiction-book-review/) In a lot of ways, *Coyote* feels like a welcome and somewhat updated throwback to the Golden Age of science fiction. It's a book that has a little bit of everything to it, from hard SF problem solving to political commentary to youthful adventures on a new frontier. There's a reason for that, structure and story-wise. In a [2009 interview](https://sciencefictionmusings.blogspot.com/2009/06/allen-m-steele-interview.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) with Ann Wilkes, Steele explained that he had trouble cracking the idea for the story: it "went through a decade-long gestation period, during which I attempted twice to write it as a normal linear novel. But the story was much too complex for the traditional novel form, so I had to come up with a different way of doing this." His solution was to look back at some of the genre's classics: "I read and collect a lot of old SF, including magazines from the 30's and 40’s, and it was around this time that I re-read some classics – Asimov’s *Foundation* trilogy, and also Clifford Simak’s *City* – in their original forms as story cycles published in *Astounding*," he explained. "It occurred to me that this form, which had largely fallen out of use during the last few decades, might be my solution to the problem." The result is something known as a [fixup novel](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/e-van-vogt-and-fix-novel/?ref=andrewliptak.com): a book made up of a series of stories that come together to form a cohesive narrative. Between 2000 and 2001, Steele published "The Boid Hunt" (June 2000, *Star Colonies*), "Stealing Alabama" (January 2001, *Asimovs*), "The Days Between" (March 2001, *Asimovs*), "Coming to Coyote" (July 2001, *Asimovs*), "Liberty Journals" (October 2001, *Aismovs*), and "Glorious Destiny" (*Coyote,* later *Asimovs*). He then published them together as a novel in 2002\. As a genre, science fiction has often explored colonization, sometimes drawing from historical examples like the British Empire and American expansion into western North America. It's often been something of a product of its time, as authors uncritically plopped settlers down onto inhabited worlds and readers followed along as humans took their place. As the genre matured, so too did the authors and the stories they told: Ursula K. Le Guin's *The Word for World is Forest* is a striking example, as is Karen Traviss's fantastic 2003 short story "Suitable for the Orient." In his interview with Wilkes, Steele explained that *Coyote* was his attempt to explore elements of America's colonial history: > "The first three novels \[are\] about the settlement of a frontier. However, the Old West wasn’t my source of inspiration. Instead, I was thinking more about the first American frontier: New England, where I live now, and the South, where I was born and raised. If you look at what was going on in those regions during the 1600’s and 1700’s – the exploration of the New World, the gradual expansion of early settlements, the political conflicts between Europe and its colonies – then you’ll see where the parallels lie." The resulting books are a nuanced, interesting look at what it's like to set down roots on an alien world. If I had to pick a personal top ten list for my favorite science fiction novels, *Coyote* would be somewhere in the mix. These are fun and thought-provoking novels, and I'm personally glad to see that they'll be available for new readers to discover. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/IMG_0138.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak Steele began the series in 2001, and earned considerable acclaim over the course of their run. John Clute [notes](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steele%5Fallen?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the *Science Fiction Encyclopedia* that "*Coyote* represents a serious take on the possibilities of a human future in the universe," and described Steele as "an author whose grasp is broad, and focused toward futures in which *Homo sapiens* has a chance of flourishing. For this alone, he is an important representative of mature Genre SF." The stories were well-regarded by readers too: both "Stealing Alabama" and "The Days Between" were nominated for the 2002 Hugo and Locus awards in their categories – "Stealing Alabama" earned that year's *Asimovs* Readers Awards, and was also nominated for a Nebula (Days Between would earn a Nebula nod the following year), while "Coming to Coyote" and "Liberty Journals" were also finalists for the *Asimovs* Readers Awards. As a novel, *Coyote* was a finalist for both the 2003 Locus and Prometheus Awards. A handful of stories that made up *Coyote Rising* also earned a slew of nominations for a variety of awards. Despite that acclaim and goodwill, the novels eventually fell out of print. In his post, Steele explained that there were some complicated reasons, which he expanded in an email: Ace Books let the physical editions fall out of print, but the eBooks were available for a while. When Steele's longtime agent, Sterling Lord's Martha Millard, [abruptly retired in 2018](https://locusmag.com/2018/09/millard-retires/?ref=andrewliptak.com), he was also dealing with his own health issues, and "wasn't paying much attention to his backlist." Following his recovery, Steele explained that he faced new troubles as he worked to rebuild his career: "for a brief time I was represented by a literary agent who persuaded me that he could get better royalties for the *Coyote* books from another publisher than what I was presently getting from Penguin, if I’d let him seek rights-reversion for the entire series from Ace." That plan didn't pan out: Steele says that this agent didn't shop the book around, but instead planned to publish them himself and charge Steele for the expenses against his royalties. Steele was eventually able to get out of the situation, and returned to his old agency at Sterling Lord. From there, he was able to bring the Coyote novels to Open Road Media, [which was already publishing other books](https://openroadmedia.com/contributor/allen-steele?ref=andrewliptak.com) from his back catalog. But the episode lasted years, meaning that the books weren't readily available to readers. While used copies of the books are generally available, that's different from a publisher actively selling them: there's nobody to make sure that they're available in stores. Readers who might be looking to download the eBook right away would find that the option wasn't available: the crucial "Available Instantly" Kindle link was missing from the product pages. As a result, the episode means years of absent potential royalties for Steele. --- With the *Coyote* novels coming back to print, they'll once again be readily available to a new group of readers, and maybe, it could lead to a return to the world for some new adventures. Steele left the series close out in 2011 with *Hex*, a standalone book about an expedition to a Dyson sphere built by an alien civilization known as the danui, who appeared in the other Coyote novels. He moved onto other projects, publishing a series of books featuring Edmond Hamilton's pulp hero Captain Future ([*Avengers of the Moon*](https://www.amazon.com/Avengers-Moon-Captain-Future-Novel/dp/0765382180/ref=tmm%5Fhrd%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Captain Future in Love*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798227270245?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Guns of Pluto*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798227877635?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*1,500 Light Years From Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798227577894?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Horror at Jupiter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798227402387?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Lost Apollo*](https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Future-Apollo-Allen-Steele/dp/B0D9RBYV3V?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Multiverse War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798231210961?ref=andrewliptak.com).) He wrote some other other hard science fiction novels along the way: 2016's [*Arkwright*](https://www.amazon.com/Arkwright-Allen-Steele/dp/0765382156/ref=tmm%5Fhrd%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=andrewliptak.com) (here's [my review](https://gizmodo.com/allen-m-steeles-arkwright-is-a-sweeping-epic-about-the-1761531434?ref=andrewliptak.com) from when it was first published) and 2021's [*Sanctuary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781515447740?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which followed a similar path as *Coyote*: stitched together from shorter works he published in magazines. Steele explained to me that he has some other *Coyote* stories that he had published that he hadn't collected yet, which he wants to bring together as a “Tales of Coyote” (no pun intended) mosaic collection." There could be more on the horizon: "I think I’m ready to return to *Coyote*," Steele told me, saying that he's "made extensive notes for a new novel." His prior agent had told him that he didn't think there was much demand for another Coyote novel, an assessment that he's now questioning. A publisher hasn't materialized for either project, but he says "if a good publisher offered me a decent advance for a major project like this, drop me a line." Hopefully, one is out there: *Coyote* has brought some fantastic adventures already, and there's lots of space for one more visit. This is a piece that started out as an entry in the usual, weekly roundup, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was worth a little more effort: effort to explain why this series is significant, and then the time to reach out to Steele, which yielded some entirely new details. If this was interesting, if you were moved to check out Steele's **Coyote* novels, please consider signing up as a supporting member for this newsletter. It really helps make these longer pieces come together. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### Wearing your fandom URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-publishing-merchandise-shirts-design/ Last updated: 2025-08-21T17:53:29.000Z Annalee Newitz's latest novella *Automatic Noodle* is a [delight](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/): at once a cozy story about finding and making community with one's peers, while at the same time serving up some sharp commentary about the nature of online misinformation campaigns, propaganda, and how to overcome the dismal state of our online culture. The story follows a group of robots who're awakened after being shut down for months to find that their employer has fled their debts, they have the opportunity to reopen the ghost kitchen in which they've been working to serve up food for their community. [Automatic Noodle is a bite-sized robotic delightAnnalee Newtiz’s latest is a bite-sized sci-fi story is a testament to the power of building and fostering community![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-260.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5727-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/) Newitz did a cool thing to accompany the book's release: they launched an [online shop](https://www.automaticnoodle.website/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (designed by [Mike Monteiro](https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of [Mule Design](https://www.muledesign.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)) that offers up some merch that ties in with the book, and in a neat meta twist, it's a site that mirrors the one that the robots set up for their own shop in the story. Newitz's store sells the same merch to their real-world readers as the fictional hungry customers can buy from Automatic Noodle (the restaurant). Even better: the site's URL is the same as its fictional counterpart. This store offers up not only the book, but a nice range of other things: a s̶h̶i̶r̶t̶ torso cover (in a variety of colors), stickers, pins, sweatshirt, hat, tote bags, and some other items, all branded with the store's in-story logo of a robot hand holding a pair of chopsticks and noodles over the Golden Gate Bridge, designed by [Lucy Bellwood](https://lucybellwood.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). There's also a blog in which Newitz has written about their [book tour](https://www.automaticnoodle.website/blog/2025-book-tour-dates?ref=andrewliptak.com) and a [bit about the world](https://www.automaticnoodle.website/blog/welcome-to-san-francisco-2064?ref=andrewliptak.com). What I really appreciate about this site is that it's a way to reward the book's fans and readers, and it's something that I think more authors should attempt to do. I wrote a little about this in *Cosplay: A History*, but clothing is one of the ways that we signal our interests and style to other people. As various nerd things became cool over the last couple of decades, there's no shortage of distressed DC, D&D, Marvel, Nintendo, Star Wars, and other shirts that people wear to show off that they're a fan of said property. [Automatic NoodleA website about a novella, by Annalee Newitz, pretending to be a website about a noodle joint.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-251.ico)AUTOMATIC NOODLE0![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/AutomaticNoodleLogo.png)](https://www.automaticnoodle.website/?ref=andrewliptak.com) I've seen a small handful of authors do this sort of thing over the years: fantasy author Brian Staveley put together one of those "Property of XX Athletic Department" shirts for the Ketteral soldiers from his books and partnered with Legion M [for some other items](https://shop.legionm.com/collections/the-emperors-blades/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Mary Robinette Kowal released a [neat collection of mission patches](https://maryrobinettekowal.com/product/lady-astronaut-flight-patch-and-sticker-collection/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that tied in with her *Lady Astronaut* novels, and then there's Brandon Sanderson, who has an [entire store](https://www.dragonsteelbooks.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) loaded with swag, art prints, signed books, and quite a bit more. There are also times when authors get a nice boost when their work is adapted for big films or TV shows, which leads to things like [apparel for House Atreides](https://shop.legendary.com/products/dune-house-atreides-adult-short-sleeve-t-shirt?srsltid=AfmBOoqT-eUG4-KAOUD0dHQr79SIW-CASZwGkrXyeuUyC3jf1-Ym1s1u&ref=andrewliptak.com) or merch from *The Expanse* via a [couple of](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-comic-scifi-a-little-death-james-sa-corey/) [Kickstarter](https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanse-action-figures-kickstarter-campaign-nacelle/) campaigns thanks to the publishers who've partnered with James S.A. Corey for various projects. (The Syfy channel also whipped up a couple of promotional shirts that I frequently wear.) And of course: let's not forget the juggernaut literary franchises like *Harry Potter* or *A Song of Ice and Fire*, which have no shortage of merchandizing opportunities. There's a caveat here: the time and effort that goes into setting up a merch site, products, and the design is not nothing, and with any sort of product, you have to play a fine game judging the appetite that's out there for one's fan base or readership. Nobody wants to invest several hundred dollars in shirts that will end up moldering in a box in a basement. But it's also not an insurmountable challenge to overcome. But these sorts of projects could be a useful tool for maybe not building an audience, but rewarding or reinforcing one in the long run. It's a way of providing fans and readers with a way to take the story that they enjoyed into the real world, allowing them to express their fandom in a tangible way. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. There's certainly an opportunity here, especially if an author happens to have a good following or have a breakout hit. It's been done before: Tor [sold an official shirt for John Scalzi's *Redshirts* back in 2011](https://reactormag.com/redshirts-shopping-guide/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which honestly, that's the lowest of low-hanging fruit) through Zazzle (no longer available), but I would love to see things like shirts with logos for GrayCris, PreservationAux, or Adamantine Explorations from Martha Wells' *Murderbot* series, the Colonial Union or Colonial Defense Forces from Scalzi's *Old Man's War* series, the Imperial Radch Navy from Ann Leckie's *Ancillary* series, and so forth. (I thought about something for *Cosplay: A History*, but couldn't really think of something interesting. Now, a shirt for Transfer Orbit...) There are companies and designers who cater to this market: heavyweights such as [Out of Print](https://outofprint.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which focuses extensively on book merch, as well as [VoidMerch](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), run by Jordan Shiveley out of Minneapolis, MN, who's partnered with authors such as [Eric LaRocca](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/eric-larocca-x-voidmerch?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Premee Mohamed](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/premee-mohamed-x-voidmerch?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Matt Wallace](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/matt-wallce-x-voidmerch?ref=andrewliptak.com) for dedicated collections, as well as some outstanding [metal-inspired shirts](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/writers-are-metal-af?ref=andrewliptak.com) for authors ranging from Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a whole bunch of others. (I'm really coveting this [Le Guin](https://voidmerch.threadless.com/designs/ursula-k-leguin-writers-are-metal-1/masc/t-shirt/extra-soft?color=gold&ref=andrewliptak.com) shirt right now.) There's no shortage of inspiration here: have a dystopian cyberpunk thriller? Put together a corporate logo for the company in question. Space opera or hard SF novel? Put together a mission logo or ship graphic, which can be used for patches, shirts, stickers, etc. Fantasy novel? Look at any shirt aimed at a traveler or tourist for inspiration. Paul Tremblay's *Horror Movie* is ripe for an in-universe shirt or poster. When there aren't official releases, fans will find ways to fill this desire: I have shirts for Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles and House Atreides (*Dune*), the Pur'n'Kleen Water Company (*The Expanse*), AgriGen Corporation (*The Windup Girl*) that people have designed and put up on the various apparel platforms like Etsy, Tee Fury, or Threadless. [ ](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Pur%27n%27Kleen%5FWater%5FCompany?ref=andrewliptak.com#articleComments) [It takes a villageThe wild success of Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter holds lessons for building a resilient fan community![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-262.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2022-03-01-at-5.05.29-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/) The publishing industry isn't terribly good at doing this sort of thing beyond producing one-offs, for structural reasons. Publishes are rightly focused on producing a book, often from authors that are essentially independent contractors: their focus isn't necessarily building an author's career or following, but whatever book they've got under contract. Publicists are overworked already, and while art departments produce art and designs for covers, these are things that are often farmed out to contractors. When merch is discussed, it's generally coached in marketing terms: stickers, tote bags, patches, etc., things that can be given away at a convention or to influencers. But this is different from rewarding fans: to drum up attention for a title, rather reward a fan's enthusiasm. As a result, these sorts of efforts fall to authors and whatever energy or connections they can muster. But I do think it's a way that publishers can help their authors in the long term by fostering and nurturing communities around their fans and their catalog as a whole. This doesn't also have to be limited to just authors and books. Magazines and public radio figured out a long time ago that tote bags and stickers are great for visibility. I have a handful of tote bags from publishers like the Folio Society, Saga Press that I regularly use, and I've often been tempted to pick up ones from Barnes & Noble, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, or The Strand Bookstore in New York City. (I'm waiting until some of the ones I have fall apart or go missing before I add more to the pile.) This isn't a thing that would work for every author or every book. Some books come out with a lot of fanfare and die on the vine. Some authors don't initially have the readership to warrant this effort and some have a lot on their plates and most certainly don't want to take the time and energy for something like this. In an ideal world, ancillary merch is available as an option to an author when it makes sense to do so. Maybe they're looking for something to accompany their debut novel, or maybe they've well into their career with an existing fanbase. A publisher already has some of the basic infrastructure that can produce this sort of graphic design work, and maybe that means having someone on staff who specializes in ancillary merch. Or maybe they have some sort of partnership with a designer who they can turn the author over to work out their own deal. I can see this starting as a conversation with an author, maybe as early as the contract negotiations, and if an author is interested, they can work together to produce some basic designs that can then be flipped over to a printer for whatever you're looking to make, and then offer them up for sale to fans through their existing sales channels or via the aforementioned apparel platforms, timed to accompany a book's release. The publishing world famously runs on thin margins, and they've worked out all sorts of ways to try and figure out how to drum up additional sales. In the last couple of years, we've seen bells and whistles like sprayed edges, variant covers, and special deluxe editions grow [beyond what specialty publishers offer to readers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/), and I think that this is another step that a publisher could take to reward readers who want to show off their fandom and help their favorite authors. Ultimately, the goal is to do one thing: increase the visibility of individual titles and authors by taking them off of the bookshelf or eBook reader by displaying them in the real world where other people can see them. This is a great way to celebrate one's favorite authors and stories. Wearing a shirt might not lead to a direct sale of a book, but if you come across someone wearing a Murderbot or Expanse or Dune or #WhateverTitleYouCanThinkOf, you've found another one of your people in the wild. That's a powerful thing, and reinforcing that sort of community is something the publishing industry should be doing more of. In the meantime, we'll have to rely on those authors who have the energy and resources to put together their own campaigns: I hope that we'll see more of them do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I picked up one of the Automatic Noodle-branded shirts as soon as I learned about its existence, and it's definitely something I've enjoyed wearing. --- Thanks for reading. What are your favorite book-related shirts or merch that you like wearing? Does this appeal to you as a reader, and what types of book-related shirts / stickers / patches do you most want to wear? I'd love to get your thoughts: drop them in the comments. ### Here are the winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-ar/ Last updated: 2025-08-18T15:01:36.000Z The World Science Fiction Convention took place over the weekend in Seattle, and with it came the winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards. I don’t have any sort of grand commentary on the field this year: I’ve only read a couple of the nominees, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that Robert Jackson Bennett won for Best Novel with *The Tainted Cup*, which I’ve hear many good things about (his *Founders* trilogy was phenomenal), and Ray Nayler’s *Tusks of Extinction* was also an excellent read. Here are this year’s nominees and winners (winners marked in **bold**): ### Best Novel - *Alien Clay* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ([My review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-alien-clay-sci-fi-book-review/)) - *The Ministry of Time* by Kaliane Bradley - *Service Model* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Someone You Can Build a Nest In* by John Wiswell - *A Sorceress Comes to Call* by T. Kingfisher - ***The Tainted Cup* by Robert Jackson Bennett** ## Best Novella - *The Brides of High Hill* by Nghi Vo - *The Butcher of the Forest* by Premee Mohamed - *Navigational Entanglements* by Aliette de Bodard - *The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain* by Sofia Samatar - ***The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler (**[**My review**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)**)** - *What Feasts at Night* by T. Kingfisher ### Best Novelette - “[The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F05%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld*, May 2024) - “[By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/by-salt-by-sea-by-light-of-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Premee Mohamed (*Strange Horizons*, Fund Drive 2024) - **“**[**The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea**](https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/TheFourSisters%5FKritzer.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Naomi Kritzer (*Asimov’s*, September/October 2024)** - “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in *Lake of Souls* (Orbit) - “[Loneliness Universe](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/loneliness-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - “[Signs of Life](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/signs-of-life/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 59) ### Best Short Story - “[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rachael K. Jones (*Lightspeed Magazine*, Jan 2024 (Issue 164)) - “[Marginalia](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/marginalia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mary Robinette Kowal (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 56) - **“**[**Stitched to Skin Like Family Is**](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/stitched-to-skin-like-family-is/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Nghi Vo (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 57)** - “[Three Faces of a Beheading](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/three-faces-of-a-beheading/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Arkady Martine (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - “[We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will-teach-you-how-to-read/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Caroline M. Yoachim (*Lightspeed Magazine*, May 2024 (Issue 168)) - “[Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld*, February 2024) ### Best Series - ***Between Earth and Sky* by Rebecca Roanhorse** - *The Burning Kingdoms* by Tasha Suri - *InCryptid* by Seanan McGuire - *Southern Reach* by Jeff VanderMeer - *The Stormlight Archive* by Brandon Sanderson - *The Tyrant Philosophers* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *The Deep Dark* by Molly Knox Ostertag - *The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1* written by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose - *Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed* written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda - *My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2* by Emil Ferris - ***Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way* written by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio** - *We Called Them Giants* written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, lettering by Clayton Cowles ### Best Related Work - “[Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics](https://file770.com/charting-the-cliff-an-investigation-into-the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-by-camestros-felapton-and-heather-rose-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones - [r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1bt4iqf/official%5Frfantasy%5F2024%5Fbook%5Fbingo%5Fchallenge/?rdt=34146&ref=andrewliptak.com) (r/Fantasy on Reddit), presented by the r/Fantasy Bingo team: Alexandra Forrest (happy\_book\_bee), Lisa Richardson, Amanda E. (Lyrrael), Arka (RuinEleint), Ashley Rollins (oboist73), Christine Sandquist (eriophora), David H. (FarragutCircle), Diana Hufnagl, Pia Matei (Dianthaa), Dylan H. (RAAAImmaSunGod), Dylan Kilby (an\_altar\_of\_plagues), Elsa (ullsi), Emma Surridge (PlantLady32), Gillian Gray (thequeensownfool), Kahlia (cubansombrero), Kevin James, Kopratic, Kristina (Cassandra\_sanguine), Lauren Mulcahy (Valkhyrie), Megan, Megan Creemers (Megan\_Dawn), Melissa S. (wishforagiraffe), Mike De Palatis (MikeOfThePalace), Para (improperly\_paranoid), Sham, The\_Real\_JS, Abdellah L. (messi1045), AnnTickwittee, Chad Z. (shift\_shaper), Emma Smiley (Merle), Rebecca (toughschmidt22), smartflutist661 - “[The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4&ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jenny Nicholson - ***Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right* by Jordan S. Carroll** - *Track Changes* by Abigail Nussbaum - “[The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion](https://jasonsanford.substack.com/p/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on)” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - ***Dune: Part Two*, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, directed by Denis Villeneuve** - *Flow*, screenplay by Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža, directed by Gints Zilbalodis - *Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga*, screenplay by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, directed by George Miller - *I Saw the TV Glow*, screenplay by Jane Schoenbrun, directed by Jane Schoenbrun - *Wicked*, screenplay by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, directed by Jon M. Chu - *The Wild Robot*, screenplay by Chris Sanders and Peter Brown, directed by Chris Sanders ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Fallout*: “The Beginning” written by Gursimran Sandhu, directed by Wayne Che Yip - *Agatha All Along*: “Death’s Hand in Mine” written by Gia King & Cameron Squires, directed by Jac Schaeffer - *Doctor Who*: “Dot and Bubble” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams - *Star Trek: Lower Decks*: “Fissure Quest” created by Mike McMahan and written by Lauren McGuire based on *Star Trek* created by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Brandon Williams - ***Star Trek: Lower Decks*: “The New Next Generation” created and written by Mike McMahan, based on *Star Trek* created by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Megan Lloyd** - *Doctor Who*: “73 Yards” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams ### Best Game or Interactive Work - ***Caves of Qud*, co-creators Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat; contributors Nick DeCapua, Corey Frang, Craig Hamilton, Autumn McDonell, Bastia Rosen, Caelyn Sandel, Samuel Wilson** - *Dragon Age: The Veilguard* produced by BioWare - *The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom* produced by Nintendo - *Lorelei and the Laser Eyes* produced by Simogo - *Tactical Breach Wizards* developed by Suspicious Developments - *1000xRESIST* developed by sunset visitor 斜陽過客, published by Fellow Traveller ### Best Editor, Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - Jennifer Brozek - **Neil Clarke** - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas - Sheila Williams ### Best Editor, Long Form - Carl Engle-Laird - Ali Fisher - Lee Harris - David Thomas Moore - **Diana M. Pho** - Stephanie Stein ### Best Professional Artist - Micaela Alcaino - Audrey Benjaminsen - Rovina Cai - Maurizio Manzieri - Tran Nguyen - **Alyssa Winans** ### Best Semiprozine - [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher Sean Markey; editors E. Catherine Tobler, Nicasio Andres Reed, David Gilmore, Laura Blackwell, Annika Barranti Klein; proofreader Josephine Stewart; columnist Amanda Downum; art and design Cory Skerry, Christine M. Scott; social media Felicia Martínez; assistant Shana Du Bois. - [*Escape Pod*](https://escapepod.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes, assistant editors Premee Mohamed and Kevin Wabaunsee, hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart, producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht; and the entire *Escape Pod* team - [*FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher and executive editor DaVaun Sanders, poetry editor B. Sharise Moore, art director Christian Ivey, acquiring editors Rebecca McGee, Kerine Wint, Egbiameje Omole, Emmalia Harrington, Genine Tyson, Tonya R. Moore, sponsor coordinator Nelson Rolon - [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), produced by Zhui Ning Chang, Aleksandra Hill, Danai Christopoulou, Isabella Kestermann, Kanika Agrawal, Sachiko Ragosta, Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Melissa Ren, Elaine Ho, Ambi Sun, Cyrus Chin, Nivair H. Gabriel, Jeané Ridges, Lilivette Domínguez, Isaree Thatchaichawalit, Jei D. Marcade, M. L. Krishnan, Ysabella Maglanque, Aaron Voigt, Adialyz Del Valle Berríos, Adil Mian, Akilah White, Alexandra Millatmal, Anselma Widha Prihandita, E. Broderick, K. S. Walker, Katarzyna Nowacka, Katie McIvor, Kelsea Yu, Lynn D. Jung, Madeleine Vigneron, Marie Croke, Merulai Femi, Phoebe Low, S. R. Westvik, Sanjna Bhartiya, Sara Messenger, Sophia Uy, Tina Zhu, Yuvashri Harish, Zohar Jacobs - [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by the *Strange Horizons* Editorial Collective - [***Uncanny Magazine***](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; poetry editor Betsy Aoki, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky** ### Best Fanzine - [*Ancillary Review of Books*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Jake Casella Brookins, Zachary Gillan, Lane Gillespie, Misha Grifka Wander, Gareth A. Reeves, Bianca Skrinyár, Cynthia Zhang - [***Black Nerd Problems***](https://blacknerdproblems.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**, editors William Evans and Omar Holmon** - [*The Full Lid*](https://alasdairstuart.com/the-full-lid/?ref=andrewliptak.com), written by Alasdair Stuart and edited by Marguerite Kenner - [*Galactic Journey*](https://galacticjourney.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), founder Gideon Marcus, editor Janice L. Newman, associate writers Cora Buhlert, Jessica Holmes, Kerrie Dougherty, Kris Vyas-Myall, and Natalie Devitt, and the rest of the Journey team - [*Journey Planet*](https://www.journeyplanet.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Allison Hartman Adams, Amanda Wakaruk, Ann Gry, Jean Martin, Sara Felix, Sarah Gulde, Chuck Serface, David Ferguson, Olav Rokne, Paul Weimer, Steven H Silver, Christopher J. Garcia and James Bacon - [Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog](https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk ### Best Fancast - [*The Coode Street Podcast*](https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, producer Jonathan Strahan - [***Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones***](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eight-days-of-diana-wynne-jones/id1776735544?ref=andrewliptak.com)**, presented by Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow** - [*Hugo, Girl!*](https://www.hugogirlpodcast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson - [*Hugos There*](https://hugospodcast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Seth Heasley - [*A Meal of Thorns*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/amealofthorns/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jake Casella Brookins - [*Worldbuilding for Masochists*](https://worldbuildingformasochists.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Natania Barron ### Best Fan Writer - Camestros Felapton - **Abigail Nussbaum** - Roseanna Pendlebury - Jason Sanford - Alasdair Stuart - Örjan Westin ### Best Fan Artist - Iain J. Clark - **Sara Felix** - Meg Frank - Michelle Morrell - Alison Scott - España Sheriff ### Best Poem - Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead - “[Ever Noir](https://www.havenspec.com/ever-noir?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mari Ness (*Haven Spec Magazine*, Issue 16, July 2024) - “[there are no taxis for the dead](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/there-are-no-taxis-for-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - **“**[**A War of Words**](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-war-of-words/?ref=andrewliptak.com)**” by Marie Brennan (*Strange Horizons*, September 2024)** - “[We Drink Lava](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/we-drink-lava/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ai Jiang (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 56) - “[Your Visiting Dragon](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/your-visiting-dragon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Devan Barlow (*Strange Horizons*, Fund Drive 2024) ### Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book - *The Feast Makers* by H.A. Clarke - *Heavenly Tyrant* by Xiran Jay Zhao - *The Maid and the Crocodile* by Jordan Ifueko - *Moonstorm* by Yoon Ha Lee - ***Sheine Lende* by Darcie Little Badger** - *So Let Them Burn* by Kamilah Cole ### *Astounding* Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines) - **Moniquill Blackgoose (2nd year of eligibility)** - Bethany Jacobs (2nd year of eligibility) - Hannah Kaner (2nd year of eligibility) - Angela Liu (2nd year of eligibility) - Jared Pechaček (1st year of eligibility) - Tia Tashiro (2nd year of eligibility) ### 17 more SF/F books to check out for the rest of August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-scifi-fantasy-books-anders-hill-kuang-scalzi/ Last updated: 2025-08-15T14:52:07.000Z August has been chugging along, and I've been spending a good amount of time this month burning through my TBR: I recently finished [*The Folded Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668078112?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Elizabeth Bear, [*The Devil Reached Toward the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668092392?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Garrett M. Graff and [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annalee Newitz ([review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/)), and I'm been working on figuring out how I need to prioritize the rest of the list over the next couple of months for reviews, interviews, and commentary. It's not the worst thing in the world, and I've been finding that it's so much healthier to turn to an audiobook instead of a podcast while I'm walking or driving, or taking my lunch out on the porch at work rather than sit and scroll through social media. I recommend it, especially now that we're in the midst of the summer, where I can hang out in the sun and enjoy a couple of chapters. SPONSORED Here's the usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-books-newitz-tingle-star-wars/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider signing up as a supporter! You can read the prior installments of this series via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. In case you missed it, here's the first list for August: [Read these new sci-fi and fantasy books out August 2025There are histories of nuclear annihilation, robotic kitchens, strange deaths, and more to add to your TBR![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-257.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5590-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-books-newitz-tingle-star-wars/) Alrighty: here are 17 new SF/F books that you should check out over the remainder of August: --- ### [*Lessons in Magic and Disaster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867322?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19th) In this new fantasy from Charlie Jane Anders, Jamie seems like she's your usual New England academic: she's got her dissertation underway, is in a stable relationship, and is dealing with a bit of generational trauma. She's also a witch. Her mother Serena has been hiding from the world after the death of her wife and abrupt disintegration of her career. Jamie has been trying to help, teaching her spells from a centuries-old spell book, and is trying to figure out what happened to her mother and how secrets from her past are coming back to haunt her before both of their lives are completely upended. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/charlie-jane-anders/lessons-in-magic-and-disaster/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This compact novel is about many things: a literary treasure hunt that strongly recalls A.S. Byatt’s *Possession*; the struggle to negotiate obligations to parents, spouses, and oneself; moving forward from grief; and a self-taught witch’s fraught journey toward understanding her own magic." ### [*The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324090663?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Baron (August 26th) Here's a book that's right up my alley: *The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America* by David Baron. In the early 20th century, there was a widespread belief that life existed on Mars, thanks in part to astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory and observed a series of features that he identified as canals, which he speculated was created by an intelligent civilization. His theories captured the attention of the nation, and eventually toppled his career and reputation. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781324090663?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe." ### [*The Possession of Alba Díaz*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593641071?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Isabel Cañas (August 19th) Isabel Cañas came to my attention a couple of years ago when she released [*Vampires of El Norte*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593436738?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), an excellent horror / romance set during the Mexican-American war in the 1800s. Her next brings us to 1762 Mexico as a plague devastates the city of Zacatecas. Alba flees with her parents and fiancé to her family's mine to wait it out, but once there, she begins experiencing hallucinations, convulsions, and sleepwalking: she's possessed by something uncanny. At the same time, her fiancé's cousin Elías has escaped to the New World ahead of a troubled past, and begins noticing that there's something wrong with Alba. The two become entangled in a string of secrets and conspiracies that could spell their doom. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593641071?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Cañas creates a lush, detailed atmosphere thick with tension and dread. Despite a slow opening and somewhat uneven pacing throughout, the richly layered narrative offers much to hold readers’ interest as it probes themes of colonialism, patriarchy, and autonomy." [Monsters on the western frontierIsabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte is the perfect spooky read this October![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-37.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3333.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vampires-of-el-norte-isabel-canas-horror-book-review/) ### [*The Art of Legend*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593237694?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wesley Chu (August 26th) This is the final installment of Chu's *War Arts Saga* (preceded by [*The Art of Prophecy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593237656?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Art of Destiny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593237687?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and takes place in a distant kingdom where a man was destined to defeat the Eternal Khan. Things didn't turn out that way: the Eternal Khan died and changed the prophecy, leaving the destined hero Jian to chart a new path. Training under his mentor Taishi, he became a great warrior, and now, there are rumors of war and the possible return of the Khan. ### [*Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262553070?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Joshua Glenn (August 19th) Joshua Glenn adds a new installment of his Radium Age series with *Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age.* This series (now published through MIT Press) is his attempt to chart a new origin story for the science fiction genre, unearthing the prot0-genre works that were published at the turn of the 20th century that went on to influence the modern genre. I'm looking forward to digging into this one. This collection pulls together short stories written between 1902 and 1928, by such authors as Francis Stevens, H. Rider Haggard, Hugo Gernsback, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more, all examining the ways that humanity could be transformed in all sorts of terrifying ways. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-248.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Blank-8-Grids-Collage-2.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) ### [*20th Century Ghosts 20th Anniversary Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063374935?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe Hill (August 19th) With books like [*Horns*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061147968?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*NOS4A2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200587?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Fireman*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062200648?ref=andrewliptak.com), Joe Hill has become one of my favorite horror authors, but that stems back to his original collection of short fiction, *20th Century Ghosts*, which came out 20 years ago this year*.* This book was transformative for me when my college professor F. Brett Cox assigned it for my Gothic Lit class nearly two decades ago: it really helped introduce me (a non-horror reader) to the genre. The book is getting a snazzy new edition to mark the occasion, with a new cover and sprayed edges. ### [*The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668057551?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene (August 19th) Stephen King's [*The Stand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307947307?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a monumental classic of post-apocalyptic fiction, telling the story of a world devastated by a global pandemic and the epic fight of good vs. evil. It's been adapted a number of times for television and film, but now there's a new expansion coming: an anthology of stories set in the same world, written by some of the field's best authors. This volume's table of contents is *packed: King* provided an introduction to the book, and the authors in it include Maurice Broaddus, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, Gabino Iglesias, Josh Malerman, Usman T. Malik, Premee Mohamed, Alex Segura, Paul Tremblay, Catherynne M. Valente, Chuck Wendig, and a ton more. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-new-tales-of-stephen-kings-the-stand-1815487?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying calling it "an incredible achievement that manages to expand, enrich, and improve its source material." ### [*Corvus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662524899?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marko Kloos (August 19th) Marko Kloos continues his *Frontlines: Evolution* series with a second installment, *Corvus* (preceded by [*Scorpio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542035491?ref=andrewliptak.com)). This series is set on an alien world years after the Lankies forced a human colony underground, and a woman named Alex and her dog Ash find themselves evading the aliens after their home is discovered. In this installment, Alex survived the attack, and signed up to join the NAC Defense Corps. She and her friend are deployed to the Alpha Corvi system to track down the whereabouts of a missing warship, and they discover that the system has been invaded by the Lankies, and has to face her past as she helps mount a rescue mission, only to find that the job has gotten much, much harder when they're stranded. The only way out is through the alien lines, and they've gotten more dangerous in the intervening years. ### [*Katabasis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021471?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)by R.F. Kuang (August 25th) R.F. Kuang has released a string of excellent books in recent years: I particularly liked [*Babel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021433?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)and [*Yellowface*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250833?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). Her next looks intriguing: Alice Law has been working on a singular goal her whole life: to become a master magician, sacrificing anything that stood in the way of working with Cambridge Professor Jacob Grimes, the greatest magician in the world. When he dies in a mysterious accident (that she might have caused), he's sent down to Hell, and she sets off after him, hoping to score a recommendation that will secure her future. She's accompanied by her rival, Peter Murdoch, and together, the pair need to rely on their knowledge of stories like Orpheus and Dante, whatever chalk they can carry with them to save someone they don't even particularly like. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rf-kuang/katabasis-deluxe-limited-edition/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Kuang melds a fantasy adventure (don’t look too closely at the magic—that’s not the point) with a rumination on academia’s problems to create a new take on the journey through the underworld." ### [*Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Susana M. Morris (August 19th) Octavia Butler is one of the genre's greatest authors: books like *Kindred* and *Parable of the Sower* have only grown in relevancy since they were first published, and there's been a resurgence in interest in her works. There's been a lot of new scholarship into her work and life in recent years, and we now have a new biography of her life by Georgia Institute of Technology professor Susana M. Morris. I'm *very* eager to pick this one up. In this book, Morris examines Butler's life through the broad lens of the Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, and Queer Rights movements, as well as the country's political and economic tides to see how the world shaped her life and views, and how they trickled into her writing and stories. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063212077?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Morris powerfully frames Butler’s work and career through her politics and personal struggles, including the way poverty “threatened to crush her spirit.” The result is a moving study of the life and creative pursuits of a literary pioneer." [Octavia Butler’s finally getting her dueWith three adaptations from the late author’s catalog on the way, Octavia Butler is getting some long overdue attention.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-256.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/malachi-brooks-EvJhJ75NwAc-unsplash-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-a24-parable-of-the-sower-adaptation/) ### [*Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780819502094?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.-H. Rosny aîné, translated by Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser(August 5th) This looks like a fascinating book: Wesleyan University Press has collected three novellas from Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny aîné. I've never heard of this author before, but he's apparently the first (or one of the first) to explore the idea of aliens and other life forms. The three novellas here were published between 1888 and 1910 and include "The Xipehuz," set in prehistoric times, "Another World", about strange beings who don't live in the same world as we do, and "The Death of Earth" about the end of humanity. [Writing in the *Ancillary Review of Books*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/08/08/new-view-on-an-old-master/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Eden Kupermintz says that it's "a fascinating and accessible view into the early years of science fiction, when the tropes of the genre were just emerging. Rosny’s unique and exciting style, coupled with the meticulous work that Chatelain and Slusser have done, means that *Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind* is a must-read for anyone interested in the roots of science fiction." ### [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359544?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359568?ref=andrewliptak.com)by John Scalzi (August 19th) Ahead of the release of his next *Old Man's War* novel [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com), Tor is re-releasing the fifth and sixth installments of the series, *The Human Division* and *The End of All Things* with a fresh trade paperback edition. They come with some slick new covers and each with a new introduction from Scalzi about the story behind the novels. [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-163.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-6.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) ### [*The Dragon Wakes with Thunder*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593641552?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K. X. Song (August 19th) Last year, K.X. Song released [*The Night Ends with Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593641538?ref=andrewliptak.com), a reimagination of the legend of Mulan in which Meilin, rather than be married off to a violent drunk, disguises herself as a man and enlists in the army. In this sequel, the war she fought has come to an end, but she now faces the consequences of her actions: she's imprisoned because of her ruse and is now a pariah. But word of her exploits has spread, and other factions find that they could use her help in their own fights to help bring the three kingdoms to a balance. Meilin is now pulled in all directions by everyone else's needs and ends, and she has to figure out who to trust, even as the dragon inside of her is coming to collect what he's owed. ### [*The Lords of Creation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647100995?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S. M. Stirling (August 19th) Years ago (2006), I came across a neat book by S.M. Stirling: [*The Sky People*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101305?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* In it and its followup, [*In the Courts of the Crimson Kings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101329?ref=andrewliptak.com), Stirling introduced us to an alternate history inspired by the pulpy planetary romances and a Venus and Mars that were inhabitable and populated with dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Nearly two decades later, he's now back with a finale to that never-finished series: *The Lords of Creation*. At the end of *In the Courts of the Crimson Kings,* we saw the activation of a piece of ancient technology that opened up a portal to another world, a Dyson Sphere. This book picks up a couple of years later, following two agents, Janice and Lee, who're on a mission to explore the new world, where they encounter some strange – and strangely familiar sights and peoples. [ ](https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=S+M+Stirling&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250398659?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756420062?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798895150382?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063324039?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Kill or Be Killed*](https://awastudios.com/series/kill-or-be-killed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter Tieryas, illustrated by Mike Choi (August 20th) I'm a big fan of Peter Tieryas's books ([*United States of Japan*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780857667229?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Cyber Shogun Revolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451491015?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Mecha Samurai Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451490995?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and was thrilled to see that he's got a new one coming out: a short illustrated piece called *Kill or Be Killed*. It has a horrifying premise: you get a message on your phone that a loved one is in danger, and to save them, you need to kill someone and livestream it. It's the work of a serial killer known as the Friendship Killer, and when one of the people he targets decides to fight back, it leads them into a darker side of the tech world. ### [*Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593969311?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Witwer (August 19th) Michael Witwer has produced some outstanding D&D-related books over the years (including histories like [*Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781632862792?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Art & Arcana: A Visual History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780399580949?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Heroes' Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984858900?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and he's got a new guide out: a definitive, illustrated guide to the best part of D&D: the dragons. This is a new exploration of the game's dragons, complete with new artwork, which compiles decades of the franchise's lore and legends into one guide. It looks like a fantastic read for anyone who's steeped in the game's stories, or who just wants to read up about some dragons. --- As always, let me know what caught your eye and what you're reading now! ### Uncovering Vermont's most notorious murder trial URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-winters-time-jeffrey-amestoy-clarence-darrow-book-interview/ Last updated: 2025-08-14T20:55:50.000Z The Vermont Historical Society will publish a new book in September: [*Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont*](vermont-history-winters-time-clarence-darrow-jeff-amestoy). It's a short, gripping read: a female executive of a local factory named Cecelia Gullivan was brutally murdered in Windsor in the 1920s, and a fellow employee, John Winters, was quickly arrested for the crime. The case was entirely circumstantial – and involved Gullivan's severed head– but he was convicted for murder. The case was appealed, and this is where it gets interesting: decades before, a Dartmouth student named Paul Darrow was involved in a tragic accident that saw the death of a five-year-old. He told the grieving parents that if there was anything he or his family could do, they would do it. As it turns out, his father was Clarence Darrow, who would become one of the most famous defense lawyers in the country. You've probably heard of him: he was the defense attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925\. After Winters' conviction, Darrow was speaking at Dartmouth and received a letter: it was the mother, calling in the favor. Darrow agreed to take on the man's appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court. The book is written by Jeffrey L. Amestoy, the former Vermont Attorney General (1985-1997) and Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court (1997-2004), who has spent years researching a fascinating and dramatic episode of Vermont’s history. (He's also the justice who authored the landmark decision that found same-sex couples have the same rights as married ones here in Vermont, which ultimately led to the state's Civil Unions law.) The book is now [available to preorder from our bookstore](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/winters-time-a-secret-pledge-a-severed-head-and-the-murder-that-brought-america-s-most-famous-lawyer-to-vermont/1500?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false&ref=andrewliptak.com), and we'll begin shipping it in September. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/08/Jeffrey-Amestoy.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak / VHS In the meantime, I sat down with Amestoy in my office to chat about his career and what led him to dive into the story of the trial, Winters, and Darrow. This interview was originally published to [VHS's blog](https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-history-jeffrey-amestoy-winters-time-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com). To support our work, sign up to [become a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### **Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?** My name is Jeff Amestoy and I’m a native of Rutland, Vermont. I was brought up here before I left the state when I was 14 and when my parents came back in the early '70s, and after getting a law degree, I returned and worked as an assistant attorney general under then-Attorney General Jim Jeffords. I spent some years as a prosecutor in that office and in 1984, after having serving as the urban industry commissioner under Governor Stelling, I ran for Vermont Attorney General. I was elected in 1985 and was elected reelected six times after that. In 1997, Governor Howard Dean appointed me to the Supreme Court, and I was Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court for eight years. Probably most noteworthy during our time was addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, which (particularly before the turn of the century) was an extraordinarily divisive issue. We issued an opinion, Baker v Vermont, in which we found that constitutionally, there is a right to all the privileges and responsibilities of marriage in Vermont. That case then went to Vermont eventually becoming the first state in the Union to adopt same-sex marriage by legislation, and we were the first court in the country to recognize the same-sex relationships. So that was an extraordinary part of my own time on the court. Following that, Harvard University invited me to come down as a fellow at their under two programs, both their institute of politics. We did seminars on same-sex marriage, law and politics, and then I was asked to stay on as a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, where I worked for primarily on issues of state judicial leadership. While still at Harvard, I wrote a book, [*Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.* ](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088191?ref=andrewliptak.com)which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015\. That was my first endeavor into living in the archives. ### **You’re publishing a new book with the Vermont Historical Society, *Winters’ Time*. Can you tell me about the story?** Winters’ Time is about one of the most notorious murders and sensational trials in the history of Vermont. It was a murder that occurred in November 1926 in Windsor, Vermont, and the victim was a woman named Cecelia Gullivan, who was a prominent executive with the Cone Automated Machine Company. She was the highest-ranking female executive in Vermont, which was very unusual in the profession at that time. The machine tool industry, which was revolutionizing the American industry, was an almost solely-dominated male culture. So her murder was front page news, not only in Vermont, but throughout much of the east and really all over the country. The governor appointed a special prosecutor, and there was an all-out effort to look for who they thought might be the murderer, and they arrested a man named John Winters. The title of this book comes from his last name, because it is a story not only of him, but really of Vermont in the roaring ‘20s. Calvin Coolidge was president and Coolidge prosperity was running at great speed. Windsor was one of the capitals of the world in terms of its innovation. So this was a murder shocked everyone, and it became a notorious case in its own right. ### When did you first hear about this story? It first came to my attention as a young lawyer in my very first appearance in court. I was waiting very nervously in the Windsor County courthouse lawyer's room and there was a picture on the wall of a number of folks standing in the courtroom. I asked one of the other lawyers about it, and he said that it was the most famous murder trial in Vermont, and that piqued my interest. Probably two or three years later, I was researching a case as an Assistant Attorney General, and I found the State versus Winters case that had been appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court. When I read who participated in the case, I was astounded to read that Clarence Darrow represented the defendant. ### Most readers might know Darrow for his role as defense attorney for the [Scopes Monkey Trial](https://www.aclu.org/documents/state-tennessee-v-scopes?ref=andrewliptak.com), but he was a much bigger figure than that, right? Darrow was the most famous lawyer in the country in the 1920s and his fame was much greater than just from the law. Along with figures such as Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, and Babe Ruth, he probably one of the most recognized names of the era. He was an extraordinary trial lawyer, famous for his oppositions to death penalty, and famous for saving defendants from execution. So the question was: what was he doing in Vermont? That led me to starting to look at this, and first thing that I found was that it was to repay a debt – a pledge that his son Paul had made. His son was a senior at Dartmouth College and was about to graduate in 1904, when he was involved in a tragic accident that killed a five-year-old. There was accident of a horse spooked by automobiles, which wasn’t uncommon at the time. Paul promised the mother that if anybody her family was ever in trouble, his dad, even then a famous lawyer, would come to the help the family. Almost 25 years later, Clarence Darrow had announced his retirement, which was big news: there was an article in *The New York Times* about it. One month later he was at Dartmouth to give a lecture opposing capital punishment when a woman gave him a letter, which asked for his help: her nephew, John Winters, was on death row in Windsor Prison. Winters had been convicted of the Cecelia Gullivan's murder, and she was now calling in this pledge. Clarence knew nothing about her, his son had never told him, but they were close enough that he immediately volunteered to represent Darrow for his appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court. ### What do you think this story tells readers in 2025 about what Vermont was like during this era of history? Well, I think it's a glimpse into the roaring 20s, even in Vermont, and the issues that were part of the fabric of the country at the time. First of all, there was an extraordinary interest in murders all across the country, fanned by the so-called the Yellow Press. Hearst’s newspapers and other sensational publications were beginning to realize that the appetite for murder coverage was almost insatiable among the American public. You don't think of Vermont as being part of that, but of course, it was: Vermonters were just as interested in notorious murder cases as any place else. When this happened, Vermonters were fixated on the trial. The case against Winters was entirely circumstantial, and many people thought that he was not the murderer. But when Darrow said in 1927 that he would represent Winters on appeal before the Vermont Supreme Court, it made for an extraordinary story for Vermont, and it reflects the fascination at the time with celebrity. In a lot of ways, Darrow was really a celebrity, more than a lawyer. He was a great lawyer, but he was just an extraordinary celebrity, and of course, at the time, Vermont was at the confluence of events here. The murder took place 30 miles from Plymouth, where President Coolidge grew up and two years into his presidency, saw the national press covering the story, so I think it reflects part of the culture of the time through a Vermont prism. There was also prohibition, which was as unpopular in Vermont as it was in the rest of the country, and part of this case and trial relates to the use of alcohol. And then of course, when you look at how cases were tried at the time, women were not allowed on Vermont juries (they wouldn’t be allowed until 1942), the evidence presented in trial, which included severed head of the victim, something that hadn't occurred any place in the history of Vermont, or any where else in the country, as far as I could determine. So again, I think it's a reflection of the extent to which Vermont as a community, was caught up in the culture of the roaring '20s. ### **When you decided to start writing this as a book, how did you go about conducting the research to uncover this story?** There had been a little bit of work on it. Paul Gilles [had written an article about it](https://librarycollections.law.umn.edu/documents/darrow/Darrow%5Fin%5FVermont%5Ffiche%5Fopt.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com). But as with any books centers on Vermont, the best places to start were archives, both from the Vermont Historical Society and at the Vermont State Archives. I spent a fair amount of time there, and the find that made this a story that I could tell was the transcript of the trial. It’s in three volumes and is on file at the Vermont State Archives, and that gave me the ability to really build this story around the trial. Without the transcript, this could not have happened. There was also the publication of Darrow’s letters and a number of letters relate directly to this case, which were absolutely critical to my story. Vermont newspapers from the trial were also very much part of the story because the coverage was so extensive. There’s also no shortage of books about Darrow and I did a fair amount of reading about the culture of the 1920s, which were all part of the story. I had great help from archivists, both from VHS and the state archives. --- Thanks for reading. You can read the other interviews that I've conducted with the other authors that VHS has published: - [Mercedes de Guardiola](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-eugenics-book/), author of "*Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State* - [J. Kevin Graffagnino](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-kevin-graffagnino-interview/), author of *Ira Allen: A Biography* - [Garrett M. Graff](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/), author of *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont* ### Recommended serving size URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-automatic-noodle-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-08-14T15:57:32.000Z Art can often be looked at as a mirror to the state of the world. Margaret Atwood [famously wrote](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/genre-and-margaret-atwood/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [*The Handmaid's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780385490818?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a few self-imposed rules: "I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime or for which it did not already have the tools," resulting in an iconic work of dystopian fiction that has only grown in relevance since its publication in 1985\. Plenty of other science fiction novels have gone with the "the real world, but let's extrapolate how it gets worse" model, ranging from Octavia Butler's classic novel [*Parable of the Sower*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781609807191?ref=andrewliptak.com) to Omar El Akkad's [*American War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101973134?ref=andrewliptak.com)to Christopher Brown's [*Rule of Capture*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062859099?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which explore how the seeds for a future with fewer freedoms and rights have already been planted and how the growing conditions are just right for them to bloom. These books are excellent warnings for the world that we could soon find ourselves in, and at times, there's a sense of inevitability that accompanies them. No matter what we do, some variation of these fictional worlds are coming. But while these futures are plausible, will we inevitably slide into them? Annalee Newitz's latest book, [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com), pushes back against this idea, showcasing a war-torn and dystopic future whilst also laying out a guiding principle for how to insulate against it: by building and fostering community. This novella has a fun premise: a team of robots employed in a crappy San Francisco ghost kitchen (Staybehind, Cayenne, Sweetie, and Hands) are reactivated to find that their restaurant's absentee owners have fled, leaving the place in a sort of limbo. In Newitz's future, intelligent robots (known as HEEI – Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligence) have some rights, but they can also be bought and sold or put to work by their owners, something that this team isn't keen on: they owe debts and don't want to be repossessed or have their parts sold from under them. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. They hatch a plan: they figure out how to reestablish a restaurant business for themselves, reasoning that if they make good food, they'll attract customers and earn enough money to keep themselves afloat and their creditors far away. They quickly settle on making hand-pulled hot oil biang biang noodles and work to figure out how to get the word out about their business. They quickly discover two things: if you make a quality product, it will appeal to people and that there are bad actors out there who're looking to cause problems for a whole host of reasons. Last year, Newitz wrote a fascinating book, [*Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324110460?ref=andrewliptak.com), an examination of history, popular culture, politics, and technology to look at how we use stories to manipulate people through propaganda and influencer campaigns. While Newitz noted in a recent newsletter that it *Automatic Noodle* is [something of a creative palette cleanser](https://buttondown.com/thehypothesis/archive/a-book-that-might-lighten-your-mood/?ref=andrewliptak.com), it's clear that the topic is still on their mind. While they're figuring out their technique and ingredients and and even their name and marketing strategy, they run up against some online trolls who're intent on review bombing their store into digital oblivion, and the robots have to find ways to mitigate the threat and overcome their strategies. If *Stories are Weapons* looks at how people use information and memes and storytelling to manipulate people, *Automatic Noodle* almost serves as a coda: this is how you negate that threat. The solution is deceptively simple: build a resilient community around you. The robots know they have a good product: their noodles keep selling out day after day. But they realize that people are lingering in the space; they want to know more about the robots and the storefront (the team is reluctant to come forward as a robot-fronted space, lest they run afoul of anti-robot people in real life) and they like the vibe of the place. The robots open their doors to other robots and community activities, are generous with kids who stop by without money, make their own merch for the store, and other steps that make their place an inviting, warm place to welcome in the neighborhood. [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-252.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1166-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) This optimism runs through Newitz's work, particularly their last novel, [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228024?ref=andrewliptak.com), which followed the inhabitants of a planet being terraformed out from under them by a malevolent mega-corporation. Like in *Automatic Noodle*, the character's path forward comes down to mutual aid and support, building up a resilient community that allows them to weather the external actions that threaten to pull them apart. It's easy to isolate individuals, picking them off from the pack and whittling down the herd one by one. At its heart, *Automatic Noodle* is a concise, focused story on that one point: divisions invite destruction, whether it's a neighborhood, online forum, or political movement. Creating connective tissue, bridges, and bonds across those factions makes destruction harder. That's a process that takes a considerable amount of time and energy to accomplish, and while we often look to big, grand actions that solve our problems, it's really the multitude of tiny, everyday decisions that gets us closer to building a better future. It's incremental work, whether that's reaching out to a neighbor or setting up shop with the goal of serving one's home. ### Embers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/embers/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T16:35:03.000Z In 2024, I had a short story published through Horizon 2045's *Far Futures* anthology, "[Embers](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/embers/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)." This was a fun project to be part of: I had been invited to a round table discussion a couple of years ago, hosted by the folks at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and an organization called N Square. The event was all about the future of nuclear weapons and denuclearization policy, and the goal was to come up with a framework for what a future without nuclear weapons might look like. This is entirely something up my alley: I got my MA in Military History, where I specifically wrote about how we transitioned from weapons designed to carry nuclear weapons around the world to more peaceful purposes. After the event, the organizers came to me with an invitation to submit a story. We talked over some options, and I realized that I had an idea that I'd written down in a notebook about a historian backtracking missile trajectories long after a war in the solar system had ended. It was roughly the right shape, and I ended up writing what eventually became this story. The [anthology included some other excellent authors](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io): Madeline Ashby, Vincent Ialenti, PAGES Matam, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, Tochi Onyebuchi, João Queiroz, Sheree Renėe Thomas, and Peter Waring. All of the stories come with audio versions, and I definitely recommend checking them out. I've now reprinted the whole story here. If you'd prefer to read it on your eBook reader, I've created a couple of eBook editions (PDF and ePub) for you to download: [EmbersEmbers.pdf20 MBdownload-circle](https://www.andrewliptak.com/content/files/2025/08/Embers.pdf "Download") [EmbersEmbers.epub1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.andrewliptak.com/content/files/2025/08/Embers.epub "Download") Enjoy! --- # Embers ### ***Now*** There's a moment before launch when time slows to a trickle. The little details around the cockpit jump right out at you: the shuddering of a loose switch cap, the glare of the touchscreen in front of me, and the creaks and groans of the rocket underneath us as it prepares to leap into space. Rickson, the pilot for this mission, turns from their seat to check up on me, nods when they see that I'm still strapped in, and goes back to whatever it was they were doing as they prepare for liftoff. The cartoonish Gambian rat mascot of Orbital Atomic Assessment and Retrieval division mission patch grins up at me from their left shoulder, riding a rocket around the earth waving a cowboy hat. It's a goofy enough image to take my mind off the impending ride. "Ready?" They ask. I nod, and before I can say anything, the rocket lurches and rumbles as it kicks to life, and we're off into the brilliant blue sky. --- ### ***Then*** I only have one clear memory of Oma. I'm at a massive parade, surrounded by cheering people waving bright-colored flags as a line of giant, armored vehicles lumber their way down a street. I couldn't have been more than four at the time, but I clearly remember the sound of the brass military band as it passed by. I remember looking for Oma's face as row after row of soldiers marched by in their dress uniforms. That memory lurches forward a couple of hours. Oma stands before a wall of flags and uniformed men, and someone places a medallion around her neck. I remember the glint as it caught the light of the sun. She was still wearing it after the ceremony, and it dug into my chest when she scooped me up in a hug. She must have felt my discomfort because she laughed and placed it around my neck. "We've done great things," she told me. "We’ll be safe forever." I didn't notice the uneasy looks my mother and father must have exchanged, because just a couple of months later, we were awoken in the middle of the night. My parents told me that we were going on an adventure, but we had to leave quickly, and I only had a couple of things that I was permitted to grab: a favorite shirt and toys, and the gold medallion. A car drove us to an airfield, and we were ushered onto a plane, which took off into the night, taking us to our new home. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0201-3-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Now*** The spaceflight trainer that OAARD assigned me warned me that the second stage cutoff was always a surprise, and they were right. The cabin jolted as the booster cut off and silence enveloped us. As the acceleration fell away, so too did my sense of weight. You've seen the videos, and it's just as delightful and disorienting as you'd imagine. Fortunately, I didn't have the sense of nausea that they warned I might feel. Rickson stretches and deftly unstraps from their seat, pushing off and sailing up and out into the ship's main compartment, pantomiming as a dancer as they flew past. I fumble with my own restraints, trying to figure them out. The mission's commander, a olive-skinned woman named Allens, reaches over and helped, unclicking the latch and freed me from the tangle of webbing as I oriented myself. She chuckled at what I'm sure is embarrassment on my face. “Everyone’s a klutz on their first ride up,” she says. “We’ve all been there.” She checked her watch. “You’ve got… 60 hours to get oriented before we arrive on platform.” She followed Rickson out into the cargo compartment, leaving me to take in the view of the Earth gliding silently below. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0197-2-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Then*** I was too young to fully understand why we didn’t see Oma again. My parents said she was too far away to visit, but the times we spoke via vidchat were few and far between. Eventually they found excuses to deflect and then those periodic chats fell away. Through it all, I would sometimes get out of the metal from my dresser drawer and trace my fingers over the text in characters that I remembered a little of. The news was full of serious – looking people speaking in urgent voices. Once I caught a glimpse of a mountain of video clip standing and shouting in a circular room full of people. Dad turned it off and left the room while mom announced that we were going out. We spent the afternoon watching movies at the local theater. When we left to return home, she pulled me aside. “ Don’t tell your friends where we’re from,” she instructed. “Don’t tell them about Oma.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0199-1-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Now*** “So Professor, how did you find this again?” Rickson moved through the crew compartment practiced ease. They and Allens are contractors from a private space corporation called Olympia Aeronautics, and between them have decades of space flight experience between them. As they explained it, it’s a pretty routine gig: one month on a couple months off as they shuttle whatever payloads they’ve been hired to more. The company did a lot of work with ORAAD’s compliance team back in the day, orbiting the planet looking for telltale signs of radiation or nuclear activity, and they were more than happy to shuttle me up for this mission. It’s a cozy gig, they told me when we first met. In the decades after the denuclearization pacts of the 2040s, plenty of countries breathed a sigh of relief, not having to devote resources to an arms race that expended trillions of dollars, and instead began focusing on more productive endeavors: massive energy and infrastructure projects, space programs, and the like. Without the drumbeat of a potential threat, demand for maintaining nuclear weapons dried up, and the hardware and the facilities to them just aren’t around anymore. ORAAD’s days of heavy lifting and retrieval ops are decades behind us, but the organization has long-term planning for the worst case scenario embedded in its DNA. “Accidentally,” I tell them. My main role is essentially traffic control, with a hefty dose of archival research. I wasn’t actually a professor, but Rickson had settled on that nickname shortly after we met, and I didn’t mind it. “The Cold War and subsequent booms of private spaceflight in the rise of tensions at the early part of the century meant a lot of hardware went up an orbit which… nations and organizations didn’t always keep good track of.” “So what, this is a rogue nuke?” Rickson asked. I shrug. “Donno. It’s got the right radar signature, it’s in the right ballpark and orientation. It’s too small and moving too quickly for a visual snapshot on any of our telescopes.” I spread my hands out to take in the cramped compartment. “So here I am.” “Expensive way to take a peek,” Allen said. I jump a bit: I didn’t hear her approach. “Sorry, I forgot that you aren’t used to moving around here yet.” I shook my head. “We’d normally just keep an eye on it, but there’s a problem with its orbit: it’s straying too close to the Luna-to-Venus-to-Mars slingshot route.” “Is it going to hit something?” Allen asked. “Space is pretty big.” I worked to put the complicated orbital calculations and organizational thinking into a coherent sentence. “ORAAD is… I wouldn’t say paranoid, but let’s say it has a low tolerance for margins.” I explain. “Collision isn’t the first worry here, actually. We — I — was running calculations on some legacy launches from the pre-pact tensions, and ended up running through decades of calculations to find this thing. It likely won’t collide with anything, but their biggest concern is that the data that I pulled is all public: anyone with an off-the-shelf AI system can do what I did, and that there’s a non-zero possibility that some rogue actor could find it, come to the same conclusions, and figure out how to get out to it. There are plenty of autonomous freighters headed out to the new installations orbiting Venus and on Mars, and someone getting onto one of those ships and getting close enough for a retrieval…” I shrug. “It’s an exceedingly small chance, but everyone on the ground figures it’s a small price to pay to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Rickson whistled. “I’m pretty sure I saw a movie about that once.” I laugh. “Yeah, it’s a bit out there. But again, low tolerance for margins.” The astronaut laughed and struck a dramatic pose in zero-g. “Maybe we’ll uncover some secret thing out there, and we’ll be the basis for a blockbuster vid. Commander, you gotta capture this moment for posterity.” Allen barked out a laugh, and swooped in, taking a selfie with the three of us with her handheld. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0202-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Then*** Mom and dad didn't tell me when Oma died. I was at college when my feed blipped an alert. I’d set it up to track news from my home country after an argument and youthful umbrerage after my parents redirected yet another question about our family’s past one too many times. I knew the basics guided by the fragments of my memories. She had Risen through the ranks of the military and have been involved with diplomacy as the rest of the world tightened embargoes and sanctions against the country’s increasingly radicalized government. But more details were harder to come by. Reading the headline my stomach dropped. Words jumped out at me: hardline. Extreme. Genocide. Oversight. Years of unspoken answers snapped into focus. She wasn’t leading the country as they threatened arms buildups and staged increasingly violent geopolitical flashpoints, but she was the one making sure those actions were being carried out, translating the rhetoric and speeches into policy. I threw up and went to bed for days unableTo face the world with anything but shame. When I emerged, I went to the registrar and change the focus on my studies from engineering to international law. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0203-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Now*** The spaceship’s thrusters kicked in as the AI made minute adjustments to our course. I looked out the front porch but only caught a glimpse of the Earth and the moon in the corner. We were still too far away for visual contact of our target. “What are you thinking?” I was getting more used to knowing where everybody was on the ship. Allen floated upside down in the compartment, cradling a warm drink that she sipped through a straw. “Just how pointless it all seems,” I answered, flipping around to match her orientation. Even if I’ve acclimated to microgravity, it’s still weird to talk to someone who’s upside down. “You look back on the Earth and don’t see the borders on a map, and remember that we’re all so small in the greater scheme of things.” She nodded. “The early astronauts and scientists called that the ‘Overview Effect’. The very act of being confronted by our fragility and insignificance in space is a transformative one.” She signed, looking out toward the distant Earth and Moon. “It’s why some of us keep coming back.” I nodded. “It’s part of how OAARD came about. The threat of nuclear annihilation has always been part of the space industry, but when you have more and more people going up into space, eventually, they just get sick of the bullshit taking place on the ground.” “I think I read that somewhere,” Allen mused. “Is that how you got involved?” I opened my mouth to answer and paused, trying to think up the best explanation. “My mother and father fled when they saw the directions things were going back at home,” I replied, “They’d realized when they had me that the life that I’d have there wasn’t something they wanted, and they chose to leave everything and everyone behind to give me options.” I stared out the window at the tiny ball that was Earth. “I didn’t know all of that until later. When I learned the cost… I realized I was in a place where I could help make that decision worth it, make those choices matter. Turns out hunting down old nukes through years of archival research was a pretty comfortable way to do that. Never thought I’d end up in space, though.” Rickson voice broke into my earbuds. “We’ve got a radar lock on our target. 12 hours to platform.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0197-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Then*** I thought I’d thrown Oma’s medal away. I’d been disgusted with what I realized it represented: a thank you for years of work ensuring a military buildup and genocide of her own people. What justifications did she make when she looked in the mirror every morning, adjusting her uniform? That the journey was for her country? Her family? Da must have found it, because when I told him and mom about my work tracking down the various weapons that had been launched into space and lost, and my impending mission into orbit, he vanished into the bedroom and returned with a bundle, opening it to reveal that hated adornment. The ribbon was frayed and metal dully polished from handling. He held up a hand when I started a protest. “I know what it meant to her and what it represents,” he told me. “And what it meant to everyone else.” He placed it in my hand and curled my fingers around it. “She wasn’t evil,” he said, “however much I hated her for what she did, and what it forced us to do. She was just someone who made the choices that were before her to protect her world in ways that seemed logical in the moment. She chose poorly and I hate her for not seeing what she overlooked. I haven’t — and won’t — forgiven her for what she did, but you can learn from her mistakes. That’s how we grow.” The next morning, I packed the medal into my carryon as I tried to calm the pre-launch jitters that bubbled up in my stomach. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_0201-2-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak --- ### ***Now*** Our target was smaller than I imagined. Its gray shell glinted against the backdrop of space: a stubby cylinder with an engine cone at one end, and a shroud containing its payload at the other. My breath hitched in my chest when our spotlight caught the familiar flag of my birth country emblazoned on the side. There was still carbon scoring wrapped around the rocket from when it launched, decades ago. Smaller, but familiar. After my revelation about Oma’s work, I’d gone from studying engineering to history and international relations, focusing in on the weapons we’d hurtled into space. I’d spent years studying and modeling various launches that made it into orbit during those tense years. I’d gone through hardware design specifications and launch conditions, and followed those missiles until we figured out where they ended up — usually incinerated fragments in the atmosphere. This was one that vanished after launch, and presumed lost. I hadn’t been convinced, and I theorized that it had made some incorrect burns and ended up drifting in space. Now, it sat before me. My breath hissed in my ears as I stared out through the open hatch at the end of the airlock module. Rickson chattered away as they made the last corrective burns as we caught up and matched the launch vehicle’s velocity and heading. I double checked the tether connecting me to the module for the tenth time, finding that it was still firmly attached. Allens was behind me in the airlock, her visor shielding her face from view. We’d practiced our procedures on the ride up, and I was finally a bit more comfortable wearing the bulky white suit. “Radiation check,” Rickson tells us over our earbuds. I held my breath as we waited for the sensors to finish reading. “Computer tells me that there is a radioactive thing in there, and it matches up with those stats you brought us, Professor. Looks like we’ve found the right target.” I let my breath out slowly. Up to this point, everything had been theoretical, and automated. Launch, allow physics to take its course, and now, human decision. I swallowed. “How’re the levels looking? Any abnormalities?” There was a pause. “Nothing dangerous from it directly. We’ll catch more rads on the ride up and back than we’ll get from that thing.” I ran through my mental decision tree of if-then situations. If the object was our target, check for danger. If none present, proceed with mission. “Okay, let’s go get it.” Rickson bricks us closer. I swallow and turn to Allen, who flashes a thumbs up. I turn and take a deep breath and gently step off the platform and over to the floating missile. The distance isn’t far: just a few meters, but the seconds it takes to cross feel like minutes. I watch as my target grows closer, and reach out as I get closer. “Contact,” I call out, louder than I planned, as I feel my hand touch the metal shell. I pull a tether from the holder on my thigh, remove the cover strip from one end to expose its sticky epoxy surface, and affix it to the target. We didn’t want to use magnets for this op: we weren’t entirely sure if a strong magnet would mess with the rocket or its payload. “Target secure,” I tell Rickson and Allen after an experimental tug. “Nice work,” Allen says. “I’m reeling the two of you to the workstation.” Our mission is two-fold: confirm that my research has been correct and what we’ve been latched onto is indeed our wayward ICBM, and from there, remove the warhead and bring it back to Earth, while leaving a small scientific package in its place. Before we’d leave, we’d attach a small navigational beacon to it to prevent any future mishaps that could arise. By the time Allen reeled me back to the spacecraft, she’d deployed the workstation: a small platform that could allow us to secure our larger spacecraft to the missile vehicle, with the right tools and power to start work on it. Our first step was to make a positive identification. I pulled up a virtual screen in my visor, a list of identifiable numbers and flaws that we’d gleaned from documents long since leaked to intelligence agencies or open-sourced networks. I laid my hands on the object, the first person to do so in decades. Allen handed me a chunky zero-G screwdriver, and after securing ourselves to the platform, set about taking off the exterior panels. It was slow-going: the screws holding down the cover plate came up one by one, which Allen plucked and affixed to a magnetic patch on her suit. When we finally exposed the rocket’s computer, we knew that what we’d found was indeed our target. On the interior of the panel was a familiar name: Oma’s: written in her — my — native script. “Professor, your heart rate just spiked,” Rickson said. “Are you okay?” I nodded to myself. “ID confirmed,” I told them. “This is what we came for.” “Well good. Just don’t blow us up, please.” That cut through the tension like a rocket through the clouds, and it took us a moment to catch our breaths after laughing. “Checking power.” I pulled a cord from my suit and plugged it into a slot in the rocket’s computer. I felt a click as it seated itself, and began running down a list of procedures. The system had long since drained itself, but after a couple of minutes, my suit recharged it enough to blink sleepily to life. A stream of ancient programming language ran across my visor. I’d practiced this with simulators, and read along as it booted up. “The payload is still armed,” I told them, skimming the text. “It’s as I thought: this thing launched and misfired a transfer orbit. Instead of jetting back down to Earth, it ended up zipping out into space.” “Jesus.” Allen said. “Catastrophe averted because of a programming error.” “Stranger things have happened,” I said. “This wasn’t designed for anything but a demonstration over the Pacific. I don’t think it would have actually gone off: just set off a ton of sensors and kick up even more alarms down on Earth. But this… I don’t think this was an accident. There’s some programming in here that wasn’t in the original specs that we recovered from intel. It was added after the fact.” “Weird. Can we finish up now? I don’t like the idea sitting on a live nuclear bomb.” “Yeah.” I clicked through a virtual screen with my hand and selected a command. The lights on the computer dimmed and blinked out. “Payload is disarmed.” “That’s it?” Rickson asked. “That’s it.” “Where’s the kaboom?” They said in a cartoonish voice. “There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom!” “No kaboom,” I confirmed. “We’ll extract the warhead and be on our way.” Allen and I spent the next twelve hours prying apart the missile and its payload. We physically removed the firing mechanism to prevent any possibility of a detonation, and then carefully packed it away into a lead-lined container to bring home. After that, the scientific package slotted in nicely. Allen handed me each of the screws as I reapplied the cover plate. When it was done, she cut the fabric tether. Rickson hit the thrusters on our ship, and we watched as we drifted further and further apart, until the only thing we could see was the blinking light that we installed. “You said that you didn’t think that it was an accident the way it ended up here,” Allen said as we watched. “What do you think happened?” I patted the now-empty pocket that had contained the gold military medal that I’d carried with me. “I think that maybe someone made a choice all those years ago,” I said. “They saw an alternative future ahead of them and decided that it looked a little better than the path they were on.” “Good for them,” Allen said, and pulled herself back into the airlock. I watched as the glint of the rocket vanished from sight, then turned and looked down at the distant dot that was Earth. “Good for her,” I said to myself. --- Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. Andrew ### 2025 Dragon Award finalists URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2025-dragoncon-dragon-award-corey-vandermeer/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T16:09:15.000Z Awards are complicated things: the science fiction and fantasy scene has an overabundance of them, with a ton aimed at honoring the best works in fairly small categories. Aside from the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, it's sometimes hard to get an idea of what fandom is enjoying or collectively putting out as the best works of the year. That's okay: it's a challenge that in and of itself helps show that "fandom" isn't one population, but a scattered collection of a whole bunch of fans. While the Hugo and Nebula Awards are still the gold standard when it comes to honoring the past year's excellence in publishing, I've been finding that the Dragon Awards, put out by the folks running DragonCon, seems to align with my particular style of SF/F fandom: not entirely the old-school Fandom-with-a-capital-F scene, but also not entirely the more modern multimedia fandoms. The awards were [founded in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/13/12461038/dragon-awards-shortlist-dragoncon-science-fiction-fantasy?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and after some [growing pains](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16118054/john-scalzi-alison-littlewood-dragon-awards-controversy-sci-fi-horror?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), they seem to have figured themselves out as they enter their ninth year: a solid roundup of science fiction, fantasy, horror, YA comics, games, literature, movies, and television shows. The awards are voted on by attendees and the general public, and while there were a lot of folks who were initially worried that they'd be used by fandom's more right-wing members to push their own books, they've turned out to be a pretty inclusive and far-reaching selection, which I think is a really good thing to see. Here are the [winners from last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2024-dragon-awards/). DragonCon has [announced the finalists](https://awards.dragoncon.org/2025-ballot/?fbclid=IwY2xjawL%5FAl5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFobHJVUW9Mak1zZkxhVE1mAR5lO7NTXRJ6CRF819GqKqUtLPDeY3QBPKVyN81z68G8ZqDiJs77HaP0PkhmOw%5Faem%5FO2Fcuj8haFwwObCOCCIvoQ&ref=andrewliptak.com) for this year's awards (eligible works go to ones published starting last fall to this summer), and voting is now open: you can go register to vote [here](https://applyto.dragoncon.org/fan%5Fawards/dc%5Ffan%5Fawards%5Fsignup.php?ref=andrewliptak.com). The winners will be announced at this year's [DragonCon](https://www.dragoncon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will be held between August 28th through September 1st in Atlanta, Georgia. Here are this year's finalists: ### **Best Science Fiction Novel** - *Alliance Unbound* by C .J. Cherryh, Jane S. Fancher - *The Mercy of Gods* by James S. A. Corey - *Absolution* by Jeff VanderMeer - *Extremophile* by Ian Green - *Nether Station* by Kevin J. Anderson - *The Folded Sky* by Elizabeth Bear - *This Inevitable Ruin* by Matt Dinniman ### **Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)** - *The Last Shield* by Cameron Johnston - *The Black Bird Oracle* by Deborah Harkness - *Shadow of the Smoking Mountain* by Howard Andrew Jones - *Heart of the Mountain* by Larry Correia - *The Devils* by Joe Abercrombie - *Long Live Evil* by Sarah Rees Brennan ### **Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel** - *Sunrise of the Reaping* by Suzanne Collins - *Labyrinth Arcanist* by Shami Stovall - *Friends Indeed* by David Weber, Jane Lindskold - *Compound Fracture* by Andrew Joseph White - *Among Serpents* by Marc J Gregson - *Rest in Peaches* by Alex Brown ### **Best Alternate History Novel** - *1635: The Weaver’s Code* by Eric Flint, Jody Lynn Nye - *1919: The Romanov Rising* by Tom Kratman, Kacey Ezell, Justin Watson - *To Turn the Tide* by S.M. Stirling - *The Martian Contingency* by Mary Robinette Kowal - *Gangster* by Dan Willis - *Gold, Gangs, and Glory* by Laurence Dahners ### **Best Horror Novel** - *Bury Your Gays* by Chuck Tingle - *The Vengeful Dead* by Darcy Coates - *It Will Only Hurt for a Moment* by Delilah S. Dawson - *Cold Eternity* by S.A. Barnes - *The Wilding* by Ian McDonald - *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter* by Stephen Graham Jones **Best Illustrative Book Cover** - *The Icarus Coda* by Dave Seeley - *Flames of Gold* by Jeff Brown - *Rise From Ruin* by Pierluigi Abbondanza - *Wind and Truth* by Michael Whelan - *Blood of Her Father* by Sam Kennedy - *Mountain of Fire* by Kurt Miller ### **Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel** - *Absolute Batman* by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta - *Absolute Superman* by Jason Aaron, Rafa Sandoval - *Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell* by Charles Soule, Steve McNiven - *Transformers Volume 3* by Daniel Warren Johnson, Jorge Corona - *Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 2* by Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto - *Ultimate Wolverine* by Christopher Condon, Alessandro Cappuccio ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet** - *Murderbot*, Apple TV+ - *Severance*, Apple TV+ - *Wheel of Time*, Amazon Prime - *The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power*, Amazon Prime - *Silo*, Apple TV+ - *Andor*, Disney+ ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie** - *Sinners* by Ryan Coogler - *Thunderbolts\** by Jake Schreier - *Wicked* by Jon M. Chu - *How to Train Your Dragon* by Dean DeBlois - *Deadpool & Wolverine* by Shawn Levy - *Alien: Romulus* by Fede Álvarez ### **Best Digital Game** - *Death Stranding 2: On the Beach*, Kojima Productions - *Split Fiction*, Hazelight Studios - *Assassin’s Creed Shadows*, Ubisoft Quebec - *Elden Ring Nightreign*, FromSoftware - *Monster Hunter Wilds*, Capcom - *Kingdom Come: Deliverance II*, Warhorse Studios ### **Best Tabletop Game** - *Arcs*, Leder Games - *Magic the Gathering: Bloomburrow*, Wizards of the Coast - *Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy*, Wizards of the Coast - *Heat: Tunnel Vision*, Days of Wonder - *Splendor: The Silk Road*, Space Cowboys - *Disney Lorcana: Archazia’s Island*, Ravensburger ### The Folio Society is publishing Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-frank-herbert-god-emperor-of-dune/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T13:00:10.000Z One of my favorite science fiction books of all time is Frank Herbert's *Dune*, and over the last couple of years, I've gathered up a small pile of different editions of the series. One of my favorites is the [Folio Society's edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-folio-society-dune-frank-herbert-sam-weber/)from 2015*,* with art by Sam Weber and an introduction by Michael Dirda. It's a gorgeous book, and I was pleased to see the publisher [follow up](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/) with the second installment of the series, *Dune Messiah* in 2023 and *Children of Dune* [in 2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-children-of-dune-frank-herbert/), both of which featured art from Hilary Clarcq. Folio Society will continue the series with a new edition of the fourth book, *God Emperor of Dune*. Folio says that its edition will be available in October 2025 and will see a switch-up with artists: [Grace Aldrich](https://www.gracealdrichillustration.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who previously worked on the company's edition of *Childhood’s End* by Arthur C. Clarke. It hasn't released pricing yet, but the prior editions have ranged from $115 to $150\. The Dune series gets progressively weirder as it goes. Herbert kicked off his saga in 1963 when he serialized *Dune* in *Astounding Science Fiction*, telling the story of Paul Atreides as he arrives on the planet Arrakis, only to have his entire family killed by a rival family who take control of the planet. Prophesized by the indigenous Fremen population as their messiah, Paul is thrust into revolution to retake the planet, ultimately toppling the entire galactic empire. *Dune Messiah* picks up 12 years later, with Paul now in charge of a galactic jihad that has killed billions of people, and he's trying to come to terms with the toll and direction that he's steered humanity in. He ultimately rejects his role and power, heading off into the desert to escape his legacy. In Children of Dune, we pick up the story of Paul's twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, who're dealing with their legacies as Arrakis begins to transform into a more habitable planet. [Interview: Hilary Clarq on illustrating the Folio Society’s Dune editionsAn interview with Hilary Clarcq about her work on The Folio Society’s editions of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah and Children of Dune![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-242.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0694-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-children-folio-society-hilary-clarcq-artist-interview/) *God Emperor of Dune* takes the weirdness up a notch: Leto II has become a human-sandworm hybrid and has ruled for 3,500 years, and controls the remaining spice that made Arrakis the most valuable planet in the universe, becoming more powerful and despotic. Herbert continued the series with two additional books, *Heretics of Dune* and *Chapterhouse: Dune*, and left another unfinished at the time of his death, which his son and coauthor Kevin J. Anderson finished and published as two novels, *Hunters of Dune* and *Sandworms of Dune* in 2006 and 2007\. Presumably, we'll see Folio finish out the rest of the series with new editions of Herbert's final two booksat some point in the future. ### Table of Contents: August 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-fiction-asimovs-analog-clarkesworld-uncanny/ Last updated: 2025-09-03T15:12:23.000Z Short fiction is one of the best places to find some of the best storytelling in the science fiction and fantasy genres: it's where you can find some incredible experimentation and up-and-coming authors (as well as familiar favorites!). Here's the latest installment of Table of Contents, which rounds up this month's short fiction releases. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-july-2025/). (I've just updated it with links to stories that have since this was originally published.) You can also find prior roundups [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/table-of-contents/). If you read a story that you enjoyed, let us know in the comments! Okay, here's what's coming out this month: --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July-September, Issue 150) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["As Ephemeral as Bubbles"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/as-ephemeral-as-bubbles?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akis Linardos (8/7) - ["A Final Song for the Ages"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/a-final-song-for-the-ages?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Pedro Iniguez (8/14) - ["Denizens of My Face"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/denizens-of-my-face?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emil Morel (8/19) (Flash) ### Nonfiction - [Interview with Author J.S. Oriel by Marissa van Uden](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-js-oriel?ref=andrewliptak.com) (8/12) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2025, *Vol. XCV No. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Analytical Laboratory Results out of "Some Warm Little Pond," Part 1: "Rifters" and the RNA World" by Kelly Lagor - "Biolog: Kelly Lagor" by Richard A. Lovett - "The First Velodrome on Mars" by Marie Vibbert - In Times To Come - "Desert Soul" by David Gullen - "Hidden Achievement" by Shane Tourtellott - "Patient Was the Doctor" by Victoria N. Shi - "Last Dam Standing" by Dawn Vogel - "If the Algorithms are Gentle" by Bernie Jean Schiebeling - "Low-Tide Salvage" by Matthew Claxton - "Unknowns Edited by Alec Nevala-Lee: Back to Square One" by Rachel Fabi - "Eri" by James Dick - "Mother Hubble's Elegy for Rhessi: (2002-2023) April 19, 2023 by Sandra J. Lindow - "Jennifer Does Pushups" by Joseph Weber - "Imaginary" by Daniel D. Villani - "Your Entry to Paradise Memorial Experience" by Robert Morrell Jr. - "The Marks We Leave" by M. Ian Bell - "Ready for New Arrivals?" by Sean Monaghan - "[Under the Moons of Venus: A Tale of a Princess Altivolant](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jay Werkheiser and Frank Wu - "[North Station Blues](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Gerrold - "[Our Lady of the Atom](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Pearce (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - [Guest Editorial: Three Gates](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Steven Barnes - [Alternate View: LUCA, Earth Life’s Universal Common Ancestor](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-alternate-view/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John G. Cramer - [Reference Library](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-reference-library/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rosemary Claire Smith - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**July/August 2025** *Vol. 49 Nos. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Chronolithographer’s Assistant](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Suzanne Palmer - "Most Things" by Rich Larson - "[Another Mother on Mars](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dominica Phetteplace - "In the Gardener’s Service" by Michèle Laframboise - "Pirates of Highship" by Stephen Case - "Perri’s Fate" by Robert Reed - "In the Halls of the Makeshift King" by Tobias S. Buckell - "Worm Song" by Derek Künsken - "Aftermath" by William Preston - "The Courier" by Lavie Tidhar ### Poetry - "Styx Seasons" by Robert Frazier - "Try to Explain the Concept of Teeth to My Alien Roommate" by Rachel Linton - "What Death Reads" by Mary Soon Lee - "Matter/Antimatter" by Lynne Sargent - "[Vivienne](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by E. H. Lupton ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: The 2025 Dell Magazines Award](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sheila Williams - [Reflections: Another Ancient Encyclopedia](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/reflections/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Writers’ Workshops by James Patrick Kelly - On Books by Peter Heck --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) () Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Brittle Terrain](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-brittle-terrain/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen Case - "[The Forgotten](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-forgotten/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Trae Hawkins - "[Bloody Muddy Water](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/bloody-muddy-water/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jonathan Louis Duckworth - "[Postman,](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/postman-soldier-traitor/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [Soldier, Traitor](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/postman-soldier-traitor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vijayalaxmi Samal --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(August 2025, Issue 227) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [A Shaky Bridge](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/lingen%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com): by Marissa Lingen - "[And The Planet Loved Him](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chan%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by L Chan - "[Sleeper](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ester%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.T. Ester - "[Memories Are Only Valuable if They Can Be Lost](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jiang%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ai Jiang - "[Sea of Fertility](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/han%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bella Han - "[Heart of Thunder](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/alvi%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Raahem Alvi - "[A Dream of Twin Sunsets](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cole%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ryan Cole - "[Vwooom!](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/nwaka%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Uchechukwu Nwaka ### Nonfiction - [The Rebellion is Real: 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale in 2025](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sessarego%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Sessarego - [Women, Technology, and the Future: A Conversation with Brenda Cooper](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cooper%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Tactical Ballgowns and Genre Turduckens: A Conversation with Fran Wilde](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wilde%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: The Future of Dealing with AI Submissions](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F08%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2025, Issue 123) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[They Must Be Angels](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/they-must-be-angels/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elle Zi Dong - “[The Ocean Vomits What We Discard](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-ocean-vomits-what-we-discard/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by J.A.W. McCarthy (reprint) - “[Husk](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/husk/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by James Bennett (reprint) - “[The Taint](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-taint/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anne Wilkins --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (August 2025) ### Fiction - "The Bite of the Cherry Blossom" by Lawrence Dagstine - "Black Magick 101" by Gray McClary - "Gladiators in the Sepulchre of Abominations by Alexander Zelenyj - "Lex Talionis (the Rule of Cord) by R.c. Bramhall - "Sadie by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Norman Nodding by Stephen Mcquiggan - "The Crooked Road by Stephen Shewmake - "The Good Shit by Brian J. Smith - "Beyond Unknown by Barry Vitcov - "Wisp" by M.P. Strayer[](javascript:void%280%29) --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 39, Summer 2025) Subscribe [here](https://psychopomp.com/grave-goods/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Deliquescence" by Kelsea Yu (fiction; released 8/7) - "Plus One" by Olufunmilayo Makinde (fiction; released 8/14) - "Miles To Go Before I Sleep" by Beth Goder (fiction; released 8/18) - "Séance" by Elizabeth Wing (poetry; released 8/21) - "Little Trinkets" by A. J. Sharpe (fiction, released 8/25) - "quietude II" by Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi (poetry, released 8/28) ### Nonfiction - Blind Date With a Corpse by RJ Aurand (nonfiction; released 8/4) - Ask a Necromancer: Fun with Formaldehyde by Amanda Downum (nonfiction; released 8/11) --- ## [*Fantasy Magazine*](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 97, Summer 2025) ### Fiction - "[How the road extracts an elegy](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/how-the-road-extracts-an-elegy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aishat Yahkub (online 8/1) - "Silence Starved and Swallowed" by Sydney Paige Guerrero (online 8/15) ### Nonfiction - Left of Center: A Conversation with Amara Hoshijo (online 8/8) - The Interrogation of So-ssang by Seoung Kim (online 8/22) - Interview With World Fantasy Finalists, Part Two (online 8/29) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2025) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Textures” by Lisa Fox - “No Laughter in a Vacuum” by Anna Clark - “I Was Made for Loving You” by Angela James - “The Body, Electric” by Lauren Kardos - “Dislocated” by Stephen Granade, and - “The Color of Things” by Eleanor Lennox --- ## [Future Tense Fiction](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2025) ### Fiction - "[The Middle](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-the-middle-erin-wagner/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Erin K. Wagner ### Nonfiction - [Can Flavor Make Scientific Sense?](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/standardizing-the-senses-christy-spackman/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christy Spackman --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2025, Issue 183) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Five Dispatches from Conflict Zone W-924/B Regarding Post-Battle Deployment of A. Thanatensis*"* by David Anaxagoras (8/7) - "It Might Be He Returns"by Fatima Taqvi (8/7) - "Feast of Famine" by Adam-Troy Castro (8/14) - "Dad Went Out to Get the Milk*"* by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (8/14) - "The Dream Tourists" by Sarah Langan (8/21) - "Savannah and the Apprentice" by Christopher Rowe (8/21) - "To Access Seven Obelisks, Press Enter" by V.M. Ayala (8/28) - "Anti-Capitalism vs. the Man of Flowers" by Naomi Kanakia (8/28) ### Nonfiction - Editorial: August 2025by John Joseph Adams (8/7) - Author Spotlight: Fatima Taqviby Alex Puncekar (8/7) - Author Spotlight: Osahon Ize-Iyamu by Mayookh Barua (8/14) - Book Review: *Mindscape* by Andrea Hairston by Melissa A Watkins (8/14) - Author Spotlight: Christopher Rowe by Alex Puncekar (8/21) - Book Review: *Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope* by Matthew David Goodwin, Alex Hernandez, Sara Rivera, eds. by Arley Sorg (8/21) - Author Spotlight: V.M. Ayala by Delia Cullity (8/28) - Book Review: *When They Burned the Butterfly* by Wen-yi Lee by Chris Kluwe (8/28) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025, Issue 152) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Bunny Ears" by Kristina Ten (8/6) - "Swallow Test" by Angela Liu (8/13) - "Eight Ball" by Martin Cahill (8/20) - "Turnip Heads" by Pedro Iniguez (8/27) ### Nonfiction - Editorial: August 2025by Wendy N. Wagner (8/6) - Author Spotlight: Kristina Tenby Alex Puncekar (8/6) - The H Word: The Waking Nightmares of Philip K. Dickby David Agranoff (8/13) - Author Spotlight: Martin Cahillby Kevin Figueroa Quiñones (8/20) - Plumbing the Depths: Archaeology in Horror Fictionby Rebecca Stone Gordon (8/27) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(August 2025) ### Fiction - "[Every Ghost Story](https://reactormag.com/every-ghost-story-natalia-theodoridou/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Natalia Theodoridou - "[With Only a Razor Between](https://reactormag.com/with-only-a-razor-between-martin-cahill/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Martin Cahill - "[In Connorville](https://reactormag.com/in-connorville-kathleen-jennings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kathleen Jennings - "[The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home](https://reactormag.com/the-hungry-mouth-renan-bernardo/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Renan Bernardo --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (August 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Poorly Salted, Well-Loved](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/poorly-salted-well-loved/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Athar Fikry - "[Yesterday](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/yesterday/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A.M. Barrie - "[The Capture](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-capture/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Raja'a Khalid ### Poetry - "[A Distressing Absence of Eyes](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-distressing-absence-of-eyes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris Clemens - "[Playing Among the Leaves](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/playing-among-the-leaves/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M. Weigel - "[With Serviettes Upon Our Heads](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/with-serviettes-upon-our-heads/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Pixie Bruner - "[New Regime](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/new-regime/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jeremiah Moriarty - "[The World Awaits My Little Chicken](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-world-awaits-my-little-chicken/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Trevor Tingle - "[\[Re: Your Failed Tonsillectomy\]](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/re-your-failed-tonsillectomy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Em Setzer - "[Hex Supply Customer Support Log](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/hex-supply-customer-support-log/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elis Montgomery - "[I Was A Fish](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/i-was-a-fish/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Svetlana Litvinchuk ### Nonfiction - [*Portalmania* by Debbie Urbanski](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/portalmania-by-debbie-urbanski/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw - [*Notes from a Regicide* by Isaac Fellman](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/notes-from-a-regicide-by-isaac-fellman/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amy Nagopaleen - [*Anji Kills A King* by Evan Leikam](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/anji-kills-a-king-by-evan-leikam/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jacqueline Nyathi - [*Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil* by V.E. Schwab](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/bury-our-bones-in-the-midnight-soil-by-v-e-schwab/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Debbie Gascoyne - [*The Vampire Tapestry* by Suzy McKee Charnas](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-vampire-tapestry-by-suzy-mckee-charnas/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ian J. Simpson - [*Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder* by ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/justice-in-21st-century-fairy-tales-and-the-power-of-wonder-by-cristina-bacchilega-and-pauline-greenhill/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/justice-in-21st-century-fairy-tales-and-the-power-of-wonder-by-cristina-bacchilega-and-pauline-greenhill/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sally Parlier - [*Dark Worlds We Wander* by Kristin Kirby](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dark-worlds-we-wander-by-kristin-kirby/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Lewis - [*Ley Lines* by Tim Welsh](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/ley-lines-by-tim-welsh/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Miguel - [I’ll Laugh As You Bury Me: New Zealand, America and Cultural Hegemony](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/ill-laugh-as-you-bury-me-new-zealand-america-and-cultural-hegemony/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alexandra Stronach - [Stories From The Radio - The Curse Of Nagana](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/stories-from-the-radio-the-curse-of-nagana/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kuzhali Manickavel - [*Metallic Realms* by Lincoln Michel](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/metallic-realms-by-lincoln-michel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Kincaid - [*The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction* edited by Rakesh Khanna, translated by Vishwambhari S. Parmar](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-blaft-anthology-of-gujarati-pulp-fiction-edited-by-rakesh-khanna-translated-by-vishwambhari-s-parmar/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sneha Pathak - [*Ice Cream Man* by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, and Chris O’Halloran](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/ice-cream-man-by-w-maxwell-prince-martin-morazzo-and-chris-ohalloran/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nataliia Sova --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 65) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Terrarium" by Jordan Taylor (Aug 05, 2025) - "Whalesong" by Daniel H. Wilson (Aug 05, 2025) - "The Garden" by Emma Törzs (Aug 05, 2025) - "Seaside Prophets" by Avra Margariti (Aug 05, 2025) - "Wishbone" by Prosper Ìféányí (Aug 05, 2025) ### Nonfiction - Precarious Employment in Precarious Futures by Amanda Wakaruk and Olav Rokne (Aug 05, 2025) - What’s a Novel Idea? What’s a Short Story Idea? I Used to Know the Difference by Charlie Jane Anders (Aug 05, 2025) - Interview: Daniel H. Wilson by Caroline M. Yoachim (Aug 05, 2025) --- Check back at the end of the month: I'll update the links to the stories that haven't come out at the time of publication. ### Here are 16 new sci-fi & fantasy books to check out this August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-books-newitz-tingle-star-wars/ Last updated: 2025-08-01T18:44:42.000Z Somehow, August is upon us, and weirdly, August has become a month that I find myself reading about one particular topic: nuclear weapons and the end of the world. 2025 marks marks the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've been reading a pair of books that explore the story behind those horrific events: *The Devil Reached Toward the Sky* by Garrett M. Graff and [*Destroyer of Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781541605893?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Frank Close. It's a topic that I've focused on quite a bit over the years; I studied the story of the ICBM and civilian space race for my Masters degree, and I've found this subject crop up in a handful of ways, either through books that I've picked up over the summer in recent years, such as [*Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501134630?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Higginbotham, and Annie Jacobsen's [*Nuclear War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476093?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([My review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/)), the movie *Oppenheimer*, or [even in my own writing](https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-science-fiction-horizon-2045-far-futures/) and studies. [Front lines in the Cold WarThe Green Mountain State was once home to a pair of missile silos armed with ICBMs![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-243.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/370184708_10223385802729371_607590677793796548_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-atlas-missiles-cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis/) What I find fascinating about the prospect of nuclear annihilation isn't the doom and gloom, but that it represents such a stark example of decisions that we've made that brings us close to our own end. It's something that I think any rational actor can agree isn't a good idea, yet we still inch toward that possibility little by little, the product of thousands little decisions that take place out of sight that could bring about an end. I hope that it doesn't happen, and I think in some small way, my work to understand this field is to try and prevent it, even if it means trying to instill or convey the importance of some rational thought in the people I come into contact with. (Don't push the button, plz.) Here's the usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/scifi-fantasy-horror-book-list-july-2025-bradbury-khaw-priest/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider signing up as a supporter! [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/account/plans) With that happy thought, here are 16 new SF/F books to check out this month. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. I'll have another list headed your way for the rest of August in a couple of weeks: stay tuned. --- ### [*The Society of Unknowable Objects*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063324039?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth Brown (August 12th) Gareth Brown earned a considerable amount of acclaim for last year's [*The Book of Doors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063323988?ref=andrewliptak.com), and this one looks line another mind-bender. The world is full of magical items that quietly possess powers – unknowable objects. They've watched by a secret magical society that meets twice a year in London, and have sworn to protect the objects from the outside world. When word of a new object arrives, two of their members: veteran Frank Simpson and newcomer Magda Sparks head off to Hong Kong to investigate. When they arrive, they face danger: they're confronted by a hitman who had an object stolen decades ago, and Magda is forced to flee home. When she arrives back in London, she finds that the society has been keeping secrets of their own, and that discovery prompts her on a journey to find answers that could change everything. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063324039?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "seasoned fantasy and mystery readers may guess some of the twists ahead of time, but, after an exposition-heavy start, Brown’s propulsive plot and plucky heroine keep the pages turning." ### [*Salvagia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798895150382?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Chawaga (August 12th) A woman named Triss Mackey has been able to evade the government by exploiting a loophole as she lives aboard a rented smart CabanaBoat, on which she spends her time diving for valuables in the now-flooded coastal cities. When the Feds begin pulling back from Florida altogether, she's forced to either buy her boat or lose the loophole. The pullback leaves a power vacuum that gang leaders are all too happy to take advantage of. To keep everyone off her back, Triss needs to find a big score, which she things she discovers when she comes across the corpse of a local gang leader, and ends up in more hot water than she anticipated. But if she can solve the mystery of his death, she might have her ticket to freedom. ### [*The Midnight Shift*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639735761?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seon-Ran Cheon and translated by Gene Png (August 12th) In this Korean novel, we follow a cop named Su-Yeon who’s investigating some mysterious deaths at a hospital: four people jumped to their deaths abruptly. Nobody seems to care until she encounters a woman who claims to be a vampire hunter, and that the deaths are because one's behind the deaths. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781639735761?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the darkly romantic flashbacks to 1980s France—highlighting Violette’s formative experiences with Lily, a charismatic vampire—are particularly mesmerizing, echoing classic gothic tales with a fresh, queer twist." ### [*When Mothers Dream*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880357?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880357?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Brenda Cooper (August 12th) Brenda Cooper brings together some of her previously published fiction – as well as some new stories. This collection features science fiction, fantasy, and poetry that follows environmentalists, grandmothers worried about their grandchildren being raised by AI, bioengineering, and more, all centered on the strength of women. ### [*Star Wars: Sanctuary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874462?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lamar Giles (August 5th) *The Bad Batch* might be over as an animated series, but the story of the crew of rogue clones lives on in a new book: *Sanctuary*. This story is set during the events of season 2, and it follows the team as they find a new, potentially safe home, Pabu. Their new home is short on the supplies after a devastating natural disaster and the team turns Phee Goena for help lining up some jobs for them. Things go quickly wrong when their cover is blown during an auction, and they barely escape with their lives. Hunter begins to worry that they’re exposing themselves to the Empire too much and has to balance their missions against their desire to stay hidden from sight. I really enjoyed the show and I’m looking forward to reading this one. ### [*The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668092392?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Garrett M. Graff (August 5th) 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the culmination of the Manhattan Project: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US forces. The attacks ultimately ended the Second World War, and it launched humanity into a dangerous new era. To tie in with the milestone, author Garrett Graff has assembled a new oral history (he published [*Life Became Very Blurry*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/life-became-very-blurry-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-in-vermont/1443?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) through us at the Vermont Historical Society, as well as oral histories about [9/11](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501182211?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [D-Day](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668027813?ref=andrewliptak.com)) about the project, drawing on everything from the scientists who fled to America to escape the Nazi regime to the work to develop the bombs and the attacks that delivered them to their targets in August 1945\. I've been reading this for the last couple of weeks, and I'm learning a lot from it. *Publishers Weekly* gave it a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-6680-9239-2?ref=andrewliptak.com): "The result is a stunning account that brings to the fore the nuclear saga’s surreal combination of ingenuity, fate, and terror." [Interview with Garrett M. GraffHow you take 100 oral histories and distill them down into a single book![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-237.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2908.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/) ### [*Mindscape*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250808769?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Andrea Hairston (August 5th) This was her debut novel and was originally published in 2006 (and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick the James Tiptree, Jr. Awards). It's now getting a re-release latest this year from Tor Books. For 115 years, the world has been divided by The Barrier by some extraterrestrial entity, dividing people against one another. Politicians have worked to create a treaty to stop the fighting, and when its architect is killed, her successor, Ellini is tasked with taking up her work. It's up to Ellini and a small group of allies to try and repair the world before it's too late. ### [*Starstrike*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593488379?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yoon Ha Lee (August 12th) Yoon Ha Lee follows up his YA novel [*Moonstorm*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593488331?ref=andrewliptak.com), the first of a space opera trilogy. In it, Hwa Young was orphaned when the Empire destroyed her home, and is now an unwittingly citizen. She dreams of becoming a lancer pilot that fights aboard giant mechs, and when her boarding school is attacked and she's left stranded with her classmates, she's quick to volunteer to pilot one. In *Starstrike*, Hwa and her companions are dealing with their decision to betray the Empire to save itself from its own destruction when they prevented Imperial forces from blowing up a singularity bomb. Hwa's friend Geum had been left behind and imprisoned, and she's desperate to save him, even as he's beginning to realize that her motivations aren't as clearcut as they seemed. ### [*Death Valley Blooms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781966503125?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.M. Mack (August 12th) In this novella, Death Valley experiences a wild bloom of wildflowers once a decade – somehow powered by a woman named Mar Ramse. She lost her mother to the valley when she was a teenager and is desperate to break the curse that's settled on her family – to the point where neither she nor her brother will have children. But it might not be enough for the desert to release the curse. ### [*Mad Sisters of Esi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756420062?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tashan Mehta (August 5th) Two sisters, Myung and Laleh are the only people who live aboard the whale of babel: a creature with endless rooms and worlds, which the pair are exploring and documenting. Laleh is content with their work, Myung is not, and flees the whale, encountering a new universe filled with strange people, lands and ghosts. She's searching for their creator, the Great Wisa, and while she misses her sister, her journey will help her understand the origins of their world and purpose. Niall Harrison [writes in *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2024/01/niall-harrison-reviews-mad-sisters-of-esi-by-tashan-mehta/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a rich novel, and the stories it tells should be savoured while you’re reading them, not least because Mehta reminds us that stories always change over time, as they are retold or re-encountered." ### [*Automatic Noodle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Annalee Newitz (August 5th) I'm always excited for a new Annalee Newitz book: not only was I someone who worked with them at *io9*, but their fiction and nonfiction books alike are always interesting. Their latest looks particularly good: it's about a group of food service bots in a war-torn San Francisco that have taken over their own delivery app account and have begun selling their own, high-quality noodles to customers. Standing in their way? Someone who's been review bombing their restaurant, which threatens to destroy everything they've worked to build. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/annalee-newitz/automatic-noodle/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "this richly flavored bowl of noodles offers additional toppings, such as edgy social commentary about climate change, PTSD, and the ways in which social media and apps like Yelp and DoorDash gatekeep restaurant publicity, ratings, and sales, creating a distorted depiction of a business with little resemblance to its physical reality." [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-151.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1166-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) ### [*Ghosts of Hiroshima*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798228309890?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charles Pellegrino (August 5th) Another book that ties in with the 80th anniversary of the bombings in Japan: Charles Pellegrino's *Ghosts of Hiroshima*. He explores the impact of the bombings and their aftermath, exploring the experiences of the survivors and the people who carried out the attack, and how it affected them for the rest of their lives. This one has been in the news quite a bit recently: director James Cameron has [picked up the rights](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/james-cameron-ghosts-of-hiroshima-last-train-from-film-1236146096/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to adapt the book, which he's [recently said](https://deadline.com/2025/06/james-cameron-interview-ghosts-of-hiroshima-movie-a-bomb-japan-1236444510/?ref=andrewliptak.com) he'll pick up after the next *Avatar* film hits theaters in December. ### [*The Magician of Tiger Castle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593952306?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Louis Sachar (August 5th) A long time ago in France, Princess Tullia of the kingdom of Esquaveta is about to be married off to a foreign prince in an effort to forge a new alliance for the struggling country. Despite those plans, Tullia has fallen in love for an apprentice scribe, prompting the king to turn to his magician for help. The magician, Anatole, was once a promising figure for the kingdom, but failure after failure has tarnished his reputation. When the king orders him to brew up a love potion to help get the princess onboard with his plans, he faces a difficult choice: restore his reputation and save the kingdom, or save the one person who believes in him: Tullia. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louis-sachar/the-magician-of-tiger-castle/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Sachar tells the comical story with the slight detachment of a fairy-tale narrator, focusing less on the fantasy elements than on the relationships among the characters, which are straightforward and touching." ### [*Hunter's Heart Ridge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250370730?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Stewart Taylor (August 5th) One of the books that I enjoyed last year was Sarah Stewart Taylor's [*Agony Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826626?ref=andrewliptak.com), a Vermont-set mystery that took place during a particularly transformative time in the state's history. She's back with a sequel: *Hunter's Heart Ridge*, which finds Vermont State Police detective Frank Warren and his neighbor Alice Bellows investigating what appears to be an accidental shooting at an exclusive hunting club called The Ridge Club. The victim is a former ambassador, and Warren and Bellows quickly figure out that a whole bunch of the man's companions might have a motive to carry out murder. Alice, who has some connections to the CIA, has to contend with the arrival of her former handler, Arthur Crannock, and she begins to wonder if his unexpected arrival is tied to that recent death. [Murders in the farmlandsAn interview with Vermont author Sarah Stewart Taylor![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-236.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/461323159_1066506882142644_7752175431673543019_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sarah-stewart-taylor-agony-hill-vermont-history-interview/) ### [*Lucky Day*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250398659?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Tingle (August 12th) Something strange took place four years ago: eight million people died in one day. Not from any one accident, but individually: people were strangled by balloon ropes, exploding manhole covers, or by animal attacks. The incident was known as the Low-Probability Event, and a former statistics and probability instructor named Vera has been struggling with the losses she incurred that day. When a special agent arrives on her doorstep investigating a casino that seems to be unusually lucky, they think it might be connected to that horrible day, giving Vera the chance to make sense of the world. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250398659?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The comedic carnage might overwhelm a lesser novel, but Tingle’s fast-paced plot makes it work, and his ability to effectively wield the many disparate elements at play here impresses." ### [*A Catalog of Storms: Collected Short Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880319?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Fran Wilde (August 12th) Fran Wilde is one of my favorite people in the entire SF/F scene, so I'm delighted to see that she's collected some of her short stories into a new collection: *A Catalog of Storms*. It'll include 14 of her recent short stories, including the Hugo/Locus-nominated "[A Catalog of Storms](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-catalog-of-storms/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," as well as other stories about sentient storms, strange creatures, uncanny museum guides, and quite a few more. --- Thanks for reading. As always, let me know what you're reading and what catches your eye on this list. ### Shared reality incongruity URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/united-states-vermont-history-ideology-misinformation/ Last updated: 2025-07-31T16:19:57.000Z I happened upon a comment thread in a Facebook group devoted to the history of Burlington the other day that's got me irritated and cranky about the poor state of our understanding of history. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/07/image-2.png) Screenshot: Andrew Liptak The Battle of Valcour occurred in 1776: it was a naval engagement between US and British Forces who were attempting to invade the colonies by way of Lake Champlain from Canada. Both sides took heavy losses, but the US forces were able to delay the British enough that they decided to postpone their invasion until the following year, which was more successful. [Gateway to the RevolutionLake Champlain’s strategic significance during the colonial era![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-239.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/4857088490_0763b62d72_k.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-american-revolution-lake-champlain-strategic/) Carleton's Prize is a small rocky island that juts out of the lake just off of South Hero, and was reportedly bombarded by the British fleet who mistaking the rocks for one of the fleeing US ships. This is where the caption comes from: "the reddish stains are from the cannon balls that the British fired into it." [The post](https://www.facebook.com/groups/502280600349047/posts/1916364458940647/) quickly attracted some commenters who pointed out that the stains aren't from the battle: they're the product of iron deposits in the rock that's oxidized. One member of the group left a couple of comments that I've been thinking about for the last couple of days: > "OR, it's iron shot that penetrated the rocks and is leeching out! Could be...and why not just allow for the lore of the great revolution. And: > But why can't there be a little historical lore allowed to exist in the world. Nobody is foisting their lies upon anyone here and demanding agreement ... it is simply fun to consider what it MIGHT be, in addition to allowing the scientific fact of what it is likely to be. This is Facebook, so we're talking about an argument with exceedingly low stakes, but I think it's illustrative of much greater arguments that are taking place around how we as a society remember the past and undertake the practice of *history* as a discipline. In 2026, the United States will enter its 250th year (starting with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776), and as the nation gears up to celebrate, we're going to see a lot more of these discussions and arguments crop up as we look back over that last quarter millennium. I've been mulling over the phrase "historical lore" and the rush to defend the idea in this post even if it's defending something that is quantifiably wrong: that the British bombarded the island by mistake and local legend claims that the stains are what remains. I can see the appeal: it's a story that attempts to explain the situation, and to remember on a cultural level something important occurred in this place. Folklore and stories passed down in oral traditions are important and historians shouldn't disregard them. In 1846, a pair of British ships, the HMS *Erebus* and HMS *Terror* vanished in Canada's far north. The ships were rediscovered just off of King William Island in 2014, [thanks to centuries of stories passed down by members of the Inuit community](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/franklin-find-proves-inuit-oral-history-is-strong-louie-kamookak-1.2761362?ref=andrewliptak.com), which conveyed that two ships arrived and were crushed by the ice off the island before sinking. In Australia, [study of Aboriginal folklore](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/find-meteorites-listen-legends-australian-aborigines-180952941/?ref=andrewliptak.com) has led to a better understanding of the Henbury meteorite field, in which stories told of fire that came from the sky and that if people drank from the water in the area, they might be poisoned. But it's important to treat folklore carefully as historical evidence and to account for errors and perspective. Human memory is fallible and as stories are transmitted across generations, they can change. Aboriginal Australians wouldn't have had the cosmological vision that we now have, and interpreted the events through their perspective. In this instance, we do have a good understanding of what occurred in October 1776: we have firsthand accounts from the people who were involved in the battle, wreckage from the ships, and contemporary documents, as well as decades and decades of scholarship from historians working to understand how this battle fit into the larger picture of the American Revolution. We also have more than a decades of [research into the region's geologic makeup](https://anrweb.vt.gov/PubDocs/DEC/GEO/Bulletins/Welby%5F1961sm.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) that explains why there might be reddish stains in the rocks in the area. There are a couple of things to pick apart with this particular story: that the British fired upon a rocky island, thinking that it was a ship, and that the cannon balls left the stains behind. There's dubious evidence for either. Firsthand accounts of the battle, such as ones from [Doctor Robert Knox](https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/BattleOfValcour.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) (a British physician) and US militiaman [Jahiel Stewart](https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/StewartJahiel.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) talk about the battle in detail, and make no mention of the bombardment, while books about the battle likewise don't include it. The only references that I can find are a [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton%27s%5FPrize?ref=andrewliptak.com) dedicated to the incident with some extreme dodgy sourcing. Something that I think about a lot is the "[Andy Letter](https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter?ref=andrewliptak.com)" that was featured on the NPR show *Car Talk*, in which the author wrote to the show in a delightful way to say that they had unwittingly answered a question: "Do two people who don't know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about?" After listening to the pair talk about electric brakes on a cattle trailer, he found an answer: "you proved that even in a case where one person might know nothing about a subject, it is possible for two people to know even less!" Per Andy: > One person will only go so far out on a limb in his construction of deeply hypothetical structures, and will often end with a shrug or a raising of hands to indicate the dismissability of his particular take on a subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes, the wherefores and why-nots, can become a veritable pas-de-deux of breathtaking speculation, interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary. That's what's happened here. Looking at the historical record, there's enough out there to say that the incident likely didn't happen and that connecting the oxidization on the island to the battle is conjecture that arose after the incident. I think about this letter a lot when it comes to information on the internet: in the last decade of social media discourse, misinformation campaigns, and general dumbfuckery that takes place online, we've seen shows just how easy it is for people who don't know what they're talking about to sound authoritative on any number of subjects, whether it's the sudden rise of armchair generals talking about Ukraine's military strategies to the aerodynamics experts who came out of the woodwork when Elon Musk unveiled the Cybertruck. I also think a lot about some of the panels that I've attended at science fiction conventions, where authors are invited before a crowd as subject-matter experts simply because they wrote a book that includes a topic – but who're often operating at a surface-level understanding of said topic. These are constant reminders that we need to be careful about who we look to for expert advice, and instead look to methodology over personality. But the letter and its realization is only the first half of the equation: [Dis](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation?ref=andrewliptak.com)\- and [Misinformation](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misinformation?ref=andrewliptak.com) are real threats to civil discourse online, and what it doesn't account for is how defensive people can be when incorrect information or lore is called out online. I keep going back to this guy's first comment: "why not just allow for the lore of the great revolution?" and "it is simply fun to consider what it MIGHT be, in addition to allowing the scientific fact of what it is likely to be." History is complicated, and unless you're studying it, what you were taught barely scratched the surface. It's a subject that's easy to deflate down to simple cause-and-effect, without delving into the enormous complexities and motivations and decisions that built up the causes and effects. One of my college professors imparted an important lesson: the individuals who led the American Revolution were political radicals who were out of step with the general public, and proceeded to explore the pamphlets through which they explained their ideology and the work they undertook to change the minds of their neighbors that ultimately led to the founding of the country. It was a far cry from the simpler version of the founding that's often taught. > Why not "allow" the lore of the great revolution? To start, it's incorrect and it doesn't bring the listener any understanding of what transpired Why not "allow" the lore of the great revolution? To start, it's incorrect and it doesn't bring the listener any understanding of what transpired during that battle. At worst, it's a story that posits that the British were incompetent and that the Americans transpired in part because of that blunder, and at best, it's just conjecture at the end of a long game of telephone that tries to simply highlight that a great battle took place here. If you take the former motivation – that the British were incompetent – you come away with the thought of American exceptionalism: that the US forces were somehow inherently better at their jobs than their enemies, and that our victory in the American Revolution was inevitable. This isn't the case: the British military was a highly competent, well-trained fighting force. Arguments like this flatten and simplify our understanding of history, reducing its complexity and giving us a poor understanding of the complications, challenges, and sheer luck that brought about an American victory. In the latter, if all you're trying to do is convey that there was a battle that took place in the area, there are plenty of historic markers and scholarship that showcases the battle. If you're looking to simply have some fun and "consider what it MIGHT be," head to your local bookstore and look up the works of [Harry Turtledove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry%5FTurtledove?ref=andrewliptak.com). ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- History has been used as a cudgel for one-sided truth for eons. The axiom "[history is written by the victors](https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" showcases its fallibility as *truth.* We Americans have a poor understanding of our own past: schools in the south systemically misrepresent the nature of the American Civil War, while we collectively have a poorer idea of the nature and direction and motivations of the people who instigated the American Revolution. The online environment doesn't help: the UN found that [social media misinformation has fueled a rise in holocaust denial and antisemitism](https://www.un.org/en/outreach-programme-holocaust/social-media-feeds-holocaust-denial-and-distortion-finds-un-report?ref=andrewliptak.com). History as a discipline is the examination of the nature of our past reality. The coming semisesquicentennial is a ripe opportunity for educators, historians, and institutions to counter these narratives by showing history grounded in facts: highlighting the process of using artifacts, documents, eyewitness accounts, and other primary sources to properly ground a story in reality and to impart readers and viewers with the tools to understand the past. These skills are vitally important: we are long past the point where we have first-hand knowledge of the events of the American Revolution ([the last survivors died after the end of the American Civil War](https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2013/11/the-last-men-of-the-revolution/?ref=andrewliptak.com)!) and the American Civil War, and we're quickly coming to the point where the last survivors of the Second World War, the Korean War, and (in a couple of decades) the Vietnam War will also be gone, along with their first-hand knowledge of what they underwent. A story like Carlton's Prize is relatively unimportant in the greater scheme of things: a small, inaccurate folktale that falls apart when you poke at it. But the same can't be said for the stories that will arise around other conflicts and events: look at the state of looking back at the Second World War. There are plenty of people who question the existence of the holocaust, despite mountains of physical evidence, stories from survivors, and documents from the perpetrators themselves. These are two very different situations, but they're linked by a similar mindset: that we're willing to accept that our history doesn't have to be grounded in fact. That approach leads to a diminished and poor understanding of the past, preventing us from learning from our mistakes and tragedies. *That* is the danger of allowing lore and storytelling to flourish in place of what really happened. ### Empirical steps URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-first-contact-murray-leinster-hard-scifi/ Last updated: 2026-03-20T19:13:09.000Z With his 2011 novel [*The Martian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553418026?ref=andrewliptak.com), Andy Weir made the rare crossover from genre fiction to mainstream success, following the story of stranded astronaut Mark Watney as he contends with the challenge of surviving on Mars with some very limited supplies. His latest, [*Project Hail Mary*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135228?ref=andrewliptak.com), Weir picks up a similar mindset: an astronaut (and humanity) is facing an existential problem. How do you solve it? In doing so, Weir taps into a longer science fiction tradition: characters solving complicated problems based on the knowledge and resources they have at their disposal. It's something that I suspect harkens back to the personalities that made up the early modern genre: science and technology enthusiasts who found some level of comfort in everything from the technical specifications of radio to building model railroads. In April 1926, magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback published the inaugural issue of *Amazing Stories*, the first magazine dedicated entirely to what he called "scientifiction." But prior to that, he had established a career in the electronics industry, helping to kickstart the amateur radio scene, imported electronics parts from Europe, and set up magazines like *Modern Electronics* and *The Electrical Experimenter*. In 1939, author John W. Campbell Jr. took over the editorial reins of *Astounding Science Fiction* and essentially issued an edict to those wanting to publish stories in his magazine: he wanted to publish stories that better adhered to reality. His educational background was in science and technology: he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before he was kicked out in 1931, and ended up at Duke University, where he studied physics. As Brian Aldiss put it: "He forced his writers to think much harder about what they were trying to say, and clamped down on the Gosh-wowery." More than anyone, Campbell helped to strike the mold for what people thought of as science fiction for decades: stories about people using science and technology at some point in the future, alongside a society that was rapidly modernizing in the aftermath of the Second World War. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/07/Copy-of-Copy-of-Collections-Videos-Thumbnail.png) Photo: [Memento Mori Fine and Rare Books](https://www.abebooks.com/memento-mori-fine-and-rare-books/5198060/sf?ref=andrewliptak.com) There's one story that comes to my mind when when looking at this particular strand of science fiction: Murray Leinster's "First Contact." (If you don't have it handy, can read it this scan of a collection of his stories [here](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/L/Leinster%20-%20Best%20Of.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com).) In the latter, the crew of a spaceship called the *Llanvabon* arrive in the the Crab Nebula and encounter an alien spaceship, and quickly work to make contact with its crew. What I like about this story is we watch the characters figure out what they're facing with some simple logic: when the ship sounds an alarm that they've detected something: > Tommy Dort said meditatively: "D'you know, sir, I saw something like this on a liner of the Earth-Mars run once, when we were being located by another ship. Their locator beam was the same frequency as ours, and every time it hit, it registered like something monstrous, and solid." Observation: inference. Tommy knew what it was like when a ship detected it was being detected by a locator beam, and therefore, they know that's what's happening now. From there, the characters know that they have a rational list of decisions they can make. They know they have an alien ship before them, but they don't know their intentions. They do know that first contact has the potential to go poorly, so they make preparations to destroy their navigational data and star charts. From there, the crew has to figure out their alien counterparts: learning about their biology and technology. They also realize that while this first contact has been friendly so far, they can't really trust one another: if one tries to go home first, they run the risk of getting killed by the other or leading them to their home planet. The story comes to a resolution that's satisfactory to both crews, and the entire thing is a neat exploration of how people can break a problem down step by step and figure out and come out with a happy ending. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Weir's *The Martian* and *Project Hail Mary* follow this model pretty well:His reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace wakes up from stasis light years from home without his memories and with a pair of dead crewmates. Weir fills us in by bouncing us between convenient flashbacks as Grace's memory returns little by little, and we realize the problem that humanity is facing: scientists have begun to realize that the sun has started dimming, and it seems to be infected with some sort of alien microbe, which they call "Astrophage." Grace is brought on to help study it, and they realize that while other stars in the immediate area have begun dimming – hinting at their own Astrophage infections – there's a single planet nearby that isn't: Tau Ceti. Observation leads to inference. This is science at its most basic: the collection of empirical evidence and drawing conclusions from those observations. If our sun and others are dimming and Tau Ceti's isn't, it stands to reason that there's a reason. One realization leads us to a next step: send a mission and find out. Make more observations and make the next steps accordingly. [Here’s the first trailer for Project Hail MaryAdapting Andy Weir’s 2021 acclaimed sci-fi novel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-235.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled-4.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-sci-fi-movie-trailer-watch/) I'd be very surprised if Weir hadn't read "First Contact" at some point in his life: one of the twists is that Grace isn't alone in the Tau Ceti system: another civilization made the same observations and reached the same conclusions, and went out to try and find a solution to the problem. Grace and his new friend – who he calls Rocky – have to figure out how to communicate with one another, and use the same bedrock understanding of the universe to unlock a way to communicate and to find common ground and to ultimately try and solve the problem that plagues both of their civilizations. You can essentially trace the entire tradition of science fiction to fantasy literature: a form of storytelling that at its broadest contours encompasses any sort of imaginary elements. *Project Hail Mary* is just the most recent entry in a chain of what we'd call "Hard Science Fiction," which the *SF Encyclopedia* [cites Allen Steele defining as](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hard%5Fsf?ref=andrewliptak.com) " form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone." The crew of the *Llanvabon,* Grace, Rocky and the problem of Astrophage only exist in our imaginations, but it's the approach that Weir and Leinster take in telling the story that I don't see quite as often these days, and that's what makes this book stand out for me: it's the solving of problems and their crew's ability to adapt to curveballs that makes *Project Hail Mary* and "First Contact" so gripping. Reader behavior and preferences ebb and flow and the history of genre literature has witnessed all types of stories grow and fade in popularity. Editors and authors who followed found other ways to utilize the genre's trappings, using it to explore the psychological, sociological and political aspects of the human condition to great – and lasting – effect. There's a cottage industry of critics who'll occasionally take up an argument that it's a shame that science fiction isn't as inspirational or optimistic as it once was – really, just a series of tired complaints that there's too much of that soft science junk out there – and that authors and editors need to get back to what the genre used to be. But what I think is missed in those arguments is that what makes stories like "First Contact," *The Martian*, and *Project Hail Mary* – and others like James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse*, Annalee Newitz's *The Terraformers*, Cixin Liu's *Three-Body Problem*, Kim Stanley Robinson's *Red Mars* or *Aurora*, and plenty of others – stand out isn't that their authors are rigidly adhering to reality, but that they're telling their stories by using their characters to solve the physical, often-science-based problems in front of them in an empirical way. Furthermore these are stories that recognize that their problems aren't purely physics puzzles to be solved: they're intensely interested in how these problems affect society at large. We live in a world with plenty of those types of technological and scientific challenges ahead of us, and these are the types of stories that help to inspire people to figure out creative solutions around those problems to build futures that look a little better for those that'll follow us. ### 14 more SF/F books to check out this July URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/scifi-fantasy-horror-book-list-july-2025-bradbury-khaw-priest/ Last updated: 2025-07-24T20:33:04.000Z I'm having some serious FOMO this month with the coming of San Diego Comic Con. When I was working for a bunch of outlets, I'd see people roll their eyes about attending, but I always loved the energy and excitement of the crowds, the cosplay, and the entire experience. It's a fun time, and I hope that I'll get back someday. Fortunately, there are a bunch of books – 14 of them – hitting stores in the later half of the month to distract me. Here's the [first list for July](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2025-scifi-fantasy-book-list/), and as always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. [Here are 11 new SF/F books to check out this July!Stories space truckers, witches, zombies, and more to add to your TBR![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-230.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4988-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2025-scifi-fantasy-book-list/) Here's the usual subscription plug: this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*! There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) --- ### [*The Martian Chronicles* Deluxe Collector's Edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063445321?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Bradbury (July 15th) Ray Bradbury's classic fixup novel *The Martian Chronicles* turned 75 earlier this year, and William Morrow has put together a special edition ([ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/)) of the book. It features sprayed edges, and new full-color, printed endpapers. It's a handsome edition for one's bookshelf. ### [*Black Brane*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781960988614?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Cisco (July 22nd) A bedridden man escapes from his pain by going into his own memories. He had once worked for the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank that studied black holes, physics, and the occult, where he worked with a range of eclectic individuals. While going back through his memories, he meets them again in a strange trip that comes together in a story of trippy social and quantum entanglement. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589452?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Volatile Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250364685?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seth Haddon (July 22nd) A scavenger named Wylla has found herself in dire straits: her ship is in need of repair and business hasn't been all that busy lately. She needs a big job, and jumps at the chance when word goes out that there's some sort of advanced tech to be found on a neighboring planet. That tech happens to be an advanced prototype mask that fused itself to the body belonging to Sable Alzian, whose consciousness was uploaded into it before she died, and now, the company that made it will stop at nothing to get it back. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250364685?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Haddon channels his heroines’ strange double consciousness through narration that cycles between second person and first-person plural, creating a dizzying effect." ### [*Tapestry of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780008731427?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kate Heartfield (July 22nd) The Sharp family has traditionally possessed the Second Sight. One of their members, Kit, is in Paris, France, where he's studying the Bayeux Tapestry and carrying on with an affair with a woman named Evelyn Larsen. He, like his father before him, thinks that the tapestry was made before 1066, and that it might have some elements that predict the future. The Nazi Party is also fascinated with the tapestry as they begin to take over Europe: they're convinced that it'll help with their goal of taking over Great Britain. Meanwhile, Ivy Sharp has joined the Special Operations Executive and uses her powers of perception to aid a dangerous mission into France. ### [*The Deepest Fake*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668032534?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Kalla (July 29th) Liam Hirsch is the CEO of a major AI company, and it's a job that's given him and his family plenty of advantages and comforts. Everything comes crashing down when he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful and soon thereafter, he's been diagnosed with a terminal illness. As this happens, something strange is happening in his company, things that are making him question everything in his life. He turns to a private investigator named Andrea DeWalt for help untangling a conspiracy that threatens to unravel his life. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668032534?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Kalla mines contemporary anxieties about technology for a shocking and emotionally satisfying tale that continually defies expectations." ### [*The Library at Hellebore*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250877819?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cassandra Khaw (July 22nd) This is a dark academia novel set in The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted, an academy for dangerous magical users, and promises the potential for redemption and normal life, if they can graduate. Alessa Li is kidnapped and enrolled in the school, and has to survive the school's horrifying graduation ceremony, where the faculty devour the students, and to survive, Alessa and her classmates will have to figure out how to trust one another. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cassandra-khaw/the-library-at-hellebore/?ref=andrewliptak.com) a "secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses." ### [*The Bloodless Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419196?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joshua Phillip Johnson (July 8th) In the 1980s, half of the world is fenced off to create a nature preserve called the Harbors, and in 1987, the world's leaders called on humanity to celebrate, only for something terrible to happen: more than 132,000 people died, turning into strange fae-like creatures that wrecked havoc before vanishing into the Harbors. Each autumn equinox saw the same thing happen: the dead transform and flee. Fast-forward to the modern day, and two government workers named Evangeline and Calidore work to fix the Harbor fences and spend their remaining time with their young daughter, Winnie. When that year's equinox approaches, the pair discover a vast conspiracy that stretches across the world, forcing them to confront everything they've known for their entire lives. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419196?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Balancing the dizzyingly high-concept worldbuilding are the very human relationships at the story’s center. Johnson’s writing perfectly fits his unfettered tale, lyrical and lilting at moments and skittering wildly at others." ### [*Killer on the Road / The Babysitter Lives*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982167677?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen Graham Jones (July 15th) Back in the day, genre publishers packaged two short novels or novellas together into a single volume. Finish one book, flip it over, and read the other one. Saga Press is doing that with two new novellas from horror author Stephen Graham Jones: *Killer on the Road* and *The Babysitter Lives*. In *The Babysitter Lives,* a high school babysitter is watching the Wilbanks twins. She's hoping for a quiet night: put the kids to bed and prepare to take the SATs. Her last job went poorly when the child wandered off, and this time, she's making sure that won't happen. But the house is strange and has a history, and it soon becomes clear that she's not alone in the house. In *The Killer on the Road,* a 16 year old girl named Harper runs away from home, but her friends, sister, and ex stop her from hitchhiking by staging a road trip. That trip goes sideways when they encounter a serial killer who's been trawling the road for years. *Kirkus Reviews* [calls](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephen-graham-jones/killer-on-the-road-the-babysitter-lives-saga-doubles/?ref=andrewliptak.com) it "a one-two punch of grindhouse horror from one of the craft’s most inventive practitioners." ### [*Echoes of Silence: A Frontlines Novella*](https://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Silence-Frontlines-Marko-Kloos-ebook/dp/B0FHJGHCVP/ref=sr%5F1%5F15?crid=2CMN7NFRGSDO4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ZvzEA3VpCqdlXqM3nPu%5FGITIEap6s2ZrXW49D-NM8PXBsAVlAC5b6NfBivvutXxXRW6ZhYRbyaMy96d-eEX401zL1UKuC%5FQS4BtwSHRvQGZS0XSUJZSvRer2haZ2KOeUg-urvy9BPoB3C41mffdLYh8Zc-tNDa05lfUS7BQLpzqx6dnASheQap-9H3izYdsBtHaG9Y6eq3s7481p4X544v-SqSYXxNBk5XW6pLeFc28.Cx01yCwXLPu5dYLCTBNeX7hQHB8BvOr2bfuyQarUKu8&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=echoes+of+silence&qid=1752584542&sprefix=echoes+of+silenc%2Caps%2C106&sr=8-15&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marko Kloos and Robin Kloos (July 15th) I'm a big fan of Marko Kloos' *Frontlines* series: they're excellent and fun military science fiction. While the main series has effectively ended and he's been working on a spinoff (*Evolution*, with [*Scorpio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542035491?ref=andrewliptak.com) out now and [*Corvus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662524899?ref=andrewliptak.com) coming next month), he's returned to the series with a novella, *Echoes of Silence*. This one takes place not from Andrew Grayson's perspective, but from his wife Halley's POV. Andrew and the mission to the Capella system goes missing (during [*Orders of Battle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542019583?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Centers of Gravity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542032810?ref=andrewliptak.com)), she has to come to terms with the thought that he might never come back home again. ### [*A Covenant of Ice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837865130?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karin Lowachee (July 29th) The final installment of Karin Lowachee's *Crowns of Ishia* trilogy is here. I really dug the first book, [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and need to get to the second, [*The Desert Talon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837864027?ref=andrewliptak.com), soon. In this installment, Havinger Lilley has reunited with his lover, Janan, and he's hoping to recover from the experience of being bonded to the soul of a King Dragon. That bond has taken over, and he's now compelled to return to the frozen northlands that was once his friend Raka's home, towards a confrontation that could kick off another war. [Revealing Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain CrownA Q&A with one of my favorite writers![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-231.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_-1-3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/) ### [*It Was Her House First*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781728292854?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cherie Priest (July 22nd) Years ago, silent film star Venita Rost inhabited a mansion on the side of a cliff. She's since passed, but her spirit lives on, claiming countless lives over the years. She trapped her nemesis, Inspector Bartholomew Sloan, who's had to watch her evil deeds play out, unable to stop them. When Ronnie Mitchell, a distraught woman who bought the house unseen, arrives to begin renovating the place, she's unaware of its past, but her presence begins to stir up the dust and memories. When a man arrives with an unexpected connection to the house, it sets everyone on a path of violence and death. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781728292854?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Finding fresh angles on a familiar premise, Priest delivers an eccentric haunted house thriller with plenty of surprises up its sleeve." ### [*Minds in Transit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101732?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joan Slonczewski (July 29th) In this followup to Joan Slonczewski's [*Brain Plague*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781604504460?ref=andrewliptak.com), the city of Iridis is one of wonders: its rulers recycle valuable gems to the Underworld, intelligent machines perform complicated tasks and pilot ships, and scientists and artists have their minds expanded with microbial enhancements. One artist, Chrysoberyl of Valedon, uses her microbes to paint amazing installations and design smart buildings, and she's just had a world-sized AI commission her to build a city on another planet. But when flaws creep into her designs and criminals invade her brain to take over her microbes. It's part of a growing movement that's beginning to undermine Iridis, a threat that the city's leaders ignored for too long. ### [*The Memory Hunters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645662082?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mia Tsai (July 29th) Kiana "Key" Strade is a talented archeologist who can delve deep into blood memories, but rather than lead her temple, she'd rather conduct research for the Museum of Human Memory and stay out of the spotlight. Her friend Valerian IV serves as her body guard to protect her from rivals, and needs the job so she can support her family. Everything gets upended when Key discovers a memory that departs from the official history, and Vale realizes that they're in for serious problems. As Key begins losing moments of time and becomes obsessed with her search for answers, they make a stunning discovery and one that serves as a betrayal for the two of them – they have to make the decision to stand by their work and lives, or remain complicit with some long-held secrets. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645662082?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Tsai subtly brings the details of a brutal world to light across two distinctly different social milieux: the formal manipulations of Key’s family and colleagues, and the jocular if violent world of Valerian and her fellow guardians. The result works both as postapocalyptic adventure and a meditation on the nature of history, told with remarkable richness and depth." ### [*The Memory of the Ogisi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250849045?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Moses Ose Utomi (July 15th) Moses Ose Utomi concludes his *Lies of the Ajungo* trilogy (preceded by [*The Lies of the Ajungo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250849069?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Truth of the Aleke*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250849052?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *The Memory of the Ogisi.* The City of a Thousand Stories sits at the edge of the Forever Desert, and while it's endured much since its founding, its inhabitants are prosperous. Yet nobody can remember the city's past, and a historian named Ethike has been trying to uncover the story of a figure from its past, Osi. While he thinks that Osi's story might be able to tell him more about his home city, what he finds only raises more questions. When Ethike heads into the Forever Desert to find Osi's tomb, he discovers a power that's been buried in the sands for an eternity, one that wants to escape. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-memory-of-the-ogisi-1816607?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "this is the close of a great epic and a beautiful but terrible-to-hear story about oppression, repression, suppression, and the discovery of truths that only lead to more terrible lies." --- As always, let me know what catches your eye, and what you've been reading lately. ### Balancing act URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/warhammer-40k-space-marine-cosplay-games-workshop/ Last updated: 2025-07-21T14:47:53.000Z There's a new costume wearable hitting the market soon: Games Workshop [announced](https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/2flkfg4j/the-big-summer-preview-wear-lieutenant-titus-helmet/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's releasing its first official *Warhammer 40,000* helmet will be coming soon. It's based on the one worn by [Lieutenant Demetrian Titus](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Demetrian%5FTitus?ref=andrewliptak.com) in *Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II*, and [it'll retail for $169](https://merch-usa.warhammer.com/products/joytoy-warhammer-40-000-space-marine-2-lieutenant-titus-mkx-helmet-display-stand-1-1-scale-preorder?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's expected to ship sometime in December 2025 or January 2026\. *(Thanks to subscriber Mark W. for the tip!)* The helmet is a 1:1 scale replica from the game, and it's designed to be worn: it has padding on the inside and features LED lights, and the company specifically notes that it's designed for display or to "enhance" a cosplayer's costume. It also comes with a display stand that features the Adeptus Astartes insignia as well as an Ultramarines purity seal. Preorders will get you a shirt, too. According to the company, it'll be produced by a toy manufacturer called JoyToy, known for their 40k action figures, and it's apparently the first in a lineup of other *Warhammer* helmets in the pipeline. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/07/image.png) Image: Games Workshop It's a neat-looking helmet, and while Games Workshop has produced legions of tiny plastic space marines and their foes over the decades, I'm a little surprised that it's taken them this long to branch into products aimed at the higher-end costume and cosplay world. I've seen people cosplay as the massive Space Marines over the years, and [they're impressive costumes to behold](https://www.instructables.com/Gary-Sterleys-40k-Space-Marine/?ref=andrewliptak.com). This particular release is a solid indication that film, television, and game studios are increasingly aware that there's a growing market for pieces specifically to high-end collectors and cosplayers. But it's also a stark reminder that the cosplay world exists in a weird, legal grey area, because its practitioners are using the intellectual property that someone else owns, and that the growth of this market could bring some uncomfortable friction between the companies that own the intellectual property and the cosplayers that dress up as the characters from it. This article is a direct result of subscriber support. **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it's supported by a group of paid readers. Supporting subscribers have access to a Slack room in which we're constantly dropping links and commentary about the news as it comes out throughout the day. This particular news item came from a member of that room, which prompted me to think about including it in a roundup, only to realize that there was far more to it, and it ended up growing into the much larger piece that you're reading now. **TO* supporters are more than just generous readers who've signed up for a subscription: this is a positive and enthusiastic community about reading, writing, and storytelling, and it's an environment that helps yield these sorts of unexpected insights and reporting. --- Cosplay has for much of its existence largely been confined to fans with a do-it-yourself mindset, making their costumes from scratch, while the only costumes studios were really interested in producing were cheaper Halloween costumes for children. That's changed enormously in the last 20 years; as cosplay has become a more widely known and accepted hobby, companies have recognized that there's a growing market for not only [better Halloween costumes](https://web.archive.org/web/20171102222814/https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/31/16513936/halloween-costumes-quality-rubies-hasbro), but for adult collectors and costumers who're looking for costumes to wear or pieces to display from their favorite films, TV shows, or games. High-end wearables and prop replicas have been around for decades, but they've mostly been limited to a smaller collector's market. Companies spent far more attention producing action figures that they could sell by the truck load than a much smaller number of more expensive items to grownups with deeper pockets. Starting in 1977, mask maker Don Post produced a range of officially-licensed helmets from *Star Wars*, including a deluxe line of screen-accurate pieces in the late 1990s. Others like eFX and Master Replicas produced similar offerings in the 2000s. These were mainly designed for display but were wearable in theory, and enterprising cosplayers found that these products were either more accurate or readily available than their fan-made counterparts, and would incorporate them into their costumes accordingly. In 2013, Hasbro launched its Black Series product line, starting with detailed 6-inch action figures for collectors, and expanded its offerings in the years that followed to lightsabers and 1:1 scale helmets, starting in 2015 with Kylo Ren's helmet. (Here's a [pretty comprehensive list](https://www.bossksbounty.com/toys/star-wars-black-series-helmets?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the releases thus far.) At the same time, a company called ANOVOS began producing its own lineup of wearable *Star Wars* costumes. ([It has since gone out of business](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-anovos-deuno-novo-cosplay/), and a new company, Denuo Novo, has taken over their products and some of their licenses.) Other companies have gotten in on the officially licensed wearable market over the years: EA released a limited edition of its 2016 game *Titanfall 2*, and [included a replica Vanguard Pilot Helmet](https://gamerant.com/titanfall-2-collectors-edition-428/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that I've seen cosplayers wear. (I have one, it's pretty cool). Jazwares released a [Deluxe Master Chief helmet](https://shop.jazwares.com/products/halo-master-chief-deluxe-helmet-includes-2-free-figures?srsltid=AfmBOooc7yaFAMB8cqXcM4FSt5JbpGNwTeF5o4R5LudK19KplAjnARKo&utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com&variant=54437282644041) alongside *Halo Infinite* in 2021 (and [another one earlier this year](https://www.gamestop.com/collectibles/replicas/products/jazwares-halo-master-chief-mjolnir-war-games-helmet-red-with-lights-and-display-stand/20015730.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)). Hasbro has also released a variety of helmets (and props) from the different franchises in its portfolio, including the Power Rangers, Marvel, Transformers, and others. And earlier this year, Burgschneider, a German-based clothing company, [announced that it was producing a line of licensed costumes](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-burgschneider-cosplay-costumes/) from J.R.R. Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings* saga. In some ways, this is a really cool thing to see. Where fan-made props are often creations based on a designer's interpretation and measurements, officially-licensed products can take advantage of a company's IP, basing them directly on the costumes and designs from the films/TV shows/video games to produce something that's exact (or really close) to what you see on screen. And as official products, they're often readily available through traditional retailers, rather than through the unofficial markets that cosplayers have long relied on. As such, they can be a good way to add a component to one's costume: helmets in particular can a difficult part to nail. They're often the most iconic or recognizable part of a costume, and even if you don't want to pull it off the shelf and add it to a costume, they're components that could be stripped down, modified, or repainted as part of the process. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/07/2862703217_50510281be.jpg) Myself and fellow VT Trooper Mike Anton trooping at a midnight video game release in 2008\. We're both wearing Master Replicas Stormtrooper helmets that we modified for use in the 501st Legion. Image: Andrew Liptak While various companies have worked to produce helmets, props, and entire costumes to fans, this is a difficult market to break into. For decades, cosplay has been a largely DYI enterprise, largely because of necessity (if fans wanted something, they'd have to make it themselves because there were no alternatives) but also because the hobby isn't just about wearing a costume, but the entire process of *building* one. That ethos is ingrained in the costuming world and as such, it instills a mindset that prizes creativity and curiosity, as well as a lot of pride in the final product. I don't subscribe to the mindset that a bought costume is any less valid than one that you build from scratch, but there is something of a punk rock-like mindset of "fuck you, I don't need you to give me permission or tell me how to build this" at play here. As such, the growth of this particular segment of the entertainment merchandise industry brings up some existential concerns for the cosplay world. Companies like Lucasfilm and Games Workshop have historically been protective and litigious over the use of their intellectual property and as they and other companies increasingly cater toward collectors and cosplayers by developing and providing officially-licensed products, how will their attitude towards their fandoms change? Will they begin to crack down on the makers who produce their own costumes or set up elaborate rules and regulations that could stifle those communities? [Cosplay, IP, and studiosI’m on Planet Money’s The Indicator!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-228.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled-collage-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-planet-money-indicator/) I recently talked about this on *Planet Money'*s podcast *The Indicator*: for decades, cosplay was something of an underground thing. For much of its history, it was confined to a small group of fans who attended conventions, and for a while, when studios saw fans making their own props and costumes, they didn't hesitate to send them a C&D. When I interviewed him for my book, [Replica Props Forum](https://www.therpf.com/forums/forums/replica-props.9/?ref=andrewliptak.com) owner Art Andrews told me that the mid-1990s was a pretty scary time, and that he began attending the product licensing conventions that were taking place in Las Vegas, and got to know the people in the field. "We eventually developed a relationship where they understood that we weren't trying to screw them: we love their properties, and they're trying to promote it. That changed the way they dealt with us." Since then, studios like Lucasfilm, 343 Industries, and others have worked with fans, forming something of a symbiotic relationship, recognizing that enthusiasts are a good way to promote their brands, and that undue pressure from above can be counterproductive. As a result, cosplayers have been cast in [official productions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-ardeshir-radpour-obi-wan-kenobi-stunt-actor-cosplay/) or in [high-profile events](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-macys-day-parade-501st-legion/). But there are other instances where they pass down some heavy-handed edicts or outright C&D notifications. In June 2016, Paramount announced a series of [onerous rules](https://www.startrek.com/fan-films?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *Star Trek* fans wanting to make their own fan films and this week: just as Games Workshop announced the release of this official, wearable helmet, cosplay 3D modeler and shop [Galactic Armory](https://galacticarmory.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) revealed that [they had received a cease-and-desist notice from the company](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/1m3hnbu/the%5Freal%5Freason%5Fthey%5Fgave%5Fthem%5Fa%5Fcease%5Fand%5Fdesist/?ref=andrewliptak.com), prompting them to take down all of their *Warhammer 40k*\-related files. Owner Aaron Hughes [told *All3DP*](https://all3dp.com/4/galactic-armory-hit-with-cease-and-desist-over-warhammer-40k-models/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that " this is our first C&D we’ve received, and we’re going to fully comply with their requests." I don't think that Galactic Armory is working with any ill-intent here: they were producing things because it had generally been permissible to do so until the environment changed. Games Workshop didn't respond to *All3DP*'s requests for a comment, but the timing doesn't feel like a coincidence. The company is known for being particularly aggressive in protecting its intellectual property rights, [once going as far as to take down works](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21380003?ref=andrewliptak.com) that used the term "space marine." Fan makers and cosplayers do exist in a weird legal gray area: we are fundamentally using someone else's intellectual property, and while some companies have permitted this at low levels, as they work to build new product categories that have previously been filled by unofficial fan works, we're bound to see more of these sorts of conflicts between makers and studios. This isn't an instance with gray area: Galactic Armory was producing a product for sale for which they didn't license the underlying intellectual property, and I think that it's important for the people who are responsible for creating those stories, characters, designs, and world should be able to benefit from the fruits of their labor. I don't think this'll be an all-or-nothing thing: plenty of studios have figured out how to balance the passions of their fan community while also ensuring that they're protecting their IP from exploitation: the most productive relationships seem to be ones where they can work with fans and fan communities by setting up some basic rules and expectations. But as Attorney Meredith Rose pointed out in that episode of *The Indicator*, "Could all of these companies turn around at any point and say, 'you know what? We're not doing this anymore,' yeah, they could do that." I don't know if that's the case here with Games Workshop and the *Warhammer 40k* fan and cosplay community, but I do think that any sort of top-down demand that fans and cosplayers should *only* utilize licensed products for their costumes would be a bad thing: it'll limit the creativity and problem-solving skills that cosplayers develop as they build their costumes, and it'll mean that an IP holder views cosplayers as another tool in their promotional toolbox, rather than a member of an enthusiastic community. These sorts of demands also won't work in the long run: if a fan wants to make a prop replica or a costume, they're going to go make it if they're super passionate about it. But onerous rules and regulations could steer people away because it's just too much of a hassle. In a lot of ways, the lighter touch that companies like Lucasfilm have utilized towards cosplayers has helped the community flourish and grow – something that certainly helps their brand in the long run. In this case, I have to imagine that you'll still be able to find the files to print up your own Space Marine helmet and armor if you know where to look or know the right people. And if you want to forgo the trouble of printing up this one particular piece, there's now a version of the helmet that you can toss into a shopping cart. Hopefully, companies, cosplayers and makers will continue to work towards maintaining a positive and well-intentioned balance that works for everyone: one that allows IP holders to foster their fan communities, makers who aren't trying to overstep their bounds, and fans to continue to celebrate the stories they love. --- If you'd like to read more about cosplay and fandom, check out the Cosplay tag for more articles. I also wrote an entire book about this topic: you can find it over on [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) and other retailers! You can also reach out to me directly if you'd like a personalized copy. ### Fonda J. Lee's Green Bone Saga is getting a snazzy special edition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/fonda-lee-jade-city-green-bone-saga-orbit-gold-edition/ Last updated: 2025-07-17T16:15:22.000Z Fonda J. Lee's *Green Bone Saga* has become a well-loved and acclaimed entry in the fantasy canon since the first book arrived in 2017\. Comprised of [*Jade City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316440882?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Jade War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316440905?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Jane Legacy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316440967?ref=andrewliptak.com), the trilogy is set in an Asian-inspired fantasy world set after a massive conflict called the Many Nations War in which the One Mountain Society booted an occupying nation from Kekon. In the years that followed, the liberation movement split into a number of rival clans, who've been fighting amongst themselves. Complicating matters is that Kekon is a major supplier of jade, which imparts users with magical abilities which certain people can take advantage of. The various clans are fighting for control over. The trilogy has been highly acclaimed: its installments have earned a number of awards, and *Time Magazine* named Jade City as one of the [100 best fantasy novels of all time](https://time.com/collection/100-best-fantasy-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Judging the coversGeorge R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is getting some new covers, and they’re a good example of the importance of striking art and the limits of minimalism design![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-226.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/ASOIF-4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/) Orbit Books [recently announced](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/orbit-books/cover-launch-the-green-bone-saga-by-fonda-lee/?lens=orbit&ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was rebranding the series with some new covers: [Jade City](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316580397?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Jade War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316580434?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Jade Legacy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316580441?ref=andrewliptak.com) will get that new treatment in September with art and design by [Thomas Walker](https://tommypocket.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Lee [noted on her blog](https://www.fondalee.com/2025/05/green-bone-saga-reissued-with-new-covers/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that she "felt that these are the covers I’ve always wanted and that the books were meant to have." But that's not all. Before those new editions drop, [Orbit will release special editions of the series in their Gold edition line](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/orbit-books/cover-launch-the-green-bone-saga-orbit-gold-edition-by-fonda-lee/?lens=orbit&ref=andrewliptak.com). This edition will come in a special box with an illustration by Tommy Arnold, along with gilded edges, special endpaper art, foil-stamped covers, ribbon bookmarks, new maps. *Jade City* will also come signed. The set will be [released on August 26th directly from Hachette](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/fonda-lee/the-green-bone-saga/9780316576666/campaign/?lens=orbit&ref=andrewliptak.com). The set will run you $180, but preorders will be 20% off. [Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the risePublishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-225.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9655-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/) This release follows a larger trend in the publishing industry to release special editions of popular (or highly anticipated new releases) books. I've written a lot about [The Folio Society's books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/) over the years, but other publishers have gotten in on the game, hoping to entice readers into picking up a special version of a book that they really like. Orbit's been doing this for a couple of years. It released new anniversary editions of Ann Leckie's [*Ancillary Justice* and James S.A. Corey's *Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abbadon's Gate*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/), as well as a Gold Edition release for [N.K. Jemisin's *Broken Earth* trilogy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-nk-jemisin-broken-earth-fifth-season-deluxe-edition/) and [Hannah Whitten's *The Wilderwood* duology](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-whitten/the-wilderwood-duology/9780316571982/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). This looks like a handsome release for the series. I really like Tommy Arnold's artwork, and it's great to see Orbit surfacing some of these recent classics for this sort of treatment, introducing new readers to the books while also rewarding those long-time fans with something unique for their bookshelves. ### Cosplay, IP, and studios URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-planet-money-indicator/ Last updated: 2025-07-17T13:49:53.000Z Back when my book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) was coming out in 2022, I pitched NPR's *Planet Money* on a piece about the relationship between fandom and studios. I wrote a bit in the book about how that relationship was frosty and uncomfortable for a long time: some studios had a heavy hand when it came to people using their IP in this way, and that translated into the sort of underground nature of the cosplay world for a long time. This is a thing that happens when you're releasing a book: ideally, you and your publicist will pitch a whole bunch of outlets about it, sometimes pulling out certain angles that best fit whatever publication you're pitching. I've been a fan of *Planet Money* for a long time and had long thought that this particular topic would be of interest. At the time, they'd run an [episode about Spider-man](https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1076531156/the-spider-man-problem?ref=andrewliptak.com) and the licensing deal that Marvel struck with Sony, and that prompted me to send the pitch to them. They were interested: they did some work on it and I interviewed with them, but ultimately, the timing wasn't quite right. If memory serves, there were a lot of other economic things happening that summer, especially around Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But I kept in touch and this year, they let me know that they were doing a series for their daily podcast *The Indicator* about the economics of Hollywood! (The prior episodes are about the time when [New Jersey was the filming capitol of the country](https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/1255667298/hollywood-new-jersey-los-angeles-filmmaking?ref=andrewliptak.com), [state tax credits for filmmakers](https://www.npr.org/2025/07/15/1255699454/los-angeles-tax-credits-film-newsom-hollywood?ref=andrewliptak.com), and how [China became a box office powerhouse](https://www.npr.org/2025/07/16/1255755400/china-hollywood-box-office-film-business-trump?ref=andrewliptak.com).) The episode is [now out](https://www.npr.org/2025/07/17/1255812242/star-wars-lucasfilm-cosplay-dc-marvel-disney?ref=andrewliptak.com): I’m in there talking about costuming and cosplay, and they spoke with some other cosplayers as well about their experiences, and take a look at not only the story of cosplay, but how groups like the 501st Legion interact with their parent studio (Lucasfilm) and how both have found ways to coexist to one another’s benefit. Being radio, they're crunched for time, but they were able to cram a lot into the nine minutes for this episode. If you want to learn more about this topic, I've got a chapter's worth of more detail in my book, including with some folks they weren't able to interview for this piece. Give it a listen! This was a fun interview, and I'm happy not just as the author of a book about the topic, but as a fan of the podcast. I've always found it to be an interesting and informative listen. ### Cautionary Tale URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/jurassic-park-michael-crichton-tech-scifi-book/ Last updated: 2025-07-16T17:28:00.000Z Michael Crichton is best known for his technological cautionary tales. Through books like [*The Terminal Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780804171298?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Jurassic Park*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345538987?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Lost World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345538994?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345539014?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a whole bunch of others*,* he explored the potential that scientific and technological innovation could bring – and all the ways that said fields could be abused, often by greedy and unscrupulous corporations. I've seen him described as an anti-science writer (indeed, his views on climate change were... [not great](https://whistleblower.org/politicization-of-climate-science/global-warming-denial-machine/michael-crichton-author-of-state-of-fear-leaves-global-warming-disinformation-legacy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)), but I don't think that's entirely accurate: I look back on his body of work as being incredibly skeptical of people, organizations, and the ways they can misbehave in ways that remain fresh and relevant decades later. *Jurassic Park* is a fantastic read. It's got a killer, high-concept premise (what if a company brought dinosaurs back to life by cloning them?) and a snappy, gripping cadence that hooks me in exactly the same way that it did when I first read it in high school. While Steven Spielberg's film captures most of our nostalgic memories about the story and its meaning, I've always been partial to the book. In a lot of ways, the dinosaurs are something of window dressing for something that Crichton was far more interested in exploring: how corporations are happy to throw scientific ethics out the window when it suits them. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. In the novel, John Hammond is the founder of a genetic engineering corporation called InGen, and he's set up Jurassic Park with the intention of earning billions and billions of dollars from an adoring public that wants to see real, live dinosaurs in person. The park itself is technologically advanced: he brags about how it can be controlled by just a handful of personnel, and that the computer systems they have in place can do everything from keep track of the dinosaurs in the field to personnel and guest safety. He also highlights how they've taken extensive precautions in bringing extinct and dangerous animals back to the world. The dinosaurs that they hatch are all female and can't breed, they have to have certain chemicals in their diet, and they're situated on an island that's hundreds of miles away from other landmasses. Crichton sets a line that runs through the center of the novel: how do you set up a complicated system and how do you prepare for contingencies when problems arise? This plays out through Hammond's conversations with mathematician Ian Malcom, who specializes in chaos theory and predicts that there's a high likelihood that the park will experience some sort of catastrophe; that it's simply impossible to control all the variations that could spiral out of control. That's exactly what happens: in the beginning of the novel, we see as a child is attacked on another island by a mysterious lizard (which turns out to be a *Procompsognathus* that's escaped), while Paleontologist Alan Grant, Malcom, and others quickly realize that those precautions have failed: not only have the dinosaurs begun to breed (thanks to some frog DNA that's been spliced into the resurrected dinosaur's DNA), a hack from an insider working to steal InGen's intellectual property wrecks havoc across the park when he turns off the security systems, allowing some of the more dangerous creatures to escape. As it turns out, extremely complicated systems are very, very difficult to control. --- There's a section that jumped out at me while I've been rereading it recently: > "You wanted to fit them with radio collars," Hammond said. "And I agreed. > "Yes. And they promptly chewed the collars off. But even if the raptors never get free," Arnold said, "I think we have to accept that Jurassic Park is inherently dangerous." > Oh *balls*," Hammond said. "Whose side are you on anyway?" A couple of pages later: > In the control room, Hammond said, "Damn, those people. They are so negative." I'm reminded of my time covering the technology world, where I've seen plenty of smart people make counterproductive or even disastrous decisions: people so enamored of the products or companies that they were building that they don't – or won't – see the potential problems that arise from their creations. Hammond is a model technology CEO: I could see him put at the head of anything from Facebook to Tesla to Uber without any changes. He's proud of his work and recognizes the potential that it has to change the world, but he's also vain: he complains loudly when he realizes that people might not approach his creation with the outright awe that his park is intended to elicit. This is a familiar attitude from a range of tech figures. Elon Musk is a prime example here: between Tesla and SpaceX, he's pointed to each company's goals to reduce traffic fatalities or to turn humanity into an interplanetary species, only to push back on criticism about their respective safety records. Tesla has been involved in [several high-profile crashes](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5234124/tesla-crash-reporting-fsd?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) where its Full Self-Driving system has been implicated, something that Musk has countered by flipping the argument around: "Human driving is not perfect." When it comes to SpaceX, Musk often deflects criticism, pointing to the data that his engineers will be able to glean from an explosion (sorry, not an explosion, a "[rapid unscheduled disassembly](https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643?lang=en&ref=andrewliptak.com)") or to point to the company's mission as a net benefit for humanity. He's not wrong with those arguments: humans do suck at driving, and you can get a lot of data from a failed launch. And Hammond isn't wrong when he points out that there are engineering solutions to the problems that the park will eventually face. But these individuals aren't really working in humanity's best interest, are they? Their arguments about making the world a better place is just PR window-dressing that deflects attention from their enormous profitability. Indeed, in a conversation with geneticist Henry Wu, Hammond [pointed out](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Jurassic%5FPark/MNeEFe9qU3cC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=help&pg=PA223&printsec=frontcover&ref=andrewliptak.com) that helping humanity is secondary to his goals of getting rich because of the regulations and red tape that governments would throw in the way: > "If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That's a terrible idea..." > "Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease–as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish..." > "From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind." Hammond's ability to skirt around problems and put his head in the sand demonstrates just why his park will fail: in his pursuit of profitability and to get investors and regulators off his back, he's willing to ignore the real and pressing challenges that he faces. When his chief park engineer John Arnold begins listing off the bugs and problems that the park is experiencing, Hammond essentially waves those arguments away. "Let's keep it in perspective. You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. Crichton's cautionary tale of a novel is fun to read, but in it, he highlights the sociopathic nature of these companies: in their rush to market / profitability / power / etc., corporations are often willing to bend ethics, guidelines, laws, principles, and rules in order to make their investors happy and rich, glossing over the finer details and potential problems that might sit in their way. This is a book about pushing back on these types of actors, to point out the clear flaws and dangers embedded in a system, and to not take someone at their word when they promise incredible things. These are lessons that apply throughout life and society; the tech barons of the 2020s aren't the only people in power who exhibit these traits. This is a key reason for why *Jurassic Park* is well worth reading: Crichton, for all of his own issues, hit the nail on the head with this particular theme. We can do incredible things with science and technology, but those incredible things are often facilitated by actors with motives that are less than altruistic. It's a book that I wish that I'd returned to earlier: an essential lesson about today, wrapped up in the guise of a gripping thriller. ### Murderbot is coming back for a second season URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/muderbot-renewed-apple-martha-wells-season-two-sci-fi/ Last updated: 2025-07-10T17:55:59.000Z Excellent news for Martha Wells fans: Apple [has announced](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2025/07/apples-acclaimed-sci-fi-series-murderbot-lands-season-two-renewal/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's renewed its adaptation of her *Murderbot* stories for a second season. Word of the renewal comes as the first season reaches its final episode on Friday, July 11th. Apple announced the series [back in November 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/). The first season is based off of the first installment of the series, [*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=andrewliptak.com), which Wells first published in 2017\. The series follows an android that calls itself "Murderbot" after it hacked its governor module and goes rogue. Rather than go on a killing spree, it would rather watch trashy science fiction shows and just avoid human interactions altogether. It's brought onto a mission to escort a bunch of scientists on a dangerous planet, and has to protect them when they get in over their heads. The show [debuted back](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-murderbot-martha-wells-streaming-series-sci-fi-release-date/) in May, and it's been a real delight to watch: Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the titular character, really nailed Murderbot's mannerisms and attitude, while they've also managed to capture the silliness of the shows that it loves watching. The episodes are also a nice, 30 or so minutes, which makes for a nice change of pace. In a statement, show creators, Chris and Paul Weitz note that they're "grateful for the response that ‘Murderbot’ has received, and delighted that we’re getting to go back to Martha Wells’ world to work with Alexander, Apple, CBS Studios and the rest of the team." What I've liked most of all about the series is that it also feels like it understands what makes the books tick: it's about a character enduring a very uncomfortable, neuroatypical existence and learning to interact with the people who surround it. While the show hasn't quite reached the top tier level of projects like *Andor*, *Battlestar Galactica,* or *The Expanse* for me (yet), it's one that's really put a lot of thought into its characters and their interactions, and for that reason alone, I've been hooked. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-219.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255-4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) Apple doesn't say where the series will go for the next season, but it seems likely that it'll tackle the next book in the series, [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will find Murderbot trying to figure out a bit more about its past, while teaming up with a research vessel called "ART", which stands for "Asshole Research Transport." That alone should make for a great season of television, and if that's the direction they go, I'll be very excited to see who they get to voice the ship. After that, there's plenty more to tackle: it's followed by [*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229861?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Fugitive Telemetry*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765376?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com). In a [recent profile of Wells in *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/do-androids-dream-of-anything-at-all?ref=andrewliptak.com), she confirmed that she's recently finished an eighth installment, *Platform Decay*. ### A cinematic century URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-cinematic-century/ Last updated: 2025-07-06T18:43:49.000Z For a while, there was a bubble of YouTubers that spent a good amount of time putting together some amazing video essays about all things pop culture. That moment seems to have passed – the economics of time and energy that it takes to produce this type of work isn't really supported, but I'm always excited to see the occasional video essay that pops up from those still at it. One of the best is Kristian Williams, who works under the name Kaptainkristian. His channel is chock-full of great videos, exploring everything from the [golden age of Superman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDMQ3tXNKgM&ref=andrewliptak.com) to why it's [impossible to really adapt Alan Moore's *Watchman*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oltd-Jsi2I&ref=andrewliptak.com)to [why Pokémon was such a success](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZObWVuoajsY&ref=andrewliptak.com) when it first launched. [Why Hayao Miyazaki’s films feel aliveYouTuber Kaptainkristian returns from hiatus![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-216.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2019-11-25-at-12.18.03-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/youtuber-kaptainkristian-hayao-miyazakis-film-watch/) His latest is something a bit different and experimental, and I really loved watching it: 100 Years of History in 100 Films. 2025 marks the moment where we're a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we've seen some [high-profile attempts to examine the cinematic work](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/movies/best-movies-21st-century.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that's been done so far. This video does something different with 100 films: he looks back at the last century and examines how our world has been depicted through the lens of Hollywood's productions. Give it a watch here: In a comment, Williams noted that his only criteria was that "each entry had to be set in a different year than it was filmed, with exceptions for 1984(1984) and The Matrix(1999) since the actual year that both of those stories occur is unknown to the protagonists." I really love this approach. There's something about the music and selections that really showcases the fraught and the triumphant as we look back at the world as it played out since 1925\. He makes some interesting choices to highlight the direction that history has taken. I might have swapped out *Son of Saul* for *Saving Private Ryan* to depict 1944, *Thirteen Days* for *X-Men First Class* for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or *Black Hawk Down* for *The Wolf of Wall Street* to show off 1993\. But there's no end to the type of variabilities here, and what I appreciate about this particular video is that it's showing off a broad section of the 20th century, not just looking at one theme over another – you could put together your own list of films that shows off the way the world has reordered itself through war and conflict, or by examining pop culture or family life and so forth. Moreover, I'm happy to see that he's still making videos. It looks like he's no longer just on YouTube: you can [subscribe and support his work](https://go.nebula.tv/kaptainkristian?ref=andrewliptak.com) over on a platform called Nebula. ### Here are 11 new SF/F books to check out this July! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2025-scifi-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2025-07-03T20:36:58.000Z Somehow, 2025 is half-over. I'm not entirely sure where the first six months evaporated away into, but here we are. It's been a pretty good six months for books, and July brings about a whole bunch of new books to add to your to be read pile. Hopefully, you'll have a long weekend to whittle that pile down a bit. This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. If you found a book from this list that caught your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support) \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below Thank you! Your support really does help keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) Here are 11 new books to check out during the first half of the month – I'll have another list headed your way in a couple of weeks. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. ### [*A Rebel's History of Mars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589452?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nadia Afifi (June 10th) A performer on Mars named Kezza plans an assassination of the man who exiled her there, only to find a devastating secret when she tries to enact her plans. A thousand years in the future, a historian named Azad finds some hidden secrets about why his ancestors left Mars. Separated by a millennia, their two stories will collide on Mars. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781787589452?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Afifi brings the story full circle, wasting no words on filler, with bone-crunching fight scenes and delicious suspense along the way." ### [*Space Trucker Jess*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880272?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Kressel (July 1st) A young woman named Jessian Urania Darger has had a rough life as she and her father have worked and grifted their way across the galaxy. When he's arrested for running a crypto-credit scam, she's forced to get a job on Chadeisson Station as a mechanic. She yearns for a better life, one away from her father and the crimes that they've committed, and has been working to save up to buy a Spark Megahauler where she can set up a comfortable life running long hauls in space. When her father goes missing from prison, she realizes that she needs to try and find out what happened to him, and sets off on a journey across space to try and figure out where he ended up. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781958880272?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Jess’s scrappy narrative voice will put readers in mind of the television show *Firefly*, and Kressel skillfully balances suspense and humor in the service of a page-turning adventure set in an inventive universe." ### [*Infinite Archive*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098158?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mur Lafferty (July 1st) This is the third book in her *Midsolar Murders* series (after [*Station Eternity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098110?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Chaos Terminal*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098134?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and follows an amateur detective named Mallory Viridian who's finally settling in to her home on a space station called Station Eternity, only to find that an entity that's the physical embodiment of the internet, a ship called the Metis, is coming, and it's bringing some trouble with it. Its arrival coincides with a mystery convention and Mallory's literary agent is along for the ride, telling her that she's the keynote speaker. All of that comes together when a murder takes place on Station Eternity, and it's a welcome distraction for Mallory. Writing for *Locus Magazine*, Alexandra Pierce [says](https://locusmag.com/2025/05/infinite-archive-by-mur-lafferty-review-by-alexandra-pierce/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Lafferty has once again done a superb job in writing a murder mystery in space. Station Eternity isn’t going to get any less interesting for humans or other sentients to visit, which means there will always be opportunities for terrible deeds to be done." ### [*The Last Vigilant*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574457?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Mark A. Latham (June 24th) I love the look of this book: the cover reminds me a lot of the types of fat epic fantasy novels that you'd find in the mid-1990s. The book sounds like a bit of a throwback to that age as well: tensions have been rising between a group of peaceful nations, and an outcast soldier named Holt Hawley is tasked with finding a Vigilant, a mythical survivor of an ancient order who could be the key to tracking down the missing child of a powerful ally. While traveling through a forest, he comes across a woman named Enelda Drake, who claims to be a vigilant. He isn't quite convinced, but they need to rely on one another to survive, especially as word of a dark and powerful enemy might be coming for them all. *Booklist* gave the book a [starred review](https://maassagency.com/starred-review-the-last-vigilant-by-mark-latham/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Latham uses his incredible world-building skills and all-consuming storytelling style to bring the reader deep into the village of Scarfell, where politics, magic, and corruption collide in a world-shaking explosion, and where Enelda is not the only legend to emerge from the shadows. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063336315?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Bewitching*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874325?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 15th) Silvia Moreno-Garcia turns her attention to witches in her next novel, which follows Minerva, a graduate student studying the history of horror literature, and who's been researching the life of an obscure author named Beatrice Tremblay. In the midst of her work, she discovers that Tremblay's best-known novel, *The Vanishing*, was inspired by a true story: the author's encounter with a strange and otherworldly roommate at the same university she's now studying at. As Minerva delves into the manuscript, she begins to sense the same presence haunting the school, and discovers that there might be a personal connection to her family. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/silvia-moreno-garcia/the-bewitching/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that the "writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors." ### [*One Yellow Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668081211?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leigh Radford (July 15th) A British scientist named Kesta Shelley had been fine with her solitary life as a microbiologist, but that changed when she met Tim, who became her best friend and companion. When London was overrun with a deadly virus and infected him, she went into triage mode, hiding him when governmental officials rounded up and disposed of the infected, working endlessly to try and find a way to cure him. She's not successful, and it's clear that he's beginning to decline. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668081211?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "the novel’s heart, though, lies in Radford’s wrenching depiction of Kesta’s passionate devotion to Tim, and the painful concessions and moral decisions she makes in her care for a victim of a devastating terminal disease. Readers will be moved and thrilled in equal measure by this unique supernatural extravaganza." ### [*Archive of Unknown Universes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063336315?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Ruben Reyes Jr. (July 1st) In 2018, Ana and Luis have found their relationship running into difficult territory, despite their similar backgrounds. Their families had fled from El Salvador during the war, and as Ana searches for answers, she turns to an experimental device known as The Defractor, which allows users to look into alternate universes to see how their lives might have turned out. What she finds steers her on a new path, one that takes her and Luis to Havana and San Salvador to find out more about their families histories. Back in 1978 during the Salvadoran war, a revolutionary named Neto meets Rafael at a meeting, and the pair fall in love. As the war rages on, the war and forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ruben-reyes-jr/archive-of-unknown-universes/?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it a "gripping family history with a fresh speculative edge and timely resonances with the currently unfolding timeline. ### [*The Unkillable Frank Lightning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964368?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Roundtree Jr. (July 15th) In 1879, Private Frank Humble is killed by Sioux warriors, leaving behind his wife, Catherine Coldbridge. Distraught, she turns to her occultist skills to resurrect him. But his soul was lost and his body goes on a killing spree, and ashamed, she flees. 25 years later, she decides its time to make things right, returning to Texas with a pair of hired gunmen to track down Frank and destroy him. But in that time, Frank has remade himself as the "Unkillable Frank Lightning" and is now working with a wild west show, complicating matters. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964368?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this gothic take on western horror provides an enjoyable and exciting spook show." ### [*A Resistance of Witches*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593831960?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Morgan Ryan (July 15th) Lydia Polk didn't think that she'd ever be accepted into the Royal Academy of Witches. But as German forces race across Europe during the early days of World War 2, witches have become a critical part of Britain's defense. She can use her powers to locate magical relics before Hitler's forces can. When her coven is infiltrated by a Nazi witch, her elders are shaken and divided, withdrawing from the war effort. But when an ancient book called the *Grimorium Bellum* is rediscovered, Lydia dedicates herself to her mission, heading into occupied France to try and locate and secure it before the Nazis can. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/morgan-ryan/a-resistance-of-witches/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "an exciting, fast-paced blend of historical fiction, spy drama, fantasy, and romance." ### [*Inner Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063377943?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jakub Szamalek, translated by Kasia Beresford (July 15th) Set aboard the International Space Station, an ammonia leak that threatens the astronauts prompts NASA to task Lucy Poplasky, the first female commander of the space station, to lead an investigation. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and some think that the country might have sabotaged the station. Onboard the ISS, the Russian cosmonauts have denied the accusations, and point fingers at their US counterparts. As the leaks get worse, the trust between the station's crew crumbles, and it's up to Poplasky to try and uncover the source of the leaks before it's too late. ### [*Girl in the Creek*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250908643?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy Wagner (July 15th) Wendy Wagner's latest is an ecohorror about a woman named Erin who's brother Bryan walked into the forests in the Pacific Northwest and vanished five years ago. She sets out to try and find him near Mt. Hood, and while doing so, stumbles across a body of a woman in a creek. she finds herself in the midst of a much larger plot that extends beyond this world. In doing so, she finds herself in the midst of a much larger, otherworldly plot between forces that would rather keep their secrets buried. *Library Journal* gave it a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/girl-in-the-creek-1815485?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it a "tightly written master class in horror, this is a short, well-paced novel where every detail matters." ### Table of Contents: July 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-july-2025/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T19:36:25.000Z Short fiction is the lifeblood of the speculative fiction genres: it's worth checking out, reading, and subscribing to these publications, because they're often the starting point for many authors who'll go on to great careers as writers. You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-june-2025/). (Stay tuned, I'll be updating links for that piece when I get a free moment. Here's this month's roundup of the short fiction that's publishing in July 2025\. --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July-September, Issue 150) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["My Song at the Conclave of Many Sorrows"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/my-song-at-the-conclave-of-many-sorrows?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel A. Oluremi - "Moebius Syndrome" by Storm Humbert (7/10) - "A Rare and Exceptional Delicacy" by G.M. Mitchell (7/22) - "What the Crab Apple Tree Near Miranda Spaceport Saw" by Elijah J. Mears (7/29) (Flash) - *We Who Hunt Alexanders* Excerpt by Jason Sanford (7/31) - "As Ephemeral as Bubbles" by Akis Linardos (8/7) - "A Final Song for the Ages" by Pedro Iniguez (8/14) - "Denizens of My Face" by Emil Morel (8/19) (Flash) - "Changeling" by Frey Lylark (9/9) (Flash) - "Mother Sun" by Amy Nagopaleen (9/23) ### Nonfiction - [Musings from Maryland](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-150?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - Interview with Author Daniel S. Oluremi by Marissa van Uden (7/15) - Interview with Artist Makayla Bounds by Bradley Powers (7/24) - Interview with Author J.S. Oriel by Marissa van Uden (8/12) - "Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review" by AC Wise (9/30) - "Review of *The Inescapable March* by Hana Carolina" by Rebecca E. Treasure (9/4) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July/August 2025, *Vol. XCV No. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Analytical Laboratory Results out of "Some Warm Little Pond," Part 1: "Rifters" and the RNA World" by Kelly Lagor - "Biolog: Kelly Lagor" by Richard A. Lovett - "The First Velodrome on Mars" by Marie Vibbert - In Times To Come - "Desert Soul" by David Gullen - "Hidden Achievement" by Shane Tourtellott - "Patient Was the Doctor" by Victoria N. Shi - "Last Dam Standing" by Dawn Vogel - "If the Algorithms are Gentle" by Bernie Jean Schiebeling - "Low-Tide Salvage" by Matthew Claxton - "Unknowns Edited by Alec Nevala-Lee: Back to Square One" by Rachel Fabi - "Eri" by James Dick - "Mother Hubble's Elegy for Rhessi: (2002-2023) April 19, 2023 by Sandra J. Lindow - "Jennifer Does Pushups" by Joseph Weber - "Imaginary" by Daniel D. Villani - "Your Entry to Paradise Memorial Experience" by Robert Morrell Jr. - "The Marks We Leave" by M. Ian Bell - "Ready for New Arrivals?" by Sean Monaghan - "[Under the Moons of Venus: A Tale of a Princess Altivolant](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jay Werkheiser and Frank Wu - "[North Station Blues](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Gerrold - "[Our Lady of the Atom](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Pearce (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - [Guest Editorial: Three Gates](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Steven Barnes - [Alternate View: LUCA, Earth Life’s Universal Common Ancestor](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-alternate-view/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John G. Cramer - [Reference Library](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-reference-library/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rosemary Claire Smith - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (**July/August 2025** *Vol. 49 Nos. 7 & 8*) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Chronolithographer’s Assistant" by Suzanne Palmer - "Most Things" by Rich Larson - "Another Mother on Mars" by Dominica Phetteplace - "In the Gardener’s Service" by Michèle Laframboise - "Pirates of Highship" by Stephen Case - "Perri’s Fate" by Robert Reed - "In the Halls of the Makeshift King" by Tobias S. Buckell - "Worm Song" by Derek Künsken - "Aftermath" by William Preston - "The Courier" by Lavie Tidhar ### Poetry - "Styx Seasons" by Robert Frazier - "Try to Explain the Concept of Teeth to My Alien Roommate" by Rachel Linton - "What Death Reads" by Mary Soon Lee - "Matter/Antimatter" by Lynne Sargent - "Vivienne" by E. H. Lupton ### Nonfiction - Editorial: The 2025 Dell Magazines Award by Sheila Williams - Reflections: Another Ancient Encyclopedia by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Writers’ Workshops by James Patrick Kelly - On Books by Peter Heck --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 2025, Issue 226) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Missing Helen](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tashiro%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tia Tashiro - "[The Walled Garden](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fiona Moore - "[Welcome to Kearney](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kloster%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gary Kloster - "[Serpent Carriers](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/teryna%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K.A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman - "[Bits and Pieces on This Floor](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/delcarlo%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eric Del Carlo - "[A Land Called Folly](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singh%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amal Singh - "[Hunter Harvester](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/bruin%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bam Bruin ### Nonfiction - [Wilderness Resurrection and Compromise](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sridhar%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Priya Sridhar - [Who Owns A Story: An Interview with Allison King](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/king%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Diverse Bodies: A Conversation with Annalee Newitz](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/newitz%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: Taking a Moment to Smell the Roses](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F07%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2025, Issue 122) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Skin and Bones” by Gary McMahon - “No Mirrors Here” by A. Katherine Black - “Window” by Charlie Hughes - “The Sisters” by E.M. Linden --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (July 2025, No. 42) ### Fiction - "Chafing*" by Jimmy Lis* - "Fred Baker is Not Quite Himself These Days" by *Karen Lee Ziner* - "Monsters" by *Mark Barlex* - "Rustlings in the Dark*" by Jon Adcock* - "The Low Rumble of Distant Thunder*" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer* - "The Last Sip" by *Daniel Gauss* - "The Navigator: An Allegory" by *D Bedell* - "The Reception" by *Bryan Fagan* - "Trembling Earth" by *Trevor James Zaple* - "Daydreamer" by *James Michael*[](javascript:void%280%29) --- ## [*Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Summer 2025, Issue 35) Subscribe [here](https://fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Time Grandma Jumped into a Lake and Transformed into a Kung Fu Warrior" by E.A. Noble - "Heavenly Harpoon" by Erin Brown - "The Cut" by SJ Powell - "Fire is Hot in Every Universe" by Brandie Marsh - "Red Wings" by Sheila Smith McKoy - “Post Bender Epiphanies” by OLLY NZE - “Resurrected in the Sky” by Ivan Ndoma-Egba --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “Recitations” by Jacob Baugher - “A Concise History of the Goldfish Trade” by Jason Pearce - “To Ashes” by Emlyn Meredith Dornemann - “The Sacred, The Sacrificial” by Kel Coleman - “My flesh, my beating heart, a willing meal that refuses to remember the danger of being eaten” by Deanna J. Valdez - “The Harrowing of Hell (Third Circle, Sausage Counter, Contracts Office)” by S.L. Harris --- ## *Future Tense Fiction* (July 2025) ### Fiction - "[When We Were Patched](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-when-we-were-patched-deji-bryce-olukotun/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Deji Bryce Olukotun ### Nonfiction - [Algorithms Could Create an Even Playing Field—if We Insist on It](https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/expert-on-algorithmic-bias-responds-to-deji-olukotuns-when-we-were-patched.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeanna Matthews --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 1st) ### Fiction - "[Water to a Goose](https://giganotosaurus.org/2025/07/01/water-to-a-goose/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Sonia Focke](https://giganotosaurus.org/people/sonia-focke/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Kaleidotrope*](https://kaleidotrope.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Summer 2025) Subscribe [here](https://kaleidotrope.net/supporters/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[How to Create a God](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/how-to-create-a-god-by-rachel-meresman?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rachel Meresman - "[Steel Holds the Heat’s Memory](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/steel-holds-the-heats-memory-by-rick-hollon?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rick Hollon - "[Transmission Systems](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/transmission-systems-by-julia-august?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Julia August - "[Into a Distant Ocean](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/into-a-distant-ocean-by-matthew-cheney?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Matthew Cheney - "[The Ink God Questions the Nature of Faith](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/the-ink-god-questions-the-nature-of-faith-by-matt-thompson?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Matt Thompson - "[The Ghost Lyrics](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/the-ghost-lyrics-by-jim-marino?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jim Marino - "[Dybbuk-Draw](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/dybbuk-draw-by-devan-barlow?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Devan Barlow - "[A Preparation of Tombstones](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/a-preparation-of-tombstones-by-maggie-slater?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Maggie Slater - "[Save the Date](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/save-the-date-by-elle-boyd?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elle Boyd - "[The Moon’s Only Daughter and the Teeth of Time](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/the-moons-only-daughter-and-the-teeth-of-time-by-malda-marlys?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Malda Marlys - "[Plastic Alternatives for Humble Seamstresses](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/plastic-alternatives-for-humble-seamstresses-by-wren-douglas?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Wren Douglas - "[The Demographer](https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-sci-fi-movie-trailer-watch/)” by Richard Ford Burley ### Poetry - [“When All I Could See Were Flowers” by Mari Ness](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/when-all-i-could-see-were-flowers-by-mari-ness?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“Night Reveries” by Alexander Etheridge](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/night-reveries-by-alexander-etheridge?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“reading the plants left over” by Mike Sluchinski](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/reading-the-plants-left-over-by-mike-sluchinski?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“Hungry Years” by Jennifer Crow](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/hungry-years-by-jennifer-crow?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“permutations” by Eva Papasoulioti](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/permutations-by-eva-papasoulioti?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“I opted for the praying mantis arms” by Katy Bond](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/i-opted-for-the-praying-mantis-arms-by-katy-bond?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [“Bergelmir” by James Joseph Brown](http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2025/bergelmir-by-james-joseph-brown?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2025, Issue 182) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Lord of Mars](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-lord-of-mars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Meghan McCarron (7/3) - "[What Else, What Else, in the Joyous City?](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/what-else-what-else-in-the-joyous-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sadoeuphemist (7/3) - "[How to Win Against the Robots](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/how-to-win-against-the-robots/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katherine Crighton (7/10) - "[A Dish Best Served Cold, Or, an Excerpt From the Cookbook Of the Gods](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-dish-best-served-cold-or-an-excerpt-from-the-cookbook-of-the-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (7/10) - "[Domestic Disputes](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/domestic-disputes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Naomi Kanakia (7/17) - "[Un-Pragmagic: A Tyler Moore Retrospective](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/un-pragmagic-a-tyler-moore-retrospective/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Spencer Nitkey (7/17) - "[Finding Love in a Time Loop: A How-To Guide](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/finding-love-in-a-time-loop-a-how-to-guide/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Leah Cypess (7/24) - "[You Knit Me Together in My Mother’s Womb](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/you-knit-me-together-in-my-mothers-womb/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Paul Crenshaw (7/24) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial, July 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-july-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams - [Author Spotlight: Meghan McCarron](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-meghan-mccarron/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (7/3) - [Author Spotlight: Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-oluwatomiwa-ajeigbe-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (7/10) - [Book Review: *When Devils Sing* by Xan Kaur](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-when-devils-sing-by-xan-kaur/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (7/10) - [Author Spotlight: Naomi Kanakia](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-naomi-kanakia-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (7/17) - [Book Review: *The Memory of the Ogisi* by Moses Ose Utomi](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-memory-of-the-ogisi-by-moses-ose-utomi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (7/17) - [Author Spotlight: Paul Crenshaw](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-paul-crenshaw/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (7/24) - [Book Review: The Blood Phoenix](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-blood-phoenix-by-amber-chen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amber Chen by Chris Kluwe (7/24) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2025, Issue 154) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Asking for It](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/asking-for-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kristi DeMeester (7/2) - "[The Hearth](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-hearth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Percy (7/9) - "[Hungry Ghosting](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/hungry-ghosting/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Mai Yee Jansen (7/16) - "[The Neighbor’s Cat](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/podcast/the-neighbors-cat/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kevin Varghese (7/23) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial, July 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-july-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner - [Author Spotlight: Kristi DeMeester](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-kristi-demeester/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (7/2) - [The H Word: The Profane Illumination of the Weird](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-the-profane-illumination-of-the-weird/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Zachary Gillan (7/9) - [Author Spotlight: Anne Mai Yee Jansen](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/default/author-spotlight-anne-mai-yee-jansen/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delia Cullity (7/16) - [Interview: Kevin Greutert](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-kevin-greutert/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Rozsa (7/23) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(July 2025) ### Fiction - "[Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy](https://reactormag.com/rapport-martha-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Martha Wells - "[Redemption Song](https://reactormag.com/redemption-song-quan-barry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Quan Barry - "[Shorted](https://reactormag.com/shorted-alex-irvine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex Irvine --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 25, July 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Little Roundfaced Dogs](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/little-roundfaced-dogs/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bernie Jean Schiebeling - "[With Flesh, He Will Create](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/with-flesh-he-will-create/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by K. L. Mill - "[Scrimshaw](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/scrimshaw/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen James - "[i beg; spare me the music, my people do not have mouths for songs](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/i-beg-spare-me-the-music/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi - "[A Bitter Orange Perfume](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-bitter-orange-perfume/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by H. Pueyo - "[Root Myth](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/root-myth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Janna Miller - "[The Duchess of Summer tells you](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-duchess-of-summer-tells-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Melissa Anne Tolentino - "[Amanita](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/amanita/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dawn Vogel --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[the panic of a god](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-panic-of-a-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elisha Oluyemi (poetry) - "[The Angel Questions His Faith](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-angel-questions-his-faith/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Zachariah Claypole White (poetry) - "[Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights from the Arms & Armory Collection](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/thirteen-swords-that-made-a-prince-highlights-from-the-arms-armory-collection/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sharang Biswas (fiction) - "[Possessed](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/possessed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carsten Cheung (poetry) - "[The Witch Is My Mother, The Witch Is My Prince](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-witch-is-my-mother-the-witch-is-my-prince/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Silvatiicus Riddle (poetry) - "[Resurrections](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/resurrections/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Emet North (fiction) - "[not tied down](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/not-tied-down/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ian Li (poetry) - "[In the Age of Dreams](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/in-the-age-of-dreams/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Holly Easton (poetry) - "[Oppressed](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/oppressed-%e0%a6%86%e0%a6%95%e0%a7%8d%e0%a6%b0%e0%a6%be%e0%a6%a8%e0%a7%8d%e0%a6%a4/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" | "[আক্রান্ত](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/%e0%a6%86%e0%a6%95%e0%a7%8d%e0%a6%b0%e0%a6%be%e0%a6%a8%e0%a7%8d%e0%a6%a4-oppressed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Sakyajit Bhattacharya](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/author/sakyajit-bhattacharya/?ref=andrewliptak.com), translated by [Rituparna Mukherjee](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/author/rituparna-mukherjee/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (fiction) - "[Cuca](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/cuca/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" | "[Cuca" (translation](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/cuca-translation/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by [Alfonsina Storni](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/author/alfonsina-storni/?ref=andrewliptak.com), translated by [Alina Lazar](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/author/alina-lazar/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - "[Heritage / Speaker](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/heritage-speaker-hablante-herencia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" | "[Hablante / Herencia](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2025/07/28/hablante-herencia-heritage-speaker/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by [Angela Acosta](http://samovar.strangehorizons.com/author/angela-acosta/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Nonfiction - Monday: [The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-fake-muse-by-max-besora-translated-by-mara-faye-lethem/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Will McMahon - Tuesday: [Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/ultramarine-by-mariette-navarro-translated-by-eve-hill-agnus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira - Wednesday: [The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-book-censors-library-by-bothayna-al-essa-translated-by-ranya-abdelrahman-and-sawad-hussain/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jake Casella Brookins - Thursday: [Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/archipelago-of-the-sun-by-yoko-tawada-translated-by-margaret-mitsutani/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dan Hartland - Friday: [BUG by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/bug-by-giacomo-sartori-translated-by-frederika-randall/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Cordasco - Monday: [Jurassic World: Rebirth](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/jurassic-world-rebirth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tansy Gardam - Wednesday: [The Incandescent by Emily Tesh ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-incandescent-by-emily-tesh/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Abigail Nussbaum - Friday: [A Far Better Thing by H. G. Parry](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/a-far-better-thing-by-h-g-parry/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande - [Short Fiction Treasures: Quarterly Short Fiction Roundup](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/short-fiction-treasures-quarterly-short-fiction-roundup-5/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by: Maria Haskins - [Speculative Poetry and the Hugos](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/speculative-poetry-and-the-hugos/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lynne Sargent - Monday: [Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/where-the-axe-is-buried-by-ray-nayler/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M. L. Clark - Wednesday: [The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-flat-woman-by-vanessa-saunders/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia Cade - Friday: [The Forestborns by Vardhini Amin](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-forestborns-by-vardhini-amin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amritesh Mukherjee --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July 2025) ### Fiction - "[Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/death-and-liquidity-under-the-new?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vajra Chandrasekera - "[Fossils of Us](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/fossils-of-us?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Wiswell - "[The Scene Near Arles-sur-Tech](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-scene-near-arles-sur-tech?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Fawaz Al-Matrouk - "Mothman and Eli Visit the Cryptid Museum" by Izzy Wasserstein --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (July / August 2025, Issue 65) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - [The Best Way to Survive a Tiger Attack](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-best-way-to-survive-a-tiger-attack/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. W. Prihandita - [When He Calls Your Name](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-he-calls-your-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Catherynne M. Valente - "[The Diner at the Intersection of Duty and Despair](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-diner-at-the-intersection-of-duty-and-despair/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by John Chu - "[Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/finer-than-silk-brighter-than-snow/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shveta Thakrar ### Poetry - "[Soft, Your Grief, and Leporine](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/soft-your-grief-and-leporine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lora Gray - "[Psycho-Journey of the Cyborg-in-Therapy](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/psycho-journey-of-the-cyborg-in-therapy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Shankar Narayan ### Nonfiction - [The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-60/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Thank You, Patreon Supporters!](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/thank-you-patreon-supporters-46/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Damian Thomas - [Better Earnestness Through Incantation—Speculative Poetry and Sincerity](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/better-earnestness-through-incantation-speculative-poetry-and-sincerity/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brandon O’Brien - [The Disneyfiction of Storytelling](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-disneyfiction-of-storytelling/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.R. Dawson - [Interview: Catherynne M. Valente](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-catherynne-m-valente/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim ### Here's the first trailer for Project Hail Mary URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/project-hail-mary-andy-weir-sci-fi-movie-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2025-06-30T14:52:11.000Z The first trailer for one of the more anticipated films of 2026 just arrived: *Project Hail Mary*, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (*The Lego Movie*, *22 Jump Street* and parts of *Solo: A Star Wars Story*) and based off of the 2021 novel by Andy Weir. The story follows a lone astronaut, Ryland Grace, who wakes up from hibernation on a spacecraft. He first has to get his bearings, and slowly begins to remember what brought him there: the sun has begun to dim, and scientists soon realized that it's been infected by some sort of lifeform that's siphoning off its energy. Not only has our sun been affected, but so have the other stars nearby, except for one, Tau Ceti. Grace is a junior high school science teacher and a former molecular biologist who specialized was recruited to help solve the problem, and eventually is dispatched to Tau Ceti with a crew to investigate and try to find a way to stop the phenomenon. Give it a watch here: Wier is best known for his 2014 novel *The Martian*, which he wrote in his spare time and self-published on Amazon. Following the plight of an astronaut, Mark Watney, who was stranded on Mars, it's a fun, profane, and highly entertaining read. It blew up through word of mouth after he began serializing it online, and it eventually led to him getting a major publishing deal, which re-launched the book in 2014, which promptly hit the bestseller lists. [A decade strandedCelebrate 10 years of The Martian with a new entry from Mark Watney![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-213.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/427983100_907240861402581_8364380697859539834_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-martian-andy-weir-decade-10-years-short-fiction/) Hollywood just as [quickly jumped on the book](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-martian-andy-weir-teaser-trailer-sci-fi-watch/). Fox optioned the novel in 2013 ahead of its release, and Ridley Scott came onboard to direct. It was released in 2015 starring Matt Damon as Watney, and like the novel, it's a fun, exciting and sometimes profane story. Weir's followup wasn't quite as well-received: *Artemis*. It's a crime thriller set on a lunar colony and while fun, didn't quite capture the same feeling at *The Martian*. With 2021's *Project Hail Mary*, reviewers and readers alike noted that it was something of a return to form for him: a solitary character using science to figure out a seemingly-insurmountable problem. The book earned a slew of accolades after it was published: readers awarded it the [2021 Dragon Award](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2021-dragon-awards/) and the Goodreads Choice Award for best science fiction novel, and it was a [finalist for the 2022 Hugo Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-hugo-award-finalists-science-fiction-fantasy-books/). I bounced off the book when I first picked it up when it came out, which I was surprised by: I blew through *The Martian* in a couple of sittings, and got through *Artemis* with no issues. I think there was something about the tone or voice that just threw me at the time, and in the years since it came out, I've seen people talk about how much they enjoyed it. With word of the trailer coming up last week (and from some encouragement from the folks in the TO Slack channel), I snagged a copy from my local bookstore and started giving it another try. I'm further into it than I was before, and I'm enjoying it a bit more than I did the first go-around. Sometimes, you just need to get the book at the [right moment](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-right-mood/). --- Like the book, this upcoming adaptation of *Project Hail Mary* has been getting quite a bit of good word of mouth: I suspect it'll be on a lot of the "most anticipated films of 2026" lists that'll come out at the end of this year, and already, there's been a good amount of buzz around the previews and early cuts of the film. The trailer makes this look quite good – the parts that I've read that show up make me think that they're sticking pretty close to the story, and folks who have read the book have noted that it shows off quite a bit of the plot: Grace ends up encountering another alien who arrives at Tau Ceti looking to solve the same problem. [Visiting Tau CetiTau Ceti is one of our nearest celestial neighbors, so it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that it’s a frequent destination for authors.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-214.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/081A036C-C3BB-4F43-BD2C5A501EBA952E_source-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tau-ceti-science-fiction-le-guin-robinson-niven-cherryh/) It has a lot going for it: Drew Goddard, who adapted *The Martian*, wrote the screenplay for this one, while Lord and Miller have a pretty good track record for comedic dramas, something that meshes well with Weir's sensibilities. There's lots of cool visuals and designs (I'm loving the spacesuits) and a [report from an early test screening](https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2025/6/1/early-3-hour-cut-of-project-hail-mary-stuns-could-awards-play-be-next?ref=andrewliptak.com) praised the acting and compared it to films like *Arrival* and *Interstellar*, which really raises the bar quite a bit. I have to say that all of this has gotten me a bit more jazzed to finally get back to the book, and I'll be eager to see how it turns out when it hits theaters on March 20th, 2026\. Fingers crossed that it'll live up to the hype. ### Returning to memory lane URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-zero-point-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-06-27T19:57:33.000Z Simon Stålenhag's artwork has been something of a viral sensation online since the mid-2010s. He broke through the noise of the internet with his nostalgia-flavored images of an alternate Sweden from the 1980s that had been home to a scientific program gone awry, the landscape dotted with fantastical machines and structures rusting away. [*Tales from the Loop*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982150693?ref=andrewliptak.com) was a gorgeous project that invites you in with those fantastic images, with Stålenhag sketching out the story through a sparse narrative alongside them. He followed up that project with [*Things from the Flood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982150716?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and a pair of similar, standalone graphic – novels? Art books?, [*Electric State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501181412?ref=andrewliptak.com) *and* [*Labyrinth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534320697?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's recently released another new book, *Swedish Machines: Sunset at Point Zero*, to [Kickstarter backers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-kickstarter/) (the regular trade edition, [*Sunset at Zero Point*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668096413?ref=andrewliptak.com) will be released in December), which he's described as his most personal book to date. [“I wanted to paint ash”: Simon Stålenhag on his latest art book, The LabyrinthThe cold has come for Vermont. I woke up this week to darkening skies and a thin layer of wet snow clinging to the leaves, and it’s remained overcast and damp, which is the perfect environment for the week of Halloween, and for a project that I’ve been![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-205.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_6996a0e0-2045-46a9-be89-0cf3a2861fc6_1024x1024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/i-wanted-to-paint-ash-simon-stalenhag-on-his-latest-art-book-the-labyrinth/) The book has all the trademarks of Stålenhag's work: sparse landscapes with giant structures, weird science projects with unintended consequences, and characters who're trying to make their way through a strange and changing world. Set in 2024, it follows its narrator after he discovers a note with a date written down on it – just a couple of days in the future, and it prompts him to return home to revisit his past. Stålenhag bounces between 2024 and the early-2000s as his protagonist, Linus, travels down memory lane. After leaving his small town in Sweden to study music in college, he was overwhelmed with anxiety and forced to drop out and return. It's there that he reconnects with a school friend, Valter, now working as a security guard for Black Fallow, the remains of a top secret facility, run by a company called Swedish Machines, which was home to a strange military experiment that ended disastrously, and is now closed off to the public. In the mid-1970s, something went wrong. "The moment the weapon was activated, it triggered an explosion so powerful it was recorded by US seismographs in the northern Cascades...when the sun set that day (described by eyewitnesses as one of the eeriest sunsets they had ever seen), an area of thirty-seven square miles had been destroyed and over the next three weeks all of the island's 1,200 resident families would be forced to leave their homes." Over the course of the Cold War, we've seen all types of man-made disasters take place around the world, such as the meltdowns at the nuclear plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima, or explosions and leaks from chemical plants or crashes like in Bhopal, India or East Palestine, Ohio. These are moments that are ripe for speculative storytelling: books like Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's classic novel [*Roadside Picnic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781613743416?ref=andrewliptak.com) or Jeff VanderMeer's [*Annihilation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824042?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which we encounter strange zones where time and space intersect in unpredictable ways. But where the zones and their origins or relationship to the characters figure prominently into the story, Stålenhag sticks it in the foreground: opting to put the story of Linus and Valter front and center as they work to figure out their feelings for one another as they advance into adulthood, and how they fit into the world. As with the real world, it's complicated and messy. Our two characters connect over their shared fascination with finding out the secretive nature of what happened in the zone back in the 1970s. Linus struggles with his anxieties and mental health while Valter contends with his own trauma: his father's suicide. They find comfort in one another when they begin to hook up, but they never quite become a couple, even if there's an attraction between them. As Linus slowly finds his footing, while Valter sinks deeper and deeper into obsession, something that begins to drive them apart. They move on, and years later, they reconnect when Linus discovers the mysterious scribbled date. Stålenhag’s sprinkles in some details about physics and alternate universes when it comes to the Black Fallow, and in a lot of ways, this feels like a story about the opportunities that we miss as we move through life, and the lengths that we'll go to obsess over those moments. It's a mature and thoughtful lesson, one that takes hindsight and a considerable amount of self-awareness to comprehend, and as I get older, I recognize just how many of those moments I might have missed, and how agonizing over the roads not taken can be a futile exercise. One might miss a path, but while the forks seem enormous or formidable in the moment, the passage of time shows that they're often a blip or aberration. *Swedish Machines* is a sublime read: Stålenhag’s artwork and storytelling is at their best, with a focused, emotional, and thoughtful take on the human condition. ### Building tension URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-bond-denis-villeneuve-sicario-film/ Last updated: 2025-06-26T16:17:56.000Z Earlier this week, Amazon's MGM [announced](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond-director-denis-villeneuve?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's hired Denis Villeneuve to direct the next James Bond film, and I think it's an inspired choice. He's one of my favorite directors and he's helmed an incredible string of science fiction films over the last decade: *Arrival, Blade Runner 2049,* and *Dune Part 1* and *Part 2*. But he's also done some great work with crime thrillers, and his 2015 film *Sicario* comes immediately to mind. If you haven't seen it, the film is about a FBI Special Agent named Kate Macer (played by Emily Blunt) who we meet during a [particularly brutal raid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDBqsnv431M&ref=andrewliptak.com) during an anti-drug operation. In the aftermath, she's tapped by a joint task force for a special mission into Mexico, overseen by the CIA and which includes Delta Force operatives, Texas Rangers, and a former prosecutor-turned assassin. They first extract a drug lord, and after that, Macer learns what they're up to: they're going to turn up the heat on the war on drugs with some extremely dirty tactics. It's a masterful film, with some gorgeous cinematography and acting from the entire cast, but what really comes to mind for me from the film is this scene: Give it a watch: across the six or so minutes that it runs, it's a masterclass in building tension. Prior to the scene, the task force has been told that the Mexican Police can't be trusted and they're going to get attacked, most likely at the border. They go in, and on their way out, we know that we're waiting for that moment when they reach the border. Every car they see on a side street, every one of the cop cars, we don't know where the attack will happen. Then they get stuck in traffic at the border, surrounded on all sides by potential hiding places for an attack. Villeneuve shows us wide shots of the traffic jam, then cuts to the cars surrounding the team in their SUVs. He doesn't rush the scene: the team knows what's coming and they soon begin identifying potential threats, pull out their guns, and wait. It's the waiting that builds the tension: we've been told what will happen over and over, we've seen them get into a situation where the worst possible place for that attack can happen, and now we're just waiting for it, looking from car to car. They're told to wait for their attackers to make the first move, and we see them do that, but prepare. They unlock their doors, keep looking as the cars shift forward, and when the moment happens, everything happens quickly: the cartel soldiers get out of their car, the American operators follow suit, and everyone stares one another down until someone shoots. The gunfire is over in just a couple of seconds. It's over in just a couple of gunshots, and the team is back in their vehicle and across the border. It's this type of restraint that I appreciated from a director, and while I'm not a huge fan of the James Bond series, I think he'll bring an interesting sensibility to the project. The Bond films are all about espionage, gadgets, girls, and action (in varying order), and while I think that we'll see all of those elements included in this film, I think what a scene like this shows is that he can do this sort of thing in a way that isn't gratuitous. The border attack is a moment of escalating tension that shows the stakes and serves as a moment that shows how quickly the characters can escalate their actions in a way that builds up the overall narrative. I think that's needed for the Bond films. I can see this same sort of scene playing out in one of the mid-1990s or even the 2000s films very differently: Bond relying on the gadgets in his car to get out of the situation, but not in a way that really raises the stakes from the film. I don't know that Villeneuve's Bond would get out of this situation in the same way, but have the feeling that the scene might *mean* more to the overall plot, rather than just an action scene that brings him from one point to another. It'll be interesting to see what this film ends up becoming (if it ends up happening – plenty of directors have left a Bond film over creative differences). Villeneuve's a professed fan of the series, and he's shown over the course of his career that he's really good at playing in another fictional universe, whether that's adapting Ted Chiang's story for *Arrival*, somehow filming a sequel to one of the best-known and acclaimed science fiction films in the form of *Blade Runner 2049*, or helming a famously unfilmable novel through *Dune Part 1* and *Part 2*. He was apparently in the lineup to helm *No Time To Die*, and turned it down to direct *Dune*. (I am a little salty that this probably means that [his adaptation](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rendezvous-with-rama-dispatcher-black-sun-adaptations/) of *Rendezvous with Rama* is probably not going to happen, or at least, not for a while.) [Clarity of visionTime allows for reflection and revision for a creator![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-210.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/MCDDUPA_WB035-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-screenwriting-film-production-storytelling/) It'll be a while before we see his Bond on screen. The part hasn't been cast yet, and Villeneuve is slated to begin production on *Dune: Messiah* is apparently about to go into production in July (for a December 2026 release). so I'm guessing this'll be a couple of years off yet. But I think it's an exciting choice: Villeneuve is someone who has an extremely good eye for visuals, clear direction, and good storytelling. If there was any worry about Amazon churning out Bond films and shows as crappy products, I think I can set that concern aside for now: going by his track record, he's capable of turning out an excellent story that isn't just a regular sequel or adaptation. Hopefully, he'll take that sensibility with him for Bond's next mission, whatever it is. ### The Pixar method URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/elio-pixar-disney-film-box-office-ip-review/ Last updated: 2025-06-26T15:31:42.000Z A number of years ago, I picked up a book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (co-written by Amy Wallace), *Creativity,* [*Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593594643?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Part business book about organizational leadership, part memoir, part entertainment history, the pair charted Pixar's ups and downs as Catmull and his partners went from inventing some breakthroughs in computer technology to a developing proof of concept films to launching their first major animated movie, *Toy Story*, in 1995\. It's a fascinating read, but what's really stuck out for me has been Catmull's exploration of how Pixar approached its work as a film studio: they placed an enormous amount of time and work on developing their stories. It essentially boiled down to an iterative process, one where they keep working on the story until they understand the emotional core of what the story is about. It's why many of the studio's earlier films – *Toy Story, Monster's Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up*, and many others – have really stood the test of time: they're films that really tug on the heartstrings. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and I was recently thinking about its recent run of films when I took my kids to see its latest outing, *Elio*, earlier this week. I wasn't sure if I'd really enjoy the film, and I was aware that I was only marginally aware of it. When we went out to see *Lilo & Stitch* last month, the theater aired the [original teaser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w%5FK3CB8PuE&ref=andrewliptak.com) for the film from a couple of years ago, which listed it as coming out in 2024, and which showed off a film about a young boy who was abducted by aliens and put to the test of representing Earth before a consortium of alien worlds. Cute, but it wasn't something that I was moved to see. As it turns out, the film is pretty good, and pretty far from what that teaser trailer showed off. I n the finished film, Elio is having a difficult time with life: his mother and father died in some unspecified way, and he's now living with his aunt, who's got a demanding job tracking satellites with the US Air Force. He's withdrawn, friendless, and is obsessed with the idea that aliens will come and abduct him to rescue him from life on Earth. *Spoilers ahead for the film.* When his aunt's facility receives a message from a consortium of alien civilizations (the Communiverse), Elio seizes on his chance and sends a greeting, disrupting the base's power and shutting everything down. He's quickly shipped off to an overnight summer camp, which reinforces his belief that he's just a burden to everyone, and closes down to everyone around him. When the aliens receive his greeting and beam him up to their meeting space, where he learns that they gather and look for new worlds to add to share their collective knowledge and wisdom with the galaxy. He wasn't the only new recruit: another alien, a warlord from a militant civilization, Lord Grigon, has also been making his case, only for the peaceful and meek Communiverse folks to reject him on the grounds that he's just too violent. When Grigon doesn't take the news well and threatens to take over the Communiverse by force, Elio, faced with the prospect of being returned to Earth over this disruption, offers to negotiate with Grigon. He heads over to the warlord's ship, ends up imprisoned, meets and befriends his son, and escapes to try and renegotiate the safety of the Communiverse. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/elio-online-use-e468_622_c6f4969a.jpeg) Image: Disney It's a cute film, one that reminded me quite a bit of the 1997 film *Contact*, right down to Carl Sagan opening and closing the film with some choice quotes. Both films ultimately boil down to some common points: the idea that we look into the stars for life because deep down, we're lonely and are looking for connections. That's where the finished film ends up, which had me scratching my head, because that's not really the film that the teaser promised back in 2023\. A lot of the same pieces are there, but in the teaser, Elio's abducted from Earth and meets the Communiverse, where he's essentially advocating to be included because ... he likes aliens and he's lonely? There are some notable differences too, the biggest being that Grigon is already part of the Communiverse and that the aliens realize that Elio was abducted by mistake early on. *Elio* was supposed to hit theaters in March 1, 2024, but in October 2023, Pixar [announced](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/disney-delays-snow-white-actor-strike-1235629856/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was bumping it back a year because of the actor's strike, along with a couple of its other projects. A little under a year later, the company made [another announcement](https://www.thewrap.com/elio-pixar-new-directors-story-cast-changes-pete-docter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the film: director Adrian Molina was being replaced by Domee Shi (*Turning Red*) and Madeline Sharafian (*Burrow*). *TheWrap*'s Drew Taylor spoke with with Pixar's Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter, who noted that Molina was moving to another, "priority project" and that they "worked together to find other directors to help carry it across." He also dropped another interesting note when asked if there were other reasons that the film was getting some new directors: “The character of Elio. And I can’t really even talk about it without giving away plot points, but I think they’ve made some major discoveries on him that really helped the audience to connect and to move forward with the character into the second act, which is, course, where all the meat happens.” *TheWrap*'s article notes some other changes that hint at a much greater re-tooling of the film's plot: America Ferrera was supposed to play Elio's mother, but she was replaced by Zoe Saldaña, who plays his adoptive aunt. [*Entertainment Weekly* also provided some additional details](https://ew.com/pixar-elio-sci-fi-classics-alien-contact-influence-director-change-11721610?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the film's production: Shi and Sharafian had provided some help in the film's development, and when Molina went off the project, Shi explained that "he entrusted \[Sharafian\] and myself to finish what he started. It's like we were handed a box of toys and we had to figure out how to tell the best story in the most meaningful and entertaining way with 'em." That sounds to me that the story was somewhat nebulous at the point where the directors shifted around, and that from there, the two new directors reformed the story and added their own spin to it, which included the changes to some of the characters, which the article lays out. From that look, it sounds very much like the finished film is pretty different from what it was supposed to be originally. Both of those things reminded me of Catmull's book: under his watch, Pixar had emphasized the need and desire to go back to the drawing board when they found that a film wasn't working, sometimes scrapping entire projects because they didn't work or land with the emotional weight that they were known for. As presented in its earlier teasers, Elio felt like a film that was about a lonely kid who ends up getting abducted by aliens: a situation where he appeared to be a fairly passive character. He just happened to end up in this situation. I think what happened here is that Molina directed the film, and when they had to push the release date back because of the strike, they took the time to look back at it and found that it was missing something: in the finished version, Elio feels like a much more active character, which I think is what Docter alluded to when he noted that as they were working on the film, they found some major things about the character. Given that they removed his mother from the film, if I had to guess, they realized that they needed to give Elio some reason to be so isolated from everyone, and that while they had a lot of the film done, they had to do a bit more work to reconfigure it. Molina still has a director's credit on the film, but so do Sharafian and Shi. That's notable: the Director’s Guild of America says that a director is entitled to that credit when they perform a certain amount of work on a project are specific reasons. Directors are entitled to producing a cut of the film once production is complete, and these rules are in place to ensure that a studio doesn't screw over a director by removing them prematurely. Given that Molina's still listed as director, it means that he did an extensive amount of work on the film. But the version that ended up in theaters probably isn't *Molina's* cut of the film. Sharafian and Shi are listed as directors, which signals to me that they also put a lot of work into the finished product. In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of what Lucasfilm ended up doing for its two standalone *Star Wars* films *Rogue One* and *Solo*, in which they had fairly troubled productions before being handed off to another director to finish them up. With *Rogue One*, Lucasfilm brought in Tony Gilroy to fix up what Gareth Edwards had shot, and reshoot to fill in the blanks. Gilroy was credited as a writer, while Edwards retained his director's credit. For *Solo*, Lucasfilm fired directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller shortly after production began, and brought in Ron Howard to finish up the film; Howard gets the director's credit there. (I'll make an unsolicited plug for you to run, don't walk, to check out Tansy Gardam's excellent podcast [*Going Rogue*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-rogue/id1636196453?ref=andrewliptak.com), which goes into a good amount of detail for this very issue.) If I had to guess, Molina finished the film, and either Disney didn't like his cut, or when they realized they had another year to work on it, they went back and realized that it needed more, and Molina wasn't available or willing to go back and redo it. Given that he's co-directing *Coco 2*, I can't imagine that he ragequit the production, and this came down to timing and scheduling. Sharafian and Shi were brought onboard to finish the film, and did enough work punching it up to bring it up over the finish line. I think this is notable because deadlines seem to be the ultimate arbiter for a film: studios will announce a slate of films, and while you do see some bumping back and forth as the studios move films out of the way (Elio was [bumped back a week](https://deadline.com/2025/02/elio-disney-release-dates-1236289608/?ref=andrewliptak.com) so that it didn't land at the same time as the live-action remake of *How to Train Your Dragon*), the creative teams have a set amount of time to produce a film. The thing is, films are complicated projects: you have hundreds of people working on them, which amounts to thousands and thousands of individual decisions that go into the making of each film. In *Creativity Inc.*, Catmull noted the importance of empowering the people in your teams to make those decisions on their own, relying on their expertise and knowledge in their fields, and while films are created under the eye of a director, there's still a lot of wiggle room for a story to change as it's being made: maybe an actor makes a certain choice with their character that changes how viewers see the story, or maybe there's a logistical thing that happens during the production that means that they have to change on the fly. When you are working towards a firm date, you don't have the time or luxury to really explore or implement those decisions. I think it's the one main reason why Marvel's films have become so lack-luster: they're just pushing to finish on time, shortchanging the special effects and story. Last year, [I wrote about why *Dune: Part 2* was so much better](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-screenwriting-film-production-storytelling/) than its counterparts in theaters: one reason that a VFX artist pointed out was that director Denis Villeneuve had a specific vision for the film in mind and stuck to it. They had spent a lot of time in preproduction figuring out those story beats, visuals, and had a good idea of what they were going to do once they got started – they didn't have to stop and recalibrate because they'd already done that. It's something that I think viewers don't realize they should appreciate: it's okay to take the time for a script to cook and marinate for a while, rather than pushing a product out because a studio needs the film to fit a slot in the box office schedule. I've seen a lot of complaints from people on the internet about the amount of time Matt Reeves is taking to deliver a script for *The Batman 2*, something that DC studio co-director James Gunn [noted](https://ew.com/james-gunn-interview-superman-gods-and-monsters-future-dcu-titles-exclusive-11755992?taid=685418cd70248a00018a8230&utm%5Fcampaign=trueAnthem%3A+New+Content+%28Feed%29&utm%5Fmedium=trueAnthem&utm%5Fsource=twitter) was irritating: "It's going to come out when he feels good about the screenplay. And Matt's not going to give me the screenplay until he feels good about the screenplay." I have a feeling that *Elio* was a good idea that didn't get enough time to marinate and go through that process that Pixar might have taken it through in its early days, and that they got lucky because they happened to have a delay forced on them by the actor's strike in 2023\. The final film is a good one: maybe not quite on the same caliber of *Toy Story* or *Wall-E*, but it packs a solid emotional punch through Elio and is part of an underrated run of films like *Lightyear, Luca, Onward*, and *Strange World*. Hopefully it'll eventually find the audiences that it really deserves. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/elio-online-use-e482_212_7eb3ba0e.jpeg) Image: Disney I've always been a bit skeptical of the idea that extensive problems during a film's production mean that it'll have trouble at the box office or that it'll somehow turn audiences away. This was an argument that I saw popping up a lot with films like *Justice League, Rogue One*, and *Solo*, and I don't generally buy it because a vast majority of viewers don't give a shit about FilmTwitter (or whatever you call it these days) or the inside baseball drama that winds up pundits. That said, this online discourse can make its way out into the perceptions of a film, which is why the news that you're seeing about *Elio* isn't so much its reviews, but its lackluster box office performance: [it opened to an opening weekend of $14 million](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/-train-dragon-tops-us-box-office-elio-marks-new-low-pixar-rcna214434?ref=andrewliptak.com), a low for Pixar, and it's sparked all sorts of dramatic headlines: "‘[Elio’ Misfire Could Hasten Demise Of Original Animation](https://deadline.com/2025/06/elio-misfire-could-hasten-demise-original-animation-wall-street-disney-pixar-1236440038/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[Elio and the reason today's original children's films are flopping](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250624-elio-and-the-problem-with-todays-kids-films?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[The Spotlight on Pixar Intensifies as ‘Elio’ Becomes Latest Original Animated Pic to Crash Land](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/pixar-pressures-elio-crash-lands-1236297754/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." The sky is falling for original films, but that's long been the case. *Titan AE*, which came out 25 years ago last week, was a big flop when it debuted, but it really caught on in that time and has become something of a beloved cult classic, if you want to go by the comments on a [Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/posts/pfbid02s5ouynhBc44Q7WNztJ4QAyFhgzVWDpjip3n8GU4jwUawBrT4ZfBNTMad4VbYTFPCl?%5F%5Fcft%5F%5F[0]=AZUfPRcTOgNjkwgHgmCGjL6eDGu4ekMW5KbcCAdUGlInntUGWDsukSl8FdZOpbp3V8ZHpP2n9eolz0lt7rV0kDdqpblSGpxrsVbNAckmdqIgCAyAGMa5n4YObPj5fBcZf9%5FgSi9J9KW-NWpUoKyBYzXUyQb1PpvwSEYSvQ5FtE1CV5wMalflPx0GzqLbbOwmDY0E-%5F%5FNBOGEd2GJhEbsZcLz&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CO%2CP-R) that I made to mark the occasion. I think *Elio*'s problems aren't necessarily the fact that it's an original film (ie, not based on existing IP) or that Pixar has lost its touch: I think it just comes down to the fact that Disney did a shitty job marketing this film. That first teaser trailer didn't leave an impression, and it's really, really weird that as of a month ago, theaters were still airing it in front of another big Disney film despite the changes that the film seems to have undergone advertising it as a 2024 film in 2025\. But beyond that, there just didn't seem to be any push for the film: I don't remember seeing any news about anywhere: no interviews with the directors or cast, no teasers or pop up ads, or the usual bombardment of stuff that usually accompanies these types of upcoming films. John Gruber [summed it up neatly](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/23/pixar-elio-dud?ref=andrewliptak.com) in *Daring Fireball* by way of a [post](https://www.threads.com/@technologizer/post/DLQKsxppcWt?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Fast Company's* Harry McCracken*:* "I wasn’t aware this movie had come out, and still can’t tell you what it’s about. And I’ve been a Pixar fan since before they made movies." This isn't a hard film to advertise: it's *Contact* for kids, with a lot of cute aliens. But I'm also thinking that there are other factors at play. It's been a busy summer already for films: *Lilo & Stitch* came out in May and has [sucked up just shy of $1 billion](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt11655566/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in revenue, while the live-action version of *How to Train Your Dragon* has [earned just under $365 million](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt26743210/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Those films, along with *Sinners, Minecraft*, *Captain America, Thunderbolts, Mission Impossible, Final Destination*, and a couple of others have led to a box office that's raked in $4 billion this year so far, which [CNN cites](https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/22/business/box-office-rebound-2025?ref=andrewliptak.com#:~:text=The%20overall%20box%20office%20is,Labor%20Day%2C%20according%20to%20Comscore.) as 18% above what we saw last year (and we don't even have the biggest films – *F1, Jurassic World Rebirth, Fantastic Four: First Steps*, and *Superman* – hitting in the coming weeks). My take on this: this isn't a problem with the film or its production: it's costs and exhaustion from moviegoers. This recent trip to the movies ran me nearly $80 – $25 for dinner at McDonalds + $31.28 for tickets and $22.01 for popcorn – just a couple of weeks after doing the same with *Minecraft, Lilo & Stitch*, and *How to Train Your Dragon*. (And we live in a pretty cheap market – I'm guessing those prices are pretty low compared to other theaters in more populated areas!) And because Disney dropped the ball when it came to marketing the film, and people either didn't know about it or didn't know what it was about. With that schedule and those costs, I have a feeling that moviegoers – especially the ones with kids – are sort of cashed out, and dropping $80 on a film that you don't know much about? I wouldn't be surprised if parents would take the weekend and throw something on Disney+ instead and just wait for the movie to begin streaming in .... probably a month or two at this rate. It's great to see that theaters have a really good selection this year. I love going to the movies, and I think that the success of a whole bunch of films bodes well for the industry for the moment. But it's frustrating to see this particular film's failure get reduced down to being an inherent problem with original IP. Audiences *want* new stories: look at the success of *Sinners* this spring. But even then, Disney's [starting to look at their original films as potential seeds for greater franchises](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/pixar-pressures-elio-crash-lands-1236297754/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which strikes me as a bad way to tell a story, trying to anticipate and shortchange your story to try and please a huge, four-quadrant audience. It's not the mindset that takes the sorts of daring and risks that real creativity demands. ([Ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/zen-cho-jrr-tolkien-lecture-fantasy-literature-freedom-writing/).) But I think they're being careful with what they're willing to actually spend money on. A new DC/Disney/James Bond/Marvel/Star Trek/Star Wars/insertiphere film means that you sort of know what you're expecting, and if you're going to spend a good chunk of money at the movie theater, you might as well know that you're going to go if you know you're going to have a good time. When you're not sure, you'll just wait until reviews come back from critics or friends and family (and run the risk that the film might not be in theaters anymore, given that they come in and out so quickly), or just wait until they hit streaming or home release. That's unfortunate, because in the long run, these sorts of failures and headlines train studios to keep playing it safe and we'll see more *Star Wars*\-type blockbusters and fewer films like *Sinners* or *Elio.* I *want* films that delight and excite me. Franchise films (and [shows](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-empire-fascism/)) can certainly do that, but it's an uphill battle to crest those expectations. Hopefully, *Elio* will end up being on of those films that has a slow burn, that'll find its audience through word of mouth. So consider this my effort to help there: it's a cute, fun film, and you should check it out (in theaters.) ### A pen when you need it URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lochby-sidekick-wallet-pen-edc-review/ Last updated: 2025-06-24T15:10:27.000Z In the years that I worked as a journalist, I found myself paying attention to the items that I'd be carrying. I'd jump in the car or on a plane, and had a short checklist of items to take with me to cover whatever contingencies that I'd come across. Most of those items were to support the writing that I'd do: notebooks, pens, backup pens, cameras, and other things that I might need. I'd take along some other things, too: pouches for chargers, a spoon, packets of sugar, business cards, tea packets, just on the off chance that I'd need them. Having all of that stuff was useful, but it also meant a lot of chaos in whatever bag I was carrying them in. Enter Lochby, whose products I came across in 2020\. The company produces a range of waxed canvas accessories for writers, and I picked up their [Field Journal](https://www.lochby.com/collections/featured/products/field-journal?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Tool Roll](https://www.lochby.com/collections/featured/products/tool-roll?ref=andrewliptak.com). The latter is an excellent field book that I hold a trio of notebooks in, while the former is a great storage accessory that keeps all of my pens in one place. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/b2fa2f6b-e12d-401e-b160-846f4f317826_4032x3024.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/8bc2bf08-86db-4949-9743-f493e91f6fdb_4032x3024.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak In the five years that I've had them, I've literally used them every day. I've been immensely impressed with how well they've held up in that time. Not only are they still doing what they're supposed to be doing, outside of a bit of natural fading, they're in outstanding shape. Ever since, I've kept an eye on the company and what it produces. Some of their items fall into fairly specific use categories (smaller field journals and notebooks, which I don't really need), but their latest product caught my eye: the [Sidekick](https://www.lochby.com/collections/accessories/products/sidekick?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'd been looking for a new wallet: I had a cheap leather one that I picked up at Walmart and it's been fraying and tearing in places, and it was just kind of boring. In a [behind-the-scenes blog entry](https://www.lochby.com/blogs/blog/the-design-journey-of-the-lochby-sidekick-from-ambition-to-simplicity?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the development of the Sidekick, Lochby explained that when it came to a wallet, "we saw an opportunity that many wallets on the market overlooked—a design that accommodates a full-size pen," without having something that was too bulky. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2383.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Like the journal and tool roll, this is an item designed for practicality, and I fell in love with it n as soon as it arrived. It fits neatly in my hand, and opens to reveal a trio of card slots on the left, another on the right, and a neat slot that forms the spine for a pen. There are some additional slots under the card slots where I can tuck cash and other cards away. Product images show that it's the perfect size for an A7-size notebook, but that's not something I really use or need: I tend to prefer other, larger notebook sizes. The clincher for me was the pen slot. It's an addition that never occurred to me as being something that I'd ever use, but it makes sense for a company that caters to writers. It's not an entirely novel concept: I've seen others incorporate loops or slots for pens, but they always seem to be stuck on the side or just sort of feel added on as an afterthought, or they require pens that are smaller in size. What I like about this one is that the pen sits right in the spine of the fold, giving it There are other neat design choices as well: a small square slot on the upper right side: it's the perfect size for an Apple AirTag, which I need because I'm always misplacing my wallet. Something that I've appreciated about the three items that I own from this company is that they're geared towards being useful while simultaneously being unobtrusive. I've seen plenty of gimmicky writing things over the years: flashy notebooks or pouches or pens, designed to signal that you're a writer. I've generally found that they take up space or simply aren't very practical to carry around day in and day out. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2377.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak I've been using this for the last couple of months, and in that time, I've been impressed with how readily I can access everything: the cards I regularly use are right where I need them, and I'm now always carrying a pen that would otherwise hang out in my pocket and risk running through the wash. The design is so intuitive that when I *don't* have it loaded with a pen, it was noticeably absent. And because I'm sort of relying on this as the go-to place to snag a pen, I generally have a better idea at all times where my wallet is: something that's useful, given that I tend to be forgetful and misplace it. Moreover: where I was impressed with the durability of the tool roll and field journal, I'm equally impressed with this one. Where those items tend to sit in my bag, this is constantly in my pocket, and it's getting quite a bit more use, and I'm expecting that it'll hold up just as well as those other items. I write a lot: not just for this newsletter, but I take notes during meetings, at my desk, jot down ideas as they come, doddle when I'm bored, and so forth. It's easy to carry a pen or pencil around with me in a pocket or pouch somewhere. I like the idea of a company that puts writers first by making sure that you have the tools that you need when you need them. Sometimes, you need them where you least expect it, and being able to grab it – and knowing where it is at all times – makes that job easier. It makes it more convenient and reflexive, and that helps when I'm inspired by something or just need to jot down a phone number when taking a message. The point here isn't to save the extra seconds that it takes to dig a card out of a pocket or find a pen. A good tool does its job quietly and well, and if it's anything like the Tool Roll or Field Journal, I'm looking forward to using this one for years to come. ### Freedom of fantasy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/zen-cho-jrr-tolkien-lecture-fantasy-literature-freedom-writing/ Last updated: 2025-06-19T19:01:36.000Z J.R.R. Tolkien is arguably the biggest name in the world of fantasy literature, and the college where he taught, Pembroke College in Oxford, has continued to honor his legacy in a variety of ways, including a public lecture series called the J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture, which annually invites notable fantasy authors to discuss the genre and promote "the study of fantasy literature, and advances our understanding of it." The series began in 2013 and has included such figures as [Lev Grossman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcIWgPvx41c&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Maria Dahvana Headley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEor8mixMJE&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Marlon James](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV2bysurBds&pp=0gcJCb4JAYcqIYzv&ref=andrewliptak.com), Kij Johnson, [Guy Gavriel Kay](https://www.andrewliptak.com/guy-gavriel-kay-2021-tolkien-lecture/), [R. F. Kuang](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBj5EVDuLzw&pp=0gcJCb4JAYcqIYzv&ref=andrewliptak.com), and a whole bunch of others. (Last year's speaker was Neil Gaiman, in what I think was his last public appearance before [allegations of his sexual misconduct came to light](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neil-gaiman-allegations-media-literacy/). Whoops.) I'm familiar with Zen Cho as the author of the 2015 novel [*Sorcerer to the Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425283400?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which I remember enjoying as a interesting read about the nature of magic in England. (She's since written a sequel, [*The True Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425283417?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as [*Black Water Sister*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425283431?ref=andrewliptak.com), [and](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618731869?ref=andrewliptak.com) [some](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250377258?ref=andrewliptak.com) [others](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250330390?ref=andrewliptak.com).) The book was about an archaic magical system contending with some existential challenges, now being led by the first African sorcerer and contending with the prospect of allowing women into their order's ranks. Cho kicked off her talk with a good observation: > "The advantage of fantasy is that you're not constrained by the laws of physics. Fantasyland is ruled by the laws of metaphor...for that space, you're freed from the restrictions from our world, and one of these restrictions is the duty of accurate reporting. This is another reason why fantasy is a good place to work things out; it provides a place of psychological safety for the creator." She goes on to point out that as we're discussing ideas – and particularly on social media – people have a tendency to go to extremes or to simplify those topics and talking points, eliminating nuance. "There's not much space to get things wrong," she says, "there's not a lot of space for healthy debate or the discussion of nuance," which can cause problems for artists and creators who feel that they have to please everyone and remain as inoffensive or unobtrusive as possible in order to succeed. "That fear is incredibly damaging to creativity, and exploration and play, which are all necessary to the creation of good art." Fantasy is a way to circumvent that: if fantasy doesn't have to adhere to reality, it can serve to provide cover and distance for those discussions to take place. It's a way grant freedom to those creators to take risks and stretch their wings. She goes on to talk about how vast and varied the world of Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings* is: Middle-earth's mix of cultural analogs, the otherworldliness of Legolas's as compared to that of the Hobbits or humans, all placed against this giant backdrop of a battle of good and evil that threatens the place. That framework allowed Tolkien to really showcase the stakes of the story the larger story against the smaller, mundane moments. That flexibility, Cho notes, is a huge advantage for practitioners like herself and others who don't necessarily see themselves in traditional fantasy. Those writers often have to go out and forge their own path, and when they do, they can be perceived as diversity hires or published because a publisher wants to check off a box somewhere, or saddled with the burden of having to tell a story with outsized dramatic, emotional, or political heft. Working with fantasy, without its duty to adhere to the real world, can be liberating. "I would argue that the freedom and flexibility of fantasy is a huge boon because it opens up a multiplicity of voices and styles and time periods to draw upon," she says. When asked about why she decided to use the "unconventional" choice of using an African sorcerer as her lead character in *Sorcerer to the Crown* in an interview, she noted "because I think he's hot." I've been writing creatively quite a bit lately and as I've done so, I've been thinking a lot about making choices and decisions in a story. I can make the characters do X, Y, and Z over the course of their journey, and their actions and decisions pin them down as they move forward through the narrative. But as I've been jotting down notes and dialogue and info dumps, the structure of fantasy literature means that *you can just do things.* If I want to toss in something really cool, I can absolutely do that. "There's a shared understanding of practitioners of this genre, whether that's readers, writers, reviewers, publishers, that it's fun!... You don't have to ask 'why put a dragon in a book?' Why wouldn't you? Dragons are cool? 'Why include magic?' Because it's magical!" Ultimately, Art is a way to express one's humanity – allowing us to take the necessary risks that allows us to be creative and to life our lives to the fullest. Fantasy, without those constraints and justifications to shoehorn itself into the real world, is an excellent expression of artistic and creative freedom, one that allows us to better live and flourish in the real world that surrounds us. I really appreciated this lecture, because Cho articulates some of the disparate thoughts that I'd had about art, genre, writing, and creativity in a world where we're constantly getting machine learning programs and predictable, formulaic patterns shoved down our throats. Living and art and fantasy are all about the imperfections and serendipity that we encounter in our lives and in our stories, and the ability to work free of those expectations and proscriptions will lead to better stories and art. You can watch the whole lecture here: ### Cycles of time and music URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/carbon-leaf-indian-summer-time-playground-music-songwriting-interview/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T13:01:00.000Z I write a lot about speculative fiction and books for this newsletter, but at the core of that work, I'm mainly interested in the process: how people write and tell stories in all of its forms. How do they translate inspiration into story, and how does the process and circumstances of the writing leave fingerprints on the results? That fascination extends beyond the genre fiction that I usually write about. One of my favorite bands is the Virginia-based rock group [Carbon Leaf](https://www.carbonleaf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've been listening to their music ever since I was in college, and I've found their songwriting to be a step above the usual top-40 rotation. Their lyrics are deep and thoughtful, touching on everything from love and relationships to loss, loneliness, and heartbreak to memories, nostalgia and more innocent times. Their music has formed something of a soundtrack for my life, and I go back to their work often for inspiration, wisdom, and comfort, sometimes finding new ideas or revelations, sometimes getting reminders that sticks me back on the right path. 2024 marked the 20th anniversary of their breakout album *Indian Summer* and the release of their latest, *Time is the Playground,* [which I described](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carbon-leaf-time-is-the-playground-music-album-review/) as a "moving meditation on time, nostalgia and love." [Album Review: Carbon Leaf’s Time is The PlaygroundCarbon Leaf’s latest album Time Is The Playground is a moving meditation on time, nostalgia, and love![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-45.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0979-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carbon-leaf-time-is-the-playground-music-album-review/) The band will [go on tour this fall](https://www.carbonleaf.com/tour-dates?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will take them all across the country through the end of the year. If you're in the US, there's a good chance that they'll be coming to an area near you, and I'd recommend checking them out when they do. I've long wanted to find out about the writing that goes into their songs, and late last year, I had an opportunity to chat with the band's songwriter and lead singer Barry Privett. I was thrilled at the opportunity, not just as a fan of their music, but as someone who's curious about how the combination of writing, lyrics, and technical skill came together to form the songs that have brought meaning to their fans and listeners. We spoke about the band's origins and evolution, how signing with a major label and the rush to produce a hit left them frustrated, and about time and nostalgia and how he approaches the writing process. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/IMG_1373.jpeg) The band (LR): Jon Markel, Terry Clark, Barry Privett, Carter Gravatt, and Jesse Humphrey. Image: Brittany Dilibert *This interview has been edited for length and clarity.* ### I've read that Carbon Leaf traces its origins back to your days at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. How did you and your other band members first meet? Terry \[Clark\] and I met not even the first day of school: we met at the prep orientation program that was required of freshman at the time. He's a more extroverted guy than I am and we just became friends that way he makes friends with anybody he meets. We were friends in our freshman and sophomore years and by our junior year, that was probably the first time the idea of a band started taking shape. Carter \[Gravatt\] was two years below us, our original bassist \[Palmer Stearns\] was a year below us, and our original drummer \[Scott Milstead\] came in as as a freshman when we were seniors. We were all in different classes, \[but\] it's a small campus. I think Carter, Palmer, and Scott were playing together, and then I would get together with Terry a little bit. This is just a long, winding way of saying that over the course of those four years, the band really didn't come together until my senior year with these disparate pieces just coagulating at some point. I knew Terry, Terry knew Carter, Carter knew the other guys and then we... ### Coalesced around one another. Yeah. I think at that point the four of them were playing together and needed a singer, and Terry was like "well, I know Barry does some singing," so I jumped in and we started learning a bunch of covers. That's kind of how it how it started. ### What subjects were you studying while you were there — were you there for music? When you're in college you're kind of figuring it all out. I was into writing and performing, so I was an English and journalism major. I think Terry, was doing English and a music–what was the music program called?–I can't remember. Something on offer there. Carter was environmental science. I can't remember with the other guys who're no longer in the band–but yeah, just the liberal art education you get in and try a bunch of stuff and see what you walk out with. ### I was going to ask if if any of you had been studying English because it seems like there's a real literary bent to your song lyrics. I was more into creative writing than literature, but certainly in high school I was a pursuing that track: \[I took\] AP English and lots of writing papers and literature analysis. When I got to college, there was the English and the creative writing side, but then on the journalism side, I'd never written more in my life in terms of volume of assignments. Our teacher was a staff writer for the *Richmond Times Dispatch,* so he treated the classroom like it was the newspaper and you were a beat reporter. He wanted people to learn how to analyze and write quickly as if you were under that kind of pressure and it was tough, but by the end of that semester, you had so much confidence as as a writer just being able to synthesize the story down to the basics. You certainly couldn't hide; you had to work. If you were cheating the system, you couldn't just pull a paper from some files, you had to go to downtown Richmond; this is going on today; you've got it interview this and that and you've got to come back with the story. Nobody enjoyed it, but at the end of the day, you're like "damn that was a really good exercise." That was all good priming for turning it all into kind of a living, I guess. Pieces like this are what **Transfer Orbit* is designed to bring to subscribers: in depth explorations of storytelling. This interview has been in the works for about six months now, and there's a lot of work that goes into something like this. While the actual interview took about an hour, the work started before that: hours of reading prior interviews with the band, listening to all of their albums with a focus on their lyrics, and then formulating the right questions to ask. Once the interview was done, there was more work: transcribing that hour of conversation and then editing it down for clarity. This was a fun project, and it brought me (and I hope you!) some new insights into storytelling, writing, and perfecting one's craft. If you value this sort of work, please consider signing up to support this newsletter. Your subscription helps make pieces like this possible. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### So was that idea of storytelling embedded in your songwriting early on? When I was younger I was into creative writing and when I had writing assignments in high school, I'd definitely gravitate towards that. But I was also into movies and just getting lost in that kind of make believe storytelling, so writing became an extension of that when it was no longer interesting to put on masks and goof around. When the band formed, for a number of years we were fine \[doing covers\] but when it started kind of boring us, I think \[that\] clued us into the “maybe we do want to do something on our own." The instincts were kind of there and we decided that we wanted to pursue our own music or it just wasn't worth doing. We already had a base \[of fans\] for like seven years of all of our contemporaries as a cover band, but once we started writing our own material, we quickly lost a lot of those people and had to rebuild from the ground up. ### Your early albums – [*Meander*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/meander-1995?ref=andrewliptak.com)(1995)*,* [*Shadows in the Banquet Hall*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/shadows-in-the-banquet-hall-1997-cd?ref=andrewliptak.com)(1997)and [*Ether Electrified Porch Music*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/ether-electrified-porch-music-1999-cd?ref=andrewliptak.com) (1999) feel to me very *90s* and I can't quite put my finger on. It might just be the equipment you recorded on, but they also feel very exuberant and enthusiastic. ### But when you when you released [*Echo Echo*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/echo-echo-2001?ref=andrewliptak.com)\[2001\], it felt like there was a real shift in tone and sound: it and its successors were more thoughtful and lyrical. What was behind that evolution? *Meander* was the first album with the original five guys and it was the first 12 songs we wrote and recorded. If we had been prudent, we would've written 10 more songs and instead of making a half-good record, we'd have made a good whole record. There's material in there that doesn't quite work, but I can look back at some of those first three records and appreciate the phase that we were in, where we were just experimenting with any creative idea that came to mind. There's clearly in those songs a glut of ideas that probably could've used some pruning, but when you're young and a new group working together, everything seems like a good idea. So learning the process of stepping back from a song and determining which which babies you're gonna kill and what the point of the song is is just part of the process. I would say we took a pretty big leap from *Meander* to *Shadow*. *Meander* was just kind of like ... our bassist liked the \[Red Hot\] Chili Peppers, so he slapped a lot of bass on a lot of songs that probably didn't need it and I was in this weird world where I was between old REM and Nirvana. With *Shadows,* we started experimenting with some more acoustic instruments and that was where the lightbulb went off: "okay, this might be a little closer to home." \[It was\] a little folkier but still kind of all over the place. \[We just jammed\] *Shadows* with as many lyrics as possible, and so I was gradually learning to let go of some of that real estate and let the music speak more for itself. With *Ether,* I feel like the songs got a little tighter, a little bit better arrangement-wise, and I wasn't trying to write as many of the lyrics as I could. I think to answer your question, that shift from *Meander* to *Shadows* to *Ether* into *Echo Echo,* I was learning about where to put a melody and where to stop. As we got better at that, the songs just started connecting a little bit more and there weren't as many super-eclectic niche ideas that were rattling in my head. Maybe a little more plain-spoken than the kind of poetry on *Shadows* or *Ether.* I think that, the acoustic instruments, the melodies, the tighter arrangements, all of that contributed to setting us up for *Echo Echo* and then the leap into a more mature sound with *Indian Summer* and onward. ### When I was re-listening to *Meander*, something I noticed is that all of the different parts of band sound like they're at equal levels. But in *Echo Echo* and *Indian Summer* \[2004\]*,* your voice is fairly central. I'm not trying to say that your voice has taken over the band, but I can hear you more clearly and the lyrics are more front and center. For sure. We were just trying to bring it up at the mix a little bit. I'm on the fence about that stuff. I kinda like the vocals to kind of sit in the mix somewhat–I feel like for some of the albums, we got way too on top of the music. I look back and just listen to it and I'm like "Gosh, you can't even hardly feel the music" on some of those \[tracks.\] You kind of learn how to do that, and whether it's just a volume issue or whether it's an EQ thing or compressors, a lot of those things are discussions that I have with with Terry (who's also our engineer). He's the one in charge of bringing to reality the things that we're trying to verbalize. ### What's an example of a song that you look back on and see the lyrics taking over? Well, they're certainly prominent in *Echo Echo*, but the music is also a lot tougher and thicker around it, so it isn't isn't quite–it's a pretty hot master, big and bright out of the speakers. I think similarly for *Indian Summer*, but maybe not as aggressive, and then when we got into *Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat,* I think the vocals definitely jumped too far out of the mix. We went in under duress for that record, where we were trying to springboard off of *Indian Summer*'s success. ### You anticipated one of my questions: I remember reading somewhere that you felt rushed following *Indian Summer.* We recorded \[*Indian Summer*\] independently and then licensed it to the Vanguard, which was the start of our label years and which continued with *Love Loss Hope Repeat \[*2006\] and then *Nothing Rhymes With Woman* \[2009\]*.* Those three albums were in this concentrated, six-year period. \[After *Indian Summer*\] our label \[Vanguard\] was like "we gotta get another thing out there!" and of course we were like "yeah, let's do it!" We showed up to Nashville at the studio in Franklin, Tennessee–Steve Earle has a country house and a studio–and lived there for five weeks, with no \[prep\]. We just we showed up with a producer. I think "The War War in Color" was the only thing we had. I would just get up early in the morning and start working on material, and just started piecing together some songs and somehow it got done. But for the production itself, we didn't have a whole lot of time to sit and think through it. Five weeks to write, record, and mix a record is all very very tight when you don't really prepare and have no preproduction. Peter Collins produced *Love Loss Hope Repeat*, and came with more of a different vibe than what we normally do. He was trying to trim every single song down to three-and-a-half to four minutes, and we ended up chopping up some stuff. The opportunity for the songs just kind of lost their character and their way in the search for "is this the radio hit? Let's trim this and this, and maybe it will be." In hindsight, it was a very pop-polished and is a little sterile. When we did the re- recording, we fixed all that, but I think the record like that, I think maybe even the record like *Constellation Prize,* I think maybe there are some spots where the music could've been a little tougher, make vocal less on top. We were there for the wrong reasons and when the next record, *Nothing Rhymes With Woman* came about, I was like "I'm gonna take the time to write the songs the way they need to be written," and so we got a little bit better there. But you trade things. It just takes more time. The pressure of trying to duplicate a thing that happened with *Indian Summer* was making us lose a little bit of what we should be doing and so we we kind of got off that train and started rebuilding independently again. ### This is fascinating to hear because I see this in other creative venues. It's always interesting to see the line between the influence of the production pipeline verses one's intentions and the art that they're trying to create. When you have a little bit of success and then you build this machine around it, you're at the top of that foundation. If things are humming along great, everybody's doing their job, and they've optimized according to what their job in that whole system is, it may not be in the best overall interest of what you're doing! It's hard to stop that that train and if you're not wise about it, you can get enamored with that insulation of all that energy of everything that's going on. But at the end of the day, it's like "well, is this thing I am in charge of making the best that it can be?" ### Was leaving Vanguard and returning to independent recording your way of breaking that machine and building it back up? By the time we released the *Nothing Rhymes with Woman* and the singles on the last two albums didn't go anywhere with radio, we weren't really making money off of the enterprise. We were basically trading our rights for a modicum of marketing power and publicity through Vanguard, and we realize we weren't getting much of anything aside from them throwing a single to the radio, in terms of what resources were worth that trade. They were not offering a whole lot of money to make a fourth record and at that point we said “we know we can make a record in our own space for less money than what you're willing to give us.” It was a no-brainer at that point; we had exhausted the relationship. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### This sounds like it was a tiring process, so I'm curious what types of things you learned making those three albums that you were able to use for the ones that followed. Well, *Indian Summer* and *Nothing Rhymes with Woman* were both written outside of that kind of pressure that *Love Loss Hope Repeat* was written, so we were coming from a much more relaxed place. We were still an independent band when we wrote *Indian Summer* and I think we spent a year and a half on that record–way too much time in the studio. I mean, I say that, but we spent the time that we wanted to make the record we wanted. It cost a lot of time and money, but that's what we wanted to get back to for *Nothing Rhymes with Woman,* and when we went independent and started recording our own stuff again, we were gonna be doing it for the first time in our own studio (for *Meander, Shadows, Ether, Echo,* we did a lot of recording at a studio and had some help.) We spent $50,000 on gear and learned to use it ourselves, so there was a little bit of a learning curve in making the projects after *Nothing Rhymes with Woman*. So I can look back and go "oh man, I wish we could've made this record knowing what we know now." \[But\] I think with each record, you're just doing the best you can and then letting time determine what you can do better. When we went independent again in 2010, we were like "let's get a studio and let's get a project out every eight months" which was an insane goal. We did it for a couple of years, and made *How The West Was One* \[2010\]*, Christmas Child* \[2010\], the *Curious George* soundtrack \[2010\], a live album, *Live, Acoustic... And in Cinemascope!* \[2011\], and then in 2013, we did two albums, *Ghost Dragon Attacks Castle* and *Constellation Prize* back-to-back, which was so stupid. We released them six months apart. I was literally sleeping in the studio to try to get this done. This was where we were at peak where we set this ambitious goal, and \[it was\] starting to feel like those days where we were under these deadlines for labels. It started to feel that false sense of urgency. ### It sounds like it wasn't as much fun as it could've been. I mean, it was fun and it was the right decision at the right time. We were all about going independent and letting people know that we were *serious artists,* writing material and not just like going out and playing whatever \[our\] hits were. So it was a good way for us to say "this is what we're about \[and\] this is what we're doing," and was fruitful, but \[eventually\] I was like "I don't know where to go with this." Two albums in one year, \[we\] should've released those a year or two apart. That's when we decided to do the re-recordings of the three albums that were on Vanguard. There was a clause in our contract that said that after five years, we could record those songs, \[so\] we consulted a lawyer and realize that there was language that basically said we could remake the albums and then we have a master recording that we owned. ### You did it before Taylor Swift did it. We did! All of our songs are owned by us, even when we were on Vanguard, but while we own *Life Less Ordinary*, but they own the master recording. So if someplace like Target called and said we want to use "Life Less Ordinary" for a holiday campaign, we would've had to say "okay, here's the number to call Vanguard and I guess we'll get a cut." Now we can say "here's our master." To come back to your question about how things have evolved with our sound, we got very good at using those three albums to hone our engineering and producing chops. ### What went into recreating those albums? A lot of it was forensic work, because we had to go dig up and listen to an album that we recorded a decade ago in a different studio with different gear and *then* try to figure out how to emulate some of that stuff. We wanted *Indian Summer Revisited* \[2014\] to be faithful to the \[original\] sound, but just *feel* better. The performance feels like it's been lived in a little bit, because when we were recording the album, those all the songs were new and we were in the studio and making up everything for the first time. That's part of where the magic comes from, so you don't want to sacrifice that. And yet, you want it to sound great and maybe you want certain things in the production to not sound dated. It's a delicate balance of finding that energy and spirit, playing it confidently like you've been playing it for 10 years, but also being faithful to that original sound. And then with *Love Loss Hope Repeat Reneaux* \[2015\], we wanted to improve on radically with the arrangements, the sound, the performance, and then again with *Nothing Rhymes with Woman* \[2016\]. So we got good making the records, but it took some time to kind of get comfortable with that. ### I imagine that how you performed "[Life Less Ordinary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T7y4GnzUlM&ref=andrewliptak.com)" in 2004 was different from playing it now. What types of things have you noticed have changed in those songs? As it should, because if your players change, that's going to inform the song too. We picked up John Markel on bass 15 years ago, and he was a part of those re-recordings, but not the original recordings. Likewise, our drummer Jesse Humphrey has been with us for seven years now, so having players coming in fresh, taking the part as it is, but then making it their own can inform the way it's interpreted. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/IMG_0979.jpeg) Time is the Playground. Image: Andrew Liptak ### While listening to "City on the Sea" off *Time is the Playground*, I realized that it had melodies that you’d released in a demo to your website like 15 years ago. Oh? ### I saved it on my computer and would listen to it because it was a relaxing track. It was fun to hear it in a new song, and it's clear that you've been playing with ideas for this album for a while now. That was the whole idea behind the album. It was born in 2020 when we got home from a tour and while the quarantine shut everything down. We put that idea together in those early months, not knowing what was coming. Over the years, we've amassed a pretty good library of bits and pieces of songs or full songs and I wanted to get to some of those things that I loved but hadn't been able to turn it into a song for one reason or another. Sometimes, I'll have an idea or a melody or a line, pieces of music that I'm drawn to that I'll sit with but just can't get out of that paper bag. So that had been rattling around in my brain a little bit in terms of what was going to be next. I wanted to bring some of those things back out and commit to them, even if it's just taking pieces of what's good and write around it. So we did that for about half the album while the other half ended up being new material written pretty late in the hunt for songs. I put out some notes to the guys like "wouldn't it be cool to do this or that" or "I'm looking for a song with this kind of style to it." They love those kinds of challenges and they'd come back to me with a rash of ideas. I'd then pick the ones that spoke to me. That's how "[Neon Signs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d96xx8DqLi0&ref=andrewliptak.com)" and "[You and Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qecx917-Nao&ref=andrewliptak.com)" came about. So, some of it was old stuff from the past, going back 15, 18 years. One song was recorded on a cassette tape in our original basement with our original drummer and we changed some stuff and made what was old new again. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/06/IMG_1375.jpeg) Carbon Leaf: (L-R) Jesse Humphrey, Terry Clark, Barry Privett, Jon Markel, and Carter Gravatt. Image: Brittany Diliberto ### Time is something you've revisited quite a bit, even back to your first album with "Clockwork". It seems like it's a recurring theme for you. *Echo Echo* and *Indian Summer,* felt like albums about standing on the edge of adolescence or young adulthood and experiencing things like heartbreak or going out on your own for the first time, whereas *Time* feels like it's a much more introspective album. The thing about *Time is the Playground*: each song references time in some real way. That was kind of the theme:that we're in this expanse, moving through time in a linear fashion in a straight line towards the final destination, and yet we live our lives in these loops, through cycles of seasons and hours of the day, and our traditions, relived on an annual basis. I was just thinking about all of that time and how all of the stuff is ours to play with while we're here (however long that may be) and just pulling ideas from different eras, different times in life and then kind of synthesizing them all together into this new project. None of the songs really deviate from the idea that the clock is running and this is life in your moment. It could be very much like "[Black Mask 1983](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naMM6qmpTOc&ref=andrewliptak.com)," where you have this massive surge of new incoming information as you cross the threshold from childhood to adolescence and you're bringing all the things that have shaped you until now, but then you're seeing and feeling all these other things, so you kind of have one foot in both of those worlds. But then there's also songs like "[Call Ahead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdeNBNYrVlg&ref=andrewliptak.com)" or "[Me and Mick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWRL5Cq5SEw&pp=ygUXTWUgYW5kIE1pY2sgY2FyYm9uIGxlYWY%3D&ref=andrewliptak.com)" or "[Time is the Playground](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4uZTzmITE0&ref=andrewliptak.com)" or "Neon Signs" where you're looking back at your experience and getting an understanding of owning your life as it is, in spite of your choices or maybe because of your choices and being being okay with that, or being okay with trying again. There's a line of "Time is the Playground": > You can't go back and start again > You just start again from wherever you end So, being okay with that and understanding that life might bring some bad decisions or regrets but you know, what are you staring at towards your future? In a way, if you have one narrator through all these songs, he's kind of standing in between these two worlds, his past and his future and what you're left with in every single moment of your life is the present and *that's* where "Time is the Playground" came from. It's like "hey look around, you know you can you can you can sit and think about it all you want your life is here to be lived." ### I want to close this out by looking back over your career: how have you guys changed as a band and your approach to songwriting? You're obviously not the same people as when you started or in 2004 or 2024. I have to really love the song and have to be drawn to a reason to write it. Whereas early on, I was just like "let's just grab these piles of songs and I'll just write write write write. I look back and go "yeah, some of this is good, some of it's not good." And then of the good stuff, what's effective? It's a hard thing to get right. I want to always be writing and not wait for inspiration, always working towards inspiration, but I want to make sure that I'm going down a path where I love this idea, even if I'm when all is said and done, even if I'm the only person that gets it. I want to love this idea, and I think if I do that long enough, I'll know if it's good or not. When we were younger, we had a lot more time to kill and we would get together as a band and just jam more and sometimes stuff would come from that. Sometimes the guys were getting into groups of two or threes and come up with the ideas. Our days now are not as free as they used to be, and so we have to do things a little bit differently. And we're still trying to work that out. We would like to, as a goal going forward, get together more often in smaller groups and get some writing in, but if we can't do that, then I've got material that I'm waiting to get to and I'll come up with something and will forward it around and then we'll begin the process of putting it together. ### I'm guessing that writing is harder to do that while you're on tour. It is. I used to write a lot on tour, but we've gotten surgical with our touring and my day is busy by the time I get up to the time I hit the pillow. I used to, when I took my driving shifts, have a notebook in my lap and I'd be working on things, but I used to be able to separate my brain a little bit easier than I can now. Now I just need to choose one thing and do it well, then put it away and go to this other thing. I spent four months and isolation in different places over the course of a winter or two, literally snowed in, writing 10 hours a day to get *Time is the Playground* to where it ended up.That worked well, but it's more of an immersive experience. Was it practical? Not really, because you have to drop your whole life to do that. But at the end of the day, I'd probably rather do that then try to write the same thing over the course of three or four years. --- Thanks for reading: this was a piece that I've wanted to put together for years now, and I was pretty happy to learn about the band and their approach. Let me know if you're a fellow fan of the band, or if you're coming to them for the first time. ### Here are 12 more books to check out this June URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list-2/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T17:13:23.000Z After several weeks of rain and gloomy weather, we've finally had a string of sunny days. I'm spending my day off digging into a couple of books that I've had on my reading list, as well as a new one: *Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age*, details of which are below. I studied the Cold War for my graduate work, and I try and keep reading up on the history behind it, even when it seems like that history is heating back up. There are lots of other books coming out in the meantime to add to your TBR: the second half of this month brings everything from weird westerns to some fantastic space operas, cozy fantasies, and more: something for everyone. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*! This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you (and thanks to the couple of folks who signed up this week!): your support really does help keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) As always, you can see prior lists through the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. Here's the first book list for June: [16 new sci-fi and fantasy books coming out in June 2025A whole bunch of new adventures to add to your TBR![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-193.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4571-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/) Here are 12 that caught my eye to check out over the course of the rest of the month: --- ### [*The No-End House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781496755513?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Bates (June 24th) This looks like a fun horror novel: a gothic stone mansion in Barcelona is one of those best-kept secret attractions with some deadly secrets. There are nine escape rooms each with their own dangerous puzzle to solve, and anyone who escapes gets a large prize at the end. Nobody has claimed it yet. A guy named Joe hears about the house from some fellow travelers, but while it sounds interesting, he's dealing with the aftermath of his wife's death. When he encounters a beautiful woman named Helen, she convinces him to try it with her, and they set off to try it out, only to find that the house seems to know his own secrets and fears, and push him to do things he would never otherwise do. *Library Journal* [said](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-noend-house-1814921?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Not just a book about a haunted house, Bates’s tale is also likely to attract fans of horror video games such as *Resident Evil*." ### [*The Folded Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668078112?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Elizabeth Bear (June 17th) [I really dug](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/elizabeth-bear-ancestral-night-book-review-space-opera?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) Elizabeth Bear's space opera novel [*Ancestral Night*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534402980?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)when I read it back in 2019, and I'm looking forward to a new installment of the series (there's one that I missed, [*Machine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534403024?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), which I need to get to), *The Folding Sky*. In this adventure, Dr. Sunya Song heads out on a journey across the Milkyway to reach an AI known as Baomind, which could hold the key to humanity's survival in a hostile universe. The intelligence is orbiting a dying red star, and it's up to her and her team to try and retrieve data from it before it's too late. As they head out, the research station and its ships are attacked by pirates who believe that the Baomind needs to be destroyed. This has everything I love: ancient technologies, pirates, space adventures, and historians saving the day. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-folded-sky-1815683?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Well-developed characters highlight not only the big ideas of artificial intelligence, xenophobia, and data preservation but family dynamics and scientific rivalries." ### [*Ten Sleep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661320?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicholas Belardes (June 24th) This is a western-horror set in the modern day, following Greta Molina as she's hired to help drive some cattle across Wyoming. It seems like an ideal way to take a break, but as they embark on their journey, they discover that the land has some deeply-held secrets: a ghost train and wild animals, a mysterious creature in the skies above them, something that should be extinct. It'll take all of their wits to survive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-64566-132-0?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Belardes adroitly keeps readers guessing about whether his protagonists will survive their harrowing journey, while demonstrating a mastery of daylight terror." ### [*Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781541605893?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Frank Close (June 10th) As I noted above, I studied the Cold War in grad school, and I've remained fascinated by the history and evolution of the atomic bomb and nuclear technology. This new book by physician Frank Close looks like a good entry into that particular canon: it's an overarching look at the history of nuclear research, going back to the first realizations that uranium had some special properties, and follows the trail as physicists began to examine – and grapple – with the awesome power that it presented to humanity. I'm reading it now and am finding it informative. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/frank-close/destroyer-of-worlds-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a deeply researched and finely told history of the revolution with which we have yet to make peace." ### [*Awakened*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915998903?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Laura Elliott (June 10th) The world as we know it has ended: as scientists and technology companies worked to make people more productive, we've lost the ability to sleep, which had the entirely-foreseen consequence of turning the sleepless people into monsters. A group of scientists who were involved in the project are now racked with guilt over their role in this, and trapped in the Tower of London, they're searching for a cure. In *The Guardian*, Lisa Tuttle [says](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/13/the-best-recent-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-review-roundup?ref=andrewliptak.com) it's a "gripping gothic tale with echoes of Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper ### [*UnWorld: A Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593802182?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jayson Greene (June 17th) Jayson Greene's latest novel sounds a bit like an episode of *Black Mirror*: a woman named Anna is devastated after her son Alex is killed and she's trying to figure out if it was an accident or a suicide. She's not the only one troubled by Alex's death: his friend Samantha witnessed his demise, and keeps returning to the cliff where he died, while Aviva is an emancipated digital entity made from a person's memories and who harbors a devastating secret. She ends up in the body of a destructive woman named Cathy who's now an AI professor and upload-rights activist. All of these stories come together as each processes their own form of grief and the memories that come with it. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jayson-greene/unworld/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a mesmerizing novel in which boundaries between human and digital are as blurred as those between reality and imagination." ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668032534?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*All-Star Superman*](https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780593915073-all-star-superman?ref=andrewliptak.com) adapted by Meghan Fitzmartin (June 24th) DC has adapted one of its best-known Superman stories as an audio drama: All-Star Superman, based on the comic by Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely. Originally published in 2005, it reimagined the character without being burdened by his longer canon backstory, and it's become a classic in the genre. This audio drama features a full cast of some pretty well-known voice actors, including Marc Thompson, January LaVoy, and a whole bunch of others. ### [*If Wishes Were Retail*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964344?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Auston Habershaw (June 17th) A woman named Alex Delmore is desperate: she hates her suburban home and wants to escape to NYU, but her parents are broke. When a genie arrives in town and begins hiring for a job at the Wellspring Mall, setting up a wishing kiosk. Alex jumps at the chance. But the Jinn-formerly-of-the-Ring-of-Khorad doesn't know anything about 21st-century America, and is too stubborn to give up on his new business, even as they run into problems with Alex's troubled brother and their troublesome, neighboring tenants at the mall. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/if-wishes-were-retail-2263231?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the book "begins as a bit of a fantasy farce and turns into something heartwarming and cozy." ### [*The Dragon Republic* Deluxe Collector's Edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063432932?ref=andrewliptak.com) by R. F. Kuang (June 24th) Last November, Harper Collins republished R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War as a special edition: it got some new endpapers and a brilliant new cover. Now, they're giving the second book in the series a makeover, once again bringing back JungShan Chang for someblack-and-white interior art, full-wrap illustrated jacket, an embossed case, designed endpapers, and stenciled edges. ### [*Star Wars The High Republic: Trials of the Jedi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723524?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charles Soule (June 17th) The final novel in the *High Republic* series is finally here. Launched in 2021 with [*Light of the Jedi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593157732?ref=andrewliptak.com) and continuing with eight additional novels (as well as a ton of MG/YA novels, comics, audio originals, and an animated and live action TV series), the series was set a millennia prior to the events of the main Skywalker saga as the Jedi faced down a major threat from the Nihil, a group of [marauders](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Pirate?ref=andrewliptak.com) who threatened the stability of the Republic. This is the book where everything comes to a head: Marchion Ro has risen to power and has left untold damages across the galaxy, stopped at various turns by the Jedi Order. They've faced a new threat that they now must solve is the release of the Nameless, creatures that feed on the Force. Nine Jedi, led by Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann are dispatched to the Nameless home world, where they hope to figure out the creatures and their connection to the Force, all leading up to a final confrontation with Ro. ### [*The Afterlife Project*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781039480452?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Weed (June 3rd) Humanity is doomed, and to try and save us, a group of scientists use technology from the Centauri Project to send microbiologist Nicholas Hindman ten millennia into the future. When he arrives, he finds himself marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, and begins searching for any remains of humanity, hoping for some sign that we've managed to save ourselves. In the year 2068, a pandemic has stopped all efforts at interstellar travel, and the surviving members of the Centauri Project set out on the sea to search for a second test subject north of Sicily, a rare woman who can get pregnant, hoping to find a way to find a way to keep humanity going. The novel was a finalist for the [Prism Prize for Climate Literature](https://www.freedomwithwriting.com/freedom/uncategorized/the-prism-prize-for-climate-literature-1000-and-publication/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and my local paper, *Seven Days* [says](https://www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture/book-review-tim-weeds-cli-fi-novel-the-afterlife-project-43683016?ref=andrewliptak.com) "for this author, the antidote to despair is not wishful thinking about undoing original sin and returning to a Rousseauean state of nature. On the contrary, the novel's central characters — Nick, Alejandra, Natalie — find their strength in a quantum vision of time, in which the past is never past and every effort matters, no matter how seemingly futile." ### [*Wearing the Lion*](https://bookshop.org/a/132/9780756419547?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Wiswell (June 17th) John Wiswell just took home the Nebula Award for his novel [*Someone You Can Build a Nest In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418854?ref=andrewliptak.com), so it's a good time to check out his next novel, *Wearing the Lion.* He follows the Greek hero Heracles, who's dedicated his legendary feats to the goddess Hera, not realizing that his existence is an insult to her. When she snaps and accidentally kills his children, Heracles sets off to figure out who was responsible, and feeling guilty, Hera sends him off on a series of quests. He's too traumatized for violence, and ends up bonding and protecting the creatures he was supposed to destroy. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419547?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Wiswell alternates between Hera’s and Heracles’s perspectives, painting distinctly modern portraits of both. The result is a Greek mythology retelling that stands out from the crowd through its sheer sense of fun." --- As always, thanks for reading: let me know what you're reading and what catches your eye on this list! ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781536236392?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974766?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780008731427?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://www.amazon.com/Condition-War-Central-Corps-Dissolution-ebook/dp/B0F368YJMT/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=1NSHAX8WIBMX5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8juTf9WVfRtL9l20WPpn9Q.tufQBaDiyJO4GqavPI6fMD8gSxsMjumc7UjLdpVV1dE&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=Condition+of+War%3A+Central+Corps%3A+Dissolution&qid=1745936956&sprefix=condition+of+war+central+corps+dissolution%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974773?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668078112?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) ### Imperial ouroboros URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-empire-fascism/ Last updated: 2025-06-13T18:30:52.000Z In May, the latest live-action *Star Wars* series *Andor* came to a close, taking viewers up to the hours before the events of *Rogue One* kicked off, setting up the 2016 prequel film as a sort of energetic and explosive series finale that launched right into the events of the first *Star Wars* film. I'm sad to see it go, because I'm [not sure that we'll ever see another series like this](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/): a story that didn't shy away from the complicated and messy political parts of a revolution, and which ends up recontextualizing the stories it grew out of. George Lucas viewed his story a political narrative, but while those ideas are at the core of his storytelling, they're often easy to miss when we're dazzled by the technical prowess on display in the films or the kinetic energy of the lightsaber fights and space battles. Indeed, projects like the sequel trilogy (*The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi,* and *The Rise of Skywalker*) and spinoff shows like *The Mandalorian* and *The Book of Boba Fett* largely glosses over the galaxy's geopolitics, opting to instead to show off a more extreme version of the Empire taking over the galaxy with superweapons and legions of brainwashed soldiers. It makes for fun and exciting visuals, but there's rarely any consideration for how the galaxy fell apart in the first place, and I think that does those stories a greater disservice: the actions of the heroes really don't have a lot of stake or weight in the fight, other than that they're waging it. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. At least, until recently. *Andor* spent its two seasons painstakingly showed not only the malevolence of Imperial rule, but also the difficulties in bringing together a resistance movement to confront it. It drew inspiration from real-world histories of revolution and rebellion, and in doing so, showcases a particular element of fascism that's worth highlighting: it's an inherently self-destructive system, even if it leads to short-term results for control. *Spoilers ahead for the entirety of Andor's second season.* There's an astonishing scene in the penultimate episode of [Andor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYE1vp4xEw&ref=andrewliptak.com)'s second season, "Who Else Knows?" when Director Orson Krennic arrives in an interrogation room where Imperial Security Bureau Supervisor Dedra Meero is waiting. Meero has been arrested after she attempted to capture Luthen Rael, a Coruscant antiquities dealer who's been living a double life as a spymaster who's been coordinating the growing resistance movement against the Empire, helping various rebel cells coordinate and (try) to work together. She designated him as "Axis" in the first season, and was fixated on tracking him down, even as her duties in the ISB took her elsewhere. In the last batch of episodes from this second season, she finally tracked him down, interfering with another supervisor's operations and ended up with Rael in the hospital and eventually assassinated. She's confronted by Krennic, who isn't there to talk about her unauthorized obsession or the recent murder of a fellow supervisor Lonnie Jung (who was a double agent who had been feeding Rael information), but for another issue: the leak of information about a top-secret project, the Death Star, which has been quietly coming to completion. She had been forwarded information about the project accidentally, which Jung had viewed and forwarded on to Rael, kicking off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the superweapon's destruction. The [scene is a masterclass in acting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYE1vp4xEw&ref=andrewliptak.com). Meero (wonderfully played by Denise Gough) begins the scene defiant and confident in the actions she's undertaken, only to have her legs chopped from under her when she realizes the gravity of the situation. "We'll do our best to carry on without you," he tells her as he stalks out, and that's when she fully understands how truly perilous of a position she's now in. *(What I love about this scene: Mendelson improvised the moment when he pokes Gough in the head. Everyone's brought their acting A game to this season, but he really chews up the scenery in every scene he's in.)* This moment is something of a culmination for something that *Andor* has done particularly well: the difficulty in maintaining authority once you've grabbed onto power, and I think it's a scene that ultimately plants the seeds for how and why the Empire eventually falls a handful of years later: it demonstrates the its inherent fragility. [The frontier of the rebellion is everywhereAn excellent video to be inspired by![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-196.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/0C8A4261-792F-4E8C-A8B2-B4190EECED49-1.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/) Midway through the first season, we were introduced to Karis Nemik, a revolutionary who was writing a manifesto about the fight against the Empire. It's a powerful moment, anchored by a fantastic line: > *The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.* I think about this line a lot: the effort that an authoritarian dictatorship has to go through to control the lives of their subjects, and it echoes a line [uttered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuaGQ6-KnY&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Princess Leia in *A New Hope*: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." The Empire has gained control of the galaxy through political manipulation and then maintains their rule through sheer force. We've seen this in spades in *Andor*: officers who're willing to commit horrific offences against their subjects, all the way up to leaders who're willing to imprison and slaughter those same people. Maintaining authority and power over a population requires discipline: the ability to line one's soldiers and assets up in the same direction to achieve one's end goal. On the surface, with their stormtroopers and naval forces, it appears that the Empire's easily able to accomplish that. Discipline requires trust: the trust in leaders from one's subordinates that they're working towards the same goals and that they'll be treated consistently, fairly, and respectfully as they work towards it. With that trust, they feel empowered and engaged with the mission and will work towards its objectives. [Andor’s second season shows off the Empire’s brutalityAndor draws on real-world history to show the Empire’s horrifying conduct against its subjects![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-168.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/stormtroopers-in-andor-season-2-trailer-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-war-crimes-empire-nazi-germany-wwii/) In his essay [Ur-Fascism](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco outlines the elements that characterize a fascist ideology, and in one of his points he writes: > "For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will...Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction." There is no space for the individual within the Imperial system, save for the Emperor: every stormtrooper, every pilot, officer, technician, supervisor, director, and governor is expendable in service of the Emperor's vision. The moment they no longer serve a useful purpose, they are at risk of being expended. Meero's interrogation shows that the control that the Empire appears to wield is just an illusion: we know (and I strongly suspect Krennic knows it as well) that she's a dyed-in-the-wool loyalist to the Empire, but ultimately her motivations don't matter. Her dedication to the Empire, her valuable work to track down Axis and to undermine Ghorman society as an excuse to strip mine its planet does not matter. She's cast aside and dumped in an Imperial prison. Krennic will later have his pet project taken from him and is ultimately killed with it when Governor Tarkin orders an attack on the citadel at Scarif. --- This stands in contrast to the other half of this season: the formation of the Rebel Alliance. We saw the percussors in the first season: Rael's efforts to connect various revolutionary cells across the galaxy, stealing equipment and money, recruiting potential allies, and coordinating attacks across the galaxy. When we pick up the story in this season's first arc, we're shown a clear picture of how formidable a task that is: not just going up against the Empire, but bringing together a coalition of groups that might share an overarching goal, but who can barely exist in the same room with one another without squabbling or arguing. Two rebel cells on Yavin fall apart as soon as Cassian throws them some complications, while Saw Gerrera's outfit shares his paranoia and reluctance to cooperate with others. Ironically, pieces of Imperial ideology is part of that mix: Rael spells it out in a hard-hitting monologue in the first season: > *"I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see.* We see as he's willing to sacrifice his own people in the pursuit of his greater mission to topple the Empire: he doesn't call off a raid, fearing that if he did so, it would alert the ISB to a leak, while he also works to track down and kill Cassian Andor after his role in the Aldhni raid and pushes Mon Mothma to marry off her daughter to help fund the growing revolution. But while initially undisciplined and chaotic, we watch over the course of the season as these various groups and individuals become allies and partners. They're not fighting in service of one singular vision for control, but of a multitude of possibilities for their future. They're willing to fight and to sacrifice their lives and ideology to come together for a common goal where they have a stake in the fight. Unlike many of the other entries in the series, *Andor* shows us *why* everyone is motivated to fight in ways beyond the idea of *it's just simply the right thing to do*. The reasons for why people take part in something as frightening as a war or revolution is an incredibly complicated proposition, and this series really delivers those stakes. The Imperials don't share that vision or those motivations, and for that reason, they will lose. Maybe not in the short, strategic term, but the longer the fight stretches out, the more exhausted and disillusioned their servants become. They will fail because they have no stake in the fight, because they know that their lives and sacrifices do not matter to anyone but the Emperor. The world they're fighting for isn't for them, but for a system that will use them until it's done with them. --- Creator Tony Gilroy has given a number of interviews where he's talked about some of the inspirations and influences behind *Andor*: there's no shortage of revolutionary and movements to which you can draw lines between the real world and this series. George Lucas's world has always been a political thing: anyone who complains about getting uncomfortable politics in their space laser sword adventures is an idiot and should be reminded that the director himself [compared](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq%5FmCJEo&ref=andrewliptak.com) the Rebels to the Viet Cong. [The art of the EmpireHow Nazi Germany inspired George Lucas’s Empire![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-197.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/462690804_2626769147525343_209862027992106802_n-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-galactic-empire-nazi-germany-uniforms-iconography/) The series has come to an end at a dramatic moment in the world right now: a story of resistance against a government bent on solidifying control for itself with a grim vision for what they want the future of the nation to look like. It's a future with fewer freedoms and choices for its citizens, where the idea of a diverse, representative democracy is reimagined with a selective memory and story and where we have little say or stake in the society we live in. Art is a symptom, not a curative. *Andor* has taken the world and shoved it into a sandbox, where we can see the implications and consequences in a safe environment. It will not change the direction of the world. But it can be a catalyst, showing off an idea that can take root and blossom and transform itself into the actions that are needed to hold onto a free and fair society. I hope that its assertion that fascism and control are fragile tactics and tools, and that they'll break under their own weight when the right people apply the right pressure. I hope that it'll move enough people to look at the world around them and look at it in a slightly different way. This is why *Andor* remains astonishing to me: it's exceedingly rare to see a story operating on this level in a mass media franchise in place of something that might otherwise be a *product.* I'm thankful that it exists, and that it reminded me that stories are powerful tools in dark times. ### Here are the winners of the 2025 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2025-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2025-06-08T14:21:51.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) held its Nebula Awards Conference this weekend in Kansas City, MO, where it announced the winners of this year's Nebula Awards. The Nebula is one of the genre's major awards, and it's been awarded annually since 1966, with votes coming from the organization's members. Here are the winners from [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2021/). Here are this year's winners (marked in **bold**) ### Nebula Award for Novel - *Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory* by Yaroslav Barsukov - *Rakesfall* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Asunder* by Kerstin Hall - *A Sorceress Comes to Call* by T. Kingfisher - *The Book of Love* by Kelly Link - ***Someone You Can Build a Nest In* by John Wiswell** ### Nebula Award for Novella - *The Butcher of the Forest* by Premee Mohamed - *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler - *Lost Ark Dreaming* by Suyi Davies Okungbowa - *Countess* by Suzan Palumbo - *The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain* by Sofia Samatar - ***The Dragonfly Gambit* by A. D. Sui** ### Nebula Award for Novelette - “[The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F05%5F24/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Thomas Ha - “[Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/katya-vasilievna-and-the-second-drowning-of-baba-rechka/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Christine Hanolsy - “[Another Girl Under the Iron Bell](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/another-girl-under-the-iron-bell/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Angela Liu - “[What Any Dead Thing Wants](https://psychopomp.com/what-any-dead-thing-wants/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Aimee Ogden - **“**[**Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being**](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prihandita%5F11%5F24/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**” by A. W. Prihandita** - “[Joanna’s Bodies](https://psychopomp.com/joannas-bodies/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou - “[Loneliness Universe](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/loneliness-universe/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou ### Nebula Award for Short Story - “[The Witch Trap](https://smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2024/09/01/lady-churchills-rosebud-wristlet-no-48/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Jennifer Hudak - “[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Rachael K. Jones - **“**[**Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole**](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**” by Isabel J. Kim** - “[Evan: A Remainder](https://reactormag.com/evan-a-remainder-jordan-kurella/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Jordan Kurella - “[The V\*mpire](https://reactormag.com/the-vampire-p-h-lee/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by PH Lee - “[We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will-teach-you-how-to-read/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Caroline M. Yoachim ### Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction - *Daydreamer* by Rob Cameron - *Braided* by Leah Cypess - *Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed* by José Pablo Iriarte - *Puzzleheart* by Jenn Reese - *Moonstorm* by Yoon Ha Lee - ***The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts* by Vanessa Ricci-Thode** ### Nebula Award for Game Writing - [***A Death in Hyperspace***](https://infomancy.net/adih/?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and Merc Fenn** - *Wolfmoor* by Infomancy.net - *Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree* by Hidetaka Miyazaki - *The Ghost and the Golem* by Benjamin Rosenbaum - *Pacific Drive* by Karrie Shao and Alexander Dracott - *1000xRESIST* by Remy Siu, Pinki Li, and Conor Wylie - *Restore, Reflect, Retry* by Natalia Theodoridou ### Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation - *KAOS* written by Charlie Covell and Georgia Christou - *Doctor Who: “Dot and Bubble”* written by Russell T. Davies - *Wicked* written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox - *Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5* written by Mike McMahan - *I Saw the TV Glow* written by Jane Schoenbrun - ***Dune: Part Two* written by Jon Spaights and Denis Villeneuve** ## Other Awards ### Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award - C. J. Lavigne ### The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award - Nicola Griffith [Nicola Griffith is the latest SF GrandmasterA worthy addition to the ranks![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-195.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/ng-bw-no-mic.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nicola-griffith-sfwa-science-fiction-grandmaster/) ### The Infinity Award - Frank Herbert Congratulations to all of the winners! ### There's a new Expanse game coming and it looks fantastic URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-osiris-reborn-owlcat-james-sa-corey/ Last updated: 2025-06-07T21:21:33.000Z *The Expanse* – both the book series and the TV show – might be over, but there's still been a lot of work to keep the franchise going in a whole bunch of ways. There was the video game from Tale Tell Games that was released in 2023, a [pair of sequel](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-dragon-tooth-kickstarter/) [comic books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-comic-scifi-a-little-death-james-sa-corey/), and [some action figures](https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanse-action-figures-kickstarter-campaign-nacelle/). Now, there's a new video game on the way from Owlcat Games: *The Expanse: Osiris Reborn*, described as an action RPG. The studio announced the game at this year's Future Games Show Summer Showcase, and while there isn't yet a release date, it'll be available for Xbox Series X, PS5 and PC. The main character is a mercenary from Pinkwater Security who's on Eros when the asteroid is locked down and you get pulled into a much greater conspiracy. You'll play the character, and you'll have to take command of a ship and gather up a crew to survive. Here's the announcement trailer: Holy shit, inject this into my veins. It's always hard to tell what a game will look like off of early graphics, but this looks fantastic – I'm particularly enjoying the equipment designs: it looks like it's drawing from both the show and sort of doing its own thing. The studio has a [whole bunch of details](https://osirisreborn.owlcat.games/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about what to expect from the game: Combat is "tactical and built around smart decision-making under pressure, where every move has the potential to shift the balance of a fight." You'll control the captain and your two fellow crew members will help you out – they'll have their own backstories, and play different roles while out fighting: they can help from afar, hack systems, or distract enemies. It also looks like you'll get to explore quite a bit of the solar system and navigate through an immersive world. Owlcat has a series of digital packs for people to support the game: Standard ($49.95; you get a digital copy and some early perks), Deluxe ($59.95; digital copy, perks, and some neat skins), and Miller's ($79.95; digital copy, early access, artbook, name in credits, and some other stuff.) There's also a collector's edition for $289, where you'll get a box, art book, assorted swag, and various digital goods. It doesn't sound like there'll be a physical copy of the game when it is released, unfortunately. I'm trying to figure out where this fits in the larger story – or if it even does. The trailer shows off a team heading down to an asteroid (I'm guessing it's Eros), where they kill a bunch of Protogen dudes and discover a whole bunch of people infected by the protomolocule. Eros, if you remember from the books, is where Protogen experimented with the protomolocule by releasing it and infecting the habitat's population – that's where James Holden and Josephus Miller meet up when their respective paths bring to the asteroid, and it's where Miller meets his end. Once the protomolecule infects the station, it takes over and ends up crashing (with Miller's help) into Venus, where it spends some time stewing and creates the gate that links up humanity to the rest of the gate network. The [*Osiris* ](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Osiris?ref=andrewliptak.com)[was also](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Osiris?ref=andrewliptak.com) a ship from the TV show, but I don't know how or if that's connected. If we want to get into the weeds with a super pedantic discussion about canon, it looks as though it's set in in parallel to that main story from the books and TV series. The studio said that we'll get to see some familiar characters – there's certainly plenty of folks to meet up with across the solar system. What's exciting about this is that it's an RPG, and I've seen a [bunch of](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/theyre-making-an-action-rpg-based-on-the-expanse-and-its-got-mass-effect-vibes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [places](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/the-expanse-osiris-reborn-is-basically-mass-effect-expanse-edition/?ref=andrewliptak.com) describe it as looking a lot like *Mass Effect*: you'll be able to customize your characters, and the decisions you make throughout the game will affect how your time as captain goes. But what I really like about this bit of news is that it feels like it's really something that's coming full circle for the story as a whole: Ty Franck originally conceived of *The Expanse* as a pitch for an MMORPG game. When that didn't go anywhere, he ported the idea over to a post-to-play RPG, then teamed up with Daniel Abraham and the rest is history. Now, we're getting a video game that seems like it's close (ish) to the original idea. That's pretty neat. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-194.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM-3.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) I'm not much of a gamer these days (although I did pick up *Split Fiction* and have been digging that), but I do have the Tale Tell game, which I never got around to finishing. This is definitely something that I'll be picking up and checking out. ### Table of Contents: June 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-june-2025/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T19:41:08.000Z Last month, I kicked off a new monthly series for this newsletter, Table of Contents, which will round up the short fiction that's coming out from authors all over the SF genre. Here's the next installment for June 2025\. All of these publications work on their own schedule, so there's going to be a little variation from month to month. I'm including issues that cover the month of June, so there are some from last month with May/June issues (like *Apex, Asimovs, Uncanny*, etc.), and not all issues will have links to the stories right away: some publications stagger their releases throughout the month. When I begin work on the next installment, I'll go through and add in the links that have come online. While we're talking about short fiction, check out the piece I sent out last week: they look at the future of 1 Paragraph's holdings (*Asimovs, Analog*, and *F&SF*). Hopefully, we'll be able to include links to all of their stories later this summer. [Changing of the guardWhat does a change in ownership for the genre’s legacy short fiction magazines mean for the SF/F community?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-189.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3166-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/asimovs-analog-fsf-science-fiction-fantasy-magazines-ownership-publishing/) You can check out last month's installment [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-may-2025/). Here are the short stories coming out this month: ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2025, Issue 149) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["Shadows Below Seaway Trains"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/shadows-below-seaway-trains?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang - "[I Remember a One-Sided Die](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/i-remember-a-one-sided-die?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Francis Bass (5/6) - ["Seven Ribbons"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/seven-ribbons?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Beth Goder - "[Heart Seeds](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/heart-seed?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by E. Thede (5/20) - "[Lies As the Natural State of Things](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/lies-as-the-natural-state-of-things?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rich Larson (6/3) - "[To Kill a Language](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/to-kill-a-language?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rukman Ragas (Flash fiction) - "[Extenta](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/extenta?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Daniel Roop (flash fiction, 5/13) - "[Things the Older Boy Understands](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/things-the-older-boy-understands?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sierra Branham (flash fiction, 6/10) - ["As It Comes"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/as-it-comes?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Derek Alan Jones - "[Swan Song](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/swan-song?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Liam Hogan (5/27) - "[The Fifth Horseman](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-fifth-horseman?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cressida Roe (6/24) - "[The Liberation of Brother Buffalo](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-liberation-of-brother-buffalo?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Michael Boatman (5/1) - "[The Neighbors](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/the-neighbors?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by L. Marie Wood (6/5) ### Nonfiction - [Musings from Maryland](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-149?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - "[Readers & Role-play: Experiencing Your Favorite Stories Through Play](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/readers-and-role-play-experiencing-your-favorite-stories-through-play?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Semaj Saint Garbutt (4/29) - "[Perfection, And the Bridges Between](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/perfection-and-the-bridges-between?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eugen Bacon (6/17) - [Words for Thought (Short Fiction Review)](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/words-for-thought-short-fiction-review-2?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A.C. Wise (5/15) - [Book Review of One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/book-review-one-level-down-by-mary-g-thompson?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Leah Ning) - [Book Review of A Palace Near the Wind](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/book-review-a-palace-near-the-wind-by-ai-jiang?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang (Leah Ning) - [Author Ai Jiang](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-ai-jiang?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Marissa van Uden) - [Author Francis Bass](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-francis-bass?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Marissa van Uden) (5/8) - [Artist Yorgos Cotronis](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-artist-yorgos-cotronis?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Bradley Powers) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2025, *Vol. XCV*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Bluebeard Womb](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.G. Wills (Novella) \[Excerpt\] - "[Isolate](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tom R. Pike (Novelette) \[Excerpt\] - "And So Greenpeace Invented the Death Ray..." by C. Stuart Hardwick (Novelette) - "The Scientist's Book of the Dead" by Gregor Hartmann (Novelette) - "Interconnections and Porous Boundaries" by Lance Robinson (Novelette) - "The Robot and the Winding Woods" by Brenda Cooper (Short story) - "Outside of the Robles Line" by Raymund Eich (Short story) - "Retail is Dying" by David Lee Zweifler & Ronan Zweifler (Short story) - "Groundling" by Shane Tourtellotte (Short story) - "North American Union V. Exergy-Petroline Corporation" by Tiffany Fritz (Short story) - "Short Selling the Statistical Life" by C.H. Irons (Short story) - "Momentum Exchange" by Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt (Short story) - "Mnemonomie" by Mark W. Tiedemann (Short story) - "Methods of Remediation in Nearshore Ecologies" by Joanne Rixon - "Siegfried Howls Against the Void" by Erik Johnson (Short story) - "The Iceberg" by Michael Capobianco (Short story) - "Amtech Deep Sea Institute Thanks You For Your Donation" by Kelsey Hutton (Flash fiction) - "The Shape of Care" by Lynne Sargent (Flash fiction) - First Contact, Already Seen" by Howard V. Hendrix (Flash fiction) - "Data Corrupted" by Bruce Boston (Poetry) - "[Homecoming](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brian Hugenbruch (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - The Day Seems as Long as a Year by Kevin Walsh - [Guest Editorial: Our Lost Earth Days](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Howard V. Hendrix - [The Alternative View: Banishing the “Inflaton” From the Early Universe](https://analogsf.com/current-issue/the-alternate-view/?ref=andrewliptak.com), John G. Cramer - Guest Alternative View by Richard A. Lovett - The Reference Library by Sean CW Korsgaard - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2025, Vol. 49) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Hunt for Lemuria 7](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt1/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Allen M. Steele (Novella) \[Excerpt\] - "Quantum Ghosts (Part II)" by Nancy Kress (Novella) - "The Passage" by John Richard Trtek (Novella) - "The Fight Goes On" by Harry Turtledove (Novelette) - "The Tin Man’s Ghost" by Ray Nayler (Novelette) - "Trial by Harry" by Michael Libling (Novelette) - "In the Forest of Mechanical Trees" by Steve Rasnic Tem (Short story) - "The Humming of Tamed Dragons" by A.M. Dellamonica (Short story) - "[Woolly](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/story-excerpt2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn (Short story) \[Excerpt\] - "[Baggus Plasticus](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/poetry/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ciarán Parkes (Poetry) - "Introducing My Friends to My Dad" by Chiwenite Onyekwelu (Poetry) - "Stellarium" by Stuart Greenhouse (Poetry) - "Micro Circuit" by Sai Liuko (Poetry) - "Train" by David Rogers (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - [Guest Editorial: The Writes of Spring](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/editorial/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rick Wilber - [Reflections: The Other Schliemann](https://asimovs.com/current-issue/reflections/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Moonshots by James Patrick Kelly - Thought Experiment: Crime and Punishment in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by Kelly Lagor - On Books by Kelly Jennings --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (#434 and #435) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Let the Gods Drown With Us](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/let-the-gods-drown-with-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.K. Duncan (June 12th) - "[Not a Fish](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/not-a-fish/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Dykstal (June 12th) - "[The Feather Tree](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-feather-tree/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by KJ Kabza - "[A Crow on the Corpse Road](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/a-crow-on-the-corpse-road/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Betsy Aoki --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 2025, Issue 225) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Emily of Emerald Starship](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yi-sheng%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ng Yi-Sheng - "[If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claire Jia-Wen - [In the Shells of Broken Things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/greenblatt%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. T. Greenblatt - "[The Eighth Pyramid](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hall%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Louis Inglis Hall - "[Faces of the Antipode](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/marcus%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Matthew Marcus - "[The Last Lunar New Year](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kunsken%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Derek Künsken - "[The Last to Survive](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chang-eppig%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rita Chang-Eppig - "[Outlier](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/meza%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R.L. Meza ### Nonfiction - [Destination: Jupiter](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Liptak (!!!) - [STEM Lesbians in Space! A Conversation with Elizabeth Bear](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/bear%5Finterview%5F2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Reality-Breaking Cosmic Stakes: A Conversation with Matthew Kressel](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kressel%5Finterview?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: Wrapping Back Around to Marketing](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F06%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, Issue 121) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The World Under](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-world-under/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" bySteve Rasnic Tem - "[The Death of Abigail Goudy](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-death-of-abigail-goudy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byNeil Williamson - "[We are the Abikus](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/we-are-the-abikus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byOgochukwu Bibiana Ossai - "[The Cephalophore](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-cephalophore/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byThomas Ha --- ## [*Dark Horses Magazine*](https://darkhorsesmagazine.mystrikingly.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, No. 41) ### Fiction - "A Carthaginian Peace" by Marcel Gabbett - "A Highly Combustible Man" by David Sheskin - "A Very Thoughtful Man" by Brian Hawkins - "A Quiet Miracle in an Obscure Place" by Cy Hill - "Beyond the Black Curtain: Liminalis" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer - "Beyond Extreme" by AJ Becker - "Bossa Nova on Pluto" by Kjetil Jansen - "Bifurcation Points" by John W. Farrell - "Deliverance" by Jennifer Kause - "The Soul Spring of Zahbalom" by Lee Clark Zumpe --- ## [*Fantasy Magazine*](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, Issue 97) Subscribe [here](https://fantasy.kit.com/products/fantasy-magazine-subscription?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Seascape w\\Ṣàngó & Ọya’s Incarnations](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/seascape/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mu’izz Ọpẹ́yẹmí Àjàyí - "Corporate Policy" by Eden Royce - "That Time Uncle George Caused the Apocalypse" by Vanessa Kyn - "How the road extracts an elegy" by Aishat Yahkub - "Silence Starved and Swallowed" by Sydney Paige Guerrero - "The Interrogation of So-ssang" by Seoung Kim ### Nonfiction - [An Interview with Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Arley Sorg](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/editorial-interview/?ref=andrewliptak.com), conducted by LP Kindred - Interview With World Fantasy Finalists, Part One - Interview With World Fantasy Finalists, Part Two - Strange and Weird: A Conversation with Rivers Solomon - Left of Center: A Conversation with Amara Hoshijo - [Unsheathing the Imagination: A Conversation with Eloghosa Osunde](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/unsheathing-the-imagination/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by Shingai Njeri Kagunda - [To Love and Be Loved Loudly and Ungovernably, Knowing We Were Never Meant to Survive: Necessary Fiction Review](https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/necessary-fiction-review/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by Shingai Njeri Kagunda --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, Issue 141) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[This Island Toward Which I Row and Row, Yet Cannot Reach Alone](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/this-island-toward-which-i-row-and-row-yet-cannot-reach-alone/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Lesh Fleck - “[Things Elan Reacquainted Himself with After Being Broken Out of His Single-Day Time Loop](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/things-elan-reacquainted-himself-with-after-being-broken-out-of-his-single-day-time-loop/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by D. A. Straith - “[It’s Become a Bit of a Habit](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/its-become-a-bit-of-a-habit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elou Carroll - “[The Aftertaste](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-aftertaste/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Julia LaFord - “[The Seal Wife](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-seal-wife/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Madeline White - “[Skinfluencer](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/skinfluencer/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Zeke Jarvis --- ## [*Future Tense Fiction*](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025) ### Fiction - "[Tunnel Fever](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-tunnel-fever-margret-helgadottir/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Margrét Helgadóttir ### Nonfiction - "[Resisting Tunnel Vision](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/tunnel-vision-climate-change-anna-pigott/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anna Pigott --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 1st) ### Fiction - "[The Starter Family](https://giganotosaurus.org/2025/06/01/the-starter-family/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sage Tyrtle --- ## khōréō (Volume 5, Issue 2) Subscribe [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/khoreo-magazine-inc/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Traveling Mountain](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-traveling-mountain/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Diana Dima - "[The Swampmaster](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-swampmasters/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joshua Lim - "[Wax and Full Circles](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/wax-and-full-circles/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stefani Cox - "[The Peculiarities of Hunger](https://www.khoreomag.com/fiction/the-peculiarities-of-hunger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Woody Dismukes --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, Issue 181) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Twenty-One Second God](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-twenty-one-second-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Peter Watts (6/5) - "[Eyes Grown Thick on the World](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/eyes-grown-thick-on-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Will McMahon (6/5) - "[Multi-Spatial Apartment Complex Malfunction Results in Body Horror](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/multi-spatial-apartment-complex-malfunction-results-in-body-horror/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byReyes Ramirez (6/12) - "[When the Faerie King Toured the Human Realm](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/when-the-faerie-king-toured-the-human-realm/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vanessa Fogg (6/12) - "[See Now the Misfortune of the Thinking Tenax](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/see-now-the-misfortune-of-the-thinking-tenax/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lowry Poletti (6/19) - "[A Week at the Raven Feather Salon](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-week-at-the-raven-feather-salon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carrie Vaughn (6/19) - "[All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/all-i-got-was-this-lousy-t-shirt/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marissa Lingen (6/26) - "[My Mother, the Supervillain](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/my-mother-the-supervillain/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Benjamin Blattberg ### Nonfiction - [Editorial, June 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial/editorial-june-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (6/5) - [Author Spotlight: Peter Watts](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-peter-watts-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (6/5)by Alex Puncekar - [Author Spotlight: Vanessa Fogg](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-vanessa-fogg-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) byDelia Cullity (6/5) - [Book Review: *Black Salt Queen* by Samantha Bansil](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-reviews/book-review-black-salt-queen-by-samantha-bansil/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (6/12) - [Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-carrie-vaughn-16/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (6/19) - [Book Review: *The Corruption of Hollis Brown* by K. Ancrum](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-reviews/book-review-the-corruption-of-hollis-brown-by-k-ancrum/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (6/19) - [Author Spotlight: Marissa Lingen](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-marissa-lingen-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (6/26) - [Book Review: *The Only Song Worth Singing* by Randee Dawn](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-reviews/book-review-the-only-song-worth-singing-by-randee-dawn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (6/26) --- ## [*Luna Station Quarterly*](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025, Issue 062) Subscribe [here](https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - Something Broken, Something New" by Caroline Shea - "The Family Ghosts" by M. E. Garber - "Through Glass" by Ziggy Schutz - "In the Orchard" by Erin K. Wagner - "Downstairs Neighbor" by H.V. Patterson - "Melilot Dreams" by EC Dorgan - "The Alliance" by T.M. Conway - "This Storm Won't Miss" by Sally Sultzman - "Lentils for Breakfast" by Maroon Stranger - "Mother Maggie" by Rebecca Harrison - "The Growing Song" by Heather Pagano - "Silver and Silt" by Lydia O'Donnell - "The Philosophy of Weeds" by Lesley Hart Gunn - "The Black Hill" by Keira Reynolds - "Our Last Celebration" by Susan Webster - "Fatherhood" by Vrinda Baliga - "A Bedtime of Fire, Alchemy and Ice" by JM Cyrus - "Ends and Means" by Ana Wesley - "Selling Chances" by Louise Hughes - "Asra's Magnificent Curio Shop of Clockworks and Curses" by Madalena Daleziou - "Oathbinder" by L. Fox --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Issue 153, June 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Here I Go Again](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/here-i-go-again/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lindz McLeod (6/4) - "[Eleven Songs for Another Lover](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/eleven-songs-for-another-lover/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by V.H. Chen (6/11) - "[Edgar Addison, the Author of *Dévorer* (1862-1933)](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/edgar-addison-the-author-of-devorer-1862-1933/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ben Peek (6/18) - "[Wet Dollars](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/wet-dollars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Daniel Oluremi (6/25) (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: June 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-june-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (6/4) - [Author Spotlight: Lindz McLeod](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-lindz-mcleod/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (6/4) - [The H Word: Free Spirits](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-free-spirits/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maria Alexander (6/11) - [Author Spotlight: Ben Peek](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-ben-peek-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (6/18) - [Media Review: *Sinners*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/media-review-sinners/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam-Troy Castro (6/25) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(June 2025) ### Fiction - "[The Sack of Burley Cottage](https://reactormag.com/the-sack-of-burley-cottage-rich-larson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rich Larson - "[The Name Ziya](https://reactormag.com/the-name-ziya-wen-yi-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wen-yi Lee - "[Slippernet](https://reactormag.com/slippernet-nisi-shawl/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nisi Shawl --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[In Which the Minotaur Just Wants to Get Out of the Labyrinth, Dammit](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/in-which-the-minotaur-just-wants-to-get-out/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nadia Born --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Poetry - "[Hansel & Gretel Part Ways](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/hansel-gretel-part-ways/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by: Ziggy Edwards (poetry) - "[Customer Service Representative’s Notes on Soul Processing](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/customer-service-representatives-notes-on-soul-processing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Dana Wall - "[Space Worm Poem](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/space-worm-poem/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Libby Graham - "[A Mermaid Falls in Love with Icarus](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-mermaid-falls-in-love-with-icarus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Elena Sichrovsky - "[In the Year of the Wedding](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/in-the-year-of-the-wedding/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja - "Do Ghosts Have Department Stores?" by Brittany Decker - "[infertile oracle](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/infertile-oracle/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by sterling-elizabeth arcadia - "[A Journey Through the Dystopiaverse](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-journey-through-the-dystopiaverse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jason P. Burnham - "[Women Who Crossed](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/women-who-crossed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Claudia Excaret Santos - "[Why Some Towns Get Extra Bears](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/why-some-towns-get-extra-bears/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Amelia Gorman - "[The Minotaur Joins a New-Age Self-Help Forum](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-minotaur-joins-a-new-age-self-help-forum/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Edryd Bowmer - "[Filaments](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/filaments/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Devan Barlow ### Fiction - "[View Window](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/view-window/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by A. T. Greenblatt - "The Ache of Hollow Places" by Avra Margariti - "[Because I Held His Name Like a Key](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/because-i-held-his-name-like-a-key/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Aimee Ogden - "[Sceach Gheal](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/sceach-gheal/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katie McIvor ### Nonfiction - [The Wild Courage of Despair](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-wild-courage-of-despair/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ian Muneshwar - [No Defeat is Final: Kerry Ryan interviews Pat Cadigan and Nicola Griffith](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/no-defeat-is-final-kerry-ryan-interviews-pat-cadigan-and-nicola-griffith/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kerry Ryan - [It's About Connection: Kerry Ryan interviews Julianne Pachico, Emily Tesh, and Hanna Thomas Uose](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/its-about-connection-kerry-ryan-interviews-julianne-pachico-emily-tesh-and-hanna-thomas-uose/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kerry Ryan ### Reviews - [Monday: *The Sea Gives Up the Dead: Stories* by Molly Olguín](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-sea-gives-up-the-dead-stories-by-molly-olguin/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth A. Allen - [Wednesday: *Dream of the Bird Tattoo* by Juan J. Morales](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dream-of-the-bird-tattoo-by-juan-j-morales/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tristan Beiter - [Friday: *Peri Peri Paprika*](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/peri-peri-paprika-by-leanne-su/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leanne Su by Eric Hendel - Sunday: [William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark by Timothy S. Murphy](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/william-hope-hodgson-and-the-rise-of-the-weird-possibilities-of-the-dark-by-timothy-s-murphy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel A. Rabuzzi - Tuesday: [*Mickey7* by Edward Ashton and *Mickey17* ](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/mickey7-by-edward-ashton-and-mickey17/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amritesh Mukherjee - Wednesday: *The River Has Roots* by Amal El-Mohtar by Archita Mittra - Monday: [Waterblack by Alex Pheby](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/waterblack-by-alex-pheby/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Eatough - Wednesday: [*The Wheel of Time* Season 3](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-wheel-of-time-season-3/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marina Berlin - Friday: [*Cold Eternity* by S.A. Barnes](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/cold-eternity-by-s-a-barnes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shannon Fay - Monday: [*Major Arcana* by John Pistelli](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/major-arcana-by-john-pistelli/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Catherine Baker - Wednesday: [*Bird Ornaments* by Angel T. Dionne](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/bird-ornaments-by-angel-t-dionne/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Chuks - Friday: [*Dengue Boy* by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dengue-boy-by-michel-nieva-translated-by-rahul-bery/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Hebblethwaite - Monday: [The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist 2025](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-arthur-c-clarke-award-shortlist-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gautam Bhatia - Wednesday: [*Beta Vulgaris* by Margie Sarsfield](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/beta-vulgaris-by-margie-sarsfield/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marisa Mercurio - Friday: [The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-hampdenshire-wonder-by-j-d-beresford/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Shaw --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (June 2025) Subscribe [here](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/subscribe?utm%5Fsource=menu&simple=true&next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sundaymorningtransport.com%2Fabout). ### Fiction - "[The Green Glass Paperweight](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-green-glass-paperweight?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Katherine Addison - *"*[Banded Iron](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/banded-iron?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by T. K. Rex (6/8) - *"*[Welcome 2 the Freedom Galaxy](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/welcome-2-the-freedom-galaxy?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Maurice Broaddus (6/15) - "[Why We Sing](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/why-we-sing?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by C. C. Finlay (6/22) --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May-June, Issue 64) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/unfinished-architectures-of-the-human-fae-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Caroline M. Yoachim (5/6) - “[Barbershops of the Floating City](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/barbershops-of-the-floating-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (5/6) - “[Vivisection](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/vivisection/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anjali Sachdeva (5/6) - “[The Breaker of Mountains and Rivers](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-breaker-of-mountains-and-rivers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aliette de Bodard (6/3) - “[Hi! I’m Claudia](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/hi-im-claudia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Delilah S. Dawson (6/3) - “[All the World Is Fog](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/all-the-world-is-fog/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by DaVaun Sanders (6/3) - “[Pale Serpent, Green Serpent](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/pale-serpent-green-serpent/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ewen Ma (5/6) - “[A Full Belly](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-full-belly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom (poetry, 5/6) - “[Letter to My Future Reader](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/letter-to-my-future-reader/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Margaret Rhee (poetry, 5/6) - “[moth boy](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/moth-boy/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Praise Osawaru (poetry, 6/3) - “[Post-apocalypse Love Poem](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/post-apocalypse-love-poem/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Gospel Chinedu (poetry, 6/3) ### Nonfiction - “[The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-59/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Michael Damian Thomas - “[Doing the Math](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/doing-the-math/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Kelly Sue DeConnick (5/6) - “[Get Lost! How Whereness Deepens Fiction](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/get-lost-how-whereness-deepens-fiction/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Alex Jennings (5/6) - “[Fantasy Musical Theatre: *Sensawunda, Activate*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/fantasy-musical-theatre-sensawunda-activate/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*!*” by Tina Connolly (6/3) - “[Disney Presents: Second Person POV: *Vloggers, Happy Haunts, and Short Stories that Use ‘You*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/disney-presents-second-person-pov-vloggers-happy-haunts-and-short-stories-that-use-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*’*” by J.R. Dawson (6/3) - [Interview: Angela Liu](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-angela-liu-2/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Caroline M. Yoachim (5/6) - [Interview: DaVaun Sanders](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-davaun-sanders/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (6/3) --- What stories did you read this month? Let us know in the comments. ### Here are 16 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read this June URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2025-06-05T13:32:03.000Z Somehow, we're at the halfway mark for the year. I'm always surprised at how quickly this seems to come up: it feels like this spring just flashed by us. I've been working on the never-ending task of catching up to my to-read list, made all the more difficult by the arrival of a new one: Swedish Machines: Sunset at Zero Point by Simon Stålenhag. [I backed the Kickstarter for this last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-kickstarter/), and was thrilled to get the finished copy in hand. It's really excellent so far. There are lots of other books coming out in the meantime to add to the TBR. Here are 16 books hitting stores in the first half of June! (As always, you can see prior lists through the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag.) If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*! This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you (and thanks to the couple of folks who signed up this week!): your support really does help keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) --- ### [*A Song of Legends Lost*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668086834?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M. H. Ayinde (June 3rd) A millennia ago, the Nine Lands belonged to the Scathed people, only to have their greyblood servants rose up against them. King Ahiki and his allies defeated the would-be rebels and drove them out to the Feverlands. In the centuries since, the invoker clans – made up of noble warriors – have fended off any attacks from those enemies, and now the time has come for the war to come to an end completely by taking the war to the greybloods. When a woman named Temi accidentally summons a spirit, she thinks that it can help end the war, only to find that some of those spirits are far more dangerous than anyone can handle. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-6680-8683-4?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Ayinde juggles a sprawling cast and multiple plotlines skillfully," and that "the result is a rich and wonderfully complex world that readers will be eager to revisit." ### [*Star Wars: Rogue Planet*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974773?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Greg Bear (June 3rd) One of the stranger books from the *Star Wars* Expanded Universe is getting the Essential Legends treatment: Greg Bear's *Rogue Planet*. It's set after the events of *The Phantom Menace* after Obi-Wan Kenobi takes on Anakin Skywalker as an apprentice. The pair head off to a mysterious planet called Zonama Sekot, which is known for building the galaxy's fastest starships, and end up in the midst of a plot between the Trade Federation, shipbuilder Raith Sienar, and some deeply-held secrets about the planet that could change the galaxy. ### [*Condition of War: Central Corps: Dissolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737390985?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Bonesteel (June 3rd) After a number of years away, Elizabeth Bonesteel is returning to her Central Corps series with a fourth installment: *Dissolution*. The series (made up of [*The Cold Between*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413659?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Remnants of Trust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413697?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Breach of Containment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413680?ref=andrewliptak.com)) follows Central Corps chief engineer Commander Elena Shaw as she deals with a series of crises that threaten her ship and fellow crewmembers. In this new installment, a Central Corps warship appears far from where it's supposed to be and threatens a civilian space station, prompting Shaw and her crew of the Galileo to intervene, only to destroy the ship. The Corps is not thrilled at her actions, and in order to clear their names, the Galileo has to trace back the rogue ship's path and figure out what really happened, uncovering some dangerous secrets as they do so. [The Cold Between is a propulsive blend of mystery and space operaIn Elizabeth Bonesteel’s debut novel The Cold Between, a murder of a Central Corps military officer and the destruction of a starship a quarter century earlier are linked by a deep conspiracy that threatens to shake the intergalactic Central Gov to its foundations. As far as space opera mysteries![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-123.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1336.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-cold-between-elizabeth-bonesteel-science-fiction-book-review/) ### [***King of Ashes***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250832061?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) **by S.A. Cosby (June 10th)** S.A. Cosby blew me away with books like [*Blacktop Wasteland*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252692?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Razorblade Tears*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252715?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and [*All The Sinners Bleed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)and I'm really looking forward to his next, *King of Ashes.* In this new crime thriller, Roman Carruthers is called home after his father is involved in a car accident, only to discover that his brother Dante is in debt to criminals and his sister barely holding everything together. He discovers that the crash was no accident and that Dante's troubles have brought their family into danger, and it's up to Roman to try and get his brother out of the deal. As he begins to figure out a way forward, those criminals soon realize that he's not the pushover they think he is, and that he'll do anything to protect his loved ones. If this is anything like his prior novels, Cosby has a real treat for us. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/king-of-ashes-1815873?ref=andrewliptak.com) and says "Reminiscent of the great tragedies, this is Cosby at his best." ### [*The Witch Roads*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250338617?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kate Elliott (June 10th) Shortly after an arrogant prince and his close circle arrive at Orledder Halt, they do something ill-advised: enter the haunted Spires, where they get stuck. The prince and company have found themselves in the kingdom because of some political machinations, and it's now up to Elen, a former child slave and now courier who's tasked with guiding them to safety. When he re-emerges, he's a changed man, leading to a fraught journey afterwards *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-witch-roads-1815697?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying it's a "fantastic first in a new duology is filled with rich worldbuilding, political intrigue, and themes of class and family secrets. Readers will anxiously await the second book in the series, \[[*The Nameless Lands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250338648?ref=andrewliptak.com)\] which arrives later this year."[](https://www.amazon.com/Witch-Roads/dp/1250338611?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Realms of the Round Table*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639369034?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Matthews and illustrated by John Howe (June 3rd) John Matthews is one of the best-known scholars of Arthurian legend, and has brought together a new collection of forgotten stories of the heroic king, and retold for a new audience, and includes a mix of magic and lore, and stories of Lancelot, Gawain, and many others. As a bonus? It comes illustrated by artist John Howe, best known for his work on *Lord of the Rings*. I've been paging through it and it looks pretty cool. ### [*Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324075103?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alec Nevala-Lee (June 10th) I'm a huge fan of Alec Nevala-Lee's history of science fiction, [*Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062571953?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I think it's one of the better books out there to understand the genre's formative years. (He also blurbed my own book, *Cosplay: A History*). I'm really looking forward to his latest biography, about scientist Luis W. Alvarez. Alvarez is someone you might not have heard of, but he played a huge role in the history of science: he took part in the Manhattan project during World War II, made some interesting theories, developed techniques to study pyramids using X-Rays, and helped to demonstrate that a massive asteroid impact was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. *Kirkus Reviews* [says that it's](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/alec-nevala-lee/collisions/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "a thoroughly researched biography of an audacious scientist—and a new window into the history of high-energy physics." ### [*The Two Lies of Faven Sythe*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572026?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Megan O‘Keefe (June 3rd) A starship called the *Black Celeste* was once a legendary craft, but it's now rotting away in a cosmic graveyard called the Clutch. It's a dangerous place, and a pirate named Bitter Amandine is the one who knows it best, and she's resolved never to enter it again. When Raven Sythe, the member of a humanoid species that's been charting starpaths across the galaxy finds that her mentor has gone missing – with their path ending in the Clutch, Amandine is the only person who can help her find answers. The two will eventually find a conspiracy that will uncover more than they want to know about the place, and other cosmic secrets that everyone would rather keep buried. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-316-57202-6?ref=andrewliptak.com) and says "Nuanced characterization and a clever mystery keep the pages flying. It’s a thrilling standalone adventure that James S.A. Corey fans will relish." ### [*The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250396068?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Malka Older (June 10th) Malka Older continues her *Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti* series *(*[*The Mimicking of Known Successes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250860507?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250906793?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with a third installment, in which investigator Pleiti is roped into a favor: help a former classmate's cousin clear their name after being accused of plagiarism when they're up for a prestigious academic post. It's a job that's suddenly more than just running down a smear job as she finds that there are huge consequences, and she'll have to go it alone with her partner Mossa's sudden change in demeanor and isolation. [Writing in *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2025/05/the-potency-of-ungovernable-impulses-by-malka-older-review-by-alexandra-pierce/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Alexandra Pierce says "In this outing, Older draws out yet more details about the realities of life there – especially having to deal with the ever-present threat of the gasses *outside* ending up *inside* – with finesse, tying them neatly into plot points. These systemic concerns are balanced by professional and personal ones." ### [*Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974766?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Steve Perry (June 3rd) Probably one of the more interesting installments of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Shadows of the Empire was something of a test-run to kick the Lucasfilm merchandising arm back into gear ahead of the Special Editions and *The Phantom Menace*, and was designed to promote a not-movie to fans through a series of connected tie-in products like a video game, merchandise, comic book series, action figures, and a novel, written by Steve Perry. The book is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and introduced some big characters like Dash Rendar and Prince Xizor. Lucasfilm is now re-releasing the book (along with a new audiobook) as part of its Essential Legends Collection series, and if you're looking for a fun romp, this is a good one. [Building a Galaxy: Expanding the UniverseWhile the Star Wars franchise is best known for its films, it’s also well-known for its sprawling novel series, the Star Wars Expanded Universe. While it’s no longer canon, it kept Star Wars going for decades, and still retains a loyal following.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-173.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0531.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/) ### [*Six Wild Crowns*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572927?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Holly Race (June 10th) This is Race's debut novel, and in it, King Henry of Elben has to marry six queens and magically bind them to six palaces arrayed around the kingdom. Otherwise, his kingdom will fall. One queen, Boleyn, is determined to become his favorite, and is adept at court games and intrigue. Seymour never planned on marrying the king, but instead ended up in his court. The two will become unlikely allies as the balance of power in the kingdom begins to shift. Publishers Weekly gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316572927?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Race skillfully weaves real history and wholly original worldbuilding into an enthralling fantasy replete with magical power plays, political intrigue, and some dragons for good measure." ### [***Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250320520?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) **by V.E. Schwab (June 10th)** V.E. Schwab has released a string of excellent fantasy novels recent years, such as [*A Darker Shade of Magic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250891211?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (and its sequels) and [*The Invisible Life of Addie Larue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765387578?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*.* Her next looks like a compelling (if somewhat cryptic) read, following three young women living in Santo Domingo de la Calzada in 1532, London in 1837, and Boston in 2019. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ve-schwab/bury-our-bones-in-the-midnight-soil/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop." ### [***Shroud***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316579025?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 3rd)** Adrian Tchaikovsky has a new book about aliens and first contact, something that he's well-versed at by this point. An expedition arrives at a distant solar system, where it finds a moon humming with radio activity. It isn't habitable to humans: its gravity is too high and atmosphere is toxic for us, but it seems like a promising world for exploration. When an accident forces two members of the expedition's crew, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne, down in an escape vehicle, they have to make their way across the hostile environment to escape, learning about the world's unnerving alien species as they do so. [Spiders! In! Space!Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-83.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time/) Russell Letson [reviewed the book for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2025/04/shroud-by-adrian-tchaikovsky-review-by-russell-letson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and said "Tchaikovsky continues to examine what it’s like to live or work at the bottom of a totalizing authori­tarian pyramid, along with the ways in which the larger, wonder-filled universe (whether science fictional-materialist or fantastical-magical) con­spire against the ideological constraints of merely human social constructions." ### [*Of Monsters and Mainframes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781964721132?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Barbara Truelove (June 3rd) A ship called Demeter is content shuttling people to and from Earth and Alpha Centauri, and on her latest voyage, her passengers have begun dying. Her medical systems say that they're from equipment failures, but these seem to be of a paranormal origin: there's a vampire onboard. Demeter has to join up with some monsters of her own: a werewolf, an undead engineer, another vampires, some spider-drones and others, to keep from getting decommissioned. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-964721-13-2?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Demeter’s computer logic becomes a welcome counterpoint to this B-movie extravaganza as Truelove packs in the drama and thrill of near misses, close encounters, and even a couple slow-burning love stories. Meanwhile, Truelove’s obvious expertise in tech and coding comes through in the voice of her utterly believable AI narrator." ### [*The Wretched And The Damned*](https://pererahussein.com/product/the-wretched-and-the-damned/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (June 1st) I've [really enjoyed Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-book-review-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-pilgrim-machines/), and his latest sounds fascinating. In 2022, he earned the Gratiaen Prize (best work written in English from a Sri Lankan writer), and it's now being published. A war is brewing in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, pushed along by decades of corruption, politics and social stratification, leading to the Kodithuwakku's ironclad rule. There are efforts to resist: the Karaawa have set plans into motion – financed by the mysterious Thanthri – and have used their knowledge of technology and financial levers to work to overthrow the government with the hopes of rebuilding from what tumbles down. ### [*Galaxy Grifter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316587396?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. Zaykova (June 3rd) Levi is a con artist with no rules: he loves his ship, the *Caerus,* and is heartbroken when he has to put it up as collateral for a loan from the sector's most dangerous criminal gang. To get it back, he steals a valuable blueprint for a high-tech anti-matter device, and hires a coder, Vera to decrypt the document. Vera has motives of her own – she's been trapped on an asteroid with debts of her own, and plans to steal the blueprints for her own freedom. The two will have to figure out how to work together when they learn the technology's true intentions, and survive when they realize that they people they stole it from will stop at nothing to get them back. ### The Dresden Files might be getting a new adaptation URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dresden-files-jim-butcher-profile-streaming-urban-fantasy-adaptation/ Last updated: 2025-05-31T15:26:37.000Z It appears that there's an effort to bring the adventures of Harry Dresden back to the small screen. Word of the adaptation comes from a [fascinating profile](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/books/jim-butcher-the-dresden-files.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.IU8.6hM4.4wp%5F2QDHuLP4&smid=url-share&ref=andrewliptak.com) of *Dresden Files* author Jim Butcher in *The New York Times* that marks the 25th anniversary of the series. Butcher published the first installment of his urban fantasy series, [*Stormfront*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451457813?ref=andrewliptak.com), in April 2000, introducing readers to the Chicago-based professional wizard who's called in by the Chicago Police Department to help them solve a gruesome murder that seems to have been enacted with some black magic. In the years since, Butcher has turned out 17 installments, following Dresden as he tangles with all sorts of supernatural creatures and magicians, such as werewolves, vampires, fae, demons, necromancers, and more, accompanied by his friends, including a talking skull named Bob. I dipped into the series while I was in college and enjoyed the first handful of books. They're quick and entertaining novels in the mold of your police procedurals: I found them to be a bit formulaic, but you stick with them for the longer-term growth of the characters. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The profile takes a high-level view of Butcher's career: he started writing the series as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, and had turned a draft of the book in for a writing class, and was encouraged by his teacher to bring in "the rest of it." He ended up writing up an outline for an entire 20 book series, which has largely guided the series ever since. (Butcher [has said](https://www.jim-butcher.com/faq?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the series will run for 25 books, which will be capped off with an "double-length apocalyptic trilogy.") The profile also goes into Butcher's personal life, detailing his struggles with depression and a suicide attempt after his 2010 novel, *Changes*. He noted that he had decided to open up about his health issues after meeting a fan who had gone through their own crises. It's been a couple of years since a new book has hit stores; the last installment, [*Battle Ground*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199312?ref=andrewliptak.com), came out in September 2020, and the next, [*Twelve Months*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199336?ref=andrewliptak.com), is slated for a January 2026 release, and in this article, he notes that it's the first time that he's made a major departure from the outline that he wrote three decades ago, and in which "Dresden takes an entire year to come to grips with the emotional pain he’s endured over the course of the series." Another interesting piece of news in the profile is that Butcher has been working towards a new TV adaptation of the series. The project hasn't been announced, but if it happens, it'll adapt three of the novels, focusing on Harry's fight against a group of vampires who turned his girlfriend, journalist Susan Rodriguez, into one of their kind. I haven't read the books in years, but skimming summaries, it sounds like they could be set around the third installment of the series, [*Grave Peril*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451458445?ref=andrewliptak.com). In the profile, Butcher notes that he's hoping to do some of the writing on the series, and that there are "serious enough talks happening that I’ve had to share my tax I.D. number and so on.” It's entirely possible that an adaptation won't progress: plenty of books are optioned and set into preproduction only to languish. But while the [streaming world has cooled](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/) a bit from its heights in the late 2010s, there's still an appetite for new shows. *The Dresden Files* could also have an advantage here because it's nominally set in the present world in a real place: it strikes me as something that a studio wouldn't have to [shell out *Wheel of Time* or *Game of Thrones* money](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wheel-of-time-cancelled-prime-video-streaming/) to produce. This wouldn't be the first time the series has been adapted: in 2007, the SCI FI Channel launched its take on the series starring Paul Blackthorne as the titular character. Created by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Hans Beimler, the show loosely adapted the first couple of books to varying degrees, and ran for only 12 episodes before it was canceled. You can stream it for free on a handful of streaming services, including Tubi, Prime Video, and Roku. I remember enjoying the 2007 adaptation for what it was, and it'll be interesting to see what it ends up looking like if it happens. The books would lend themselves well to a TV adaptation, but even if we don't get one, there's still plenty of installments to dig into in the meantime. ### Best laid plans URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/asimovs-analog-scifi-magazine-fiction-1-paragraph-interview/ Last updated: 2025-05-31T17:48:54.000Z Yesterday, I published a [report](https://www.andrewliptak.com/asimovs-analog-fsf-science-fiction-fantasy-magazines-ownership-publishing/) about the change in ownership of three of the speculative fiction genre's legacy publications: *Analog Science Fact and Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction*, and *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction* (*F&SF*). I had reached out to Michael Khandelwal and Steven Salpeter, two of the folks behind 1 Paragraph, but didn't get answers back before I published. Shortly after publishing that piece, they sent me their answers–that sometimes happens in journalism. I'm glad they did: they provided some additional details about their background and intentions for these publications in the months and years ahead. [Changing of the guardWhat does a change in ownership for the genre’s legacy short fiction magazines mean for the SF/F community?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-185.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3166-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/asimovs-analog-fsf-science-fiction-fantasy-magazines-ownership-publishing/) "When I was 12 \[in 1982\], I went to see *Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan* at a local theater, and ran into a local *Star Trek* club, Starfleet Atlantic," Michael Khandelwal explained in an email. " I joined the club, and after my parents realized they were all nice people (they were all adults, much older than I was), I was allowed to go with them to my first convention, Sci-Con, that same year." Khandelwal is one of the groups of investors who owns 1 Paragraph, the company that acquired *Analog, Asimovs*, and *F&SF* (as well as *Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine*) from Dell Magazines earlier this year. He has a long tenure within fan circles, noting that after that first convention, he went on to run a computer room at a convention the following year, and frustrated with the organizers, decided to run his own, starting with a one-day event and following up in 1984 and 1986 with Galacon I and II, and continued with a string of additional conventions through the mid-1990s. Along the way, befriended noted genre painter [Kelly Freas](https://kellyfreas.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and his wife Polly, who became a close friend and who helped him network with the genre's many authors. When Khandelwal moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to attend the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, Kelly also relocated to be closer to his daughter and "\[acted\] as my stand-in parents." In the years that followed, Khandelwal graduated from the USC's professional writing program, where he studied fiction, poetry, and screenwriting, and worked as a TA in the school's neuroscience program. When he relocated to Virginia in 2000, he explained that while he had kept up with writing articles for local a local magazine, he missed teaching, and began teaching poetry classes for a local art school, and when that institution closed, he set up [The Muse Writers Center](https://the-muse.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Along the way, he kept up with his roots in fandom, assisting with MarsCon in Virginia, where he's served in a variety of roles, including Toastmaster. He's also become an art collector, acquiring a number of Freas's paintings. "some of them SF/F book covers, but many are his fine art, which are particularly meaningful to me because they were often the paintings on the walls in \[his\] house." Salpeter took a slightly different journey. "I have been reading genre fiction as long as I can remember," he explained, and noted that he took a different route than Khandelwal: he became involved in the professional side of publishing, first as a literary agent where he "represented literary estates, then living authors, then managed literary rights for companies including a Film/TV company." He also worked on helping a British romantasy publisher set up their distribution to the US through one of the big five publishers, and developed material to adapt into film and television projects, serving as an executive producer on some of them. He explained that he and his partners had long been fans of the genre's magazines, noting that he had been trying to find ways to help some of these publications from the roles that he worked in. But, he said, "the more I spoke to people involved, the more I was advised to get involved more directly," and "as soon as we saw a path for the new company to thrive we dove right in." He and Khandelwal had been working on a project together, and had "for a long time been talking about working on the right project together," describing Khandelwal as "\[embodying\] the pure fan on our board." Khandelwal notes that he was drawn to the project because of his connection to Freas, who illustrated many of the covers that the magazines used. In an email, *F&SF* owner Gordan Van Gelder (owner of F&SF) explained that it had become clear during the COVID-19 pandemic that "I needed to do something to provide for the magazine's future," and began looking around for options, eventually "got to talking about the future of *F&SF* with the head of 1 Paragraph and that eventually led to the magazine's acquisition." Salpeter noted that while there are plenty of online short fiction publications out there, "It would take half a century to build a new version of \[them\]," and rather than building competitors, "we love them and want\[ed\] them to continue." He emphasized that one of the majors strengths of each of the magazines are their editors and staff: "the editorial staff are some of the best in the world and have the awards to prove it." The writers they publish are another strength, he explained. "Our magazines are driven by the great writers in them. I’ve heard from a few young award-winning writers in these genres that some of them see the magazines as lofty goals for later in their careers. Reaching new writers for some of the magazines will help us reach new readers." Khandelwal noted that he thinks of the magazines as "pillars of fandom. Most everything we love can be traced back to the influence they, and their authors and artists had. They made SF/F accessible and cool to the rest of society," and that he thinks "that these magazines can have a powerful and positive affect in larger fandom. We need to show how they are relevant to readers of all ages and passions, and Steven and the editors have that clearly in mind." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The pair note that with the acquisition, they have a number of plans to update and modernize each of the publications. Salpeter explained that the magazines have fallen behind their digital counterparts, and that they "have significantly lower digital readers than any of the other genre fiction magazines out there and on average sell a far fewer percentage in digital than readers who buy ebooks in the same genre. There’s an audience we’re missing." To that end, Salpeter says that "we'll launch a new web vertical at the end of this summer to house each magazine," and that while they aren't planning on moving away from the print editions, they want make sure that readers can access their stories online. He pointed to *F&SF* as the publication that needed the most support. The magazine last published an issue in the summer of 2024, prompting concerns about its health and direction. It "has short fiction in inventory and we're grateful for the writers and readers who stuck with it during the turbulent times," he explained, and said that they're moving the magazine to the same systems as the other four publications, and have updated some guidelines to get "back on a regular publishing cadence" and will have updates about the next issue for subscribers shortly. "Ultimately, we want the websites to be a place for more readers to discover the writers who contribute to the magazines and in our genre spaces in general," and noted that "we suffer a little during some award seasons because other venues make their stories more available." He also noted that they're working to "change the way we share the news content in the magazines online, and may expand a bit of what our online audience responds to most." He also noted that they're trying to be sensitive to the concerns of their readers. "There are probably many startups that could change their design on a dime, but for us we owe it to our existing readers and writers to make updates carefully." Since word of the sale broke earlier this year, *Asimovs* and *Analog* have each released their May/June issues (as did *Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine* and *Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine*). Salpeter says that they're currently working on the July/August issues, and will roll out the updated websites for each of the sites by the end of the summer, which they hope will help to bring the stories from each of their publications to the wider audience they're seeking. Hopefully, it'll work, continuing their legacies of storytelling in the decades to come. This reporting is thanks to the subscribers who've signed up to support **Transfer Orbit*. This newsletter is designed to keep folks up to date on the world of SF/F reaching and publishing, and it's stories like this that I think help keep readers informed on the state of the genre and fandom. Help bring more stories like this to your inboxes by signing up as a supporting subscriber: [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/account/plans) ### Changing of the guard URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/asimovs-analog-fsf-science-fiction-fantasy-magazines-ownership-publishing/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T17:54:47.000Z At the end of February, Jason Sanford [reported on a change to three of the science fiction and fantasy community's pillar publications](https://jasonsanford.substack.com/p/asimovs-analog-and-f-and-sf-purchased) in his newsletter *Genre Grapevine*: [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://www.analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://www.asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*](https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/?ref=andrewliptak.com) were being sold to a new owner, Must Read Magazines. The revelation brought with it worries from readers and writers within the SF/F community, who were concerned over the uncertainty that new ownership brings to the publications and what it means for the field and the stories that it brings to readers. Modern science fiction owes its existence to the magazines that published short stories: they were an integral part of the formation of the genre and helped its best-known authors to legions of readers. The heyday of print magazines seems to have passed, and as these three remaining legacy publications move into the future under new ownership, they'll face an uncertain future. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/service-pnp-fsa-8a27000-8a27300-8a27330v-1.jpg) Magazine stand, Windsor Locks, Connecticut, October 1939, taken by Russell Lee. Image: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8a27330/?ref=andrewliptak.com) It's hard to stick a pin in the timeline for a definitive starting point for any artistic movement; there are always influences and precursors that move the starting line earlier and earlier. Science fiction as we know it emerged during the 1920s and 1930s; a period of mass media where hundreds of publications crowded newsstands and mailboxes, and where technological innovations such as the radio and television were still in their infancy. In April 1926, Hugo Gernsback published the first issue of *Amazing Stories* – widely recognized as the first "true" science fiction publication. With a table of contents full of stories that tapped into the adventurous spirits of readers across the country about fantastical futures and strange technologies, its popularity exploded and led to plenty of imitators and copycats as publishing magnates sought to capture those readers for their own companies. One such magazine was *Astounding Science Fiction,* launched in January 1930, and eventually landed author John W. Campbell Jr. as its editor in 1938\. Under his tenure, he placed an emphasis on scientific realism and in doing so, transformed the magazine into one of the powerhouses of the field, providing space to authors that included Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, C.L. Moore, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and many others. It was during this period that science fiction was almost entirely published through the pages of magazines like *Astounding* and the ones that followed, like *Planet Stories* (1939-1955), *The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction* (1949-), *Galaxy Science Fiction* (1950-1980), *If* (1952-1974), and *Fantastic* (1952-1980). These publications formed an ecosystem between writers and readers by connecting them through letter columns, conventions, and club chapters and provided the environment for writers to produce the stories and tropes that make up the genre. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The popularity of magazines didn't last: the market began to contract in the mid-20th century, and readers were also able to tap into other forms of entertainment, from books to television to movies and video games, and as the industry shrank, many genre publications were forced to close up shop. Those that survived, such as *Astounding* (renamed *Analog* in 1960), *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction* and *Galaxy Science Fiction* were able to hang on, thanks to their owners and editors who were able to recognize, support, and publish high-quality stories and adjust to the genre's changing tastes. New publications, like *Omni* (1978-1995) and *Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine* (1977-) continued that legacy, providing not only new outlets for authors to publish their work, but key roles for editors and publishing professionals who carried the field into the 1990s. --- *Astounding/Analog* changed hands a couple of times over the years: it was published by Street & Smith through 1959, when Condé Nast purchased it and added it to its portfolio in the early 1960s. *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction* took its own route: in 1940, author Anthony Boucher approached editor Fred Dannay with an idea for a magazine devoted to fantasy, and following his success launching *Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine* from Mercury Publications in 1941, returned to the idea to launch *The Magazine of Fantasy* in 1949\. It was renamed *The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction* for its second issue, and it grew from there, eventually competing with *Astounding*. Mercury Publications changed hands in the 1950s, and in 2001, editor Gordon Van Gelder purchased the magazine. Interestingly, Mercury sold *Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine* to Davis Publications in 1957, which then acquired *Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.* After launching *Asimov's* in 1977, the company bought *Analog* in 1980 and eventually sold all four magazines to Dell Magazines in 1992, which held them until 2025\. In February, [1 Paragraph acquired Dell Magazines' four publications and *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*](https://jasonsanford.substack.com/p/asimovs-analog-and-f-and-sf-purchased)*.* 1 Paragraph is owned by a group of investors, including art collector and fan Michael Khandelwal, who co-founded the [Muse Writers Center](https://the-muse.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Norfolk Virginia, as well as Steven Salpeter, a former literary agent at Curtis Brown and was the President of Literary and IP Development at [Assemble Media](https://www.assemblemedia.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), where he edited a genre magazine [*Assemble Artifacts*](https://www.assemblemedia.com/assemble-artifacts?ref=andrewliptak.com). The magazines will be run through a company owned by 1 Paragraph, Must Read Books Publishing, with P.L. Stevens serving as Publisher. Editors Sheila Williams (*Asimovs*), Trevor Quachri (*Analog*) and Van Gelder (*F&SF*) confirmed the sale and spoke about some of the initial plans for their respective publications. In an email, Van Gelder reported that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, "it became obvious to me that I needed to do something to provide for the magazine's future. I made some discreet inquiries. Somewhere along the line, I got to talking about the future of *F&SF* with the head of 1 Paragraph and that eventually led to the magazine's acquisition." Van Gelder didn't go into detail about what 1 Paragraph had planned for the publication, other than to say that the company had plans that he hadn't imagined, that it would be providing resources towards that he hadn't been able to in the past and that "getting *F&SF* back on track is the top priority." He and Sheree Thomas will remain at their editorial posts. Similarly, Quachri explained in an email that "the editorial staff was brought along specifically for our experience with the magazine. In the immediate term, it probably doesn’t mean all that much. We may take the opportunity to refresh some minor layout or art decisions, but likely nothing that I haven’t been aiming to get to “one of these days” anyway." Williams also told me that "Our relationship with writers continues to be paramount. As [I wrote on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/sheila.williams.7146/posts/pfbid036yDeVzqS6zjbT8Y6rgMdyVtZ3r5zr2igmv1TA3sEzR3mvMKQShXgYeQiz87k6cSRl?%5F%5Fcft%5F%5F[0]=AZXcoT7kFUJIvQowcqKNKaTg9LPX3jpcuMrSjP0-HbKkDk7Pncx1DZIsDypahL82XQSNZFGV5H3zX58aYEXviQWwDKsCTgTR2qiLQwOlKAS3CAUa1EYspR8%5FW4YWyJpo6AuaAg-UR-d5MDk1ELgGd2M5&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CO%2CP-R), I’m still working with a lot of well known and previously published authors, but I’m constantly on the lookout for new writers." She went on to note that 1 Paragraph was "encouraging of both," and that there are "plans for expanding our readership" in the works, but didn't have details to share about that that entailed. Quachri echoed that. "Once we get through the current transitionary period, we’re looking at opportunities to increase *Analog*'s visibility, to expand readership (as always!), and to better promote our authors." Expanding readership is a critical issue for each magazine. "Our biggest problem is visibility," Williams explained. "Once people discover the magazines, they love them. The loss of newsstands and the consolidation of magazine distribution has been difficult for the entire magazine industry." While the regular science fiction audience are aware of the magazines, she explained, "real growth depends on reaching readers who aren't aware of our existence. Clearly lots to do." Months ago, I reached out to Salpeter and Khandelwal for this story with a detailed list of questions. While they agreed to answer them, they did not get back to me before publication. Stevens did [provide a statement](https://locusmag.com/2025/03/details-on-the-new-owners-of-analog-asimovs-and-fsf/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to *Locus Magazine* in March, saying that "We feel these magazines are extremely important to the legacy and future of these genres, and hope to continue each magazines mission while updating the business behind the magazines in order to reach more readers and writers. The acquisitions were necessary for the magazines to survive and hopefully thrive in the changing publishing economy." He continued: > The company plans to bolster the magazines by expanding their distribution in trade bookstores, increasing their digital footprint, investing more in marketing the magazines to new readers and writers across channels, and using their platform to promote genre fiction authors in general…. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak Even with new ownership, each of the magazines face some considerable challenges in the years to come. The magazine industry has seen considerable declines since its [peak in the mid-20th century](https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/america%E2%80%99s-mailing-industry-industry-segments/magazine-publishers?ref=andrewliptak.com), declines that the science fiction magazines shared. At its heights, *Analog* [counted more than 100,000 subscribers](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/analog?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the 1960s, which fell to below 15,000 three decades later. *Asimovs* dropped from a [high of 105,000 in 1983](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/asimovs?ref=andrewliptak.com), to around 30,000 in 2003/2004, while *F*[*&SF* went from around 60,000](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fsf?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the 1980s to below 15,000 by 2011\. The magazines have compensated by making some changes: *Analog* and *Asimovs* shifted from a monthly to bi-monthly schedule in 2017, and released digital editions of each issue. Mike Ashley, anthologist, historian, author of an excellent series of histories of science fiction's magazines ([*The Time Machines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780853238652?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Transformations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780853237792?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Gateways to Forever*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781846310034?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Science Fiction Rebels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789621716?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Rise of the Cyberzines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835537770?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)* noted that while *Analog, Asimovs,* and *F&SF* have played a significant role in shaping the direction of science fiction as a genre, "I don't feel they hold the same power and, in any case, most modern readers don't know that legacy." Growing a print subscriber base also brings with it challenges, as the costs of print publications continues to rise. "For subscribers, the one big factor is the colossal rise in postage costs over the years and this often pushes subscription costs over the limit," Ashley explained. "Add that to the cost of paper, printings and distribution and print magazines are being edged out of the business unless they can be supported by profitable online sales." A major point of improvement for each of the magazines would likely be their websites: *Asimov's, Analog* and *F&SF* , but their priority is clearly their print editions. While they list the table of contents, editorials, and columns of their recent issues, their stories aren't available beyond excerpts and the occasional story nominated for an award – while prior stories aren't available at all. *F&SF*'s website is also badly out of date, currently listing the November / December issue from 2020\. Indeed, Ashley says, the role that *Analog, Asimovs*, and *F&SF* played as leaders of the field has shifted "to magazines like [*Clarkesworld*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Uncanny*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* where its possible to experiment more, include an international range of contributors and do it comparatively cheaply so far as the reader is concerned." A web presence is critical in 2025, especially as publications such as *Clarkesworld*, [*Lightspeed*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), *Uncanny*, and others have demonstrated that short fiction can thrive on the internet, and that – while still challenging – they can do so by offering paid subscriptions and memberships. Throughout their history, this trio of legacy publications have shaped the speculative fiction genre, with decades of stories contained within their archives, while also continuing to champion and produce quality work from new and established authors alike. Properly leveraged, those legacies can be a huge asset to these publications as they work to reach new readers. Van Gelder noted that there remains considerable value in the traditional digest form that the trio of magazines have existed in. "The digest form is remarkably hardy and durable. One example: at *F&SF* we'd frequently hear from someone who first started reading the magazine when they found a box of old issues in the basement or the attic. I myself found a box of issues on a street corner in Manhattan back in my first or second year as the magazine's editor." What the future holds for these magazines remains to be seen: institutional change takes time, and 1 Paragraph has yet to roll out its plans for the magazines in its portfolio. But Williams, Quachri, and Van Gelder reported that they are continuing their work on the upcoming issues of their respective publications: the May/June issues of both *Analog* and *Asimovs* have hit newsstands since this story broke, and Van Gelder noted that readers will begin to see some of the planned changes in the next issue of *F&SF*. Hopefully, these planned changes will help modernize and continue their legacies of storytelling well into the future, where they can continue to provide space for the next generation of writers and the readers to discover them. ### Wheel stop URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/wheel-of-time-cancelled-prime-video-streaming/ Last updated: 2025-05-25T11:05:24.000Z Add another one up to the list of canceled-before-their-time shows: Prime Video has canceled its big epic fantasy series, *The Wheel of Time*. [Word comes via *Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2025/05/the-wheel-of-time-canceled-prime-video-1236409657/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which notes that while the studio's executives were pleased with the show, the reasons came down to the "current economic environment," which is to say: it was an expensive show produced during an uncertain time. The series was based on the book series by the late Robert Jordan, a staple of 1990s sprawling doorstop novels (15 of them published prior to his death, with three others co-written by Brandon Sanderson) that followed a farm boy who learned that he was the prophesized Dragon Reborn and that it's his destiny to save the world from evil. There had been a whole bunch of attempts to adapt the series over the years (including a low-budget pilot in 2015 designed to allow a studio to hold onto the rights) before [Jordan's widow announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wheel-of-time-robert-jordan-fantasy-tv-show-announcement/) that they were working on a series in 2016\. That adaptation eventually made its way to Amazon's Prime Video, and the first season debuted in November 2021, a year before Prime Video's *other* big-name epic fantasy series, *Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power* arrived. The series was picked up through a third season. *Deadline* notes that there were "lengthy deliberations" after that third and last season concluded in April, and ultimately, Amazon opted to axe the show. It's a shame, because the show's creators had quite a bit more planned to adapt the rest of Robert Jordan's lengthy series: [at least five more seasons](https://www.thewrap.com/the-wheel-of-time-eight-season-plan-showrunner-tv-series-adapted-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. By all accounts, the series has been well-received by fans. I muddled my way through the first season before giving up, but I also never could get into the novels. But I have seen fans of the books really enjoy it. TO Slacker Adam M. noted that he was a huge fan of the series and that he enjoyed the decisions they made to adapt the massive books to television: "I thought they were doing really well, but I'm also a fan of adaptations that use the book just as raw material rather than 1-to-1 comparisons." > "Costumes and worldbuilding? Stunning. Acting? Good for Moiraine, the rest were getting better (they were finally getting to Rand's madness in this season, and it was moving along well). I enjoyed that they were leaning into a lot of things that Jordan touched on (gender dynamics, power questions, etc.) and leaned further than Jordan ever would .. S3 of WoT was loosening the ropes and the characters were actually having fun--something I think we need more of in big budget fantasy, and something that WoT the books encourages. The characters actually laughed and danced and sang, which just humanizes a show especially when it's about the struggle with darkness." That tracks with what I'd been seeing others say about the series: that it had finally hit its stride and was becoming a *great* series. But at the same time, I've always had in the back of my head a question about how well you can really adapt such a *huge* series. There's a lot of material to go through, even if you cut away some of the bloat of the novels, and I've always thought it was a little strange that Prime was bankrolling both this series, and another epic fantasy at the same time: *The Rings of Power.* HBO's *Game of Thrones* had demonstrated that there was a huge audience for big-budget epic fantasy on television, and when Prime Video picked up *The Wheel of Time* in 2018, *GoT* was heading into its final seasons, and everyone was looking for a successor to capture that audience. When the series was first announced in 2016, streaming television was in its wild west years: companies and studios were throwing money at the wall to see what sticked, including some of these massive undertakings with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars *per season*. At the time *The Wheel of Time* was greenlit, subscriber numbers was the bigger number: everyone was chasing after as many people as they could lock into their respective services. *Rings of Power* is thought to have cost around a billion dollars between the rights and first season, and while *The Wheel of Time* didn't come close to that, [it was still an expensive production](https://www.ign.com/articles/wheel-of-time-expensive-shows-amazon?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm going to point back to a piece that [I wrote a couple of weeks ago about *Andor*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/)*,* and how the streaming environment of the mid-2010s is vastly different from that of 2025\. As the streaming environment has tightened, the metrics have changed: those shows with price tags that range from $200 to $400 million for a couple of short seasons just doesn't make much sense when it costs more to borrow and when investors are increasingly more concerned with these companies ensuring that they'll be profitable. In a lot of ways, that's a bit of a shame, because that amount of money sloshing around Hollywood really allowed for some big hits like *Andor, The Wheel of Time,* and *Rings of Power*. Whether or not you're a huge fan of any of these, the size and reach of these companies really enables them to put a lot of money into some incredible-looking entertainment. With those budgets tightening up, we'll see more shows like *The Wheel of Time* get the axe. We've already seen *Andor* come to an end, but other big fantasy shows like [Netflix's *The Witcher*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/the-witcher-ending-season-5-netflix-1235876837/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*3-Body Problem*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/netflix-3-body-problem-renewed/), and [*Stranger Things*](https://deadline.com/2022/02/stranger-things-renewed-season-5-final-season-4-premiere-date-1234935526/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [HBO's *House of the Dragon*](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/house-of-the-dragon-end-season-4-1236095543/?ref=andrewliptak.com)are coming to planned endings in the near term, and others have been moving forward with more cost-effectiveness in mind, [like Apple's *Foundation*](https://deadline.com/2024/02/foundation-season-3-production-restart-date-1235829653/?ref=andrewliptak.com). At the same time, we're seeing that those enormous budgets aren't necessarily the key to a smash hit: just look at HBO's *The Pitt*, whichis not only fantastic, but also relatively cheap to produce, [which was by design](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-pitt-max-casey-bloys-interview.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). But budgets do allow storytellers to tell stories that they might not otherwise be able to tell: the real-world infrastructure and logistics helps shape the types of things that make it to our screens. *The Pitt* isn't intrinsically better than *The Wheel of Time*, they're just different types of stories, and we'll likely see more of one than the other for the foreseeable future. It's also worth noting that we've started to see these companies begin exploring ways to offset these costs: they've started selling the syndication rights for these shows: Amazon [just brought *Rings of Power* and *Citadel*](https://variety.com/2025/tv/global/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-citadel-amazon-1236407566/?ref=andrewliptak.com) before potential buyers, while *The Pitt* [is headed to TNT this fall](https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/the-pitt-linear-premiere-tnt-this-fall-1236397048/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and most streaming services now have some sort of ad-supported tier for subscribers. If I have to guess, we'll see streaming services like Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix, Paramount+, and others continue to tighten their budgets, while still occasionally making the big swing for a show when it makes sense. HBO, for example, isn't giving up on Westeros. While *House of the Dragon* is coming to an end, another series, *A Knight of Seven Kingdoms* is coming next year – but even that is designed to be cheaper. Back in March, *The Hollywood Reporter* [spoke with](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/harry-potter-big-little-lies-pitch-hbo-1236155898/?ref=andrewliptak.com)HBO's executive team in charge of original programming, who yielded some interesting insights: > **You’ve collectively survived multiple regimes. What’s been the biggest challenge to this one?** > > **Sarah Aubrey:** Our challenges are specific to us, in some respects, but the whole business has lived through an earthquake going back to a couple years ago when it just became apparent that everyone can’t just spend like a tech company, making as many shows as you can, as fast as you can. Between that and the strike, there have been seismic shifts, and we all have to deal with those in various ways in our creative lives. > > **Francesca Orsi**: I like being charged. As much as there was a day of budgets being a bit more robust and now, while they continue to be for a number of shows, there are some shows that we’re being charged with making for far less. I have an example that really took me aback. We’re doing a *Game of Throne* spinoff titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdomsfor under $10 million in episode, \[which is peanuts\] relative to what *Game of Thrones* or *House of the Dragon* cost episodically. And the battle sequences that the directors achieved match those across *Game of Thrones* and are a fraction of the price, so it’s a lesson for us that we need to be challenging these budgets. The we "can’t just spend like a tech company, making as many shows as you can, as fast as you can" really stood out for me when I first read that, and the anecdote about the next *Game of Thrones* series costing around $10 million an episode (around half of what an episode *House of The Dragon* costs) drives home that whatever genre TV we'll see hitting screens in the next couple of years, the epic scale and flair that shows like *The Wheel of Time* and *Rings of Power* and *Andor* are probably behind us, at least for now. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when *Rings of Power* seems to have sort of muddled its way through based on brand recognition and the sunk-cost fallacy alone. Those enormous budgets does bring out shows that look spectacular and which can tell stories that really fit their settings, but as we've seen, those huge budgets mean that they're not sustainable in the long run. An eight-season run of *The Wheel of Time* was probably never going to happen, and while *Rings of Power* has a planned five-episode arc, the only way I can see it getting to that point is because Amazon has invested so much time and money into it already that they've passed the point of no return. So what will we see? Certainly, science fiction and fantasy isn't going anywhere, although we'll likely see the field thin out a little as these more expensive shows work their way out of the system. My guess is that we'll see more of an emphasis on shows with budgets that are a bit more contained, with executives and producers considering adaptations with more of an eye towards "can this be shot for $5-10 million per episode" rather than "sky's the limit. Apple's *Murderbot* feels like it's more in line with that thinking than say, *Rings of Power* or *The Wheel of Time*. I wonder about what shows that we've seen put into development will actually make it through under this environment. [A24's *Earthsea*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wizard-of-earthsea-ursula-k-le-guin-fantasy-tv-a24/)? [Prime Video's *Consider Phlebas*/Culture](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-culture-iain-banks-consider-phlebas-adaptation-scifi/)? [Prime Video's *Mercy of the Gods*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-streaming-adaptation/)? [Lev Grossman's *The Bright Sword*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-tv-adaptation/)? More than one season of [Apple's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)? [Netflix's *Old Man's War*](https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3ki73ba5br72q?ref=andrewliptak.com)? [J. Michael Straczynski's remake of *Babylon 5*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-reboot-j-michael-straczynski-the-cw/)? If I had to guess, most of those now have a harder time, considering that some of them, like *Consider Phlebas*, *Mercy of the Gods* or *Old Man's War* are set in some huge worlds. It's not impossible, but I can see them stalling for the time being. And certainly, any big original genre shows are probably also going to be backburnered, if anything because they don't have that theoretical built-in audience or name recognition. For fans of *The Wheel of Time*, it's a shame that they won't be able to see where this series could go if given a little more time, and it's even more frustrating (or maybe it's a relief) for this decision to come down to factors that are systemic to the industry as a whole that are outside of the hands of the show's creatives. Either way, the era produced some good television and storytelling for huge audiences, attention that will hopefully encourage those viewers to pick up the books and discover the rest of the story for themselves. ### Reading comprehension URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/rebel-moon-entertainment-journalism-clickbait-fandom/ Last updated: 2025-05-22T13:00:22.000Z A couple of weeks ago, word broke that [Vox Media sold its gaming site *Polygon* to Valnet](https://www.andrewliptak.com/polygon-vox-media-valnet-journalism-writing/), which troubled me because Valnet and its outlets have a reputation for churning out an endless stream of stories about the most minute bits and pieces of information about upcoming films and shows, and the potential that that environment has for giving readers a warped sense of what the state of the stories we consume really is. I came across an interesting example in RSS reader the other day that provided a neat way to look at this: a fairly routine, non-update about the future of Zack Snyder's space opera *Rebel Moon* Netflix franchise [from screenwriter Kurt Johnstad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvke0oyOr5Q&ref=andrewliptak.com) on the I Minutemen podcast: > We outlined movies, 3, 4, 5, and 6\. I don't know – you know, those decisions are way above me, like how how those things are made and where the money is going to come from. I hope that we get a chance to tell that story to its very end because it's it's an amazing world and and I loved writing those characters...We know where we can go and we've written we have very detailed outlines. Zack has literally plotted out the whole world. So maybe with some luck and an act of God, we'll get to go back to that world. I noticed this story pop up in a couple of places on social media, and found that it was being interpreted in a couple of ways, and after dropping some links in the TO slack channel, I realized that it was a good example of just how annoying the nerd media world has become in the pursuit of SEO traffic, and it got me thinking about how we consume news as fans. --- To rewind a little: Snyder had been thinking about a *Star Wars*\-esque space opera universe and ended up pitching it to Lucasfilm at some point when they were considering standalone films. They didn't take it, and he [ended up going to Netflix](https://www.andrewliptak.com/zack-snyder-netflix-rebel-moon-star-wars-science-fiction-movies/), and somehow convinced them to fund not only a film, but to split it into two installments when it turned out to be really, really long. Not only that, but he also convinced them to *also* release an extended directors cut for each installment. They've also quickly expanded this world into other mediums as well: there are [comics](https://rebel-moon.fandom.com/wiki/Rebel%5FMoon:%5FHouse%5Fof%5Fthe%5FBloodaxe%5F%28book%29?ref=andrewliptak.com), [companion books](https://rebel-moon.fandom.com/wiki/Rebel%5FMoon:%5FWolf:%5FEx%5FNihilo:%5FCosmology%5F%26%5FTechnology?ref=andrewliptak.com), [novelizations](https://rebel-moon.fandom.com/wiki/Rebel%5FMoon%5FPart%5FOne%5F-%5FA%5FChild%5Fof%5FFire:%5FThe%5FOfficial%5FNovelization?ref=andrewliptak.com), a [narrative podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seneschal-a-rebel-moon-story/id1756367082?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a [video game](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-unveils-blood-line-a-rebel-moon-game-and-more-at-geeked-week-2024?ref=andrewliptak.com). *(Tansy Gardam has a* [*great pair*](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/rebel-moon-part-one-a-compromise-of-filmmaking/id1636196453?i=1000663590014&ref=andrewliptak.com)[*of episodes*](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/rebel-moon-part-two-the-cutgiver/id1636196453?i=1000664995516&ref=andrewliptak.com) *of her podcast Going Rogue that delves into the production.)* Where we've seen big franchises grow organically with all of these things, Netflix has loaded up everything into a franchise cannon and is blasting it in our direction, whether we asked for it or not. Netflix has done this before: remember *Jupiter's Legacy*, based on Mark Miller's comics? They had some extensive plans for an interconnected comic book universe, only for the show to be canceled after a season and the rest sort of wilted on the vine. When it comes to *Rebel Moon*, it remains to be seen if it'll keep going. I have my doubts, because ... neither film is particularly good. I found them to be overly self-indulgent, loud, and pretty dumb, but ultimately watchable action films with lots of Snyder's visual flair. It's pretty clear that these were positioned as Netflix's exclusive equivalent of *Star Wars* for its dedicated subscribers and Snyder aficionados who spend their time on Twitter complaining about James Gunn's coming *Superman* and how woke Disney made *Star Wars*. I have a feeling that this is a situation where Netflix's executives and data folks pulled *Star Wars* apart and found in Snyder's pitch all of the right story beats, characters, design elements, and visuals, and hoped that they'd get a hit film right out of the box. And to be fair, it does seem as though these two films did pretty well for the streaming service: *Child of Fire* attracted [23.9 million views in its first week](https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/news/rebel-moon-netflix-viewing-figures-zack-snyder-cut-b2470575.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) in December 2023, while *The Scargiver* pulled in [21.4 million in its first week](https://deadline.com/2024/04/zack-snyder-rebel-moon-scargiver-netflix-charts-1235892943/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in April 2024, prompting Snyder to make some interesting [claims](https://www.indiewire.com/news/analysis/zack-snyder-rebel-moon-part-two-the-scargiver-viewership-vs-barbie-1234977296/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how big it was, and there's been some chatter about how they've got anywhere from four to six films planned. Now. Franchises and cinematic universes are big, unwieldy things, and films such as this take a long time to develop and put into production. Snyder ended up splitting the film into two parts, which is why they came out within months of one another, but any additional films would take the better part of a year to film. At the present, it looks as though they've gotten some way into the pre-production process that you'd expect after the film was out in the world. In the meantime, Snyder was pulled into an animated series for Netflix called *Twilight of the Gods* and in November 2024, [was beginning work on an film](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/zack-snyder-lapd-action-thriller-netflix-1236063130/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the LAPD for the streamer. In March, [word broke](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/zack-snyder-brawler-movie-ufc-1236175905/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he's also writing and directing a film about the UFC, *Brawler*. All of this leads down to: if Netflix deems *Rebel Moon* successful enough to continue, it could be a little while, but we don't have an official word on that yet. That's led fans and entertainment writers to use tea leaves to speculate about whether or not it was a flop or not. --- When I scan around for news headlines – first at sites like *io9*, *The Verge,* or *Tor.com*, there's a certain bar that I'd pick for reputable news, sites like *Deadline,* , *The Hollywood Reporter*, *Variety* or *The Wrap*, because their staff are generally well-sourced with either publicists or employees in studios. There's also writers that I'll specifically look for stories from: Anthony Breznican of *Vanity Fair*, for example, because he's usually the guy who gets invited to conduct the curtain-raiser interviews that studios like to use to introduce their projects. The rise of the dedicated fandoms around the mega franchises means that there's a lot of incentive for people to gather information about them. Lucasfilm's employees have noted that they're constantly under a spotlight when it comes to new projects, and you don't have to look far for people trying to connect every morsel of information that you can glean from casting news, leaked set photos, podcast appearances or interviews, and behind-the-scenes developments from influencers to learn everything they can about said upcoming project. Most of that information filters its way over to sites like *Cosmic Book News, Screenrant*, *Comic Book Review, Bleeding Cool, ComicBook.com, Collider,* and so forth. There are some good writers at those sites: Maggie Lovitt of *Collider* is a good interviewer, as is Germain Lussier of *io9\.* But for the most part, these are sites that exist to provide a flood of content to attract traffic and advertising revenue for their parent companies. It's not particularly in depth or thoughtful, and I don't find this type of reporting to be terribly useful in the greater scheme of entertainment reporting. All of this brings me to the lead that I've buried pretty far down this post: Johnstad's statement about his work on the next couple of *Rebel Moon* films prompted three different websites to come up with three differing, dramatic conclusions, and in doing so, shows just how easy it is to get a warped view of what a story really is. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_4445.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_4446.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_4447.jpeg) *CBR* [led with the news](https://www.cbr.com/rebel-moon-writer-encouraging-update-future-franchise/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the films have been "mapped out" and that while Johnstad isn't sure if the films will end up on Netflix, he's optimistic. *ComicBook.com*'s take is a [little grimmer](https://comicbook.com/movies/news/rebel-moon-3-zack-snyder-film-franchise-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and offers up a possible suggestion: "For a franchise envisioned as a sprawling multi-part epic, these new statements strongly imply that, from a conventional studio perspective, *Rebel Moon* is dead in the water, and its only path forward might echo one of the most unexpected fan-driven revivals in recent memory: *Zack Snyder’s Justice League*." (The URL also includes the words film-franchise-dead.) And finally, *Cosmic Book News* [went with](https://cosmicbook.news/rebel-moon-dead-netflix-zack-snyder?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the writer of Zack Snyder’s *Rebel Moon* confirms the movies are dead at Netflix and there will be no more sequels." Of the three, *Cosmic*'s report is just inaccurate. Pedantically, this isn't an official cancellation of the franchise or films. All Johnstad said was that they've outlined them and that they're hoping that they'll get to make them. The likelihood of these films getting made feels to me to be pretty low, given their reception, but an "official" cancellation would be Snyder, his studio, or Netflix coming out and saying "We're done with these films." At best, this is just a bad, cynical analysis, and at worst, it was tossed out there to grab eyeballs. *CBR*'s piece isn't much better. Ask anyone involved in the film or entertainment industry about the work they're doing, and *of course* they're going to say that they've built out contingencies to continue a story if it's a mega hit, and even if it isn't, they'll be hopeful that a studio will pick it up and continue it. ComicBook.com's assessment is probably the most level-headed: this is a film franchise that appears to be stalling, and if it's going to continue, you'd need a lot of fans to really demonstrate that it's got an audience that'll justify the expense. At the end of the day, all that we know about this particular story is that the writer of *Rebel Moon* was on a podcast, that he and Snyder have written up detailed outlines for four additional films, but he's not the person who gets to decide whether or not they're made and that he hopes that at some point, whoever does make that decision will allow them to make it. It's worth looking at each of the pieces to see how they presented the story, and what work they put into contextualizing it. None of these writers say anything about pinging Netflix PR for comment[\[1\]](#fn1), which is a pretty basic thing a writer can do to see if their assertions are correct. Even if you don't get a response, it's a good indication that they're making an effort to check what's being said, because again, the writer in this situation can *just be saying stuff* because he's got an incentive to spin news in a favorable way. Snyder's studio is hard to get contact information for from just googling around, but an entertainment site could do something like sign up for an IMDBpro account ($150 annually for an individual or $80 a month for a site), which would put some contact information in your hands. You don't generally see this effort made for a range of stories: all these writers are doing are reporting "this person said this thing", putting a bit of an angle or spin on it, and provide a bunch of context and back-links to their prior coverage. None of it really adds any real understanding of the content in question, and that's what generally bothers me about this type of reporting: it essentially exists only to pop up on Google when someone at some point types in "what's the deal with *Rebel Moon* part 3? I don't place a lot of value in these iterative updates. (I'm certainly not immune to this type of reporting just look through the [News](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/news/) tag) But, when I do write news pieces, I like to provide some context with the story, because a news piece might be the first time someone encounters your writing. You want to ensure that they come away with an understanding of why this particular update is important in the bigger story, but going back through the entire chain of updates can just be an exercise in tedium.[\[2\]](#fn2) That all said, context *is* important, and the level of detail and background knowledge that a writer provides to connect the dots about the world and environment that surrounds a story can greatly enhance one's understanding of the situation. The biggest pieces of context that all of these pieces don't mention is that filmmaking is *hard* and it takes a lot of luck and work to get them across the finish line. There's never a guarentee that a film will get made, and there are so many factors that go into the production of a sequel, from the reviews and box office returns, the production, the quality of the proposed next projects, and so forth, all factors that you can't always control or account for. Maybe an audience just doesn't turn out for a film because of something one of the stars said on Twitter. Or maybe the film just isn't something that audiences are clamoring to see, or there was another film that came out just before that's too similar to it. Or the weather was bad. Or, or, or. You can have all the right factors, the right actors, story, effects, and so forth, and you can still have something that ends up not capturing the attention of audiences. A studio can say that they want to set up a big, money-making franchise, but until money is put into a project to pay people to work on it, it's all vaporware. Just look at how many times we've seen back and forths on all of the various *Star Wars* projects that are in development. We know any film will likely do pretty well at the box office, but it's just a difficult and almost impossible process to go from an idea to sitting in a theater with your bucket of popcorn. --- 1. Which to be fair, Netflix's publicists aren't the most responsive, but you can at least make the effort to send an email saying "hey, the writer of this franchise said that they've outlined four more films... is that something you're working on? – which I just did, to the account that had emailed me a couple of years ago (it bounced) and someone I tracked down on LinkedIn. I'll let you know what they say, if they get back to me. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Sometimes, it works: I did a [laundry list](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-new-star-trek-film-timeline/) of updates for the non-progress on Star Trek 4 last year and another one about the end of the DC Expanded Universe [the year before](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dc-universe-james-gunn-dceu/). Other times, it's just annoying, like [this piece](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wandavision-matt-shakman-director-star-trek-film/) I did about a random update about Star Trek 4\. [↩︎](#fnref2) A big part of this reporting environment exists because of the frantic pace of social media: I've been in newsrooms where there was a lot of push to get a story up onto the site because if you're early to a story, you'll get rewarded with attention and traffic. Even outside of the front pages and social media channels for places like CBR, Cosmic Book News, ComicBook.com, there's a whole network of social media accounts like [@DiscussingFilm](https://x.com/DiscussingFilm?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor&ref=andrewliptak.com)that further these types of posts. On Twitter, reporter/newsletter writer Jeff Sneider [pointed out](https://x.com/TheInSneider/status/1923432282104148224?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "all of these terrible comic book sites/accounts take things one step too far in an effort to advance the story", a sort of game of telephone where rumors get mixed up in hype and facts. He followed up by [neatly defining what I really don't like about this type of reporting:](https://x.com/TheInSneider/status/1923433080557387983?ref=andrewliptak.com) "If you want Just the Facts Ma'am, read the trades when deals are done or close to done. Imagine THAT universe, where there are NO comic book movie rumors. The MCU/DCU need folks like me to keep people talking. Otherwise, we'll be waiting forever for "official updates" from the studios."[ ](https://x.com/TheInSneider/status/1923433080557387983?ref=andrewliptak.com) The problem with this – professional leakers, franchise outlets, and the entire online environment – is that this leads to an echo-y bubble of discourse that can quickly depart from reality. A core element of this problem is our collective ability (or inability) to parse the information that we're getting. Social media can allow information to spread like wildfire, and if readers look only to an influencer's follower count for their credibility rather than their track record, it's incredibly easy for bad information, misinformation, or disinformation to make its way into the larger discourse, where it can tilt perceptions in any number of directions. Back in 2022, writer Richard Newby penned an excellent overview of the effects of this: [Marvel Disappointed the Rumor Mill at D23](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/marvel-fans-sad-henry-cavill-jodie-comer-1235218078/?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he outlined that fans often speculate or look for information, find validation in rumors or leaks, and then get upset when what they were hoping for didn't happen. When these situations blow up, they can have a real role in shaping the public perception of a film or project. "Unreliable scoopers have thrived off the attention that comes from putting out shaky information, and backing it with their likely nonexistent 'trusted source,'" he wrote. "Entire websites and accounts had dedicated themselves to this misinformation." This brings me back to our case study of Johnstad's appearance on the I Minutemen podcast: three of these high-volume sites came up with three different interpretations on what was actually said. One was flat-out incorrect, and the others recounted what was said with a bit of light analysis. On any given day, you'll probably find similar things happening as these sites weed through various sources to come up with a nugget of news to report and speculate on. In their pursuit of traffic, we're presented with information that feels increasingly uncoupled from reality, and the readers who come across these articles likely won't take the time to think about the validity of what they're reading. When I taught journalism at a local college, one of the things that I emphasized for my students was that you have a duty to provide an accurate view of the world, and that the work you put into capturing that reality – getting good information by talking to the people with first-hand knowledge, talking to experts, going to the scene of the crime, etc. – ensures that your readers can trust what you're telling them. That's not something that I see on these sites. As readers, it's useful to consume news carefully: think about who's providing the information that you're reading, but also who's being interviewed or cited, what level of context is provided, and what assertions is a writer making? Is a project "officially" dead because a writer made that assumption, or was it someone who is in a position to make that statement? Did the writer take the time to check their work when dealing with a source that might not be credible? Did the writer provide the reader with a better understanding of where this news – like a writer jawing on a podcast – fits in the larger structure of a narrative? One thing that I recommend to people is when you're drawn into a story like this, it's worth scanning the article for a source link, and trace it back to the source to read what was said first-hand. What level of research and context did the writer provide, and do they make the argument to connect the dots? --- We can infer a bit from the bits of context that's also out there: Snyder's got some other films in the works, and the ratings and reviews for the first two films were ... eh. But that's just us inferring: absent hard numbers, leaked memos, or on-the-record statements from studio executives, we *don't* actually know the status of the future of this particular franchise. This isn't limited to just *Rebel Moon* or the broader entertainment world: this applies to our news intake writ large, and I think our inability to understand and think about the news and information that we get isn't a great thing for us. We make decisions about our lives based on our assumptions and perceptions of the real world: we should ensure that we're seeking out a view of the world that's accurately portraying it, whether it's deciding whether or not to see the latest film that's hit theaters or show that's begun streaming, to how things like crime and homelessness to the state of your town's budget are portrayed. ### The Battle of Hoth: a critical analysis URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-empire-strikes-back-battle-hoth-warfare/ Last updated: 2025-05-21T13:00:34.000Z A number of years ago, I pitched a project to the folks at the official *Star Wars* website: a series of articles that examined the various battles that you see in the films and TV shows as though they were real history: an in-universe history paper that sought to explain and convey some clarity on the action that we saw on screen. That column never went anywhere – what I pitched and what the site's editors wanted ended up being too far apart. But the idea stuck with me and I ended up telling other people about it, and somewhere along the way, the idea for a book about *Star Wars* and military strategy emerged. That book is [*Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781640123601?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Edited by Max Brooks, John Amble, M.L. Cavanaugh, and Jaym Gates (along with an introduction by Stanley McCrystal) and it's an interesting look at the field of military history and strategy through a pop-culture lens. Its table of contents is full of people who you might recognize if you're in this particular sphere of military strategists, like Max Brooks, General Mick Ryan, Steve Leonard, B.J. Armstrong, Admiral James Stravridis, August Cole, John Spencer, and a bunch of others. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak I contributed a piece to it, something I'd written up while thinking about this project, an overview of the Battle of Hoth from *The Empire Strikes Back*. It was a fun piece to write and it became the 19th chapter in the book. Here it is: --- With the destruction of the Imperial Death Star during the Battle of Yavin, the Rebel Alliance established itself as a formidable opponent against the Empire. However, despite their victory, the Alliance found itself facing two major problems: a new, serious effort by the Empire to track down and eliminate the threat that the Alliance posed and an inability to stand toe-to-toe against the Empire. The Battle of Hoth provides an excellent case from which to examine the mindset of Alliance leaders during this critical time. By examining the assault on a newly established headquarters and the reaction from Rebellion commanders, it’s clear that the leadership from the Alliance commanders and the dedication of the soldiers on the battlefield are what helped keep their movement from collapsing, while they were aided by critical military errors on the part of the Empire's armed forces. ### **Setting the Stage** Forced to abandon its central headquarters on Yavin 4, the Rebel Alliance now had to locate a suitable home base from which to plan their operations while broadly withdrawing from the center of the galaxy. With Imperial forces redoubling their efforts to locate the Alliance command structure, Rebellion commanders had to contend with inhospitable choices. Alliance commanders selected a planet in the Anoat sector, Hoth. Because of the planet’s inhospitably cold temperatures and massive asteroid belt, they believed that the largely uninhabited planet would likely be overlooked by Imperial surveillance. > With all the meteor activity in this system, it’s going to be difficult to spot approaching ships. - General Rieekan The Rebellion tasked the construction of their new headquarters to General Rieekan. Under his watch, soldiers used native tauntauns to patrol the surrounding areas and to set up a sensor system to detect Imperial equipment. To further bolster the base’s defenses, they also installed a costly V-150 Planet Defender surface-to-orbit ion cannon, which would allow the base to defend itself from direct orbital attacks. To complement their defenses, a small squadron of modified T-47 airspeeders was assigned to the base. As the Rebel Alliance worked to reestablish their headquarters, Darth Vader and the Imperial forces under his command began a massive search to locate the Rebellion’s core leadership. The task force was commanded from Vader’s own Super Star Destroyer by Admiral Kendal Ozzel. To aid their search, they began deploying thousands of Viper probe droids, which would autonomously search planets and report back their findings to Vader’s task force. One such probe was deployed to the Hoth system, where it began to seek out any signs of the Alliance. Prior to the Battle of Hoth, a key figure in the Rebellion, Luke Skywalker, went missing, attacked by a native life-form. The disappearance forced Rebellion technicians to accelerate the efforts to adapt the t-47s for flight, allowing them to join the search-and-rescue operations the next morning and giving the pilots a chance to test out the aircraft. Echo Base’s control crew picked up movement on the new sensor system and quickly ruled out native life-forms and Rebellion personnel before identifying it as an Imperial probe droid, which then self-destructed. The information was received aboard the *Executor* and reviewed by Captain Firmus Piett and General Maximillian Veers, each of whom believed the information was a solid lead in their search. > We have thousands of probe droids searching the galaxy. I want proof, not leads. - Admiral Kendal Ozzel Piett noted that the Hoth system was supposed to be devoid of human life. Vader, upon seeing the information, ordered the task force to deploy to the Hoth system and ordered Veers to begin preparing his units for an assault. This appears to be a critical moment for the failure of the Imperial forces to ultimately stop the Rebellion at this point in the war. With the self destruction of their probe—the Empire’s only intelligence asset on the planet—the Empire was now limited in the amount of information that they had from the planet. Rather than deploy further intelligence assets to the planet, Vader ordered an immediate deployment of the task force to Hoth. Following the discovery of Echo Base, the Rebel Alliance began their evacuation, anticipating the imminent arrival of the Empire’s forces. The base had a small fleet of gr-75 medium transports at their disposal for transporting equipment and personnel, along with a squadron of Incom T-65b X-Wing starfighters for escort duty. Due to the short amount of time available to evacuate, the Alliance had to come to terms with abandoning much of the heavy equipment installed on the base. Rieekan’s decision to abandon the newly established base was met with some skepticism—the base had only just been completed, with a considerable amount of equipment installed. Ultimately, his caution proved to be the deciding factor in the survival of the Alliance. ### **The Battle** With the arrival of the Imperial task force, Rieekan ordered the activation of the base’s energy shield. With the forces arrayed overhead unable to bombard the base, he was able to effectively dictate the course of the battle by forcing the Imperial military to fight on the ground, without air support from TIE fighters or bombers. This not only allowed him to task his X-Wing fighters for escort duty but also bought him time to continue the evacuation. The Imperial task force (which included the *Executor*, the *Tyrant*, the *Devastator*, and the *Avenger*) dropped out of hyperspace in close orbit over the planet Hoth. As Vader had ordered an immediate redeployment, Ozzel followed his orders, assuming that the Rebel forces would be quick targets from orbit. However, the lack of information about the disposition of the Rebels foiled these plans. Echo Base had already anticipated the arrival of the Imperial task force and prevented them from carrying out a routine orbital bombardment. It was at this point that the Empire lost the ability to effectively end the Rebellion. Ozzel was executed for his error, thus depriving the task force of its most senior flag officer. Despite the setback, Vader’s task force had been designed specifically for the actions that followed in orbit. The smaller Imperial II–class destroyers’ maneuverability would allow the Imperial forces not only to capture escaping vessels but to contend with any additional armed threat that the Alliance might field. As it turns out, Rebel forces were woefully understaffed for such an escape; troop transports would be escorted by a single pair of X-Wing fighters tasked with running interference with Imperial fighters. Despite the disparity in force projection on the battlefield, the Alliance base did have an asset that they could use to aid their escape: the V-150 ground-to-orbit ion canon. Due to the Empire’s rush to arrive at Hoth, their knowledge of Rebellion assets was next to nothing, and they arrived at the battlefield not knowing the state and disposition of Rebellion fighters. Their lack of knowledge about the Alliance’s ground-to-orbit assets became a critical weakness for the task force. The first transport lifted off from the planet’s surface, followed by a pair of salvos from the v-150\. The blasts targeted the *Tyrant*, the Star Destroyer covering the ship’s escape vector, disabling it and leaving a hole in the Impe rial blockade. Rebel troopers cheered as they learned of their comrades’ escape, which provided a major morale boost to the soldiers on the ground. The lack of knowledge about the Alliance forces on the ground likewise led General Veers to certain tactical decisions. His primary target was to destroy the base’s power generators, which in turn would eliminate the shield protecting the base. To this end, he landed a squadron of All-Terrain Attack Transports (AT-AT), along with an All-Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST), beyond the shield. With the shield up, it is clear that he only anticipated meeting resistance from ground troopers, as fighter assets would be utilized for escort duty. Additionally, the planet’s climate made fielding aircraft difficult—something that the Rebellion had only accomplished in the rush to locate a missing pilot. Rieekan had already identified the power generators as a primary target and deployed his forces accordingly: Rebel soldiers from the 61st Mobile Infantry’s Twilight Company manned hastily prepared trenches, backed by heavy stationary weapons. On the ground, Veers’s armored forces attacked Rieekan’s ground troopers, targeting the heavy guns between them and the power generator. As they approached, Rieekan scrambled his T-47 squadron to provide air support for the 61st Mobile Infantry. Despite the heavy armor protecting the AT-AT walkers, Rogue Squadron was able to exploit a critical weakness; using tow cables, they undermined the legs of at least one walker, while another was destroyed by a pilot who had been shot down. Despite their innovative use of equipment, the squadron was quickly depleted. > Yes, Lord Vader, I’ve reached the main power generators. The shield will be down in moments. You may start your landing. - General Veers The Rebels’ combined use of ground and air power, coupled with the lack of battlefield intelligence, was not enough to stop Veers from advancing and ultimately destroying Echo Base’s power station, but that wasn’t their primary objective. What the members of Rogue Squadron and the 61st Mobile Infantry were able to accomplish was to slow the incoming armored forces enough to allow the rest of the Rebellion forces to escape into orbit. As Veers deployed his snowtroopers, Organa issued the order for the remaining ground forces and base personnel to board the last transport. ### **Aftermath** While Veers was ultimately able to destroy the power generator and occupy the base, he did so at great cost; he lost several of his heavy walkers before reaching the Rebellion’s lines and took further casualties as he entered the base. Furthermore, the task force itself suffered from major losses in orbit; the loss of one Star Destroyer at the onset of the battle demonstrated the cost of Imperial confidence in their tactics, while another Destroyer was heavily damaged in the pursuit of the remaining Rebel commanders in the asteroid belt. Despite the high cost to the Imperial forces, the cost to the Alliance was equally high, but not catastrophic; while they took numerous casualties on the battlefield (in both personnel and equipment), they were able to escape with their command structure largely intact. What could have been a major blow to the Rebellion became a mere battlefield loss. The loss of a permanent headquarters meant a setback in the Alliance’s ability to command their forces on the battlefield and to plan a larger strategy for winning their fight against the Empire. Additionally, the loss of critical weapons, equipment, and personnel would further impact the ability of the Rebellion to continue its military operations in the short and long terms. It was the work of the commanders on the ground on Hoth, as well as errors by Imperial commanders, that prevented the loss from ending the Rebellion completely. Rieekan’s prudent measures to abandon the newly completed base saved numerous lives and preserved what equipment could be evacuated from the base. Admiral Ozzel’s decision to drop his task force near the planet within sensor range allowed the Rebellion not only to push forward their evacuation plans but to devise a quick defensive plan that helped hold off Imperial ground forces to evacuate the remaining personnel from the planet and regroup with the rest of the Alliance fleet, where they began to plan their next moves. --- Thanks for reading! One of the things that I've actually had in drafts for this newsletter for years is a similar piece about the Battle of Scarif from *Rogue One* that I've gotten outlined, but not written out. I should revisit that... Andrew ### Bringing a new trooper online URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-revenge-of-the-sith-212th-airborne-trooper-cosplay-501st/ Last updated: 2025-05-20T17:01:58.000Z *Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith* turned a solid two decades old in 2025, and it's one of those milestones that's a little hard to believe. Disney recently re-released the film to theaters to mark the occasion, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to get moving on a project that I've had lingering in my basement for longer than I'd care to admit: a 212th Airborne Clone Trooper from the film. Since 2004, I've been a member of the [501st Legion](https://www.501st.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a world-wide *Star Wars* costuming group that extensively focuses on the franchise's "bad guys", which encompasses everyone from Darth Vader and the stormtroopers to some of the more ambiguously bad characters, like Jawas, background denizens. In the time that I've been part of the group, I've amassed a collection of costumes: a [classic stormtrooper](https://databank.501st.com/databank/Costuming:TK%5Fanh%5Fstunt?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *A New Hope*, a [First Order heavy trooper](https://databank.501st.com/databank/Costuming:TK%5F-%5FFirst%5FOrder?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *The Force Awakens*, a [Phase 1 clone trooper](https://databank.501st.com/databank/Costuming:TC%5Fstdgrunt?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Attack of the Clones*, a [shoretrooper](https://databank.501st.com/databank/Costuming:ST%5Fsquad%5Fleader?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Rogue One,* and a [Blue Squadron rebel pilot](https://rebellegion.com/rogue-one-x-wing-pilot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Rogue One*. It's quite the stack of boxes, and for years, and almost a decade ago, I had been working on another clone trooper costume for my wife. She lost interest in suiting up in it, and I decided that I wanted to move it to someone who'd use it. After a year or two listing it for sale, I got a message: a kid in Denmark was interested, but with a catch. He had another clone trooper costume that he'd built but wasn't really interested in keeping, and wanted to know if I'd be interested in trading. His costume? A finished 212th trooper. It was an easy decision to make, and we soon had one another's costumes in hand. --- When they first appeared in *Attack of the Clones*, the Republic's clone troopers were pretty basic: white, with the officers painted different colors to denote rank. I had been enamored of the stormtroopers when I first saw them on the big screen. I didn't care that they were the bad guys: I just thought that the armor looked cool. When Episode 2 rolled around, I loved their predecessors just as much: troopers that shared a design language, but which were just different enough that they stood on their own. In the years between the two films, authors and artists filled in the story and put their own spin on the clones. When *The Clone Wars* animated series debuted in 2008, its art department went even further: introducing tons of new designs and colors, sometimes specifically to [to inspire the cosplayers they knew would be building them](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/13/15293090/star-wars-celebration-2017-dave-filoni-clone-wars-cosplay?ref=andrewliptak.com). Rewatching *Revenge of the Sith* on the big screen the other week, I was impressed at how weird and fantastic this film is. From its wooden performances and forced, stilted storytelling, it's not a great movie, but it's a film with an ridiculous amount of ambition and craftsmanship in the mix, and if nothing else, it's just gorgeous to look at. Watching it on a theatrical screen for the first time in 20 years, I was impressed at how much George Lucas stuffed into each frame, including tons of random troopers that sit in the back of the frame that you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/image-4.png) Image: Lucasfilm That's where the 212th troopers come in. In the story, the [212th Attack Battalion](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/212th%5FAttack%5FBattalion?ref=andrewliptak.com) is the unit that General Obi-Wan Kenobi leads is the 212th, with [Commander Cody](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cody?ref=andrewliptak.com) as his subordinate. These guys have a burned-yellow color scheme, with some bright stripes streaked across their armor, and they ended up getting a lot of screentime in *The Clone Wars.* But if you look closely during *Revenge of the Sith*, you see another subset of troopers, ones festooned with some extra webbing and gear strapped to them, and with a zany-looking helmet. When the 212th goes into action on the planet Utapau to back up Obi-Wan as he heads out to capture a high-level target, you catch a couple of glimpses of these troopers in the background. [Star Wars: Attack of the Clones Inspired A Wave Of Clone Trooper CosplaysEpisode II was the catalyst for cosplayers to create Clone Trooper suits![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-109.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1455-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-cosplay-clone-wars-troopers/) They're truly blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, but what I love about these troopers is how much these specific troopers add to the larger story by only being in a couple of frames of the film. The blank white armor plates were the perfect canvas for all sorts of wild designs and color schemes, and it's a good way to signal to the audience that while the fresh-off-the-line troopers we saw in *Attack of the Clones* had matured and grown in the intervening years. These weren't just mindless automatons being pressed into combat but people in their own right, and they used paint (and in *The Clone Wars*, tattoos) to denote their identities and individuality beyond the ranks they held. (I'd highly recommend checking out Karen Traviss's [*Republic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599495?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Commando*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722169?ref=andrewliptak.com) [novels for](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722206?ref=andrewliptak.com) [more of this](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726068?ref=andrewliptak.com)–she did an excellent job bringing them to life.) But more than that, we see that the war had its own impact on the way the troopers saw themselves, and the types of combat they were involved in. Beyond the change in helmets (to better line up with the original trilogy stormtroopers), we saw a ton of different equipment variations: airborne, cold weather, desert, and heavy-weapons troopers, equipped with binoculars, backpacks, jetpacks, scuba gear, bags, and quite a bit more. All of this speaks to a military force that went into combat with one set of gear, and ended up learning and adapting as they went. New helmets and equipment suggested domain and mission-specific needs so that they could operate effectively in the field. Once you see it, it's a good indicator of the larger world that we're seeing only glimpses of, and it's an outstanding storytelling technique that allowed Lucas and his collaborators to signal that *Star Wars* is a vast sandbox. That's one of its strengths: it's easy to drop those details in with dialogue or stories that say or show the physical size or scale of the place, but it's another thing altogether to design a whole bunch of background characters that you only glimpse for a moment to really drive the point home. --- I don't remember exactly where I first noticed the 212th Airborne Clones. Probably on some rewatch, or by coming across one of the action figures that flooded toy store shelves while the film was in theaters. But I remember being captivated by them: something about the bright orange, white, and black color scheme, and the equipment that they're loaded down with. While building my Shoretrooper costume back in 2016 ahead of *Rogue One*, I came across a [useful tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXzxEqdvuIE&ref=andrewliptak.com) from Adam Savage: how to weather props and costumes. Using watered-down acrylic paints, rags, and a little imagination, he took a new-looking object and made it look like it had been well-worn with age. Weathering, I came to realize, was a type of storytelling in and of itself: each ding, caked-on grime or dirt, crack, and coat of dust gives the audience an indication of the things they've experienced. Looking at the official images of these troopers, you could tell that they had been put through the ringer. They were pockmarked and dinged up, moreso than the regular line troopers. When the opportunity arose to snag one of these troopers, I jumped at the chance: not only did they look cool, but suiting up as one would bring that world to life for bystanders. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_3999-1.jpeg) Image: Patrick Ormiston Picking up a costume from someone else is always a bit fraught. 501st members generally build their own costumes, either from scratch or from a kit, and as you build, you typically tailor them to your own body type. Sometimes, you'll get a costume from someone your height and weight. In other times, you have to make some adjustments. This costume took several years of off-and-on work to get to where I could wear it. It mostly worked out of the box: the helmet, chest, torso, and arms fit, but the legs needed some significant work, and I'd go through phases where I'd pull it out, list out what needed to fix, realize it was a daunting amount of work, and put it away for a little while before repeating the process. The original maker took some shortcuts when he built it, and I ended up commissioning a new bag from a friend, swapped out the regular Velcro with an industrial strength version, screwed on the column of ammo cartridges on the left shoulder, and other minor upgrades here and there. The biggest obstacle was the shins, something that was emblematic of a problem with the clone trooper costumes: [until Lucasfilm released *Obi-Wan Kenobi*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fresh-from-the-foundry/) in 2022, all of the Clone Troopers you saw on screen were CGI, and as such, the designers didn't need to worry about the finer details like "how does a person actually put this on and wear it?" As a result, clones armor can be a bit uncomfortable: it digs in in weird places and has a lot of parts, like the knees and elbows, that can shift around as you walk. When folks looked at the images, they didn't see any seams where these pieces of armor could open. That's fine for things like the parts that cover one's upper arms, forearms, and thighs, because those pieces tend to be wider and can slide right on. One's shins have to slide on over your foot and calf, and these parts just aren't designed for that. The 501st devised a workaround: cutting the back out of the shin lets you slide one's foot in and twist it around, siding the "spoon" back into place once it's on, which lets a builder have a seamless piece of armor. My shins and calves aren't shaped like that, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get it to work, and it was a frustrating problem: I wanted to get this armor together and wearable, but I could just never get it to work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_9521.jpeg) Image: Hayes Johnson With *Revenge of the Sith* coming up soon, I resorted to a workaround of my own – with the exception of the helmet, the clone's basic armor is the same, so I swapped out the shins from my AOTC clone (which didn't need to be seamless when I got them approved way back when), and asked my Garrison Membership Liaison officer if it would be okay to do for the screening. I got the approval for a "day pass" and ended up bringing it out for the screening. There's still a little more work to be done on it: I want to swap out some straps, replace the kama, get some better ventilation in the helmet, and a couple of other things here and there, but for the event? It held up spectacularly well: nothing fell off or really needed that much adjustment, and it looked pretty cool in the group pictures. Some fans recognized the character and came up to take pictures with me, and after taking if all off, it turned out to be a really excellent way to give the suit a test run and see what else I needed for it to get it over the formal approval line. Hopefully, now that I know it's something that I can actually wear, it'll be push I need to get it added to my roster. And then, it's onto the next costume. ### 12 new SF/F books to check out in the second half of May URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2025-new-scifi-book-list/ Last updated: 2025-05-16T16:30:18.000Z Apple finally releases its adaptation of Martha Wells' *Murderbot* novels, and the first two episodes are great: I thought they really captured the tone and feel of the books nicely. Because the show was coming, I recently picking up the first and second books ([*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to refresh my memory and sink back into them. Given the pile of books that I've amassed, I don't often go back to books that I've already read, but there's a certain joy to sinking into a familiar read. I've read the first four novellas a couple of times, and I've found that they're a delightful, light-yet-serious series of stories, and they've been just what I've needed, reading-wise. I remember the broad beats of the stories, and get to focus on the smaller things that I might have missed. I came away from both of these books with a better sense of Murderbot's dislike of people and its social anxiety, something that feels very timely and relevant at the moment, and appreciated its efforts to balance doing its job against interacting with people and slacking off. I'll likely return to the next couple of entries ([*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in the next couple of weeks when I need another familiar, quick read while I wait for the next couple of episodes of the show to drop. There are lots of other books coming out in the meantime to add to the TBR. Here are 12 that caught my eye to check out over the course of the rest of May. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*! This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). It's $40/year ($3.33 a month) or monthly at $4/month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you (and thanks to the couple of folks who signed up this week!): your support really does help keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) As always, you can see prior lists through the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag, and in case you missed the first book list for May, here it is: [18 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out in May 2025New books for your TBR.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-157.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4101.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/) --- ### [*Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599778?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Delilah S. Dawson (May 13th) I've enjoyed Delilah S. Dawson's *Star Wars* tie-in novels like [*Phasma*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524796334?ref=andrewliptak.com)(I have [*Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593598580?ref=andrewliptak.com)on my to-get-to list), and now she turns her attention to another franchise, *Dungeons & Dragons*. Five strangers awaken in a strange, misty world called Barovia: Rotrog (orcish wizard), Chivarion (drow barbarian), Alishai (tiefling paladin), Kah (kenku cleric), and Fielle (human artificer). They're soon presented with an invitation: a Strahd von Zarovich invites them to dine with him at Castle Ravenloft, and find themselves in over their heads: they have to survive Strahd and the dangers his castle holds, confront their greatest fears and secrets, and get along before they're trapped by Barovia's mists forever. ### [*Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958598740?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Renan Bernardo (April 29th) A century from now, a generation ship called Kap's Needle departed Earth for a new world, only to run into trouble. As the ship and its crew make a desperate attempt to return home, they have to contend with a dwindling oxygen supply and the collapse of their biospheres. Life Support Manager Reva has been placed in charge of who gets to breathe, and when the ship's captain, Horvat, begins purging officers to cover up his own incompetence, she knows she'll be next, and has to turn to the last person she can trust, First Officer Torres, to save her son. ### [*The Knight and the Moth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316582704?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rachel Gillig (May 20th) Rachel Gillig kicks off a new series called *The Stonewater Kingdom* with *The Knight and the Moth*, in which a woman named Sybil Delling has found her calling as a Diviner, using her dreams to get visions from six entities known as Omens. She uses her skills to predict the terrible things her kingdom will confront. Coming to the end of her tenure, everything is upended when a knight arrives at the cathedral. He doesn't care about her visions, but when her sisters begin to vanish, she seeks him out to help find them in the wild world outside of her home. ### [*The Sword Triumphant*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316537766?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth Hanrahan (May 27th) Gareth Hanrahan brings his Lands of the Firstborn trilogy ([*The Sword Defiant*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316537155?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Sword Unbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316537438?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to an end with *The Sword Triumphant*. In the first book, Sir Aelfric and his eight companions saved the world from a Dark Lord and set about dealing with the aftermath. Aelfric found himself keeping Skellbreaker the Dark Lord's cursed sword, had to gather his former companions to face a new threat, only to find that some of them have turned to the dark side themselves, only to get branded as a traitor himself. Now, he's been pulled into a rebellion against a malevolent ruler who has been manipulating humanity, and is brought back for one last quest to save the world. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-sword-triumphant-1814249?ref=andrewliptak.com) "At its heart, this is the story of a brother and sister who, despite being too old and burdened to shoulder the weight of the world, do so anyway with admirable resolve and humanity." ### [*Written on the Dark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593953983?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Guy Gavriel Kay (May 27th) Thierry Villar is a poet who’s well known in taverns and shadows of medieval France and unexpectedly finds himself caught up in a plot that involves assassins, royal, and invading armies. He has to use all of his wits and charm to navigate his way through the halls of power as a war looms. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/written-on-the-dark-1814957?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Kay once again delivers a skillful blend of history and fantasy that captures both the beauty and brutality of the past with poetic precision." ### [*Never Flinch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668089330?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen King (May 27th) Holly Gibney has appeared in a bunch of Stephen King's novels: [*Mr. Mercedes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781476754475?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Finders Keepers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501100123?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*End of Watch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501134135?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Outsider*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501181009?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*If It Bleeds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982137984?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Holly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668014943?ref=andrewliptak.com), and he's brought her back for his latest novel. When the Buckeye City Police Department gets a letter from someone threatening to kill a whole bunch of people to atone "the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes isn't sure what to think, and turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help. At the same time, Holly is hired to serve as a body guard for a controversial women's rights activist whose lectures are being disrupted by a stalker. ### [*Amplitudes : Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660866?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Lee Mandelo (May 27th) Lee Mandelo assembles an excellent table of contents for his new anthology *Amplitudes*, in which he explores the various possibilities that the future holds for queer and trans people. These stories, written by folks likeKatharine Duckett**,** Meg Elison, Sarah Gailey, Margaret Killjoy, Sam J. Miller, Neon Yang, and many more, includes everything from knights fighting in the streets of dystopian cities to Appalachian conservationists to dance-club cruising in the distant edges of the galaxy. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lee-mandelo/amplitudes/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Although the mood shifts frequently throughout the anthology—Miller’s tale is easily the most lighthearted, Yoakeim’s the saddest—each story is a poignant, unflinching look at what could be for the LGBTQ+ community." ### [*Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Final-Thoughts-Jerry-Springer-Audiobook/B0F4KZHLFY?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leon Neyfakh (May 2nd) Leon Neyfakh is one of those rare podcast hosts who knocks something out of the park with each project he undertakes. I came across him via his first couple of season of *Slow Burn* on *Slate* (about Watergate and President Clinton's impeachment), and then his podcast *Fiasco* (which had seasons about the Bush/ Gore election and supreme court decision, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Boston busing crisis, the Benghazi incident, and the AIDS Crisis). His latest project is an audiobook from Audible that's a close look at TV host Jerry Springer and picking apart his public persona and who he really is. It's a really fascinating listen. ### [*Harmattan Season*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250782977?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tochi Onyebuchi (May 27th) "Harmattan" is a season that takes place between November and March, which brings dusty winds off from the Sahara through West Africa into the Gulf of Guinea, and sets the tone for Tochi Onyebuchi's latest novel. A veteran-turned-private eye named Boubacar is contending with a dry spell during the season. When a bleeding woman appears at his door and vanishes, he begins to investigate while his city is primed for violence between rebels and the occupying French government. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250782977?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "blending elements of classic noir fiction (including a Chandleresque narrative voice) and fantastic acts of terroristic martyrdom, Onyebuchi crafts an equally heady and page-turning narrative." ### [*Esperance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419912?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Oyebaji (May 20th) A Chicago detective named Ethan Krol comes across a strange scene: the bodies of a father and son who appear to have drowned in the ocean – hundreds of miles away from the city. At the same time, a woman named Abidemi Eniola arrives in England, and is hunting for clues about a ship that set sale from Bristol in 1791\. She has some strange tech with her, along with heirlooms that she's trying to get back into the hands of their owners. Krol's investigation eventually includes Abidemi and her assistant Hollie, and it seems that their two quests are related in some strange ways as technology, history, and culture crash into one another. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419912?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The plotlines eventually intersect, yielding a satisfying, if grim, solution. Rob Hart and Blake Crouch fans should check this out." ### [*Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781536236392?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Wade Roush (May 20th) Wade Roush follows up his 2023 YA anthology [*Tasting Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781536232882?ref=andrewliptak.com) with another: *Starstuff,* in which authors William Alexander, A. R. Capetta, Maddi Gonzalez, Carlos Hernandez, Kekla Magoon, Jenn Reese, David Robertson, Roush, Eliot Schrefer, and Fran Wilde take on hard science fiction with stories about space junk, multiverses, asteroids, and quite a bit more, all with an optimistic lens. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/william-alexander/starstuff/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the themes of humanity, morality, and the quest for knowledge will appeal beyond aficionados of the genre. Naturally inclusive diversity is interwoven throughout, for example through the presence of nongendered characters." ### [*Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316392402?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Django Wexler (May 27th) Django Wexler closes out his *Dark Lord Davi* duology with a followup to last year's [*How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316392204?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Dark Lord Davisaved her kingdom and became its ruler, but how has tons of wilders under her command who're out for human blood – all of it. She's beginning to face threats at her borders, and has to figure out a way to use her time loop to bring some sort of harmony to the kingdom before it all comes tumbling down. [*Publishers Weekly* says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316392402?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Wexler raises the stakes by removing Davi’s “reset” option this time around: now deaths are permanent. The added emotional weight nicely balances out the snarky humor and barrage of pop-culture references. This is a worthy finale." ### Here's the first trailer for Marvel's Ironheart URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-ironheart-iron-man-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2025-05-14T13:57:20.000Z After a lot of waiting, Marvel has finally released a first trailer for its upcoming streaming series, *Ironheart*. It's been cutting it close: the series has been scheduled for June 2025 for a while, it's only now (well, after a teaser that was shown at a convention somewhere) that it's kicking off the publicity for it. The series stars Dominique Thorne, who first appeared in 2022's *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* as tech genius Riri Williams. Riri is an MIT student who ends up building her own suit of armor like Iron Man's, and ends up getting involved in some Wakanda problems before returning home. Now, she's the star of her own series, in which she's back home in Chicago and gets wrapped up in a greater plot as she works to further her ambitions of creating another suit of armor. Here's the trailer: When Marvel released *Avengers: Endgame* back in the summer of 2019, it put itself into an annoying corner. For more than a decade, it had built up this incredible run of superhero films and ironic characters: Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and so forth. *Endgame* marked a significant transitional point for the larger MCU: most of those actors were done with those roles after playing them for so long, but the studio juggernaut isn't anywhere close to stopping. The solution? Bring those characters back, but differently, something that the comic books have been doing for ages. Over the last couple of years, we've been seeing something of a changing of the guard for a number of those characters: *She Hulk: Attorney at Law* introduced Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters / She-Hulk, *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* and *Captain America: Brave New World* saw Anthony Mackie take on the helm of Captain America, *Hawkeye* brought in Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, *Ms. Marvel* introduced us to Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel, and *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* featured Thorne as Riri. Marvel introduced the character in 2016's *Invincible Iron Man* Vol. 3 #7 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mike Deodato and has appeared in a range of Iron Man-related comics since. In an interview that year, Bendis noted that "\[I created her\] with the idea that Tony \[Stark\] needs more supporting characters in his world" and that "She’s based on research that I’d done about some other things that I’d been interested in, young geniuses \[and\] kids from Chicago trying to make something of their lives when the streets are literally danger zones." This series has been a long time coming: [Marvel announced it way back in 2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-next-crop-of-mcu-shows-include-armor-wars-ironheart-and-secret-invasion/) along alongside *Secret Invasion* (which came out in 2023) and *Armor Wars* (which was being reworked from a series into a film and seems to be on the back burner at the moment). Ryan Coogler, the director of both *Black Panther* films was brought in as an executive director in 2022, and production took place mostly in 2022, and ultimately wrapped last year. Coogler appeared in a new featurette about the upcoming series, and he notes that Ironheart wasn't designed as a successor to Tony Stark in the comics, but was a friend and mentee who eventually developed her own identity as a hero, while the other producers note that this is echoed in the series: she's not taking on the role that Iron Man had in this world, but is forging her own path forward. This series will mark the end of Marvel's fifth phase (which included *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Marvels, Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts\*, Secret Invasion, Loki, Echo, Agatha All Along*, *Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man*, and *Daredevil: Born Again*), and it'll debut with three episodes on June 24th, with the remaining three episodes dropping weekly. After that, Marvel will move into its 6th Phase in July with *The Fantastic Four: First Steps*. I'm excited about the show: Iron Man has long been one of my favorite characters, and I do love me some power armor. ### Will we ever get to see another show like Andor? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-disney-plus-streaming-budgets-economics/ Last updated: 2025-05-13T16:00:17.000Z *Andor* comes to a close with its final block of episodes tonight, and man, I'm excited and more than a little depressed that it's over. From [some of the earliest developments](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-disney-plus-cassian-andor-rogue-one-series-tony-gilroy/) to the [first trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5UX1Adanis&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD&ref=andrewliptak.com), I've been blown away by the scale of the world, the depth of the story, and the lengths that the production has gone to build up this story. I've [said before](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) that the series has delivered the serious take that I've always wanted from George Lucas's world. I can't help but shake the feeling that it'll be the last time in a while before we see something like it, and as I began thinking about that, I realized that there's probably a good reason for that: the environment when the was pitched has drastically changed, and everything, from competition to interest rates has had an effect on how this show came together. Looking back at this run, it's almost unbelievable that this show exists in the first place. It's a gritty, character-driven story about radicalization, revolution, and rebellion within the trappings of a massive, family-friendly franchise, and an expensive one at that. The total cost of the project is [reportedly around $645 million](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/12/22/disney-reveals-645-million-spending-on-star-wars-show-andor/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (it's probably a bit higher), which far exceeds the budget of 2015's *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* ($447 million) – which happens to be the most expensive film ever made. It's not entirely fair to put those two stories head to head when it comes to budget, however. *Andor*'s $645 million budget is spread across 24 episodes, (about $27 million per episode), and if you think of the eight big arcs that make up both seasons, you come out with what's essentially the equivalent of eight films costing $81 million each. That's still an astounding amount of money – $27 million per episode. I remember the waves that *LOST'*s pilot episode made when its budget was pegged at around $14 million – the most expensive TV project to date in 2004\. In a roundabout way, you can point to the 2008 financial crisis and great recession as a factor in the era of big-budget prestige television that we've been living through, driven in part by the "streaming wars" that saw entertainment conglomerates fighting for subscriber eyeballs for their direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. Bear with me, this gets a little wonky. --- To try and stimulate the economy when the markets cratered in 2008, the Federal Reserve began cutting steadily cutting its Federal Funds interest rates (which it had held at 5.25% throughout much of 2007) from [3.5% in January](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20080122b.htm) all the way down to [0% to .25% by December](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20081216b.htm). This rate dictates what banks charge one another, which in turn impacts what those banks will charge for anyone borrowing money from them, and lowering by lowering those rates to zero (or nearly so), the Fed hoped that it would have the effect of stimulating the economy by allowing businesses to borrow money cheaply. The Fed kept interest rates near zero from December 2008 through November 2015\. This seven year period helped fuel the enormous growth in the tech sector: those low interest rates [helped fuel profits](https://www.axios.com/2018/09/15/dotcom-bust-tech-growth-great-recession?ref=andrewliptak.com) for companies and investors, giving them plenty of room to grow with new products, services, or headcounts. We had a little discussion in the TO Slack channel about this, because the more I thought about this question, the harder it became to quantify, so I'm going to hedge a bit. I can't tell for sure if they were borrowing tons of money because interest rates were low, or if they were willing to sell lots of debt to investors just because the markets were generally favorable. That seems like a question for the folks at NPR's *Planet Money*. I started looking through Netflix's financial documents and I wasn't having a whole lot of luck in parsing them. Either way: my impression (and assumption) is that both of these things are factors: because the Fed lowered interest rates, borrowing was cheaper and whether streaming companies were taking advantage of that, or if it just led to a good environment for investors, that's what helped bring about the "streaming wars", the point in time roughly between the point in time when Netflix began debuting original content on its platform starting with *House of Cards* and *Orange is the New Black* and up to around 2022 when Netflix [started reporting drops in its subscriber base](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/19/netflix-loses-subscribers-first-time-10-years-ukraine-shared-logins?ref=andrewliptak.com). Original content has been the carrot for the massive growth of those streaming companies. While Netflix and Hulu had been the go-to places where you could watch whatever you wanted, they found that the way to really incentivize people to come over to your pool of content was to offer up stuff that you couldn't find elsewhere, because it was locked to that platform. And thus, you saw these companies pour billions and billions of dollars into funding original movies and shows, sometimes at ridiculous budgets. To quote John Hammond from *Jurassic Park*: "[We spared no expense](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cI6KhH-x7w&ref=andrewliptak.com)." The heyday of the streaming wars brought about some wild experiments: AMC launched a dedicated horror streaming service called Shudder in 2015 (which is still running), MGM launched the franchise-dedicated Stargate Command in 2017 (which contained the entire catalog of *Stargate* shows, complete with its own original series *Stargate Origins*) while Warner Brothers built DC Universe, which included a range of adaptations from the company's IP, comics to read, and a slew of original animated and live action shows for subscribers. As other companies like Apple, Disney, NBC, and Warner Bros. put together their own streaming platforms, you saw them invest a lot of money in this original content, which resulted in shows like Netflix's *3 Body Problem* ([$20 million an episode](https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/netflix/3-body-problem-budget-ending-explained-spoilers-game-of-thrones-industry-problems?ref=andrewliptak.com)) and [*Stranger Things*](https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-facing-reality-check-subscriber-loss-stock-plummet-cut-costs-vows-to-curb-its-profligate-ways-11650547424?ref=andrewliptak.com) ($30 million an episode), Amazon Prime's *Rings of Power* (a reported $465 million for the first season – more than $1 billion for the series thus far), Apple's *Severance* ([$200 million for season 2](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-21/apple-tries-to-rein-in-hollywood-spending-after-years-of-losses?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and Disney's *Star Wars: The Acolyte* ([$180 million for one season](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/09/26/disney-reveals-star-wars-show-the-acolyte-was-over-budget-at-230-million/?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and the aforementioned *Star Wars: Andor* ($645 million for two seasons). All of that isn't counting the tons of other shows that all of those streaming platforms put into production and released: 2021 and 2022 saw a peak of more than 600 shows on the air, [which dropped quite a bit](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/us-scripted-tv-shows-2023-peak-tv-study-1235877669/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2023 and 2024\. When you're flush with cash, studios were clearly willing to spend it, either on making those huge shows look really good, or just to experiment and see what they could come up with. SNL had a [funny take](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqRQ5Y6OYi4&ref=andrewliptak.com) on this in 2018\. When Netflix reported its first losses in more than a decade, it led to a [cascade of changes](https://www.andrewliptak.com/batgirl-warner-bros-discovery-hbo-max-canceled-streaming-services/) in the streaming world. Warner Bros. Discovery made incredible, painful cuts by cutting down completed films, while [other](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/the-peripheral-canceled-amazon-season-2-renewal-1235700019/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [streamers](https://deadline.com/2023/11/shadow-and-bone-glamorous-agent-elvis-captain-fall-farzar-canceled-strike-impact-1235611562/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [canceled](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/the-game-grease-rise-of-the-pink-ladies-star-trek-prodigy-queen-of-the-universe-canceled-paramount-removed-1235653191/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [shows](https://deadline.com/2023/03/willow-canceled-disney-disney-plus-no-season-2-1235300401/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [rejiggered budgets for existing ones](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/foundation-david-s-goyer-steps-down-showrunner-season-3-1235834630/?ref=andrewliptak.com), or canceled shows [well in development](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/20/apple-tv-remake-of-sci-fi-classic-metropolis-cancelled-due-to-us-writers-strike?ref=andrewliptak.com), while also raising prices and introducing ad-supported tiers. And on top of that, interest rates have been going back up – we're back up to 4.25-4.5%, so money is getting a bit more expensive to borrow. (And, on top of that, threats of tariffs for productions outside of the US.) I think the revelation showed investors that these companies were chasing after a fixed number of eyeballs and that years of virtually unlimited spending was enough of an enticement: they now had to use those subscriber bases to make those investments worthwhile. --- From the [looks of things](https://www.indiewire.com/news/analysis/media-company-content-spend-2025-1235094104/?ref=andrewliptak.com), streaming companies are still spending quite a bit, but it looks like that rate is starting to slow. They're still spending a lot – [Disney is on track to burn through $24 billion](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/walt-disney-annual-content-spending-next-year-1236061130/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on content in 2025 (but only up slightly from $23.4 billion last year), while [Netflix will spend $18 billion](https://www.mediaplaynews.com/netflix-cfo-2025-content-spending-to-increase-11-percent-to-18-billion/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2025 (up from $16.2 billion in 2024.) *Business Insider* points out that at these insane numbers, [an increased couple of percentage points](https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-stock-price-interest-rate-risk-rounding-error-2018-7?ref=andrewliptak.com) really aren't going to make a huge difference to Netflix and Disney: "If the company added another, say, $2.0 billion in debt over the next year and interest rates were 1% higher than otherwise would be the case, that estimated 1% higher interest rate adds only an incremental $20 million in extra interest costs. Netflix is a company that should have $2.0+ billion in EBITDA this year so $20 million in higher interest expense on new debt due to higher rates is a rounding error." While that doesn't exactly line up with my theory that low interest rates fueled this boom in content, I do think that that era of low rates played a role by making it conducive for companies to embark on setting up the infrastructure and audience development for this entirely new segment of the entertainment industry. These companies are still spending a lot of money, but we're now out of the "we have money, let's see what works" phase and aren't feeling our way around in the dark. Thus, we won't see the rise of those zany streaming platforms like Stargate Command, [storytelling experiments](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/black-mirrors-interactive-episode-bandersnatch-is-being-removed-from-netflix-as-the-technology-has-served-its-purpose/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and if [my suspicions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-familiar-galaxy-far-far-away/) about the next couple of years for *Star Wars* are correct, more of an emphasis on safer bets than riskier ones. I get it, but I think it's a bit of a shame: experimentation and risk-taking is where you'll find the unexpected stories and characters that go on to become classics, technologies that end up becoming an integral part of an industry, or the writers and personnel who'll be telling the next generation of stories. [Speaking to *Empire Magazine* last month](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/tony-gilroy-andor-existence-mandalorian-exclusive/?ref=andrewliptak.com), *Andor* creator Tony Gilroy said that the existence of *The Mandalorian* helped ensure his show's existence: it "gave us the platform to jump off. Their success is what would fuel the whole thing. I mean, no Baby Yoda, no *Andor*." Furthermore, he noted that "no-one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this," explaining that they had a lot of faith from Lucasfilm and Disney leaders that "protected" the project. Even so, *Andor* was cut down from an initial concept of five seasons down to two because of the "monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us," [Gilroy told SFX Magazine in April](https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/star-wars-tv-shows/andor-showrunner-says-season-2s-more-fast-paced-structure-is-a-fascinating-experiment-that-is-born-out-of-desperation-i-dont-know-if-anyones-ever-done-it-before/?ref=andrewliptak.com). "We realized that I didn't have enough calories to do it, and Diego's face couldn't take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it. We were saved by Disney saying, 'Okay, if you guys can figure out a way to do it, we're into it.'" I have a feeling that the decision was less about Diego Luna getting older and more Gilroy, Lucasfilm, and Disney recognizing that the environment that helped conceive *Andor* just doesn't exist in 2025\. Disney's Bob Iger recently noted that his company had [made a bit too much content](https://variety.com/2025/film/news/bob-iger-thunderbolts-marvel-new-movie-strategy-1236389765/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in their scramble into the streaming market and that quality dropped as a result. [A report in the *Wall Street Journal*](https://www.wsj.com/business/media/marvel-avengers-mcu-robert-downey-jr-dr-doom-311f9ffc?ref=andrewliptak.com) backed that up, noting that Marvel was particularly affected here, as studio head Kevin Feige found himself stretched too thin across the increase in shows that they company put into production. [Swinging for the fencesStar Wars: The Acolyte felt like a bold experiment for Lucasfilm, one that didn’t quite work out. That shouldn’t stop the studio from trying again.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-164.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/the-acolyte-101-highlights-noodle-shop_8feb2237-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/) This has all been a roundabout way of saying: I wonder if that means we've seen the last of really ambitious projects like *Andor or The Acolyte,* which were both ambitious in intent, production, and scale. It's clear that *Andor* is something altogether different from anything that's been released in the franchise, and I while I'll cop to being a huge fanboy for this show, there are few genre shows that are hitting on the same level: I'm certain that it'll be held up alongside other classics like *Babylon 5*, *Battlestar Galactica*, or *The Expanse*. It's a show with real substance, one that has taken significant risks with its storytelling and subject matter, and which went to huge lengths to put the world into the camera frame, eschewing [tools like The Volume](https://illumin.usc.edu/the-volume-how-the-mandalorian-revolutionized-filmmaking/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in favor of building massive sets and going out on location. And above all, it's a rare franchise project that feels like it actually advances the world rather than fills it in. *Andor*'s been a critical hit, but it's been a bit of a slow burn with audiences. As studios – and Disney rein in (or at least slow down) their spending, will they be willing to a) take a risk on a show like *Andor* in the first place, or 2) invest as much money as they have if they do? I have a feeling that the case for such a show is much, much harder in 2025 than it was in 2019\. I don't think it's an accident that the [next new *Star Wars* film](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/) in theaters is going to be a continuation of a show that was a massive hit – *The Mandalorian*, because the need for a huge box office win is so crucial. But on the other hand, maybe the quality of the show and the critical acclaim that came with *Andor* will serve as an example of how taking the time and effort to really craft a series that pays off. Cable channels like HBO have shown that quality is something that will pay off in the long-term: look at how many of their shows remain enormously popular because they put in the work to make them as good as they can be, while Netflix's throw-cash-at-the-wall strategy means a lot of content, but how much of it will be remembered in 10, 15, or 20 years from now? For every *Stranger Things*, you get a lot more of *Electric States.* Will we see another *Andor* from Disney? I doubt it, at least not one with the same scale and ambition. I think *Andor* had all the right things converge–the right creators and writers, actors, production, budget, and industry timing–to create a show like this. Maybe we'll get something similar, but maybe with a lower budget, or maybe with not quite as much risk when it comes to message or story. I hope I'm wrong, because it's these types of shows that'll inspire the next generations of fans and storytellers. --- While I'm thinking about this, let me see if I can manifest something into reality: if Disney really wants to capitalize on the success that it's had with *Andor*, there's a perfect story just waiting to be told: take advantage of Genevieve O'Reilly and follow Mon Mothma as she leads the Rebellion after Yavin, and all of the challenges that you'd have building and holding together the Rebel Alliance as it fights against the Empire. There are some really cool stories in the world like the Battle of Derra IV, the aftermath of the Battle of Hoth, and of course, Mothma's line in Return of the Jedi: "many Bothan died to bring us this information." All of that is enormously rich ground for a successor to *Andor*. Tony Gilroy might be [ready to move on from *Star Wars*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/andor-tony-gilroy-ready-move-on-from-star-wars-1236191375/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but you've got Beau Willimon or Dan Gilroy or Stephen Schiff or Tom Bissell out there. ### Gateway to the Revolution URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-american-revolution-lake-champlain-strategic/ Last updated: 2025-05-10T15:28:42.000Z At the dawn of the Holocene, the glaciers that covered North America began to retreat, leaving in their wake an inlet that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Ottawa to what’s now known as the Champlain Valley. As the sea retreated in the thousands of years that followed, Lake Champlain and the far-reaching forested lands were appealing to the first Paleo-Indians who arrived around 13,000 years ago. They called the lake Bitawbagok, or “The Waters in Between,” and found it to be a useful route that allowed for easy access to trade far beyond the valley. As European colonizers began arriving in the fifteenth century, amongst the challenges they faced was the landscape: endless dense forests covering mountain ranges that terrified the Puritan settlers and made travel across the land difficult and dangerous. Rivers and watersheds became essential routes into the continent. The elements that made Lake Champlain so appealing to its inhabitants over the millennia made it a critical strategic corridor for the various sides that fought during the American Revolution and drew the settlers living in the New Hampshire Grants into playing a critical role in the conflict. Writing in [*Lake Champlain: An Illustrated History*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/lake-champlain-an-illustrated-history/1396?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Russell Bellico notes that “no other lake in America has experienced the breadth of military activity as has Lake Champlain,” and that “the pivotal battles fought in the Champlain Valley determined the fate of the continent and political destiny of America.” European and Indigenous inhabitants understood the importance of these waterways. The French set up a series of fortifications along the Richelieu River Valley starting in 1665, and as they and England vied for control of the region during the Seven Years War, each relied upon the lake and neighboring waterways to move goods and troops throughout the region. In [*We Go as Captives*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/we-go-as-captives-the-royalton-raid-and-the-shadow-war-on-the-revolutionary-frontier/472?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Neil Goodwin underscored the region’s importance: “The Hudson River-Lake Champlain-St. Lawrence River-Great Lakes waterway was considered the most important transportation and communications route in North America,” a straight shot from Canada into the heart of American territory. As the American colonies prepared war in 1775, its leaders recognized Lake Champlain’s importance early on. In March 1775, John Brown, a lawyer from Pittsfield, MA, who was dispatched to Montreal to gauge support from their northern neighbors, [reported in a letter](https://ndar-history.org/q-node/389/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Canada wouldn’t join the American cause, and that “the Fort at Ticonderoga must be seized as soon as possible, should hostilities be committed by the King’ s Troops. The People on the New-Hampshire Grants have engaged to do the business and in my opinion are the most proper persons for the job.” After the attacks in Lexington and Concord in April, Connecticut officials committed funds for an attack against Ticonderoga, while Massachusetts officials dispatched Captain Benedict Arnold to mount an invasion. The British were also well aware of the lake’s strategic importance. In April 1775, Colonial Secretary Lord Dartmouth, issued orders to General Thomas Gage in Boston that all forts in North America were to be reinforced. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/05/IMG_9484.jpeg) Lake Champlain Image: Andrew Liptak His orders arrived too late. Ethan Allen and members of the Green Mountain Boys, along with Arnold and Massachusetts volunteers, crossed Lake Champlain and captured Ticonderoga on May 10th, while to the north, Seth Warner and his men captured Crown Point. A third contingent captured the town of Skenesborough the next day. Capitalizing on the assaults, Arnold and a small group of his men took a ship up the lake to St. Jean, “where he seized its small garrison and the heavily armed British sloop Enterprise,” which Michael Sherman, Gene Sessions, and P. Jeffrey Potash note in *Freedom & Unity: A History of Vermont*, “gave the patriots total control over the lake.” As the Revolution ignited, control over the lake would be essential, as an invasion could split the colonies into two. After the Americans mounted a disastrous invasion of Canada in the winter of 1775, the British launched their own in 1776\. General Guy Carleton led his fleet of 33 ships into Lake Champlain on October 9th with the intention of reaching the Hudson Valley. They were met by Arnold and his smaller flotilla off Valcour Island on October 11th, and after a violent battle that inflicted heavy damage on both sides, Arnold retreated down the lake but was able dissuade Carlton from continuing. It was a temporary reprieve: General John Burgoyne led a larger force south the following year, occupying Crown Point on June 30th and advancing on Ticonderoga on July 2nd. Outnumbered, the American forces ceded control of the forts but hampered Burgoyne rear-guard actions and battles throughout July and August, ultimately leading to his defeat at the Battle of Saratoga in September. After the Saratoga campaign stalled and failed, both American and British forces continued to fight around Lake Champlain. The British opted to abandon both Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point in November 1777, but they continued to launch attacks against the region through the end of the war. After the American Revolution ended, Lake Champlain proved to be a lucrative commercial route for the new United States and Vermonters, and its strategic importance returned nearly three decades later during of the War of 1812, when British forces once again attempted to make their way into the U.S. by way of Lake Champlain, only to be repulsed after the Battle of Plattsburgh on September 11th, 1814\. It was the final invasion of the country, and with its conclusion, Lake Champlain’s time as a battleground came to an end. Now, the only physical reminders of the nearly three centuries of conflict rest at the bottom of the lake, a reminder of the importance that its waters once held for the fate of the nation. 🏛️ This piece originally ran in the Winter 2024 edition of **History Connections*, VHS's member magazine. To get it and support the organization, sign up as a member [here](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Here's the first trailer for Foundation's third season URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-foundation-season-3-asimov-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2025-05-08T15:11:09.000Z Apple is [debuting its long-awaited adaptation of Martha Wells' *Murderbot*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-apple-tv-martha-wells-sci-fi-streaming/)next week (May 16th), and it'll be followed by another big SF adaptation: the third season of Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*. The streaming service has released our first look at the upcoming season, which will debut on July 11th. The show debuted in 2021, picking up some of the big pieces of Asimov's classic science fiction novel, making some updates and adjustments as it did so. Set in the very distant future, humanity has spread out through space and is governed by the Galactic Empire. A mathematician named Hari Sheldon has pioneered a field that he calls psychohistory, in which he uses statistics to predict the future, and through his calculations, predicts that the Empire is headed for a downfall, which would plunge the galaxy into a chaotic dark age for millennia. To stave off that fall, he sets up The Foundation, ostensibly a repository for all knowledge, but in reality, it's a community with the seeds to restart and rebuild human civilization. [Asimov’s empireHow Foundation became the story that powered space opera![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-161.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2021-09-22-at-1.27.10-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-isaac-asimov-foundation/) Asimov was inspired by Edward Gibbon's [*History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780140437645?ref=andrewliptak.com)to write the stories that eventually made up [*Foundation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553293357?ref=andrewliptak.com)in the 1950s, and the show has followed the story in broad strokes. The first season introduced us to the concept of psychohistory and the Foundation on the planet Terminus, but introduced some other concepts like Emperor being a trio of clones. The second season (which I have yet to finish – it's on my list) has been setting up the conflict between the Empire and the growing Foundation, and began teasing the coming of an existential threat to the Foundation in the form of a man known as The Mule. The Mule's arrival seems to be the focus of this coming season: a war is coming, and in the books, he's a superhuman individual with some psychic powers, and who's working to take over the galaxy. With his introduction, we've moved into some of the territory of the next book in the series, [*Foundation and Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553293371?ref=andrewliptak.com), and judging from the trailer, we've got a bit of action headed our way this season. I've [generally enjoyed the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/foundation-finale-the-leap-recap/). It's certainly taken liberties with the source material, but [as I've noted in the past](https://www.andrewliptak.com/foundation-trailer-apple-faithful-adaptations/), "it's worth looking at the elements that play well to that new medium, and what parts of the story are most compelling." *Foundation* is a strange book, in part because of how it's a [fixup](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/e-van-vogt-and-fix-novel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of a bunch of shorter works, but also because it shifts wildly in tone from story to story. You go from some really heady concepts (for the 1950s) to people shilling washing machines. The series has picked up a lot of the broader concepts and run with them, and the resulting show is slick and while not exactly in the same class as shows like *Game of Thrones* (the early seasons, anyway) or *Andor*, I think it's one that'll hold up in in the years ahead. Plus, the studio behind the show has thrown a *lot* of money at designing the world, and it just looks astounding. The trailer shows off some really fun imagery and spaceships, and if nothing else, the scenery makes it worth it. *Foundation* is just one of a handful of science fiction shows running on the streaming service: the first season of *Murderbot* is coming on May 16th, and we've got the [upcoming fifth season](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-for-all-mankind-renewed-star-city-streaming-series/) of the alternate history space drama *For All Mankind,* [an adaptation of William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)*,* bothcoming sometime this year. There's also new seasons of *Silo* ([based off of Hugh Howey's *Wool* books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugh-howey-wool-silo-apple-tv-streaming-history/)) and *Monarch: Legacy of Monsters*, and some new shows: *Star City* (a spinoff of *For All Mankind*) and *Wycaro 339*, from *Breaking Bad'*s Vince Gilligan. I need to catch up on Season 2: I kept getting distracted when it debuted in 2023, but there's plenty of time to catch up before it debuts in July. ### Here are the finalists for the 2025 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-awards-finalists-2025-science-fiction-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2025-05-05T13:00:19.000Z *Locus Magazine*, the major industry magazine for the SF/F community issues a poll from its subscribers and fans for its awards. The Locus Awards are up there along with the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and it's a good survey of the past year's storytelling. Last Friday, the publication has released [its list of finalists for the 2025 awards](https://locusmag.com/2025/05/2025-locus-awards-top-ten-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here are [last year's winners](https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2024-martha-wells-kingfisher-chandrasekera/). As in years past, it's an excellent roundup: there are some good titles on here, and I'm looking forward to seeing which ones end up winning. This year's awards will be announced during this year's Locus Awards Ceremony, which will be held on June 21st during this year's Locus Awards Ceremony, which will be held at Nile Hall in Oakland, California. You can get tickets for the event [here](https://locusmag.com/2025-locus-awards-weekend/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and see the schedule [here](https://locusmag.com/2025-locus-awards-weekend/?ref=andrewliptak.com#schedule). Here's the full list of nominees: ### Science Fiction Novel - *The Man Who Saw Seconds* by Alexander Boldizar - *Rakesfall* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *The Mercy of Gods* by James S.A. Corey - *The Bezzle* by Cory Doctorow - *The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles* by Malka Older - *Kinning* by Nisi Shawl - *Alien Clay* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Service Model* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Space Oddity* by Catherynne M. Valente - *Absolution* by Jeff VanderMeer ### Fantasy Novel - *I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons* by Peter S. Beagle - *The Tainted Cup* by Robert Jackson Bennett - *The Dead Cat Tail Assassins* by P. Djèlí Clark - *The Bright Sword* by Lev Grossman - *Asunder* by Kerstin Hall - *A Sorceress Comes to Call* by T. Kingfisher - *Somewhere Beyond the Sea* by TJ Klune - *The Siege of Burning Grass* by Premee Mohamed - *Long Live Evil* by Sarah Rees Brennan - *The City in Glass* by Nghi Vo ### Horror Novel - *Cuckoo* by Gretchen Felker-Martin - *House of Bone and Rain* by Gabino Iglesias - *The Angel of Indian Lake* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Incidents Around the House* by Josh Malerman - *The Wilding* by Ian McDonald - *Forgotten Sisters* by Cynthia Pelayo - *Model Home* by Rivers Solomon - *Bury Your* Gays by Chuck Tingle - *Horror Movie* by Paul Tremblay - *The Underhistory* by Kaaron Warren ### Young Adult Novel - *Sleep Like Death* by Kalynn Bayron - *Blood Justice* by Terry J. Benton-Walker - *Rest in Peaches* by Alex Brown - *Fall of the Iron Gods* by Olivia Chadha - *The Feast Makers* by H.A. Clarke - *A Tempest of Tea* by Hafsah Faizal - *The Maid and the Crocodile* by Jordan Ifueko - *Moonstorm* by Yoon Ha Lee - *Sheine Lende* by Darcie Little Badger - *Compound Fracture* by Andrew Joseph White ### First Novel - *The Ministry of Time* by Kaliane Bradley - *The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands* by Sarah Brooks - *Sargassa* by Sophie Burnham - *Lady Eve’s Last Con* by Rebecca Fraimow - *The Book of Love* by Kelly Link - *The West Passage* by Jared Pechaček - *The Spice Gate* by Prashanth Srivatsa - *Womb City* by Tlotlo Tsamaase - *Someone You Can Build a Nest In* by John Wiswell - *Hammajang Luck* by Makana Yamamoto ### Novella - *Navigational Entanglements* by Aliette de Bodard - What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher - *Mislaid in Parts Half-Known* by Seanan McGuire - *The Butcher of the Forest* by Premee Mohamed - *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler - *She Who Knows* by Nnedi Okorafor - *Countess* by Suzan Palumbo - *Haunt Sweet Home* by Sarah Pinsker - *The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain* by Sofia Samatar - *The Brides of High Hill* by Nghi Vo ### Novelette - “[A Stranger Knocks](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-stranger-knocks/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Tananarive Due (*Uncanny* 9-10/24) - “[I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe](https://reactormag.com/im-not-disappointed-daryl-gregory/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Daryl Gregory (*Reactor* 11/20/24) - “[The River Judge](https://reactormag.com/the-river-judge-s-l-huang/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by S.L. Huang (*Reactor* 3/6/24) - “[Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!](https://reactormag.com/reduce-reuse-recycle-tj-klune/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by TJ Klune (*In the Lives of Puppets*) - “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea" by Naomi Kritzer (*Asimov’s* 9-10/24) - “[Another Girl Under the Iron Bell](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/another-girl-under-the-iron-bell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu (*Uncanny* 9-10/24) - “[By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars](http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/by-salt-by-sea-by-light-of-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Premee Mohamed (*Strange Horizons* 6/9/24) - “Encore” by Wole Talabi (*Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art*) - “[Joanna’s Bodies](https://psychopomp.com/joannas-bodies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Psychopomp 7/1/24) - “[Loneliness Universe](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/loneliness-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny* 5-6/24) ### Short Story - [The Wood at Midwinter](https://www.amazon.com/Wood-at-Midwinter-Susanna-Clarke/dp/1639734481?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury) - “Autumn’s Red Bird" by Aliette de Bodard (*Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art)* - “[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rachael K. Jones (*Lightspeed* 1/24) - “[Parthenogenesis](https://reactormag.com/parthenogenesis-stephen-graham-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Stephen Graham Jones (*Reactor* 10/2/24) - “[Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld* 2/24) - “[The V\*mpire](https://reactormag.com/the-vampire-p-h-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by PH Lee (*Reactor* 10/23/24) - “[Three Faces of a Beheading](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/three-faces-of-a-beheading/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Arkady Martine (*Uncanny* 5-6/24) - “The Night Birds” by Premee Mohamed (*Northern Nights*) - “[Stitched to Skin Like Family Is](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/stitched-to-skin-like-family-is/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nghi Vo (*Uncanny* 3/24) - “[We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will-teach-you-how-to-read/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Caroline M. Yoachim (*Lightspeed* 5/24) ### Anthology - *The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction* edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay - *The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8* edited by Neil Clarke - *We Mostly Come Out at Night* edited by Rob Costello - *Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art* edited by Indrapramit Das - *The Black Girl Survives in This One* edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, - *Northern Nights* edited by Michael Kelly - *Egypt + 100* edited by Ahmed Naji - *The Crawling Moon* edited by dave ring - *New Adventures in Space Opera* edited by Jonathan Strahan - *Thyme Travellers* edited by Sonia Sulaiman ### Collection - *Not a Speck of Light* by Laird Barron - *Weird Black Girls* by Elwin Cotman - *The History of the World Begins in Ice* by Kate Elliott - *Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions* by Nalo Hopkinson - *Kindling* by Kathleen Jennings - *You Like it Darker* by Stephen King - *Lake of Souls* by Ann Leckie - *Buried Deep and Other Stories* by Naomi Novik - *Power to Yield and Other Stories* by Bogi Takács - *Convergence Problems* by Wole Talabi ### Magazine - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - *Clarkesworld* - *Fiyah* - *khōréō* - *Lightspeed* - *Reactor* - *Strange Horizons* - *The Deadlands* - *Uncanny Magazine* ### Publisher - Angry Robot - DAW - Erewhon - Gollancz - Neon Hemlock - Orbit - Small Beer Press - Solaris - Subterranean Press - Tachyon *Tor Publishing Group recused itself from this category.* ### Editor - Neil Clarke - Ellen Datlow - Diana Pho - dave ring - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - Sheree Renée Thomas - E. Catherine Tobler - Wendy N. Wagner - Fran Wilde & Julian Yap ### Artist - Brom - Rovina Cai - Julie Dillon - Kathleen Jennings - Abigail Larson - John Picacio - Shaun Tan - Charles Vess - Michael Whelan - Alyssa Winans ### Nonfiction - *Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction* edited by Eugen Bacon - *This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook* by Mark Bould & Steven Shaviro - *Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right* by Jordan S. Carroll - *The Book Blinders* by John Clute - *Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic* by Stefan Ekman - *Capitalism: A Horror Story* by Jon Greenaway - *Laozi’s Dao De Jing* by Laozi & Ken Liu - *Track Changes* by Abigail Nussbaum - *A History of Fans and Fandom* by Holly Swinyard - *Star Trek: Open a Channel* by Nana Visitor ### Illustrated and Art Book - *The Last Unicorn* by Peter S. Beagle, art by Tom Kidd - *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* by Susanna Clarke, illustrated by Charles Vess - *The Hunger Games* by Suzanne Collins, art by Nico Delort - *R.U.R.: The Karel Čapek Classic* by Kateřina Čupová, translated by Julie Nováková - *Hell, Ink & Water: The Art of Mike Mignola* edited by Scott Dunbier, art by Mike Mignola - *Supernatural Tales from Japan* by Lafcadio Hearn & Yei Theodora Ozaki, art by Sakyu - *Undying Tales: Mythologies of Species on the Verge of Extinction* by Stephanie Law - *Dungeons & Dragons: Worlds & Realms* by Adam Lee - *Frank Frazetta: An Artists’ Tribute* edited by Marisa Lewis - *Stone of Farewell* by Tad Williams, art by Donato Giancola ### Table of Contents: May 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-short-stories-may-2025/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T19:43:19.000Z Welcome to a new feature for *Transfer Orbit*: Table of Contents, a monthly roundup of the short fiction that's being produced within the science fiction and fantasy community. I've been thinking about running something like this for a little while now, and figured it would be a useful resource to direct readers to the magazines and writers who are are producing excellent stories each month. This is a bit of a trial run, but here's what I'm planning: - I'll aim to get this out close to the first of the month, and it'll include publications publishing new stories on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. - This'll be a bare-bones list by publication, with a listing for their fiction and nonfiction entries in each issue. This won't have summaries of the stories. - This list will include links when they're available, but I won't be going back to update each month's list after it's published. Click on the link for each publication to find the latest stories. - This list will likely go out to a smaller subset of supporting subscribers I call the "Firehose Group" – folks who've requested that they get everything, but it'll be linked in the book lists and end-of-week roundups. - I've set up a template with a much larger list of publications: some don't publish every month, and you'll see them when they have a new issue. If I've missed something that *is* out, or if a new issue goes up after each list is published, let me know and I'll get it added up. Let me know what you think. If you find stories that you really like, you're highly encouraged to recommend them in the comments! I want to get back into the habit of reading more short fiction, and I'll try and remember to highlight what I've enjoyed. Okay, here are the short stories coming out in May 2025: --- ## [*Apex Magazine*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May-June, Issue 149) Subscribe [here](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/apex-magazine-one-year?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - ["Shadows Below Seaway Trains"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/shadows-below-seaway-trains?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang - "I Remember a One-Sided Die" by Francis Bass (5/6) - ["Seven Ribbons"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/seven-ribbons?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Beth Goder - "Heart Seeds" by E. Thede (5/20) - "Lies As the Natural State of Things" by Rich Larson (6/3) - "[To Kill a Language](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/to-kill-a-language?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rukman Ragas (Flash fiction) - "Extenta" by Daniel Roop (flash fiction, 5/13) - "Things the Older Boy Understands" by Sierra Branham (flash fiction, 6/10) - ["As It Comes"](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/as-it-comes?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Derek Alan Jones - "Swan Song" by Liam Hogan (5/27) - "The Fifth Horseman" by Cressida Roe (6/24) - "The Liberation of Brother Buffalo" by Michael Boatman (5/1) - "The Neighbors by L. Marie Wood (6/5) ### Nonfiction - [Musings from Maryland](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/musings-from-maryland-149?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lesley Conner - "Readers & Role-play: Experiencing Your Favorite Stories Through Play" by Semaj Saint Garbutt (4/29) - "Perfection, And the Bridges Between" by Eugen Bacon (6/17) - Words for Thought (Short Fiction Review) by A.C. Wise (5/15) - [Book Review of One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/book-review-one-level-down-by-mary-g-thompson?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Leah Ning) - [Book Review of A Palace Near the Wind](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/book-review-a-palace-near-the-wind-by-ai-jiang?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang (Leah Ning) - [Author Ai Jiang](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-author-ai-jiang?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Marissa van Uden) - Author Francis Bass (Marissa van Uden) (5/8) - [Artist Yorgos Cotronis](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/interview-with-artist-yorgos-cotronis?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Bradley Powers) --- ## [*Analog Science Fact and Fiction*](https://analogsf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2025, *Vol. XCV*) Subscribe [here](https://analogsf.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "Bluebeard Womb" by M.G. Wills (Novella) - "Isolate" by Tom R. Pike (Novelette) - "And So Greenpeace Invented the Death Ray..." by C. Stuart Hardwick (Novelette) - "The Scientist's Book of the Dead" by Gregor Hartmann (Novelette) - "Interconnections and Porous Boundaries" by Lance Robinson (Novelette) - "The Robot and the Winding Woods" by Brenda Cooper (Short story) - "Outside of the Robles Line" by Raymund Eich (Short story) - "Retail is Dying" by David Lee Zweifler & Ronan Zweifler (Short story) - "Groundling" by Shane Tourtellotte (Short story) - "North American Union V. Exergy-Petroline Corporation" by Tiffany Fritz (Short story) - "Short Selling the Statistical Life" by C.H. Irons (Short story) - "Momentum Exchange" by Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt (Short story) - "Mnemonomie" by Mark W. Tiedemann (Short story) - "Methods of Remediation in Nearshore Ecologies" by Joanne Rixon - "Siegfried Howls Against the Void" by Erik Johnson (Short story) - "The Iceberg" by Michael Capobianco (Short story) - "Amtech Deep Sea Institute Thanks You For Your Donation" by Kelsey Hutton (Flash fiction) - "The Shape of Care" by Lynne Sargent (Flash fiction) - First Contact, Already Seen" by Howard V. Hendrix (Flash fiction) - "Data Corrupted" by Bruce Boston (Poetry) - "Homecoming" by Brian Hugenbruch (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - The Day Seems as Long as a Year by Kevin Walsh - Guest Editorial: Our Lost Earth Days by Howard V. Hendrix - The Alternative View, John G. Cramer - Guest Alternative View by Richard A. Lovett - The Reference Library by Sean CW Korsgaard - Brass Tacks --- ## [*Asimov's Science Fiction*](https://asimovs.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May/June 2025, Vol. 49) Subscribe [here](https://asimovs.com/order-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "The Hunt for Lemuria 7" by Allen M. Steele (Novella) - "Quantum Ghosts (Part II)" by Nancy Kress (Novella) - "The Passage" by John Richard Trtek (Novella) - "The Fight Goes On" by Harry Turtledove (Novelette) - "The Tin Man’s Ghost" by Ray Nayler (Novelette) - "Trial by Harry" by Michael Libling (Novelette) - "In the Forest of Mechanical Trees" by Steve Rasnic Tem (Short story) - "The Humming of Tamed Dragons" by A.M. Dellamonica (Short story) - "Woolly" by Carrie Vaughn (Short story) - "Baggus Plasticus" by Ciarán Parkes (Poetry) - "Introducing My Friends to My Dad" by Chiwenite Onyekwelu (Poetry) - "Stellarium" by Stuart Greenhouse (Poetry) - "Micro Circuit" by Sai Liuko (Poetry) - "Train" by David Rogers (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - Guest Editorial: The Writes of Spring by Rick Wilber - Reflections: The Other Schliemann by Robert Silverberg - On the Net: Moonshots by James Patrick Kelly - Thought Experiment: Crime and Punishment in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by Kelly Lagor - On Books by Kelly Jennings --- ## [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025, Issue #431) Subscribe [here](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Messengers of Despair](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-messengers-of-despair/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jordan Kurella - "[The Tale of How You Were Born](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-tale-of-how-you-were-born/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Eleanor Elizabeth Fog --- ## [*Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(May 2025, Issue 224) Subscribe [here](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Brainstem Disco, 2191](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Angela Liu - "[The Library of the Apocalypse](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/mehrotra%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Rati Mehrotra - "[We, the Fleet](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singer%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Alex T. Singer - "[Descent](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/talabi%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Wole Talabi - "[Oh Time Thy Pyramids](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/leblanc%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ann LeBlanc - "[Proxima One](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/reuven%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Caryanna Reuven, translated by Sue Burke - "[Yarn Theory](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vibbert%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Marie Vibbert ### Nonfiction - [Symbiosis and Holobionts, or Life Is a Manifold](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dewinter%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gunnar De Winter - [Dialogue Only: A Conversation with Jane Espenson](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/espenson%5Finterview?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Inside the Science Fiction Studio: A Conversation with David Barr Kirtley](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kirtley%5Finterview?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg - [Editor's Desk: From Unusual Places](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F05%5F25?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neil Clarke --- ## [*The Dark*](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025, Issue 120) Subscribe [here](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/support-us/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Blunt Teeth](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/blunt-teeth/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMargaret Ronald - "[One Will Grow to Eat the Other](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/one-will-grow-to-eat-the-other/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMichael Kelly - "[Apostasy in Fruit](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/apostasy-in-fruit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byMoustapha Mbacké Diop - "[Suddenly My House Became a Tree of Sores](https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/suddenly-my-house-became-a-tree-of-sores/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" byGemma Files --- ## [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Spring 2025, Issue 38) Subscribe [here](https://www.patreon.com/the%5Fdeadlands?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Treatise of the Lyric on the State of Things](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/treatise/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Justin Cruzana (poetry; 4/21) - "[Highway 1, Past Hope](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/highway-1-past-hope/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Maria Haskins (fiction; 4/24) - "[Soul Shepherds](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/soul-shepherds/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Joshua Lim (fiction; 4/28) - "[Whalesong](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/whalesong/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Guan Un (fiction; 5/1) - "[After the Storm](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/after-the-storm/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ishita Basu Mallik (poetry, 5/5) - "[John](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/john/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Penelope K. Parker (nonfiction, 5/8) - "[The Twelve Deaths of You](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/twelve-deaths-of-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by C. J. Subko (fiction; 5/12) - "[Flesh Ghosts](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/flesh-ghosts/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Andrew Kozma (poetry; 5/15) - "[Penny For Them](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/penny-for-them/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Die Booth (fiction; 5/19) - "[The Wanderer](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/the-wanderer/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by C. T. Muchemwa (fiction; 5/22) - "[Fractionated Doses Don’t Quench the Thirst of Those Who Knew the Whole](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/issue-38/fractionated-doses/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Le Werner (fiction; 5/26) - "Interrogation of Saint Winifred" by Caroline Shea (poetry; 5/29) --- ## [*Flash Fiction Online*](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) Donate [here](https://weightlessbooks.com/flash-fiction-online-12-month-subscription/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Robot, Changeling, Ghost](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/robot-changeling-ghost/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Avra Margariti - "[Entropy in a Fruit Bowl](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/entropy-in-a-fruit-bowl/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nicole Lynn - "[Eight Legs of the Mother Hunted](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/eight-legs-of-the-mother-hunted/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Brandon Case - "[To Be a Woman Is to Be Without a Name](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/to-be-a-woman-is-to-be-without-a-name/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chidera Solomon Anikpe - "[Transubstantiation](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/transubstantiation/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sam W. Pisciotta - "[Yes, No, Goodbye](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/yes-no-goodbye/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by LeeAnn Perry ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: Grandmas All the Way Down](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/editorial-grandmas-all-the-way-down/?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ## [*Future Tense Fiction*](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) ### Fiction - "[All That Burns Unseen](https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/fiction-archives-all-that-burns-unseen-premee-mohamed/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Premee Mohamed ### Nonfiction - "[Firefighting Chemicals Are Dangerous for the Environment. Can That Change?](https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/firefighting-foam-chemicals-wildfires-pfas.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Meg Duff --- ## [*GigaNotoSaurus*](https://giganotosaurus.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)(May 2025) ### Fiction - "[Shadow Jack](https://giganotosaurus.org/2025/05/01/shadow-jack/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by CL Hellisen --- ## [*Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025, Issue 180) Subscribe [here](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Rthing It Up: An Oral History](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/rthing-it-up-an-oral-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gene Doucette (science fiction, 5/8) - "[Shadows on the Pavement](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/shadows-on-the-pavement/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R. P. Sand (fantasy, 5/8) - "[The Temporal Displacement of the Graves](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-temporal-displacement-of-the-graves/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Russell Nichols (science fiction, 5/15) - "[The Price of Manners](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-price-of-manners/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Martin Cahill (fantasy, 5/15) - "[Where Are They Now?](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/where-are-they-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Meg Elison (science fiction, 5/22) - "[Through the Machine](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/through-the-machine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by P.A. Cornell (fantasy, 5/29) - "[The Meaning We Seek](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-meaning-we-seek/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nancy Kress (science fiction, 5/29) - "[Ninnagan Says Remember](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ninnagan-says-remember/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jonathan Olfert (fantasy, 5/29) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: May 2025](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/editorial-may-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Joseph Adams (5/8) - [Author Spotlight: R. P. Sand](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-r-p-sand/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mayookh Barua (5/8) - [Author Spotlight: Martin Cahill](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-martin-cahill-4/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mayookh Barua - [Book Review: I Want That Twink Obliterated! by Trip Galey, Robert Berg & C.L. McCartney, eds.](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-i-want-that-twink-obliterated-by-trip-galey-robert-berg-c-l-mccartney-eds/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arley Sorg (5/15) - [Author Spotlight: P.A. Cornell](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-p-a-cornell/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoebe Barton (5/22) - [Book Review: Esperance by Adam Oyebanji](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-esperance-by-adam-oyebanji/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa A Watkins (5/22) - [Author Spotlight: Jonathan Olfert](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight/author-spotlight-jonathan-olfert-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Puncekar (5/29) - [Book review: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-of-monsters-and-mainframes-by-barbara-truelove/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kluwe (5/29) --- ## [*Nightmare Magazine*](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025, Issue 152) Subscribe [here](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/store/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Beak](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/beak/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ian Muneshwar (5/7) - "[Blood of the Idugan](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/blood-of-the-idugan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lilia Zhang (5/14) - "[Notes from the Graft Failure](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/notes-from-the-graft-failure/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by R. Diego Martinez (5/21) - "[Exorcism](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/podcast/exorcism/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Cassandra Khaw (poetry, 5/28) ### Nonfiction - [Editorial: May 2025](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/editorial/editorial-may-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wendy N. Wagner (5/7) - [Author Spotlight: Ian Muneshwar](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-ian-muneshwar-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Marcus (5/7) - [The H Word: Masks](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-masks/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Knost (5/14) - [Author Spotlight: R. Diego Martinez](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-r-diego-martinez/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Finch (5/21) - [Plumbing the Depths: Shapeshifter, She-Devil](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/plumbing-the-depths-shapeshifter-she-devil/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephanie M. Wytovich (5/28) --- ## [*Reactor*](https://reactormag.com/fictions/original-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) ### Fiction - "[Asymmetrical](https://reactormag.com/asymmetrical-garth-nix/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Garth Nix - "[The Nölmyna](https://reactormag.com/the-nolmyra-david-erik-nelson/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by David Erik Nelson - "[Squid Teeth](https://reactormag.com/squid-teeth-sarah-langan/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Sarah Langan --- ## [*The Sunday Morning Transport*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) ### Fiction - "[There Be Monsters](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/there-be-monsters?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Suzan Palumbo - "[Tell Me I’m Wonderful](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/tell-me-im-wonderful?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Kelly Robson - "[Phantom Agency](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/phantom-agency?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Chris East - "[For Ever and Ever](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/for-ever-and-ever?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mary Anne Mohanraj --- ## [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 5th-19th) Donate [here](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/donate/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[Everything We Lost in the Apocalypse](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/everything-we-lost-in-the-apocalypse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Mar Vincent - "[The Strangers Came](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-strangers-came/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Adam Ford (Poetry) - "[Come Back Wrong](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/come-back-wrong/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Izzy Wasserstein (Poetry) - "[Five Things You Can See](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/five-things-you-can-see/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Nadia Radovich - "[Instructions for Borrowing Time](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/instructions-for-borrowing-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Subham Rai (Poetry) - "[Stranger](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/stranger/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Vivian Estelle McMeekin (Poetry) - "[The Admiral Pub Pinball Repairman Repairs Witch Mountain](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-admiral-pub-pinball-repairman-repairs-witch-mountain/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by M.C. Childs (Poetry) - "[Rabbit Delusion with Desire Line](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/rabbit-delusion-with-desire-line/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Em Setzer (Poetry) ### Nonfiction - Monday: [Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction edited by Sonia Sulaiman](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/thyme-travellers-an-anthology-of-palestinian-science-fiction-edited-by-somia-suleiman/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Akankshya Abismruta - Wednesday: [Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/sky-full-of-elephants-by-cebo-campbell/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Vivian Wagner - Friday: [Don’t Let the Forest In by C. G. Drews](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dont-let-the-forest-in-by-c-g-drews/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cameron Miguel - Monday: [The West Passage by Jared Pechaček](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-west-passage-by-jared-pechacek/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Electra Pritchett - Wednesday: [The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-raven-scholar-by-antonia-hodgson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Bill Capossere - Friday: [The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-frozen-people-by-elly-griffiths/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sneha Pathak - Monday: [The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Walker Thompson](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-strange-case-of-jane-o-by-karen-walker-thompson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenny Hamilton - Wednesday: [You, From Below by Em J. Parsley](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/you-from-below-by-em-j-parsley/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Phoenix Scholz - Friday: [Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/exit-zero-by-marie-helene-bertino/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Anushree Nande --- ## [*Small Wonders Magazine*](https://smallwondersmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May 2025) Donate [here](https://smallwonders.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/e180f9a3-2123-4cf2-a934-0457f6fc4cd7?embed=1&logo=0&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - "[The Darkening](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-darkening/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Anne Wilkins - "[In the Café That Was Once a Detention Center](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/in-the-cafe-that-was-once-a-detention-center/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Lillian Tsay - "[A Transhuman Enters a Coffee Shop](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/a-transhuman-enters-a-coffee-shop/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Jon Hansen - "[Backdoor](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/backdoor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Gendel Gento - "[Lexicographer of Quiet Corners of the Mind](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/lexicographer-of-quiet-corners-of-the-mind/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bogi Takács - "[Sterling Analog Shut Down Kit: Quick Start Guide](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/sterling-analog-shut-down-kit/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Bret Nelson - "[The Warfighter](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-warfighter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Timothy Quinn - "[skeletal arms will sprout](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/skeletal-arms-will-sprout/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Isabel Cañas - "[The Scent of a Thousand Homeless Footsteps](https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/the-scent-of-a-thousand-homeless-footsteps/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Carol Scheina --- ## [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May-June, Issue 64) Subscribe [here](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/support-uncanny/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Fiction - “[Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/unfinished-architectures-of-the-human-fae-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Caroline M. Yoachim (5/6) - “[Barbershops of the Floating City](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/barbershops-of-the-floating-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (5/6) - “[Vivisection](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/vivisection/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Anjali Sachdeva (5/6) - “The Breaker of Mountains and Rivers” by Aliette de Bodard (6/3) - “Hi! I’m Claudia” by Delilah S. Dawson (6/3) - “All the World Is Fog” by DaVaun Sanders (6/3) - “Pale Serpent, Green Serpent” by Ewen Ma (5/6) - “[A Full Belly](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-full-belly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom (poetry, 5/6) - “[Letter to My Future Reader](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/letter-to-my-future-reader/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Margaret Rhee (poetry, 5/6) - “moth boy” by Praise Osawaru (poetry, 6/3) - “Post-apocalypse Love Poem” by Gospel Chinedu (poetry, 6/3) ### Nonfiction - “[The *Uncanny* Valley](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-uncanny-valley-59/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Michael Damian Thomas - “[Doing the Math](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/doing-the-math/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Kelly Sue DeConnick (5/6) - “[Get Lost! How Whereness Deepens Fiction](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/get-lost-how-whereness-deepens-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Alex Jennings (5/6) - “Fantasy Musical Theatre: *Sensawunda, Activate!*” by Tina Connolly (6/3) - “Disney Presents: Second Person POV: *Vloggers, Happy Haunts, and Short Stories that Use ‘You’*” by J.R. Dawson (6/3) - [Interview: Angela Liu](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-angela-liu-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Caroline M. Yoachim (5/6) - Interview: DaVaun Sanders by Caroline M. Yoachim (6/3) --- Read one of these stories? Let us know in the comments what you read and what you enjoyed! ### Here's the May 2025 book list URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-may-2025-star-wars-neuromancer-wells/ Last updated: 2025-05-01T21:00:33.000Z Warmer weather is finally reaching us here in Vermont, and I'm hoping that it'll stick (we've had a couple of false starts the last couple of weeks.) I'm looking forward to spending some time in the woods and in the back yard with one of the many books that I've had piled up, because sometimes, it's just too noisy in the house to get through a couple of pages. If you find a book on this list that catches your eye, please consider supporting **Transfer Orbit*! This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). At $40 a year, that's just $3.33 a month! \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-new-books-april-2025-wendig-okorafor-zahn/#/portal/support). \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. Thank you (and thanks to the couple of folks who signed up this week!): your support really does help keep this newsletter running smoothly. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) I have a programming note: I release these book lists monthly, and they'll soon be joined by another one (probably to some of the supporting subscribers or directly to the front page): I'm calling it Table of Contents, and it'll be a roundup of the TOCs from the larger short fiction publications. It'll be a stripped-down list (no descriptions of each store), but I'm hoping that it'll be a good way to direct folks to some of the publications producing some of the best SF/F short stories month to month. I'm still working out some of the kinks in how that'll work and look, so stay tuned. Okay, here are 18 new books to check out in the first half of May. (I've got another list that'll head your way in a couple of weeks.) As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. --- ### [*The Devils*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250880055?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe Abercrombie (May 13th) Joe Abercrombie takes readers to a fantastical medieval Europe where Brother Diaz has been recalled to the Sacred City, where he's expecting to be rewarded for his work. Upon arriving, he finds that he's been assigned to a new group: one made up of murders, magicians, and monsters, and sent out to protect their world against an invasion of Elves who're planning on devouring everyone they come across. Salley Berrow [writes in *Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-devils-by-joe-abercrombie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's a "fast, furious, and an absolutely rollicking good time." ### [*Use of Weapons*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/catalogsearch/result/index/?author=Iain+M.+Banks&q=iain+banks&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Iain M. Banks (May 6th) The Folio Society recently announced their Summer 2025 collection, which includes the next installment of Iain M. Banks' Culture series: *Use of Weapons*. This edition follows the prior two that Folio has released: [*Consider Phlebas*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Player of Games*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-player-of-games.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). I really like these editions: artist Daniel Taylor did a good job with the artwork, and I really loved re-reading *Consider Phlebas* not too long ago. I've been meaning to get to *Player of Games*, but I've had a lot of people tell me that *Use of Weapons* is even better. [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-125.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0832.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) ### [*Monk and Robot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250386335?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Becky Chambers (May 6th) Becky Chambers made a splash with her debut novel *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet* and its sequels, and her most recent novellas, *A Psalm for the Wild-Built* and *A Prayer for the Crown-Shy* were just as good: calm, quiet, optimistic, and wonderful meditations on the worlds we live in and what we need. They both follow a tea monk named Sibling Dex and a robot named Mosscap in a world called Panga where the robots became self-aware and vanished into nature. The two books are now being packaged together into a single volume, *Monk and Robot*, and it's a good opportunity to dig into them if you haven't already. [Becky Chambers on writing optimism and ending her Wayfarers seriesBecky Chambers won the inaugural Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and with her latest novel, The Galaxy and the Ground Within now out, she talks about building “wonderful and insignificant” stories about space.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-46.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0818.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/becky-chambers-wayfarers-galaxy-and-the-ground-within-sci-fi-interview/) ### [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (May 13th) The sixth installment of Matt Dinniman's popular *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series ([*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com)) has arrived in hardcover form. The series follows a Coast Guard veteran as he navigates his way through an Earth transformed into a series of sadistic game-like levels. In this installment, he's reached the 8th level, which involves capturing six monsters, who'll be turned into a card at the end. If they do it right, they'll have a good hand to go up against the level's boss, which has its own cards. If Carl wants to win this time, he needs to go up against a terrifying monster known as the Shi Maria, aka, the Bedlam Bride. Capturing her is just the first step. ### [*The Country Under Heaven*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781685891695?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Frederic S. Durbin (May 13th) In the years following the Civil War, a Union veteran grapples with his experiences during one of the conflict's most horrific battles at Antietam, and begins having visions. As he travels west, he begins to find himself in a stranger world than he expected, both in his mind and the wild west. As he journeys westward, he encounters others broken by the war as he tracks down strange creatures and lost children as he tries to find his own peace from the strange visions that haunt him. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781685891695?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "the cases are distinct and fascinating, and Durbin’s vivid prose makes both Vesper and the colorful cast that surrounds him come alive. This is Lovecraftian fiction at its finest." ### [*Atacama*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781957941165?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jendia Gammon (May 13th) A research team operating in the Atacama Desert in Chile turns up dead, and when researcher Fiona Hawthorne learns that her best friend, Alva, was one of them, she's devastated. Things turn screwy when her professor, Dr. Bingham gets a visit from members from a mysterious corporation, and it prompts her to begin looking into the team and how it met its fate, only to find that there's more than just corporate goons involved: there's a monster that's been hiding in plain sight. ### [*Neuromancer*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/neuromancer-william-gibson.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)by William Gibson (April 22nd) Another recent release from The Folio Society is a "core" edition of William Gibson's *Neuromancer*, which it released as a limited edition last summer. This edition doesn't have all of the fancy bells and whistles, but it does have the illustrations by Anna Mill and a nice slipcase. It's a little pricy at $125, but it's a nice-looking edition for someone wanting a little more than the regular trade edition. [The Folio Society goes cyberpunkThe Folio Society’s latest release is a slick limited edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-126.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-Copy-of-This-Place-in-History-Thumbnail.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neuromancer-william-gibson-folio-society-cyberpunk-book-sci-fi/) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316582704?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Overgrowth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250768230?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Mira Grant (May 6th) Since she was a child, Anastasia Miller has told everyone that she's really an alien disguised as a human, and that she had been left behind by her fellow extraterrestrials. As it turns out, she was telling the truth, and when humanity receives a signal from an alien civilization, they begin to realize that time is running out: Stasia's family is coming back, and they have more on their mind than picking up a forgotten kid. ### [*Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874431?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Justina Ireland (May 6th) *The Acolyte* might have been canceled after one season, but the *Star Wars* universe has lots of options for keeping the story going. This new novel is set prior to the events of the series, and follows Jedi Master Vernestra Rwoh as she's ordered back to Coruscant by the Jedi Council. She ignores their orders, opting to stay on course with her current mission, prompting the council to dispatch a messenger, Jedi Knight Indara, with a message: a Republic Senator is in trouble and requested her specifically. Vernestra is intrigued and returns to Coruscant, and is an odd match for the less-seasoned Indara. The two have to figure out how to work together to figure out what's going on with the Senator and an influx of weapons that could bring chaos to the Republic. ### [*A Spell for Change*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835410943?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicole Jarvis (May 6th) Kate Mayer can see the future, and despite having that foresight, there's nothing that she can do to prevent terrible things from happening. At the same time, Oliver Chadwick Jr, a veteran of the First World War has returned home and is haunted by the death of his best friend, while Nora Jo Barker yearns to be a witch like her mother and grandmother. These three end up coming together as a dark presence begins stalking their town, and they quickly realize that there are powers in the world stronger than their own, and that those who wield them don't always have good intentions. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fa-spell-for-change-1814661&ref=andrewliptak.com) "Jarvis offers a heftier version of Paul Cornell’s “Witches of Lychford” series, exploring witchcraft in the United States similarly to Ami McKay’s *The Witches of New York* or Alix E. Harrow’s The *Once and Future Witches*." ### [*Anji Kills a King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250369246?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Evan Leikam (May 13th) In this debut fantasy, a castle servant named Anji takes advantage of an opportunity to kill her hated king, and ends up going on the run. After a bounty is put on her head, she's pursued by mercenaries: members of a group called the Menagerie, who use magical animal-shaped masks that gives them powers. She's discovered by a swordswoman named Hawk, who ends up keeping her alive, if anything, to keep the reward for herself. The two form a fragile alliance that might have greater repercussions for the kingdom down the road. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/anji-kills-a-king-1813811?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Leikam’s grim, yet often charming debut won’t let readers escape its riveting pages." ### [*Sestia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982167950?ref=andrewliptak.com) by G.R. Macallister (May 13th) G.R. Macallister brings her *The Five Queendoms* trilogy (preceded by [*Scorpica*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982167905?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Arca*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982167936?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to a close with *Sestia*. A matriarchal society rules the world, and a centuries-long peace has broken down after no girls have been born for decade. A fragile peace has taken hold across the Five Queendoms, but it's tenuous at best: an undead sorcerer has been working to make his return to try and unleash his evil forces. At the same time, other factions are trying to figure out their place in the world as they face off against lingering threats that threaten to topple everything they've worked for. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781982167950?ref=andrewliptak.com) "balancing character development and worldbuilding can be a difficult task, but Macallister handles it with ease." ### [*Metallic Realms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668058671?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lincoln Michel (May 13th) I really like meta books about books and storytelling, and this latest one from Lincoln Michel looks like it'll hit that sweet spot. It's about a writer named Michael Lincoln who's discovered that real life isn't like the stories he'd rather be writing with his writing group, Orb 4\. He – along with his friends and fellow writers Taras K. Castle, Castel Ocampo, Jane Noh Johnson, and Darya Azali – have been writing the Star Rot Chronicles, a collection of science fiction stories set in the Metallic Realms. They've gone unpublished, and through in-story excerpts and annotations, Lincoln delves into the stories and relationships of the group as the line between the real world and the fictional one they created begin to blur. [Writing for *Mythaxis Magazine,* Mattia Ravasisays](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel-review.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) *"Metallic Realms* is a brilliant enigma, a novel in layers that works as an ode to worldbuilding and imagination and, at the same time, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing oneself in one’s fantasies." ### [*Anima Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062434159?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Moore (May 13th) In 1911 in Vienna, artist Gustav Klimt spotted the body of a naked women in Danube canal and sketches the scene before calling the police. The woman suddenly awakens, and she fishes her out of the water – she can't remember who she is or how she ended up in the canal, and he calls her Judith and decides to help her figure out her identity. With some help from some now famous psychologists, Judith begins to remember some things: she had visited the underworld, been trapped in the arctic, and was locked in a crate by a scientist named Victor Frankenstein, and visiting the Underworld. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/anima-rising-1814689?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This is a wild adventure through history, art, and literature for Moore’s many fans and those who enjoy historical fiction with a side of fantasy and wry humor." ### [*Requiem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589544?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Palisano (May 13th) Eden is a moon-sized satellite that serves as a cemetery for Earth's dead. A member of its crew, Ava, has to take on an entity that's trying to claw back the souls of the dead who're interred there, including her lover, Roland. Amongst Ava's crew is a musician who's tasked with writing a requiem, and they have to work against time before they're all driven mad. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781787589544?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Palisano’s evocative prose makes the setting both eerie and enthralling." ### [*The Incandescent*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250835017?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emily Tesh (May 13th) Doctor Walden oversees a magical school in England, and deals with all the mundane issues that come with it: meetings, teaching, and ensuring that the school's boundaries are able to keep out demons. The demons are relentless, but she loves her job, despite the heavy responsibility that comes with it. But when a crisis emerges, Walden will have to confront the demons of her own in order to save everyone. The book earned a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250835017?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Publishers Weekly*, which says by "focusing on the administrators is a fresh entryway into a popular genre, and “awful nerd with a superiority complex” Walden makes for a fascinating and often humorous narrator." ### [*The Emilie Adventures: Emilie and the Hollow World & Emilie and the Sky World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250873149?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Martha Wells (May 13th) Just ahead of the release of [*Murderbot* on AppleTV+](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-apple-tv-martha-wells-sci-fi-streaming/), Martha Wells has a new book coming out: two of her steampunk novels, *Emilie and the Hollow World* and *Emilie and the Sky World,* originally published in 2013 and 2014, now in omnibus form! ### [*Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357342?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Neon Yang (May 6th) A masked guildknight named Yeva killed her first dragon at the age of 13, and when her talents were recognized, she was sent off to the imperial capitol to train as a dragon slayer. She rose through the ranks to become a legendary hunter, but despite those accomplishments, has never felt at ease with the journey that her life has taken. When she heads off to a remote kingdom called Quanbao, which is rumored to worship dragons, she's welcomed by the kingdom's queen, Lady Sookhee, she begins to fall for her, and has to decide to follow her purpose, or her heart. ### Polygon has been sold to Valnet URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/polygon-vox-media-valnet-journalism-writing/ Last updated: 2025-05-01T18:31:54.000Z The state of gaming journalism is in a dismal state at the moment, and there's been a lot of chatter about the state of the industry amongst the ranks of current and former journalists working in this space. Another shoe just dropped today (via [*Kotaku*](https://kotaku.com/polygon-sold-vox-media-valnet-layoffs-digital-gaming-1851778655?ref=andrewliptak.com)): Vox Media [has sold](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250501630767/en/Valnet-Acquires-Premium-Gaming-Publication-Polygon-from-Vox-Media?ref=andrewliptak.com) its gaming and entertainment site, *Polygon*, to Valnet, owner of such sites as *Screen Rant, Collider, CBR, Game Rant*, and a whole bunch of others. This is a distressing development, one that hits home for me: I worked for Vox Media's tech site *The Verge*, under *Polygon* co-founder Chris Plante, and knew and worked closely with a number of the writers who were currently at the site, and who have been laid off. When I left *The Verge*, Plante and the editors who worked there threw me a lifeline by letting me contribute to the site, where I wrote a number of pieces that I'm really proud of, like [Disney's refusal to pay some of its tie-in writers](https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/16/22166064/star-wars-alien-novelization-disney-royalties-sfwa-alan-dean-foster?ref=andrewliptak.com), [how cosplayer culture helped inspire *The Mandalorian*](https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/4/23/21227476/star-wars-the-mandalorian-clone-wars-cosplay-timeline-boba-fett-mask-signet-costume?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [how the war on terror crept into the look and feel of *Halo*](https://www.polygon.com/22775372/halo-weapons-armor-history-military-influence-war-on-terror?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* interviews with folks like [Timothy Zahn](https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/9/3/21408128/star-wars-books-thrawn-ascendency-chaos-rising-timothy-zahn-interview-thrawn-trilogy?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Mike Mignola](https://www.polygon.com/22839499/mike-mignola-art-hellboy-radio-spaceman?ref=andrewliptak.com), and nerdy explainers about everything from [Larry Niven's *Ringworld*](https://www.polygon.com/22903093/book-of-boba-fett-halo-ringworld-space-station?ref=andrewliptak.com)to [Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*](https://www.polygon.com/22691724/foundation-apple-tv-robot-lady-asimov-demerzel-three-laws?ref=andrewliptak.com) to [clone troopers](https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/3/14/21179020/star-wars-clone-wars-rex-episodes-trooper-stories-expanded-universe?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm angry and sad about this. The gaming industry is *massive*, but outlets are increasingly ignoring or cutting down on covering it. *The Washington Post* [closed down its gaming vertical *Launcher* in 2023](https://www.ign.com/articles/washington-post-is-closing-launcher-its-highly-regarded-video-game-website?ref=andrewliptak.com), Vice Media [shut down](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/vice-shutting-down-waypoint?ref=andrewliptak.com) *Waypoint* the same year,and [GameStop shuttered *Game Informer* in 2024](https://kotaku.com/game-informer-gamestop-meme-stock-gme-last-issue-1851611973?ref=andrewliptak.com). There have been some bright points: [*Game Informer*](https://www.gameinformer.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) was [recently brought back](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/game-informer-returns-after-being-shut-down-by-gamestop?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the dead, Walmart [recently launched](https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/17/24323309/walmart-restart-run-game-informer-ziff-davis-buyouts?ref=andrewliptak.com) [*Restart*](https://www.restart.run/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and former *Kotaku* staffers (that site itself going through a ton of cuts) launched an excellent site, [*Aftermath*](https://aftermath.site/?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Polygon* was a site that I'd never imagine getting cut from Vox's lineup, and what really gets me here is that Vox sold off the site – one with a really strong masthead with committed and curious writers – to Valnet, whose portfolio is made up of sites that churn out an endless stream of click-bait garbage. The site was recently the [subject of an investigation by *TheWrap*](https://www.thewrap.com/valnet-labor-lawsuit-hassan-youssef-digital-media-sweat-shop/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which reported on the working conditions and pay: > When Valnet takes over a fan site, the playbook is well established: employees are replaced by contractors, compensation plummets and writers who complain land on a blacklist that blocks them from working for Valnet sites altogether. Given that a ton of writers that I respect were just laid off, I have to imagine that that's what's going to happen with *Polygon* now is that its interesting, well-researched (and infused with a good sense of journalistic ethics) explainers, reviews, and commentaries will be replaced with more SEO clickbait. It's a damn shame, because it means a lot of talented writers are now out of work and a site that did a lot of good coverage probably won't be any longer. ### Watching from all angles URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-04-30T18:40:23.000Z I enjoy John Scalzi's books for a couple of reasons. The first is that he's a generally entertaining writer with some fun stories and characters, but something that I've begun to appreciate more in recent years is his willingness to experiment with a story's form. In [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765369550?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com), he broke away from the conventional form of a novel by telling a story in a series of discrete chapters, sort of like a season of television. His latest novel, [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com)is another exercise in unconventional form*.* Across thirty-ish chapters, he plays out a ridiculous premise: what happens when the Moon turns to cheese? The result is a fascinating experiment that captures a far-reaching story in an interesting way. While not every chapter lands, it's a fascinating journey that's fun and breezy, while also carrying a heavier message that has quite a bit to say about our current moment in time. [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-119.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-4.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) This story kicks offwhen workers at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio notice that their lunar samples have gone missing and have apparently been replaced by ... something. NASA scientists are also quick to discover that their samples have been swapped out, while people who happen to be outside looking up at the night sky notice that the Moon appears to be a bit bigger and brighter. In a White House briefing, the president's advisors note that mirrors placed on the Moon for experiments are now showing that the surface is closer to Earth, and that everyone's at a loss for what's happening. The Moon's mass is the same, but it's now made up of a substance that everyone is reluctant to say out loud: cheese. In the chapters that follow, Scalzi does something a little different. Rather than follow a handful of characters, he zooms the lens out, opting to switch perspectives chapter to chapter. There are a handful of characters that we follow every couple of chapters: some folks in the American Midwest and New York City who try and make sense of the world around them, a wealthy private space magnate (Elon Musk-with-the-serial-numbers scratched off) who leverages his company's assets and takes an unauthorized and ill-advised jaunt up to the Moon, and a pair of feuding siblings who own rival cheese shops across the town square from one another. It's a zany kaleidoscope of perspectives as the revelation turns from quirky to apocalyptic. The Moon might have transformed in an instant, but once it does so, it begins to break down, jettisoning water as it contracts and squishes down under its own mass, blowing massive chunks into space that everyone soon realizes will come down to Earth in a string of impacts that'll be comparable to the asteroid that touched down 66 million years ago to deliver a killing blow to the dinosaurs. This is where I really appreciated this book's unconventional structure. As a narrative device, a book – and especially with science fiction – often frames an incident through a narrow lens. One – or a handful – of characters are tasked with facing a situation that might have an impact that extend far beyond their lives. A regular person getting caught up in global events is the stuff of a lot of science fiction storytelling, for good reason. It's an ideal device that an author can use to hook a reader by shoving an average Joe into the action and seeing how they react. Most of us aren't those exceptional superheroes or experts that make for good competency stories. But even an everybody character is one singular vision of a larger event. I've been listening to a new edition of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers recently, and we see Johnny Rico contend with an alien attack that destroys his home and his time in the Mobile Infantry. That's one *tiny* story in an event that encompasses millions of people, and thinking about how any of those other stories might play out in very different ways if the spotlight landed on them. Earlier this year, I read [*Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/life-became-very-blurry-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-in-vermont/1443?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), part of a larger project that we released at my day job at the Vermont Historical Society. I've been thinking a lot about it since reading it, in part due to something that our editor, Garrett M. Graff [said in an interview I conducted](https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/): > One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time. He uses 9/11 and D-Day as an example: we know what happened in broad strokes in each instance, because we have the advantage of hindsight and years of removal from that time. What an oral history does is allow the author convey "the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time." With that structure, Scalzi takes a monumental event and sprinkles it out through a wide swatch of the US population. We see a reporter from *The New York Times* interview characters in the Midwest about their reactions, follow a member of a religious community see the impact on the people in her congregation, some Hollywood executives take pitches for stories, scientists and authors try and figure out and explain to the public what's going on, and so forth. The result is a month-long window into a nation's reaction – and Scalzi keeps things pretty close to home for this one – to this inexplicable event that forces everyone to come to terms with our limited existence on Earth. Those reactions are from a whole range of people: the typical Midwestern voter to the coastal elites to knowledgeable experts who're all working through their respective fears and uncertainties. In doing so, Scalzi paints a compelling picture for how we collectively deal with uncertainty when faced with an improbable situation like the Moon turning to cheese. In his novel [*The Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com), Scalzi made an interesting choice: he specifically set it during the COVID-19 pandemic. While that doesn't play the biggest of roles in the story, it was one of those rare works where a creator planted a flag in the ground and acknowledged the existence of this tumultuous time in the world's history. COVID only gets a couple of mentions here, but in many ways, this is a book about the pandemic: how does society deal with this this terrifying, insurmountable event that completely upends society? Scalzi closes out the book with a couple of entries that jump forward decades and centuries as the cultural memory of this transformation ebbs: people could that the Moon had changed, but as time passes, people begin to doubt those experiences and memories, chalking it up to mass hysteria and conspiracy as time goes on, much like we're seeing now. Like the codas in his novel [*Redshirts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com), these chapters helps give this silly story a bit of deceptive narrative heft for the reader to ponder. *When the Moon Hits Your Eye* allows Scalzi do to what he does best: take a comical or dramatic situation and have a whole bunch of average characters try and make sense of it – usually by talking and explaining their way through it. His characters are snarky, scared, rational, melodramatic, and egotistical and do everything from scream at the Moon to hijack a rocket to try and land on it. The Moon turning to cheese is a bit of a ridiculous premise, but through this narrative framing and this array of characters, it's a book that proves to be a fascinating mirror of the chaotic world that we're now dealing with – one that I'm not too sure is really all that much more ridiculous than the headlines that flash across my screen every day. I really like taking the time to think about a book that I've read and what it means and to jot down a review that goes beyond "this book is good and you should read it." If you found this piece interesting, please consider supporting subscriber to help keep this newsletter going. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### Philip Pullman announces The Rose Field URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials-rose-field-book-of-dust/ Last updated: 2025-04-29T13:55:25.000Z One of the best works of fantasy literature in recent decades is Philip Pullman's superb trilogy *His Dark Materials*. Made up of [*The Golden Compass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418320?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Subtle Knife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418320?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Amber Spyglass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780440418566?ref=andrewliptak.com), they're an epic story that follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua, who lives in an alternate Oxford that's ruled by a powerful religious order known as the Magisterium. In the first novel, one of her friends, Roger, is kidnapped, and when Lyra heads off to find out what happened to him, she finds that the Magisterium has been conducting some horrifying experiments around a particle it calls Dust. Dust is an elementary particle that leads to consciousness, but is believed by the organization to be the cause of sin. Aided by a truth-telling device called an alethiometer, Lyra sets off for the arctic and aided by witches, armored polar bears, and explorers, discovers that the plot spans entire worlds, and over the next couple of books, ended up travelling all over the place. [A Journey into the History of Philip Pullman’s His Dark MaterialsA journey into the history of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-150.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8877-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-pullman-golden-compass-his-dark-materials-hbo/) If you haven't read the novels, I'm probably underselling them a bit, but I found them to be electrifying reads with incredible depth and thought behind them (at a time when *Harry Potter* reigned supreme in bookstores, these far out-class them.) The first book was adapted as a film in 2007 (it's fine, but doesn't live up to the books), while HBO adapted the entire trilogy as His Dark Materials between 2019 and 2022\. After the trilogy came to an end, Pullman noted in 2005 that he had begun working on another book set in the same world, *The Book of Dust.* The story ended up taking a lot longer to tell, and it wasn't [until 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14620038/philip-pullman-his-dark-materials-the-book-of-dust-fantasy?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he announced that the story would come out – not as a single book, but as a new trilogy, with the first, [*La Belle Sauvage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553510744?ref=andrewliptak.com) (set prior to the events of *The Golden Compass*), hitting stores that fall. The next, [*The Secret Commonwealth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553510706?ref=andrewliptak.com), was published in 2019\. Now, Pullman [has announced](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/philip-pullman-the-rose-field-lyra-final-story-his-dark-materials-book-of-dust?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the final installment is coming this fall – 20 years after first announcing the the story, and 30 years after he began the entire series. This book will be titled *The Rose Fields*, and it's due out on October 23rd. Here's the book's description from Waterstone's: > When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra. > When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra. > In *The Rose Field*, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer. All around them, the world is aflame – made terrifying by fear, power and greed. > As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers – on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination – so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear. I was a bit [lukewarm on the first book](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/25/16640892/book-of-dust-la-belle-sauvage-philip-pullman-fantasy-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [the second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-secret-commonwealth-bn-scifi-and-a-gift-guide/) when I read them – I don't know that they really lived up to what he came up with in those first three books, but I've often wondered if the story as a whole will click into place when you can see the entire thing. I'm looking forward to finding out when this new, final installment hits this fall. ### Galactic war crimes URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-war-crimes-empire-nazi-germany-wwii/ Last updated: 2025-04-25T02:34:33.000Z *Andor* is back for its second season, and it's off to a pretty interesting start as it looks at the formation of the rebellion against the Empire as we barrel towards he events of *Rogue One* over the next couple of weeks. This season will play out in a quartet of three-episode arcs, each taking place in the years between Season 1 and *Rogue One*. In these episodes, we follow Cassian Andor as he steals an experimental TIE Fighter from a secure facility and ends up in the midst of some squabbling rebels, Mon Mothma as she contends with her daughter's politically expedient marriage, and Bix and Brasso after they escaped Imperial custody on Ferrix, hiding out as itinerant mechanics on the farming planet Mina-Rau. Quick content warning before you go further: I'm going to mention a couple of things from the first couple of episodes of Season 2, which deals with sexual assault and the history of wartime violence, which is the subject of this piece. The local residents of a Mina-Rau community have sheltered the characters, and it isn't long before an Imperial cruiser arrives in orbit to begin some snap inspections. If discovered, the soldiers would likely find that Bix and Brasso are wanted after escaping Ferrix, and they're on pins and needles trying to figure out how to avoid them. When the soldiers eventually catch up to them, one officer approaches Bix in her home, and tries to rape her. She ends up escaping by hitting him on the head with a hammer, but their escape is costly. It's a striking, uncomfortable scene, and it's already generated some complaints from the usual quarters of bad-faith commentators, most notably a prominent YouTuber called Star Wars Theory who [complained](https://imgur.com/a/x3zFw8y?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the scene was "unnecessary," that there are other ways to show that the Empire is terrible, and that "Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it." The tweet is probably bait and while I hate reacting to takes from other folks online and give them the attention and oxygen that they need to survive, it's a subject that's worth examining, because it *is* a notable and worth including: a fascist Imperial force would absolutely do this, and historically, they have. *Star Wars* has from the beginning been about standing up to a fascist regime, one that was explicitly coded as Nazi Germany, right down to the uniforms. This particular scene in this first arc of episodes from *Andor* reminded me very, very much of how German forces operated in the territories they conquered. These Imperial teams are shown to operate with impunity, rolling into settlements for inspections, taking food, and committing crimes against the people there. This lines up with the actions of Nazi soldiers during the Second World War. [The art of the EmpireHow Nazi German inspired George Lucas’s Empire![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-142.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/462690804_2626769147525343_209862027992106802_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-galactic-empire-nazi-germany-uniforms-iconography/) This whole rant prompted me to dig up a talk I gave back in 2017 about the connections between the iconography of Nazi Germany and the Empire in Star Wars and republish it here. This is a complicated historical subject that still merits scholarship, but I did come across a paper by Fabrice Virgili[\[1\]](#fn1) "Rapes Committed by the German Army in France (1940–1944)" which provides some insight (in pretty horrific detail – use your judgement if you decide to read it) into the sexual violence that German military and soldiers used against civilians during the war. In general, rape was something that occurred sporadically early on, and which became more frequently in the war's later years. [\[2\]](#fn2) --- 1. A Director of Research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research, who specializes in gender relations during the First and Second World Wars. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Another good book that's worth checking out is Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945 by Margaret Collins Weitz, which I read for a class while in grad school. [↩︎](#fnref2) Virgili cites several cases of where German officers would sexually assault the women they encountered. These situations weren't about sexual gratification – he notes that German soldiers frequently relied on prostitution for that – but of power. He also notes that many incidents weren't necessarily what we'd think of when you think of an assault, pointing out that the power that the occupying forces wielded held certain implications. One French woman explaining "I met a German captain with whom I had intimate relations twice. Prior to this, he had hit me and although I slept with him, it was because I was worried about reprisals." In another instance, Virgili points out that German authorities *did* prosecute soldiers who committed violence against women in the field, a Luftwaffe gunner was sentenced to three years of forced labor for raping a 10-year-old shepherdess in October 1940, but points out that these efforts were used to portray their forces as behaving properly during occupation. As the war intensified in 1943 and 1944, those authorities relaxed their orders against resistance fighters: "in the current situation, measurements that are too severe cannot lead to punishment for those who carry them out," and Virgili points out that while there were situations where offending soldiers were reprimanded or even executed, "such severity was becoming increasingly rare." Speaking to [*The Hollywood Reporter*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/andor-star-wars-season-2-bix-rape-interview-1236191397/?ref=andrewliptak.com), *Andor*'s creator Tony Gilroy explained his thinking behind the scene. “I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having \[the story\] tip over,” > “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape. I mean armies and power throughout history \[have committed rape\]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy.” The Empire is an occupying force that uses incredible, overwhelming violence against its subjects across the galaxy. We've seen them use [superweapons to destroy planets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1xNRXROfA&ref=andrewliptak.com), use [genocidal tactics to destroy their enemies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3nuk8UI76M&ref=andrewliptak.com), use [torture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwgK3EqPYC4&ref=andrewliptak.com), [executions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dqF8ltX3xw&ref=andrewliptak.com), [civilian murders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qdoL1x77I&ref=andrewliptak.com), [child murder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBbQg8r8tdc&ref=andrewliptak.com), and [indiscriminate imprisonment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7J4wqxw9po&ref=andrewliptak.com): sexual violence is just another tool that they can utilize to demonstrate the power that they hold over the people they've conquered. There is a reason why the galaxy devolved into a brutal civil war, and *Andor* has been the first project that really shows that brutality up close. Militaries are [generally governed by rules and laws](https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/assets/files/other/law1%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com), telling their soldiers not to commit war crimes and to adhere to basic tenets of acceptable behavior, for a range of reasons – ensuring that their soldiers are treated humanely in the event that they're captured, and widespread atrocities can make an occupying's military's job all the more difficult without the cooperation of locals. But there are rules on the books and the realities of conduct on a battlefield: soldiers in every conflict known to man have committed crimes against enemy combatants and civilians. It doesn't matter if a chain of command wouldn't condone these crimes: they will still occur. As Virgili explained, if these types of attacks are found to help their cause, how they're treated within the chain of command can come down to individual discretion, ranging from a "hey, don't do that again," to execution. In the situation we see in *Andor*, rape and sexual assault is used by Imperial personnel as a coercive tactic on Mina-Rau. The officer in question knows that his victim is an illegal migrant, and understands that her presence is required to keep the farms operating and lays it out for her: if she cooperates and submits, she gets to stay. We also see the locals sheltering the characters from Ferrix (maybe) yield to the Imperial forces when the pressure mounts on them, painting a complicated picture of the situation and how even the threat of sexual violence against a population can be used as a tactic to yield results. These are things that have happened during real-world conflicts: soldiers using the power of their uniform and everything it represents to operate with impunity. War operates in broad strokes from overarching strategy and filters down to decision and actions made by individuals in the moment. It doesn't *matter* what the chain of command has as its policies: if you imbue people with power and authority of an oppressive government with few or no options for recourse against them, of course that power will be abused. Within the story's larger world, I imagine that the Republic and Imperial militaries would probably have a policy against assaulting and murdering civilians and children – even child combatants, but these rules didn't stop Darth Vader and the Clone Troopers from executing children during Order 66\. Rules on their own won't hold soldiers back from committing misconduct and war crimes: a military's judiciary structure and internal culture is what will hold them accountable, and that only works if it's used. If Imperial officers from the highest ranks can call a meeting where they casually discuss the destruction of a planet and its population, (as we see in another part of these episodes) will they really hold soldiers who sexually assault and rape civilians to account? The show and these episodes are showing that the Empire is fine with operating this way: in their eyes, whatever it takes to get the job done. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-143.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA-6.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) This is the point of *Star Wars*: it's an allegory for how unfettered power is a bad thing, using space wizards and plastic Nazis, and it's one reason why I was so taken with *Andor.* It's a serious take on the world that explained and showed precisely *why* fascist and oppressive force is so terrible. It drives home the point that the Empire is willing to use brutal tactics to achieve their ends, and as we lose our first-hand memory of the atrocities of the Second World War, it's an important thing to continue to examine, especially as the world appears to be sliding back into this territory. This is a series that does what good storytelling should do: challenge our perceptions of the world and give us insights into the one we live in. If these first episodes are anything to go by, the season is off to an interesting start. These are the types of pieces that I like digging into for readers: things that examine the intersection of science fiction and the real world, and what it all means. If you found this piece informative, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber: it helps keep the newsletter running. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) --- This is a lot of explanation and history chasing after an emotional response, but this is a story decision that's important to take some time to understand! *Star Wars* is a franchise that can accompany a lot, everything from animated shows aimed at preschoolers (*Young Jedi Adventures*) all the way up to more serious content (*Andor*). That's one of its strengths, and it's worth understanding how "Star Wars" isn't just one thing to one audience, and shouldn't be treated as such. I've written before about the fairly toxic environment that exists online for franchise fandoms and something that I'll note is that I'm taking this "complaint" at face value, because we live at a time when media literacy isn't great, and where anyone with a camera and microphone can game some social media algorithms for attention, clicks, and revenue. [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-144.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816-4.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) I think it's one thing to say that you don't want to see a scene like this in a franchise like *Star Wars*, and honestly, I'd agree: this was an unpleasant and uncomfortable scene to watch. But it's not the first time that we've seen sexual violence portrayed against female characters: Princess Leia's iconic metal bikini is one example. Twi'leks have an in-universe reputation for being victims of sex trafficking, and Ahsoka Tano was put up for auction as a child in *The Clone Wars.* I'd follow that up by saying that we've seen characters and the Empire do plenty of terrible things throughout the franchise – this feels like a weird, arbitrary line to draw in the sand. Scrounging around for justifications that these actions and this scene in *Andor* is out of place feels like an extended exercise in explaining to one's audience that it's another example of Disney's mishandling of the franchise. It plays into a long-running and tired narrative that serves only to rile up the usual brigade of bad-faithed commentators while misreading the purpose of the scene. While arguments such as this gives these bad-faith arguments some attention, they're worth highlighting because they have enormous followings. Military history is a topic that I've studied quite a bit – a school gave me a piece of paper saying so! – so it's especially frustrating to see this sort of ignorant crap floating around. It might be uncomfortable to watch, but like all history, it's especially important to understand. ### Fitting a round peg into a genre-sized hole URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/publishing-linda-nagata-elizabeth-bonesteel-science-fiction-writing/ Last updated: 2025-04-24T18:45:30.000Z One series of books that I really enjoyed when they first came out was Elizabeth Bonesteel's Central Corps novels ([*The Cold Between*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413659?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Remnants of Trust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413673?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Breach of Containment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062413680?ref=andrewliptak.com)), a space opera series that hit all of the right buttons for me: space organizations, spaceships, weird mysteries, and some compelling characters. The books came out between 2016 and 2017, and [while I liked them](https://www.andrewliptak.com/elizabeth-bonesteel-central-corps-trilogy-review/) and they seemed to have a lot of promise, the series never really took off: Bonesteel has written a handful of posts recently about her frustration with the publishing world, and why she's essentially thrown up her hands and opted to go the self-publishing route. [The Cold Between is a propulsive blend of mystery and space operaIn Elizabeth Bonesteel’s debut novel The Cold Between, a murder of a Central Corps military officer and the destruction of a starship a quarter century earlier are linked by a deep conspiracy that threatens to shake the intergalactic Central Gov to its foundations. As far as space opera mysteries![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-136.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1336-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-cold-between-elizabeth-bonesteel-science-fiction-book-review/) I've noticed an uncomfortable phenomenon recently. While assembling some lists on Bookshop.org for some of the earlier monthly book lists I publish here, I was surprised at how many of those books were coming up as not available, and appeared to be out of print – including some that had been launched with quite a bit of fanfare. You'd see them get a lot of attention, but just 2, 3, or 5 years later, it's harder to find them, and in some instances, it doesn't look like the authors have written anything since. There are a *lot* of factors that go into this. Said authors could be writing under a different name, had career / life changes, or something. And publishing *is* a business: if one particular book isn't selling, they'll cut their losses: the book might not be reprinted, and if it's part of a series, the follow-up novels might get smaller print runs. That's hard in an industry that's driven by personalities and personal connections. [In her latest post](https://lizmonsterwrites.com/2025/04/17/about-trade-publishing-part-3-marketing/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Bonesteel points to another issue: how mismatches in editors, agents, publishers, and authors can cause some considerable friction. She points to her debut novel, *The Cold Between* and how there were some efforts before the book was even published to try and pitch it to a certain audience: romance readers. The problem was: her book wasn't explicitly a romance. There was romance in it, but she'd envisioned it differently. > They played up the romantic elements of the plot. Which seemed fine at the time. I *loved* the romantic elements of the plot! But the marketing very quickly blurred, pushing the book toward romance reviewers who objected to the lack of a Happily Ever After for the romantic elements in question. It's been a while, but I remember romance being an element that the marketing highlighted. Here's part of the original press release: > *THE COLD BETWEEN is the start to a stellar military science-fiction series, with a hint of mystery and romance in the tradition of Lois McMaster Bujold.* > *Central Corps starship mechanic Elena Shaw doesn’t have time to grieve when her crewmate Danny is murdered during shore leave on the rich-but-lawless colony planet Volhynia. All evidence points to Treiko Zajec: former captain of one of the huge generation ships making up the mostly-benevolent outlaw tribe known as PSI, and Elena’s lover. But Elena knows Trey is innocent – he was with her when Danny was killed – and the cops are covering for the real killer.* Marketing, as she points out, "is about *setting reader expectations.* And if your publisher gets that wrong, the consequences can be dire." While her book got some decent reviews (mine included), the tenor changed when it hit the romance community and was trashed by a better-known author. As she notes: > But genre romance killed my career. My publisher looked wistfully at the buckets of money genre romance was making and decided to make my work an experiment. They thought they were being coy, using terms like “romantic elements,” which was fine until they started sending the book to romance reviewers. That had a huge impact on the rest of the series. There were those diminishing returns, and after the last book was released in 2017, she parted ways with her agent and wasn't contracted to continue the series with Harper Voyager. Last year, [she wrote about how difficult the entire experience was](https://lizmonsterwrites.com/2024/02/17/success/?ref=andrewliptak.com): > On a personal level it was *horrific*. It dismantled a part of my life that had been important to me since early childhood, a part that I needed to function properly in the world. I had to take the shattered mess and rebuild it. It’s going on seven years now, and what I’ve learned is that while I may build something new, I’ll never get that part of my life back. That field has been poisoned and salted. --- In another corner of the internet, Linda Nagata wrote on her blog that she recently [got the rights to her novel *The Red: First Light* and sequels back from Saga Press](https://hahvi.net/?p=8139&ref=andrewliptak.com), and provided an honest assessment of how they performed: not well. She originally self-published *The Red* in 2013: it was a military science fiction novel set in the nearish future, following a US Army Lieutenant James Shelley who starts to hear voices from an implant that he has. It turns out that it's an artificial intelligence that has some protective tendencies, and begins steering him in different directions. The book has the distinction of being the first self-published novel to earn a nomination for a Nebula Award – no small feat, considering that it was nominated alongside Neil Gaiman's *The Ocean at the End of the Lane*, Ann Leckie's *Ancillary Justice*, Helene Wecker's *The Golem and the Jinni,* and others. That nomination brought the book to the attention of Saga Press, which contracted Nagata to write two sequels, *The Trials* and *Going Dark*. [Mission CompleteDiscussing The Red Trilogy with Linda Nagata![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-137.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/nagata.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-linda-nagata-red-trilogy-interview/) Again, these books were fairly well received: I reviewed them for various places and interviewed Nagata, but as she pointed out, "sales never amounted to much." That's always boggled my mind: it's an outstanding novel, and it really deserves to be widely read. Publishers such as Orbit, Saga, and Tor have been on the lookout for breakout hits in the self-publishing world: look at the success of John Scalzi's [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com), Andy Weir's [*The Martian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553418026?ref=andrewliptak.com), or Matt Dinneman's [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com) series: these are books that were successful in self-published form that publishers were able to pick up and bring to a wider audience. "Me, my agent, and my editor, all thought this was going to be my breakout novel," Nagata wrote, but that didn't happen in this case: the Red series just never caught on. But I have to wonder if this was again how the books were pitched to readers and bookstores, with the complication of a prior, self-published edition floating around out there: the readers who had already picked up and nominated *The Red* had already read it. And while I'm a fan of near-future military science fiction, it's a tough genre: it's often thought of as a jingoistic and right-leaning genre (I disagree), and the traditional science fiction community doesn't seem to have a huge appetite for gritty technothrillers that really dig into the nature of warfare and artificial intelligence in the way these books do. --- The line that you can draw between these two books is that they were written and envisioned as one thing, and the publishers had trouble finding the right combination of people to pitch it to. *The Cold Between* was aimed at genre romance readers and it didn't land, while *The Red* and its sequels didn't find the right collection of technothriller/military fiction fans. These efforts are something that are generally invisible to readers. There's the adage that you only get one first impression, and I think that really holds true for books: if a publisher or author lays out a case for a book as being one genre or another, it does so with a whole bunch of signals: the body of critics that are pitched, the style and design of a cover, the title, language in the back-cover copy, and the blurbs from fellow authors, the way that the book is described and pitched to a bookstore. All of these things set a track for where the book ends up in the mind of the reader. I've had some experiences with this: my own book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com), is kind of hard to place. It's a history of the genre and cosplay, but it's also a book at fandom and technology. On the back cover descriptor, it's listed as "Social Sciences," and it's often stuck in a section where genre readers – *the folks who this book is designed to appeal to –* really aren't zooming over to when they enter a bookstore. You sort of have to know where to find it. Had it been placed in the section of Barnes & Noble alongside other books about movies and TV and entertainment, I have to imagine that it would have done a bit better. This isn't anyone's fault: I had an *excellent* publicist, Lucy Nalen, who did a great job drumming up interviews, reviews, and other media attention leading up to its release: it got mentions in *The New York Times* and *Washington Post*, which let me tell you, isn't easy. But it's the underlying structure of publishing and publicity that made this book a bit harder to get to the right combination of readers. Part of that issue, I think, is that readers are *very* easily swayed by those publicity efforts and don't realize it. Look at the books that most appeal to the traditional science fiction and fantasy fandom: these are readers who don't generally look outside of the catalogs put out by Tor, Orbit, Harper Voyager, Baen, etc.: those sales channels work really well, but the folks they're targeting for sales aren't generally going outside of those channels. I'm trying not to slam the idea of a genre here: it's a good guidepost for readers. But where we do run into problems are when they're immutable and a publisher is fighting to stick a square novel into a genre that it doesn't quite fit into, as in the case of *The Cold Between*. This does readers a disservice: they're sold a book that doesn't conform to their expectations, and that can impact sales and even an author's career. I had a conversation with an author friend of mine who noted that while her books had romantic elements in it, she was finding that she was starting to get stuck into the romantasy bucket. Her books were ones that would appeal to those readers broadly, but weren't the sex-drenched romps that really draws those readers in. I wrote about this a couple of years ago after a conversation I had with some folks on Twitter about Michael Crichton, and noted how difficult it was to get folks interested in books like K. Chess's [*Famous Men Who Never Lived*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781951142285?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)(I had a lot of people *yell* at me online for reviewing this book when it was released, and other folks screaming at me that they'd never forgive me for recommending Tom Sweterlitsch's *The Gone World*)or Charlotte McConaghy's [*Migrations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250204035?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). Samantha Harvey's [*Orbital*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780802163622?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a novel that's earned considerable critical acclaim (I'm reading it now and it's excellent), but it's had little-to-no attention from the readers who eat up this stuff. [Walled gardensFandom often has some significant blinders when it comes to adopting or authors and books![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-138.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0955-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-crichton-scifi-genre-fandom/) I don't know what the solution for that particular problem is there, other than to point out that I've found it mentally healthy to read widely and to recognize genre for what it is: a marketing category that happens to line up well with a canonical body of work. I've gotten to the point where I find splitting hairs about genre tiring ([one reason why I enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor's *Death of the Author*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/)), and ultimately, just not productive when thinking about what a story is trying to convey. But I do think that publishers need to take some time to really rethink how books are marketed to audiences – no small feat, given the volume that they have to [move month-to-month](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). Publicity departments often fall to a small group of employees who might be juggling a huge number of titles, all of which comes down to one-on-one chats or emails with a group of reviewers and critics. I just spent 2-3 months [launching and selling our COVID book in my day job](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-historical-society-covid-19-garrett-graff-book-cover/) and that entire process was exhausting! Because of the scale and volume, a lot of this comes down to sending out press releases to a broad audience and hoping that someone is picking up the phone. To be fair: this is an approach that works! Look at some of the excellent, dense, complicated books that have come out in recent months / years. Audiences do find these things. But there are lots of instances where books just aren't given the priority or attention, and have to rely on coasting along with a bit of hope and luck attached. As a business practice, that doesn't strike me as a good or productive method. I'm sure that there are also some ingrained habits and "this is how we do things" approaches and tactics, but I've often felt that the entire field is one where publishers should put more time and energy into experimenting and finding new ways to get their books before readers. I had a bunch of publicity meetings ahead of *Cosplay*'s release and presented a whole bunch of ideas to try, none of which were picked up, while I was essentially laughed out of a newsroom for the wild idea that a publisher *might* consider some ancillary things to accompany a book release, like prints of cover art or knickknacks to reward super/devoted fans and build up some sort of fan identity around them. I digress. --- What Bonesteel and Nagata's posts highlighted and reinforced for me is how publishing as a whole is designed to operate in big, broad swaths: take X number of books and figure out how to get them to Y audience via bookstores, reviewers, and influencers. That might work in a number of instances: an author's written a book that slots in nicely to a genre. But what these posts also highlight is that there are a lot of decisions that go into how these books are positioned, even as they're being written and edited, for the market. Does this particular character get changed around because an editor decides that it'll make the book fit better into this category? Or does the plot shift into a different direction because a particular audience found the book and that's what they're expecting? The logistics and machinery of the publishing industry has an impact on the content that it's creating, one that's at times highly responsive to audience feedback and commentary. There's a good part of that that makes me uncomfortable: I like to think of art as the distillation of an author's experiences, views, and creativity, and when you start to inject these other factors in from a commercial standpoint, you run the risk of diverging from that original vision. I think of fans and readers being led along for the ride, rather than dictating where they'd like to go. As both authors noted, there are plenty of options for them to jettison that entire framework. Nagata has been self-publishing her books for years, while Bonesteel has begun to do the same. Nearly a decade after she released her first Central Corps. novel, she's returning to the world with a new one: [*Condition of War*](https://www.amazon.com/Condition-War-Central-Corps-Dissolution-ebook/dp/B0F368YJMT/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=3TANUPE7IWH7F&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rwMF7wDm3NBVM9fs9F7ZuGiJHFuy6iA90YhEQO4e0IJojHnMOMXZfO%5F0BNBCk-Ra4Wzinw3V-X2-Eph-xqYEibdxl7%5FdU67D6YElSGSq609q4YX5awntrvIBwJC7xzef.ZgfcYfX6xgLFyiDB8PpEfekyjnK4TdzBrV2Z1As9-mw&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=elizabeth+bonesteel&qid=1745071741&sprefix=elizabeth+bonesteel%2Caps%2C155&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com), which is due out in June 2025\. Nagata hasn't continued her *Red* series, but she did self-publish an excellent military thriller in a similar vein back in 2017, [*The Last Good Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937197223?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and is now selling ebook copies of her series directly. ([*The Red: First Light*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0124PDSXO?&linkCode=sl1&tag=mip56-20&linkId=83a8b13889c23c91e0473be6ffaeba77&language=en%5FUS&ref%5F=as%5Fli%5Fss%5Ftl&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Trials*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015281J86?&linkCode=sl1&tag=mip56-20&linkId=2c0fecdc4b9d7e997dd8892ccca52ff4&language=en%5FUS&ref%5F=as%5Fli%5Fss%5Ftl&ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Dark*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017KXEWUS?&linkCode=sl1&tag=mip56-20&linkId=3778ac2cfa78f37d50bf12b0fffbc501&language=en%5FUS&ref%5F=as%5Fli%5Fss%5Ftl&ref=andrewliptak.com).) There's a tradeoff, but in each situation, it seems that they're comfortable with the switch. Hopefully, they'll have readers who'll follow them, and maybe find some new ones along the way. These are the types of pieces that I like digging into for readers: things that examine the intersection of science fiction and the real world, and what it all means. If you found this piece informative, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber: it helps keep the newsletter running. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### Trapped in the machine URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/black-mirror-uss-callister-harlan-ellison-ai-no-mouth-must-scream/ Last updated: 2025-04-24T18:45:44.000Z *Black Mirror* just returned to Netflix for its 7th season, and with it comes the first time the team behind it has continued the story of from another episode, "USS *Callister*." Rewatching the episode and this new one, "USS *Callister*: Into Infinity" prompted me to dig out the OG story of people trapped by a malevolent AI: Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." *Black Mirror* is a magnificent science fiction series. Created by Charlie Brooker, it debuted on the UK's Channel 4 in 2011\. It's an anthology series, where each episode stands on its own and explores our troubling relationships with technology. Some of the memorable episodes involve people being able to replay their memories, people stuck in dystopias, killer robots, people being resurrected with the help of artificial intelligence, dealing with the pitfalls of augmented reality, and so forth. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. \[Spoilers ahead for *USS Callister* and its sequel\] One of the best episodes is USS *Callister*, which opens with the crew of a cheery *Star Trek*\-like scenario where a crew deals with a sworn enemy. It seems fairly straight forward until the crew celebrates with a bit of over-the-top hero worship for their captain, Robert Daly (played by Jesse Plemons). As it turns out, Daly's a tech genius who helped create a computer game called Infinity, a massive, immersive online space opera game, and he's considered the office weirdo: he's obsessed with a classic space opera show called *Space Fleet* (*Black Mirror*'s version of *Star Trek*), while he's responsible for the company, he doesn't get a lot of respect from the folks who work for him. The horrifying twist soon arrives when a new employee Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) is warned about him and his eccentricities. Slighted, he collects her DNA and brings it home, where he's able to create a digital copy of her in a home-grown test build of the Infinity universe. The digital Nanette quickly finds that her fellow crew are fellow cloned versions of all the people who've slighted Robert, and he's brought them there to play out his fantasies of being respected while playing mission after mission in Space Fleet. Nanette eventually engineers an escape of sorts by blackmailing her real-world counterpart, leaving Daly in a coma with her and her fellow crew members escaping his private universe into the larger online game, killing him in the process. In this newly-released sequel, Nanette and her digital crew are now free to move around the larger *Infinity* universe, but they've found that they're at the mercy of the culture of gamers and game developers. They're strapped for cash and can't jump or get supplies, and as they hunt down and rob players for their in-game currency, they're finding just how sociopathic and horrifying people can be – while soon realizing that their only way to really escape and survive might be to journey to the heart of Infinity, only to find some troubling secrets about the nature of the game and how it came about. *USS Callister* is a phenomenal episode, and while *Into Infinity* isn't quite as good, they're both playing with some really interesting themes that science fiction and cyberpunk authors have played with for decades, including Harlan Ellison, whose story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is one of the genre's best – and most horrifying – stories. Published in the March 1967 issue of *IF: Worlds of Science Fiction*, Ellison introduces readers to a small group of tortured characters: Benny, Ellen, Gorrister, Nimdok, and Ted, who've been kept alive by a malevolent artificial intelligence after the conclusion of World War III. The rest of humanity has been destroyed, and the machine – AM – has kept these five around to toy with them, horrifically transforming them when they step out of line, sending them on torturous quests across hellish landscapes, and providing them with the barest minimum of resources to keep them going. Ellison really hammers home the surreal and horrific existence these characters endure through his setting and his language, and uses it as a parable for how badly technology can go off the rails. The inspiration isn't hard to parse. It was written at the height of the Cold War, where the US and USSR aimed plenty of nuclear weapons at one another and set up systems that would allow for an automated apocalypse if the right conditions arose. Those anxieties over nuclear apocalypse sparked plenty of stories, from Walter M. Miller Jr.'s *A Canticle for Leibowitz* to James Cameron's *Terminator* and Ellison's masterpiece. [Mushroom Clouds on the Future HorizonScience fiction was born in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-141.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_30decfbc-ca0e-46ac-b83e-4c320e2565a6_956x577.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mushroom-clouds-on-the-future-horizon-science-fiction-was-born-in-the-fires-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/) But what struck me about this story isn't the possibility of runaway nuclear war, but a striking version of a malevolent machine intelligence that reflects humanity's twisted ego and its capacity for cruelty. After all, if we make machines in our image, wouldn't some of those same traits and tendencies carry over, despite our best intentions? Brooker pulls these anxieties neatly into *USS Callister* and its sequel. If there's a throughline that runs through *Black Mirror*'s episodes, it's an examination of what we'll do with power when it's placed in our hands without many limits. Sometimes, that comes with horrifying social implications, like when two child murders have their minds wiped and are endlessly chased through a village over and over again, or when a military uses tech to force its soldiers to see their enemies as mutants, perpetuating a genocide. Here, the stakes are a little more personal: Robert gets to play god in this little pocket universe, torturing the people who slighted him in the real world. It's a horrific idea that runs hand in hand with Ellison's story, someone being given the absolute control to manipulate reality for their own pleasure, while the people trapped inside are forced to contend with it. Robert erases Nanette's face when she rejects his advances, transforms a couple of crew members into horrific aliens, jettisons someone's child out of an airlock (and keeps their DNA on file as leverage to ensure his cooperation) and endlessly toys with them for his own amusement. He's a sadistic child playing with toys. In the sequel, we learn that the reason Infinity is such a good game is that Robert himself was cloned and stuck in the game, and when the digital version of Nanette makes the trek to the center of Infinity to him, she finds that this earlier version of him can easily be tipped over into the same sadistic tendencies: "I'm a good guy" he says as he tries to clone her to be a companion against her will. Ellison's AM does something similar. It had evolved out of various weapons systems during the Cold War and wound up hating its makers, taking that hatred out on its subjects in horrifying ways: it transformed Benny into an ape-like creature and blinded him, while Ellen is sexually assaulted by the group over and over again, Ted is transformed into a horrific slug-like creature, and the others are tortured in their own ways, unable to die from the elements. Each of these stories shows how people – human, digital, or mechanical will do if given a free hand: horrific things. They might be able to rationalize it, as Robert does – he's lonely and needs someone to talk to – before eventually realizing that they don't need to justify their actions. They will just do whatever they want with nobody can stop them. It's a fitting bit of commentary in 2025. These are the types of pieces that I like digging into for readers: things that examine the intersection of science fiction and the real world, and what it all means. If you found this piece informative, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber: it helps keep the newsletter running. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) ### A familiar galaxy, far, far away URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/a-familiar-galaxy-far-far-away/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T19:00:53.000Z Celebration Japan is now over, and with it a whole bunch of news about the immediate future of the *Star Wars* franchise. I love these cons, and had some serious FOMO seeing friends and fellow cosplayers attending this year. The name is apt: online Star Wars fandom can be incredibly toxic, but every time I've gone, I've found it to be a positive, refreshing experience. The biggest news from the con came on the first night: a teaser trailer screener for attendees for the next theatrical film, *The Mandalorian & Grogu*, as well as an announcement for the film that'll follow it: *Star Wars: Starfighter*, word on the next big animated series, *Maul – Shadow Lord*, and news that the second season of *Ahsoka* will soon go into production. These projects will drop in 2026 and 2027, and when they do, they'll bring the franchise back to theaters for the first time since *The Rise of Skywalker* in December 2019\. With the con now over, I figured it was good moment to take stock of the next couple of years for the franchise. It looks like we're in for an era of comfortable, risk-adverse projects. --- ### *The Mandalorian & Grogu* The big expected news from Celebration was an update on *The Mandalorian and Grogu*, which is set to hit theaters on May 22nd, 2026\. Lucasfilm screened a teaser trailer for attendees, featuring an action sequence in which Din Djarin took out the crew of an AT-AT Walker on an ice planet, some clips of Sigourney Weaver, and a bit more. It hasn't been released online, but you can find some bootlegged versions floating around online. What struck me about the crowd's reaction was that it's really leaning into those crowd-pleasing moments (at least for the trailer), with lots of action scenes, comedy, and heartfelt moments – there was a big cheer when we caught a glimpse of the Razor Crest (or at least, its replacement?) as well as when we see Din Djarin in action. *The Mandalorian* is a show designed around fan service, and if this trailer is any indication about its tone and style, it's a bigger version of the show. AT-AT Walkers? ✅. Din Djarin riding an AT-RT from the Clone Wars? ✅ Familiar characters (Zeb from *Rebels*?) ✅. Baby Yoda doing cute things? ✅. This is shaping up to be a film that's designed to appeal to fans and to avoid pissing them off by doing something unexpected. It'll be fun, people will talk about how it's leaning back into the spirit of the original films, and it'll make a bunch of money at the box office. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/04/image-2.png) Image: Lucasfilm ### *Star Wars: Starfighter* The other [big announcement](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-starfighter?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the con was for another film: *Starfighter*, which will be directed by Shawn Levy and star Ryan Gosling. We've been burned by announcements before, but they say this film will head into production this fall and hit theaters on May 28, 2027 – just in time for the 50th anniversary of the franchise. We don't have many details about this one at the moment: only that it's set five or so years after *Rise of Skywalker*, and that it's a standalone film, with Gosling playing a "brand-new character." The title suggests that we're going to see *something* to do with X-Wings. I've been burned by these predictions before, but I have to wonder *if* this film has something to do with space combat, if that might be why we haven't seen much forward progress on Patty Jenkin's *Rogue Squadron*, which was announced with quite a bit of fanfare a couple of years ago, and which is [seemingly still in development](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-rogue-squadron-patty-jenkins-development-update/), but which wasn't mentioned at the con. *IF* – and that's an if resting on a whole bunch of assumptions – that's the case, it makes sense: you don't want to have two different films about roughly the same subject matter near one another. There's a lot of opportunity for audience confusion who don't want to parse the different eras and minutia that comes with it. Hopefully that's not the case: *Rogue Squadron* is something that I really want to see. I like Levy as a director, and he's directed a lot of fun action (*Night at the Museum*) and comedy (*Cheaper by the Dozen*) films that feel like they're aimed at the huge, [four-quadrant audiences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-quadrant%5Fmovie?ref=andrewliptak.com) that studios are really aiming for these days. Two of his most recent films, *Free Guy* (about an NPC who learns he's in a video game) and *The Adam Project* (about a pilot who travels back in time to his younger self, trying to save the world) both feel like they're hitting the right tone for a *Star Wars* film: something fun and with a wholesome-ish story, with plenty of action set pieces and special effects. They're also very much a product of the genre blockbuster world we're in, and most recent film, *Deadpool & Wolverine*, is entirely self-aware of that. I don't think this'll be a film where we'll see all sorts of random pop culture references, but Levy strikes me as someone who knows what types of plots make those films tick. I would be very surprised if this is more *Rogue One* or *The Force Awakens* in worldview than Rian Johnson's subversive *The Last Jedi*. That's not really a bad thing, but it does feel like it's a safe choice. If you're lining up a film to land on the 50th anniversary of the franchise, big, brash, and earnest are probably the way to go. Thanks for reading. If you'd like to help keep **Transfer Orbit* going, consider signing up as a supporting member. [Support Transfer Orbit ](#/portal/signup) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/04/image-1.png) Image: Lucasfilm ### *Maul – Shadow Lord* There had been word of another animated series in the works in the last year that I've seen percolate through the rumor mill, Clone Uprising, presumably about the Clone Troopers who were unhappy about the direction the galaxy had taken after the rise of the Empire. That wasn't announced – if it even is in the planning stages – but I can't say that I'd be surprised that it wasn't, given that we just went through three seasons of another animated series, *The Bad Batch*. Instead, [we're getting a series about Darth Maul](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-maul-shadow-lord?ref=andrewliptak.com): the tattooed villain from *The Phantom Menace* who was brought back in *The Clone Wars* and *Rebels* and who made a surprise appearance in *Solo: A Star Wars Story*. I can't for the life of me find it, but I remember writing *something* about how *Star Wars* has a whole bunch of big story buckets: the main arcs that blend action, The Force, and hero journeys, alongside the western-tinged adventure serials like *The Mandalorian* and *Skeleton Crew* or serious military and political intrigue in *Andor*. In *Solo, The Bad Batch*, and *Book of Boba Fett*, we've seen another big bucket: the galaxy's criminal underworld. This series feels like it'll be a good exploration of that. The only description we've got is "after the Clone Wars, Maul plots to rebuild his criminal syndicate on a planet untouched by the Empire." Presumably, that syndicate is Crimson Dawn, which played a central role in *Solo,* and what we'll be getting here is a bit of the story that we've seen in the bits and pieces of worldbuilding that we got in the film. Maul's a fun character: he worked well as an enigma in *TPM* (and in the excellent novel *Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter*, by the [late Michael Reeves](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-reaves-darth-maul-star-wars-rip/)), but was fleshed out quite a bit in *The Clone Wars*, which turned him into a fuller character. At this point, the animated side of *Star Wars* feels like it's a well-oiled machine, with a huge fanbase and the ability to take place all over the galaxy and playing out some connective tissue between the various games, films, and other shows. I would bet that we'll see some connections not only to *Solo*, but that we'll get some other familiar characters from *The Clone Wars, Rebels*, and *Bad Batch* popping up. Maybe even some fun cameos of characters from games like *Jedi: Fallen Order* and *Jedi: Survivor.* --- ### *Ahsoka* We got [confirmation](https://deadline.com/2025/04/ahsoka-season-2-hayden-christensen-rory-mccann-1236372220/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the next season of the live-action series *Ahsoka* is about to enter production. The biggest part of that announcement was that we'll see Hayden Christensen return as Anakin Skywalker – his surprise cameo in the first season was a real highlight, and a payoff years in the making for fans. Another bit of news was that the season would feature Admiral Ackbar in a prominent way, and that he'll be going up against Grand Admiral Thrawn. The first season of *Ahsoka* was fun, but it also felt like it was a show that required a lot of homework. It's embedded in the overarching bundle of Mandoverse live-action shows, but also followed the animated series *Rebels*, paying off some storylines that had been left behind when that series was ended in 2014\. As a result, it's a show that feels like it's designed to really nod to fandom: here's the fan-favorite Thrawn in live-action form, here's Sabine, Ezra, Hera, Huyang, and Ahsoka from these other projects, and here's some other deep-cut references to these other projects, along with some intriguing other characters like Baylan Skoll, Shin Hati, and Marrok that feel like they're designed to generate new spinoffs in comics or book form for their backstories. A friend of mine and I were talking about this, and their chief complaint was that this was a show that they weren't sure who it was *for*: it wasn't something that was actively expanding the franchise's existing fandom, and it wasn't something that really stood on its own, unlike *The Mandalorian* or *Andor* (as much as any *Star Wars* project can stand on its own.) My guess is that it'll be *fine*: another season that'll require some homework to understand the bits and pieces and characters, but will otherwise be fun to watch, but which doesn't fundamentally change my feelings about Star Wars in one direction or another. --- All of this is to say: it looks very much like the foreseeable future of *Star Wars* projects is designed to be comfortable and familiar. All those things you like about the franchise: lightsabers, big action scenes, some fun comedy and witty lines, some heartfelt hero moments and lessons, these films/movies will have them. They’ll be fun to watch: *The Force Awakens*, *Rogue One*, and *The Mandalorian* all had elements of the familiar, brought into the modern day, and they remain good films. But I’ve always felt that *The Force Awakens* was a film designed in a lab to make sure that they weren’t pushing fans away in ways that the prequel trilogy did. I have a feeling that the folks at Lucasfilm have that feeling rolling around in their heads. That's not surprising: ever since *The Last Jedi* in 2017, the studio has learned that trying to tinker with the underlying appeal and source code for *Star Wars* is a good way to kick a hornet's nest. The studio has found itself put in the crosshairs of vocal, bad-faith fans when it has tried to do something different. [I thought that *The Acolyte*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/) was a good try that didn't quite pan out, and because it had a whole bunch of female and POC characters in its lineup, it earned the ire of YouTube idiots who were willing to spend their free time picking everything apart for any hint of "woke" and who were ready with thousands of dramatic headlines and YouTube thumbnails about how Disney and Kathleen Kennedy have ruined *Star Wars* and that their precious childhood memories and any love they had for the franchise is now irrevocably destroyed. [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-139.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816-3.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) It's bullshit, plain and simple, but it's exhausting bullshit that draws Lucasfilm's resources away from their work and into damage control. I'm generally skeptical that online movements perfectly translate into real-world action, but there have been some notable examples of where these online campaigns can really put a damper on a film's box office returns, like *Lightyear*, *The Little Mermaid, Wish, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves*, or a TV show's audience numbers, like *Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, The Last of Us, She-Hulk*, *Ms. Marvel*, and *The Acolyte*. I don't see that discourse changing anytime soon: we've got a generation of online commenters who've established a neat little ecosystem drumming up rage about film and TV and a political and cultural environment that supports it. These people *will* create endless videos and online noise about how *The Mandalorian and Grogu* and *Starfighter* will ruin *Star Wars*. There's no way around that, but I suspect that by leaning into familiar territory, those arguments will have a little less traction to hold onto. The reactions to *The Force Awakens, Rogue One*, and *The Mandalorian* were all generally well-received by audiences because they took cues and beats from the original trilogy. Even with its critical and subversive worldview, I think *Andor* escaped some of those petulant voices because it was wrapped up in a recognizable environment and trappings, while the critical appeal and reviews helped drown out the rest. This is not an environment we should be in, and it's deeply frustrating that it likely plays some factor in this lineup: films and shows that are generally safe and won't be taking any risks. Good art – even good commercial art – should be willing to take risks and push and chip away at boundaries and expectations! Comfortable is boring. The films that stand the test of time are the ones that are willing to undertake that challenge and to make audiences think about what they've seen, rather than just something to merely consume. I *want* more films that push at the boundaries of what Star Wars can be, like *The Empire Strikes Back*, *Revenge of the Sith, The Last Jedi, Andor,* and *The Acolyte.* Even if they aren't a complete home run or a perfect story, it's that underlying attitude of wanting to push and poke at things that helps make those stories really stand out. It's something we need more of, not less. --- ### All the other stuff A last bit of commentary to cap this off: we got a non-update for a handful of films that have been in development: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's Rey movie, James Mangold's origins of the Jedi film, Taika Waititi's film, and Simon Kinberg's post-*Rise of Skywalker* trilogy, all of which are still in the developmental phase. For those keeping score at home, there's no word on Jenkin's aforementioned *Rogue Squadron* film, Dave Filoni's Mandoverse film, Donald and Stephen Glover's Lando ... film? TV show?, and Rian Johnson's trilogy. I'm not going to read too much into any absence of an update, because I don't have the feeling that it's an all-or-nothing thing. *Rogue Squadron* I already mused on, Filoni's Mandoverse film is probably contingent on the success of *Mandalorian & Grogu*, and the Johnson and Glover projects are probably in the category of "whenever these guys can fit it into their busy schedules." What surprised me about these announcements is one huge missing thing: Disney+. We've got *Andor* coming out this week, and after that, that's it until the next season of *Ahsoka* debuts. There's a little more on the animated front: *Tales from the Underworld* drops May 4th, Season 3 of *Visions,* and a third season of *Young Jedi Adventures*. There's really nothing for that core audience until 2026, when the Maul series comes out. What we've gotten in recent years has been generally good: with the exception of *The Book of Boba Fett* and Season 3 of *The Mandalorian*, we've been treated to some decent shows, ranging from truly great (*Andor*) to fun popcorn fare (*The Mandalorian, Skeleton Crew* and *Obi-Wan*) to solid experiments (*Acolyte*) to it's-fine-but-not-offensive (*Ahsoka*). The streaming world has contracted quite a bit in recent years, and Disney has made a concerted effort to shift its focus from streaming back to theatrical films: *Moana 2* was originally a series while *The Mandalorian and Grogu* was apparently what had been planned for a fourth season of *The Mandalorian*. There's also been a lot of changes at the top of the company: Bob Iger returned in 2022 and is apparently apparently looking for a successor when his contract ends in 2026, and I'm guessing that's injected a bit of uncertainty into the studio's future priorities. There were also some reports that Kathleen Kennedy was planning on announcing a retirement [earlier this year](https://deadline.com/2025/02/kathleen-kennedy-clarifies-lucasfilm-exit-star-wars-future-1236304421/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but those were sort of shot down, but I can see that bringing some complications as well. That said, it's weird that there doesn't seem to be anything in the pipeline on that front, given that streaming is still a pretty big part of Disney. *Andor* has been a *huge* critical hit for Lucasfilm and Disney, as has *The Mandalorian*. I have to imagine that there are *some* streaming projects in the works, but it looks like there'll be a bit of a drought in the foreseeable future. News of another show *did* [pop up today](https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/star-wars-series-lost-carlton-cuse-1236374079/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but that seems like it’ll be a ways off. This isn’t the worst thing in the world: the more content you throw at the walls, the higher the likelihood that you're going get diminishing returns (Again, see *Book of Boba Fett* and *Mandalorian* season 3). The streaming and modern blockbuster world relies on volume and frequency: you don't really see projects really marinating for a good while before they're given a release date and shoved into production. Hopefully, what we're seeing is Lucasfilm paring down their projects and devoting more time and attention to them, rather than tossing things out with the hope that they'll help with subscriber numbers. --- ### Here are 12 more SF/F books to check out this April URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-new-books-april-2025-wendig-okorafor-zahn/ Last updated: 2025-04-17T19:04:20.000Z We've hit the part of the year where I'm juggling a huge pile of books: ones that I've started reading or listening to (Ray Nayler's [*Where the Axe is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com), Alexander Freed's [*Reign of Empire: Mask of Fear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723463?ref=andrewliptak.com), and Samantha Harvey's [*Orbital*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780802163622?ref=andrewliptak.com)), a couple that I've been re-reading (it's so much fun to sink back into the [*Murderbot novellas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250389824?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and others that I've been wanting to read that are staring at me from their perches on my to-read list, ranging from Mary Robinette Kowal's [*The Martian Contingency*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250237040?ref=andrewliptak.com) to Ursula K. Le Guin's [*The Dispossessed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063382930?ref=andrewliptak.com).) It's a good problem to have, but sometimes, I'm dealing with a big case of decision paralysis. Do I pick up this one or that one? What mood am I in? Do I have an audiobook edition that I can listen to alongside it? Am I going to get stuck in the middle of this? It doesn't help that there's been a lot going on between work and life, and sometimes, I just end up doom scrolling through my phone until the late hours. I'm making a concerted effort to toss it aside during the day and evening. I'm not always successful, but the more I can get a chapter finished here, or another there, it feels more rewarding and frankly, healthier for my brain. Even if it's just a handful of chapters that I can listen to while driving to work, I call that a win. 📚 Here's my usual pitch for your support: **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). At $40 a year, that's just $3.33 a month! \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- Support TO with a [one-time tip](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-new-books-april-2025/#/portal/support). Thank you: it really does help keep this newsletter up and running. In case you missed it, here's the first list for April. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. [11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this AprilAnother busy month for new books![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-118.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3194.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-new-books-april-2025/) Okay, here are 12 new SF/F books to check out for the rest of April: ### [*Parable of the Talents : A Graphic Novel Adaptation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419749483?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Octavia E. Butler, Damian Duffy, John Jennings, David Brame (April 22nd) A couple of years ago, Damian Duffy and John Jennings adapted Octavia Butler's classic novel [*Parable of the Sower*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419754050?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a graphic novel. The book has taken on incredible relevance in the last decade, in which she depicts a future where the country has descended into fascism (led by a president who used the slogan "Make America Great Again"), California is stricken with devastating wildfires, and chaos has infected the streets. We experience that world through the eyes of Lauren Olamina, who has some special empathetic abilities. Butler followed *Sower* with a sequel: *Parable of the Talents*, which now gets its own graphic novel edition. This volume is set in in 2032, five years after the first book, and follows Lauren as she has to navigate through a country that has fallen further into Christian fundamentalism and white supremacy, and the community that she's set up, Acorn, has been invaded and its residents are captured and brought to reeducation camps. [Octavia Butler’s finally getting her dueWith three adaptations from the late author’s catalog on the way, Octavia Butler is getting some long overdue attention.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-113.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/malachi-brooks-EvJhJ75NwAc-unsplash.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-a24-parable-of-the-sower-adaptation/) ### [*Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250825858?ref=andrewliptak.com) by P. Djèlí Clark (April 29th) I've really enjoyed the books that I've read from P. Djèlí Clark: [*Ring Shout*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/ring-shout-p-djeli-clark/13705280?ean=9781250767028&next=t&affiliate=6134&ref=andrewliptak.com) was spectacular, and I loved the alternate history he depicted in [*The Haunting of Tram Car 015*](https://bookshop.org/books/the-haunting-of-tram-car-015/9781250294807?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) and [*A Master of Djinn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250267689?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*.* Last year, he wrote a YA novel, [*Abeni's Song*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250825841?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* about a young girl named Abeni who was picked up by an old woman who trained her in the magical ways after arriving in her village with a warning that "they are coming," and sets off to not only learn, but save her friends and family who were taken. In this sequel, Abeni saved them from the Witch Priest's army of monsters, but refuses to go home and help them rebuild their village: there's still work to be done. She's soon captured and imprisoned by the Kingdom of Gold Weavers, and has to win her freedom by retrieving an artifact, the mystical Golden Throne, or she'll be turned into a living statue of gold. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/p-djeli-clark/abeni-and-the-kingdom-of-gold-abenis-song-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Clark’s worldbuilding connects readers even more deeply to this mythical African-inspired world. The strong character development combined with the humorous elements will resonate with a broad range of readers." [P. Djèlí Clark on history, fantasy, and how racism creates monstersP. Djèlí Clark on history, fantasy, and how racism creates monsters![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-134.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B89B50E0-2117-4B94-BB0D-1341BE5EC848.JPG)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clark-interview/) ### [*Notes from a Regicide*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250329103?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Isaac Fellman (April 15th) Griffon Keming was saved from an abusive family when he was adopted. They taught him how to live as a trans person, paying for his transition and loving him for who he is. But they have their own pasts, and faced troubles in their homeland before being driven out. After their deaths, Griffon is moved to learn more about them and their pasts. He discovers his father's journal, written while he was imprisoned, and as he reads, learns far more about their lives, and understand their journey and what it cost them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/isaac-fellman/notes-from-a-regicide/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Most notably, though, Fellman paints a tender portrait of Griffon and his journey to coming out as trans, which he handles with real compassion and insight. This beautifully written, self-assured novel is a major accomplishment." ### [*The Raven Scholar*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316577229?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Antonia Hodgson (April 15th) For decades, the Empire of Orrun under the rule of Bersun the Brusque has been one of peace and stability. But when that administration comes to an end, a race for throne's successor begins. Seven people – soldiers, leaders, strategists, and thinkers – have come together to compete to become the emperor, and when one of them is murdered, it's up to Neema Kraa, the emperor's High Scholar, to track down the killer. [Writing in *Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-raven-scholar-by-antonia-hodgson/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Chris Kluwe says that it's a "a fascinating book on multiple levels, the first of which was Hodgson’s command of description and tone...\[and is\] an absolute delight to read." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*City of All Seasons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835411445?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley (April 29th) Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley team up for *City of All Seasons*, a science fantasy novel about a city called Fairharbour, which has been stuck in a never-ending winter and another city called Fairharbour, which is stuck in a never-ending summer. The two cities are in different worlds and are mirrors of one another. Jamie Pike lives in the winter version, and Esther Pike lives in the summer version, and both have to contend with their homes being taken over by authoritarian powers after the environmental catastrophe. They were once one city, and sometimes, their inhabitants can catch sight of their counterparts. Both Jamie and Esther have figured out how to talk to one another, and together, set about figuring out how to solve the mystery of what happened and then figure out how to repair their world. In *The Guardian*, Lisa Tuttle [says](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/11/the-best-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-reviews-roundup?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's a "a surreal and engaging magical fantasy from two talented writers." ### [*The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262049542?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gabriel McKee (April 22nd) Something that I've always wanted to write about is the weird relationship that traditional SF fandom has (or doesn't have) with other communities that are immersed in some of the same stuff, like extraterrestrial life. This new book takes a look at the life of one of the UFO movement's more prominent members: Gray Barker, who wrote extensively about UFOs over the course of his life. Barker set up a publisher called Saucerian Books, which produced a number of books about UFOs, and in this biography, Gabriel KcKee takes a look at how he impacted the movement and subculture. It looks like a fascinating read. ### [*One Way Witch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418977?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor (April 29th) This is the followup to Okorafor's Africanfuturist novel [*She Who Knows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418953?ref=andrewliptak.com), and which is part of a series that sets up her landmark novel [*Who Fears Death*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756417109?ref=andrewliptak.com). The first book followed Najeeba, a girl who had The Call and sets off on a journey and becomes the kponyungo, the beast of wind, fire and dust. It's taken a lot from her, but she was able to make something of a normal life for herself afterwards. Decades later, she's lost both her second husband and daughter, Onyesonwu, who saved the world. Only she and her daughter's teacher Aro know of her daughter's sacrifice, and Najeeba seeks him out to try and learn about the Mystic Points, the only way to get something that she really wants. He agrees to help, but to get where she's going, she has to confront her past. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/one-way-witch-1814643?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a coming-into-power story that will be highly appreciated by *She Who Knows* readers or anyone looking for more set in the world of *Who Fears Death*." [Review: Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the AuthorDeath of the Author is a fantastic novel about remaining authentic in the face of the demands fame and success brings![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-127.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2890.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/) ### [*Marvel: Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723494?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (April 29th) Suyi Davies Okungbowa pens an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates's [acclaimed run](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781302961763?ref=andrewliptak.com) of Black Panther comics from between 2018 and 2021\. In it, the African nation of Wakanda is a free and prosperous land, but across the universe, there's another Wakanda: one that leads an empire that rules over five galaxies and oppresses its subjects. A man ends up there and finds himself a subjecet of Emperor N’Jadaka. He's forgotten his name and how he got there, but knows that he has to fight for the liberation of the empire's subjects, and ends up falling in with a rebel group that calls themselves the Maroons. As the movement grows, people begin to wonder if he was the legendary T'Challa of the Avengers. [ ](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608014/marvel-studios-black-panther-dreams-of-wakanda-by-ruth-e-carter-hannah-giorgis-yona-harvey-tre-johnson-marvel-and-more-foreword-by-nic-stone/9781984826176/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Fantasy: A Short History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781350407824?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Adam Roberts (April 24th) For years, I wrote a column on science fiction's history for *Kirkus Reviews,* and one of the first places that I'd turn to was often Adam Robert's [*The History of Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781137569592?ref=andrewliptak.com). It remains an excellent source that takes a wide look at the history of the genre, and now, he's got a new book coming out about the history of Fantasy literature. In it, Roberts traces the history of fantasy literature back to three big things: Arthurian legends of the 19th century, Christian allegory, and the rise of Norse/Germanic/Old English mythology, and then looks at how those influences brought about the modern genre that we know today, examining the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the explosion in fantasy that occurred post–*Lord of the Rings*, up through the modern day, all while looking at how the genre has evolved and transformed across literature, television, games, and film. I've been reading this over the last couple of days, and I'm really enjoying learning from it. I'm looking forward to the rest of what Roberts has to say. ### [*The Lie That Binds Them*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316477062?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matthew Ward (April 15th) Matthew Ward continues his *Soulfire Saga* with a third installment (preceded by [*The Darkness Before Them* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316476607?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Fire Within Them*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316476805?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which he introduced us to the Kingdom of Khalad, where a magical mist called the Veil has been consuming the land, all while the kingdom is dealing with a brutal power struggle. Kat is a thief who's been after one last heist that will settle her debts, and who found herself sucked into the war for Khalad. In this new installment, the kingdom has come under control by a new authoritarian leader, and those who've been rebelling have been scattered. A folk hero known as Vallant has gone missing, and Kat now finds herself leading what remains of the resistance. ### [*The Staircase in the Woods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593156568?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Wendig (April 29th) I've really appreciated Chuck Wendig's horror novels like [*The Book of Accidents*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780399182150?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Black River Orchard*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593158760?ref=andrewliptak.com) (both of which I've started but just haven't gotten to finish yet. Soon!) His latest looks like it'll be a lot of fun: five close high school friends are out on a camping trip in the middle of the woods in 1998 when a staircase appears before them. One of their number climbs up it, and before long, the staircase vanishes. Two decades later, the staircase reappears, and the group decides to follow in their lost friend's footsteps to figure out what happened to them, and what that staircase leads to. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chuck-wendig/the-staircase-in-the-woods/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the book isn’t as overtly gothic as *Black River Orchard* (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations." ### [*The Icarus Coda*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668072356?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (April 1st) Timothy Zahn wrote one of my favorite SF novels nearly a quarter of a century ago: [*The Icarus Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553573916?ref=andrewliptak.com), about a plot to transport a starship to another system, while evading an alien civilization known as the Patth, who had a stranglehold on interstellar travel. A couple of years ago, he followed it up with a series of sequels:[*The Icarus Plot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668072684?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Icarus Twin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193782?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Icarus Job*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193256?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Icarus Changeling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193485?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Icarus Needle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193799?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* about Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene, who've joined a mysterious government organization known as the Icarus Group, and have been trying to track down an ancient technology. They're now on the run from the Commonwealth, the Patth, and the Ammei who controlled the portals. --- Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what catches your eye and what you've got on your TBR. For subscribers: I'm going to be changing up how I do roundup posts for this newsletter. For a long time, I'd used this format to roundup recent posts and news about the SF/F world, usually pegged to a longer essay at the top. I've fallen out of the habit of writing those, but I'm going to start again, with some changes: - Starting tomorrow, I'll start resending them, sometime on Friday. I'll be omitting the header essay – I don't want to get into the habit of having to come up with a take for the sake of it, but I'll include what I've been reading, recent posts, and a handful of links from the last week, with the idea being that it'll catch you up on the week's news. - These are only going to go out via email. They won't hit the main page. I sort of want to get back to the practice of writing up a *newsletter* rather than a blog that gets emailed to you. - I'm treating this like a trial or pilot. Let me know what you think of it! [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964306?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250825858?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Risk and reward URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nnedi-okorafor-death-of-the-author-africanfuturist-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-04-11T18:29:09.000Z Years ago while writing a column on the history of science fiction for *Kirkus Reviews*, I was struck at how some of the genre's most creative and best-known works felt as through they came from creators that weren't incubated within the confines of its fandom. I have a feeling that it has something to do with being unincumbered by the tropes and conventions and designs that came before, leaving them a bit more free to let their imagination play out, yielding stories that really stood out. One of the authors that I've thought fit that description neatly is Nnedi Okorafor, whose books like [*Lagoon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481440882?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Binti*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756416935?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Noor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418304?ref=andrewliptak.com), feel like nothing else out there. She's created worlds and characters that are a vibrant bend of science fiction, fantasy, folklore, the strangeness of the natural world, her Nigerian ancestry, her American upbringing, and a whole lot more. As her star has risen within literary circles, she's pushed back hard against those genre definitions, firmly rejecting descriptions of her work as "[Afrofuturism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism?ref=andrewliptak.com)" in favor of her own definition: "Africanfuturism," which she [spelled out in 2019](https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) as fiction that "specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West." I've always wondered about the vehemence that she's defended that title online, and why or if genre distinctions are really anything more than marketing directions for a bookstore and things for people who attend cons to endlessly argue over. Her latest book, [*Death of the Author*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391147?ref=andrewliptak.com)provides some understanding: it's her line in the sand over the boundaries of one's artistic identity and how one goes about preserving the integrity of one's stories in an environment where it's hard to maintain control over the message, especially online. It's a passionate, razor-sharp novel that feels both autobiographical and fantastical as she and her characters contend with the boundaries between fame and reader expectations. It's a novel about taking a risk to produce something wholly creative and special, and protecting those instincts against the forces that will erode it away into something widely palatable but bland. The novel follows a struggling, disabled creative writing adjunct named Zelu Ony­enezi-Oyedele. She's the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and was paralyzed as the result of a childhood accident, and has grown up something of an outlier in her family. While her siblings have gone on to notable and powerful careers, but she's been content to study English, teach college students, and write. As the book opens, she's fired from her job as a professor of creative writing after she lost her temper with her class of entitled graduate students – while overseas at her sister's lavish destination wedding. Stewing, high, and sitting on the beach after the celebrations, she's struck with an idea: a story set in the distant future where humans have vanished, leaving behind factions of robots and AI. The words flow out of her, and she's soon written a novel, *Rusted Robots*. When she shows it to her friend and her agent, she's soon in the midst of a bidding war for the publication rights and finds herself shot into the stratosphere of the literary world. Her debut earns considerable acclaim and a massive print run, gaining her legions of fans who're enamored of her world and the vibrant story she's constructed. Running parallel to all of this is Zelu's relationship to the rest of her family. They aren't exactly thrilled at her career choices, have concerns about her health and safety, and worry about how the members of their extended family back in Nigeria perceive her. With fame comes expectations. Her new fans hang onto her every word on Twitter, demanding to know when the next book in the series is coming. Her book's sky-high popularity leads to a fast-tracked movie deal, and it's at the premiere that Zelu realizes that everything has gotten away from her. The movie is an unrecognizable twisting of her story and when she speaks her mind during a press interview, she finds just how quickly the unmanageable fandom and media attention that's followed her can turn. *Death of the Author* pairs nicely with another couple of works that came out recently that explore this fraught relationship with sudden fame: R.F. Kuang's novel [*Yellowface*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250857?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Cord Jefferson's 2023 film *American Fiction.* In the former, a young white author passes off a manuscript as her own after her Chinese-American friend and fellow author dies, and has to keep up with the lie as accusations pile up on social media, while in the latter, a professor, frustrated that his latest novel was deemed "not black enough" writes a caricatured novel that leans all the way into the stereotypes and ends up becoming a critical hit. Zelu isn't in a situation where she's hiding her identity behind the book, but *Death of the Author* is all about authenticity. She sees *Rusted Roots* as a story that's integral to all parts of her identity; drawing on her life, beliefs, and the cultural heritage from which her family came from. Writing in all of its forms is an intimate act, and when they put something out into the world, a creator is sharing some part of themselves. It's a tricky, anxious thing to do, and Zelu finds that the combination of fame and her identity can be exhausting: > Zelu found herself spending less and less time on social media. Not only did she hat ethe progressively ruder messages asking for updates about the next book, she also didn't want to educate people about her exos, or debate whether she was an American, a "diasporic," an Africanfuturist, or an African writer. Stalled on her next book, Zelu just wants to *create* in the purest sense of the word, and she doesn't – as I suspect Okorafor doesn't – want to be defined by anything other than the boundaries that she sets out for herself. As her fame exploded, she found that all of those nit-picky discussions over her work really didn't have anything to do with *her.* For someone who has been forced to be independent for her entire life – through her career, injury, interests, personality, and family – the entire exercise is tantamount to torture. It's little wonder that she had so little patience with the unprepared journalists who interview her and explodes when they try and tease out some level of responsibility that she might have for her fans. For years, Okorafor has worked closely with author George R.R. Martin: he [signed on as an executive producer](https://grrm.livejournal.com/542263.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) for an adaptation of her novel *Who Fears Death* back in 2017 (the project seems to still be moving along in the developmental phase), and I couldn't help but think about how their experiences with online fandom has percolated into this story. Martin has long been working on *The Winds of Winter*, the next installment of his *A Song of Ice and Fire* series, so long that its completion has become something of a meme in its own right: "Get back to the keyboard, George." The pressure that he faces online every time he pops up for air seems like it's excruciating: a continual stream of demands for when he'll deliver the book, predictions that he'll die before he finishes, and a flurry of reactions whenever he provides an update – no matter how miniscule. Zelu faces something like that: an excruciating onslaught of demands and expectations for the hypothetical sequel that she's supposed to be working on. In many ways, those demands are a constraint in and of themselves. *Rusted Robots* was a book that flowed from her in the moment, rather than something that she planned out as a series of works, and with the success of the book and film, there's a clamor for more of the same, something that she doesn't seem entirely sure that she wants to do. In the biggest possible picture, *Death of the Author* feels to me as though it's a primal cry against the sort of industrialized content that we're fed in the form of big brand-name franchises and publishing cycles: stories that are willed into being because they further the goals of a studio or publisher, or written because its author (and publisher/marketers) know that it'll be a surefire success. There's creativity and talent that goes into those sorts of projects, but if often feels like the final products that we get are the ones who made it through the production gauntlet because they're the version that has the least risk. That big-budget film adaptation of Zelu's novel? Her deeply- personal, African-inspired characters were watered down and changed to better suit a western audience, turning her story into something unrecognizable and which wasn't *her.* Zelu's in a place where she could easily continue the story of *Rusted Robots*, even if it was something she figuratively phoned in. She could coast for the rest of her life on that career path, pushing out installment after installment whenever she needed some extra cash. But is there really passion and creativity in that work? Zelu is principled and determined to ensure that whatever she writes lives up to the passion and personality that informed the book that led to her runaway success and fame in the first place. I've often found Okorafor's books following that same line: they're enormously creative and often confound whatever expectations I might have had going into them. After finishing this book, I feel like I understand why she's continually fighting to define herself on her terms, and better understand why she hasn't thrown up her hands in frustration and moved onto other things: it's the only way to keep herself from becoming something unrecognizable. It's fitting that this novel defies those expectations and genre labels to be something wholly its own thing. Is it literary fiction because of the family drama? It has excerpts from *Rusted Robots* sprinkled throughout, is it science fiction? An autobiographical novel? But at the end of the day, does it actually matter where it's supposed to sit on the shelf? It's a Nnedi Okorafor novel: it'll go and do wherever it wants. We're just along for the ride. ### Self-inflicted wounds URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/history-imls-politics/ Last updated: 2025-04-10T19:20:30.000Z A short rant about the state of the country _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Here's the first trailer for Murderbot URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-apple-tv-martha-wells-sci-fi-streaming/ Last updated: 2025-04-09T17:24:56.000Z The first trailer for Apple TV+'s upcoming series *Murderbot*, has dropped, and man, this looks like it's going to be a ton of fun to watch. The series is based on the books by Martha Wells ([*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io),[*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229854?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Fugitive Telemetry*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765376?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)), which follows a security android that begins calling itself Murderbot after it hacks its governor and becomes self-aware. In your typical science fiction blockbuster, it would probably exact revenge and kill everyone in sight, yes? Murderbot would rather watch TV and keep a low profile, avoiding people at every opportunity. The books have been enormously popular, [revitalizing Wells' career](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-wired-profile-sci-fi/) and now, we've got a TV adaptation. Apple first [announced the series back in 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/), and it's been in production ever since, starring Alexander Skarsgård as the central, titular character. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. In the trailer, we get that thumbnail background of Murderbot's origins, and its attitudes towards people: "Humans are idiots," and learn that it's being brought onboard an expedition as the second-best option (because it's a "refurbished" model and thus cheaper.) Here's the trailer: The best part about this? We're also getting glimpses of the show that Murderbot is obsessed with: *The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*, a melodramatic and over-the-top space soap opera that looks absolutely perfect: full of bright neon colors and dramatic acting. (What's also funny? The brand new SecUnit looks just like the one on the book covers.) The trailer comes a day after *Vanity Fair*'s Anthony Breznican published [a big curtain-raiser feature](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/murderbot-first-look?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the making of the series, which delves into some behind-the-scenes details about the characters and what to expect. *Empire* [also interviewed Skarsgård](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/murderbot-relatable-character-alexander-skarsgard-exclusive/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about his take on the character. When I posted some news about this on Bluesky, I saw a lot of folks worrying about how the show would capture Murderbot's internal dialogue and snark, and from this trailer? I'd say they nailed it: Skarsgård's voice really feels like it's capturing the tone of what I imagined in the books. It also looks like it'll be balancing the humor and action nicely. Of course, we'll have to see how it shakes out when the series begins streaming ([May 16th](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-murderbot-martha-wells-streaming-series-sci-fi-release-date/)), but I'm optimistic. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-122.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255-3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) The nice thing about adaptations like this is that they'll serve as a great platform to introduce folks to the books: they really deserve to be read. And, it joins a pretty excellent lineup of shows and films on Apple's streaming service. *Severance* has been getting rave reviews after it just ended its second season recently, and others, like [*For All Mankind*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/for-all-mankind/)*, Monarch, Silo,* [*Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/)*,* are all pretty good. It's not the only big adaptation in the mix either: the platform has [William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)coming up as well. ### Here are the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-finalists-for-the-2025-hugo-awards/ Last updated: 2025-04-07T19:22:18.000Z This year's World Science Fiction Convention is taking place in Seattle later this summer, and ahead of the event, the con has announced the finalists for this year's Hugo Awards. The awards are the best-known for the science fiction community: nominated and voted on each year by the convention's members. Here are [last year's winners](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-2024-scifi-fantasy-glasgow-worldcon/). [Why are they called the Hugo Awards?A history of science fiction’s biggest award![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-121.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/721EFD5A-F03F-4AE7-ABC9-FD9008F56BD1.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-history-science-fiction/) This is one of those interesting years where the finalists are pretty different from the books that I would have thought would end up on the list ([Any of the novels here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-best-books-2025/) I would have thought would have made the list), and it's a good reminder that fandom isn't homogeneous! I've heard a lot of good thing about many of these entries, and there are a bunch that I'll be adding to my TBR soon. Here are the finalists for this year's award: (I've added links to where the stories are available online.) ### Best Novel - *Alien Clay* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ([My review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-alien-clay-sci-fi-book-review/)) - *The Ministry of Time* by Kaliane Bradley - *Service Model* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Someone You Can Build a Nest In* by John Wiswell - *A Sorceress Comes to Call* by T. Kingfisher - *The Tainted Cup* by Robert Jackson Bennett ## Best Novella - *The Brides of High Hill* by Nghi Vo - *The Butcher of the Forest* by Premee Mohamed - *Navigational Entanglements* by Aliette de Bodard - *The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain* by Sofia Samatar - *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler ([My review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)) - *What Feasts at Night* by T. Kingfisher ### Best Novelette - “[The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F05%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld*, May 2024) - “[By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/by-salt-by-sea-by-light-of-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Premee Mohamed (*Strange Horizons*, Fund Drive 2024) - “[The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea](https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/TheFourSisters%5FKritzer.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Naomi Kritzer (*Asimov’s*, September/October 2024) - “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in *Lake of Souls* (Orbit) - “[Loneliness Universe](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/loneliness-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - “[Signs of Life](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/signs-of-life/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 59) ### Best Short Story - “[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rachael K. Jones (*Lightspeed Magazine*, Jan 2024 (Issue 164)) - “[Marginalia](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/marginalia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mary Robinette Kowal (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 56) - “[Stitched to Skin Like Family Is](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/stitched-to-skin-like-family-is/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Nghi Vo (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 57) - “[Three Faces of a Beheading](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/three-faces-of-a-beheading/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Arkady Martine (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - “[We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will-teach-you-how-to-read/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Caroline M. Yoachim (*Lightspeed Magazine*, May 2024 (Issue 168)) - “[Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Isabel J. Kim (*Clarkesworld*, February 2024) ### Best Series - *Between Earth and Sky* by Rebecca Roanhorse - *The Burning Kingdoms* by Tasha Suri - *InCryptid* by Seanan McGuire - *Southern Reach* by Jeff VanderMeer - *The Stormlight Archive* by Brandon Sanderson - *The Tyrant Philosophers* by Adrian Tchaikovsky ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *The Deep Dark* by Molly Knox Ostertag - *The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1* written by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose - *Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed* written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda - *My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2* by Emil Ferris - *Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way* written by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio - *We Called Them Giants* written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, lettering by Clayton Cowles ### Best Related Work - “[Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics](https://file770.com/charting-the-cliff-an-investigation-into-the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-by-camestros-felapton-and-heather-rose-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones - [r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1bt4iqf/official%5Frfantasy%5F2024%5Fbook%5Fbingo%5Fchallenge/?rdt=34146&ref=andrewliptak.com) (r/Fantasy on Reddit), presented by the r/Fantasy Bingo team: Alexandra Forrest (happy\_book\_bee), Lisa Richardson, Amanda E. (Lyrrael), Arka (RuinEleint), Ashley Rollins (oboist73), Christine Sandquist (eriophora), David H. (FarragutCircle), Diana Hufnagl, Pia Matei (Dianthaa), Dylan H. (RAAAImmaSunGod), Dylan Kilby (an\_altar\_of\_plagues), Elsa (ullsi), Emma Surridge (PlantLady32), Gillian Gray (thequeensownfool), Kahlia (cubansombrero), Kevin James, Kopratic, Kristina (Cassandra\_sanguine), Lauren Mulcahy (Valkhyrie), Megan, Megan Creemers (Megan\_Dawn), Melissa S. (wishforagiraffe), Mike De Palatis (MikeOfThePalace), Para (improperly\_paranoid), Sham, The\_Real\_JS, Abdellah L. (messi1045), AnnTickwittee, Chad Z. (shift\_shaper), Emma Smiley (Merle), Rebecca (toughschmidt22), smartflutist661 - “[The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4&ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jenny Nicholson - *Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right* by Jordan S. Carroll - *Track Changes* by Abigail Nussbaum - “[The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion](https://jasonsanford.substack.com/p/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on)” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Dune: Part Two*, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, directed by Denis Villeneuve - *Flow*, screenplay by Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža, directed by Gints Zilbalodis - *Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga*, screenplay by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, directed by George Miller - *I Saw the TV Glow*, screenplay by Jane Schoenbrun, directed by Jane Schoenbrun - *Wicked*, screenplay by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, directed by Jon M. Chu - *The Wild Robot*, screenplay by Chris Sanders and Peter Brown, directed by Chris Sanders ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Fallout*: “The Beginning” written by Gursimran Sandhu, directed by Wayne Che Yip - *Agatha All Along*: “Death’s Hand in Mine” written by Gia King & Cameron Squires, directed by Jac Schaeffer - *Doctor Who*: “Dot and Bubble” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams - *Star Trek: Lower Decks*: “Fissure Quest” created by Mike McMahan and written by Lauren McGuire based on *Star Trek* created by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Brandon Williams - *Star Trek: Lower Decks*: “The New Next Generation” created and written by Mike McMahan, based on *Star Trek* created by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Megan Lloyd - *Doctor Who*: “73 Yards” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams ### Best Game or Interactive Work - *Caves of Qud*, co-creators Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat; contributors Nick DeCapua, Corey Frang, Craig Hamilton, Autumn McDonell, Bastia Rosen, Caelyn Sandel, Samuel Wilson - *Dragon Age: The Veilguard* produced by BioWare - *The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom* produced by Nintendo - *Lorelei and the Laser Eyes* produced by Simogo - *Tactical Breach Wizards* developed by Suspicious Developments - *1000xRESIST* developed by sunset visitor 斜陽過客, published by Fellow Traveller ### Best Editor, Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - Jennifer Brozek - Neil Clarke - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas - Sheila Williams ### Best Editor, Long Form - Carl Engle-Laird - Ali Fisher - Lee Harris - David Thomas Moore - Diana M. Pho - Stephanie Stein ### Best Professional Artist - Micaela Alcaino - Audrey Benjaminsen - Rovina Cai - Maurizio Manzieri - Tran Nguyen - Alyssa Winans ### Best Semiprozine - [*The Deadlands*](https://psychopomp.com/deadlands/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher Sean Markey; editors E. Catherine Tobler, Nicasio Andres Reed, David Gilmore, Laura Blackwell, Annika Barranti Klein; proofreader Josephine Stewart; columnist Amanda Downum; art and design Cory Skerry, Christine M. Scott; social media Felicia Martínez; assistant Shana Du Bois. - [*Escape Pod*](https://escapepod.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes, assistant editors Premee Mohamed and Kevin Wabaunsee, hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart, producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht; and the entire *Escape Pod* team - [*FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction*](https://fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publisher and executive editor DaVaun Sanders, poetry editor B. Sharise Moore, art director Christian Ivey, acquiring editors Rebecca McGee, Kerine Wint, Egbiameje Omole, Emmalia Harrington, Genine Tyson, Tonya R. Moore, sponsor coordinator Nelson Rolon - [*khōréō*](https://www.khoreomag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), produced by Zhui Ning Chang, Aleksandra Hill, Danai Christopoulou, Isabella Kestermann, Kanika Agrawal, Sachiko Ragosta, Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Melissa Ren, Elaine Ho, Ambi Sun, Cyrus Chin, Nivair H. Gabriel, Jeané Ridges, Lilivette Domínguez, Isaree Thatchaichawalit, Jei D. Marcade, M. L. Krishnan, Ysabella Maglanque, Aaron Voigt, Adialyz Del Valle Berríos, Adil Mian, Akilah White, Alexandra Millatmal, Anselma Widha Prihandita, E. Broderick, K. S. Walker, Katarzyna Nowacka, Katie McIvor, Kelsea Yu, Lynn D. Jung, Madeleine Vigneron, Marie Croke, Merulai Femi, Phoebe Low, S. R. Westvik, Sanjna Bhartiya, Sara Messenger, Sophia Uy, Tina Zhu, Yuvashri Harish, Zohar Jacobs - [*Strange Horizons*](http://strangehorizons.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), by the *Strange Horizons* Editorial Collective - [*Uncanny Magazine*](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; poetry editor Betsy Aoki, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky ### Best Fanzine - [*Ancillary Review of Books*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Jake Casella Brookins, Zachary Gillan, Lane Gillespie, Misha Grifka Wander, Gareth A. Reeves, Bianca Skrinyár, Cynthia Zhang - [*Black Nerd Problems*](https://blacknerdproblems.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors William Evans and Omar Holmon - [*The Full Lid*](https://alasdairstuart.com/the-full-lid/?ref=andrewliptak.com), written by Alasdair Stuart and edited by Marguerite Kenner - [*Galactic Journey*](https://galacticjourney.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), founder Gideon Marcus, editor Janice L. Newman, associate writers Cora Buhlert, Jessica Holmes, Kerrie Dougherty, Kris Vyas-Myall, and Natalie Devitt, and the rest of the Journey team - [*Journey Planet*](https://www.journeyplanet.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Allison Hartman Adams, Amanda Wakaruk, Ann Gry, Jean Martin, Sara Felix, Sarah Gulde, Chuck Serface, David Ferguson, Olav Rokne, Paul Weimer, Steven H Silver, Christopher J. Garcia and James Bacon - [Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog](https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk ### Best Fancast - [*The Coode Street Podcast*](https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, producer Jonathan Strahan - [*Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones*](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eight-days-of-diana-wynne-jones/id1776735544?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow - [*Hugo, Girl!*](https://www.hugogirlpodcast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson - [*Hugos There*](https://hugospodcast.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Seth Heasley - [*A Meal of Thorns*](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/amealofthorns/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Jake Casella Brookins - [*Worldbuilding for Masochists*](https://worldbuildingformasochists.podbean.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Natania Barron ### Best Fan Writer - Camestros Felapton - Abigail Nussbaum - Roseanna Pendlebury - Jason Sanford - Alasdair Stuart - Örjan Westin ### Best Fan Artist - Iain J. Clark - Sara Felix - Meg Frank - Michelle Morrell - Alison Scott - España Sheriff ### Best Poem - Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead - “[Ever Noir](https://www.havenspec.com/ever-noir?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Mari Ness (*Haven Spec Magazine*, Issue 16, July 2024) - “[there are no taxis for the dead](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/there-are-no-taxis-for-the-dead/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 58) - “[A War of Words](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/a-war-of-words/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Marie Brennan (*Strange Horizons*, September 2024) - “[We Drink Lava](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/we-drink-lava/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Ai Jiang (*Uncanny Magazine*, Issue 56) - “[Your Visiting Dragon](http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/your-visiting-dragon/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Devan Barlow (*Strange Horizons*, Fund Drive 2024) ### Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book - *The Feast Makers* by H.A. Clarke - *Heavenly Tyrant* by Xiran Jay Zhao - *The Maid and the Crocodile* by Jordan Ifueko - *Moonstorm* by Yoon Ha Lee - *Sheine Lende* by Darcie Little Badger - *So Let Them Burn* by Kamilah Cole ### *Astounding* Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines) - Moniquill Blackgoose (2nd year of eligibility) - Bethany Jacobs (2nd year of eligibility) - Hannah Kaner (2nd year of eligibility) - Angela Liu (2nd year of eligibility) - Jared Pechaček (1st year of eligibility) - Tia Tashiro (2nd year of eligibility) The awards will be presented at this year’s [Seattle WorldCon](https://seattlein2025.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), between August 13th and 17th. What catches your eye and what are you rooting for? ### A return to The Expanse URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-comic-scifi-a-little-death-james-sa-corey/ Last updated: 2025-04-02T19:01:04.000Z It's hard to say that *The Expanse* has come to an end. While the book series concluded with the release of [*Memory's Legion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316669191?ref=andrewliptak.com) (a collection of the shorter stories) and the TV series came out in 2022, we've seen more stories from the world in the [form of a comic series from BOOM! Studios, *Dragon Tooth*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-dragon-tooth-kickstarter/). Now, there's another continuation coming: another comic series, titled *A Little Death*, [which is now funding on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boom-studios/james-sa-corey-returns-to-the-expanse-in-a-little-death?ref=andrewliptak.com). The project has since blown past its goal of $50,000, and will run for four issues, picking up where *Dragon's Tooth* left off. The campaign will end at the end of the month, and the comics are expected to be delivered in November 2026\. For the uninitiated, the TV adaptation came to an end with the events of the sixth book, *Babylon's Ashes*, which wrapped up most of the storylines. The book series runs for another three books, but with a time jump of three decades, leaving plenty of space for a whole bunch of other adventures for the crew of the Rosinante. *Dragon Tooth* and this new series sit in that timeframe. Here's the description: > Discover the missing adventures of the crew of the *Rocinante* – James Holden, Naomi Nagata, Amos Burton, Bobbie Draper, and Clarissa Mao and the ebbs and flows of the Inners, Belters, and Transport Union… all leading to the rise of the Laconian Empire! And it all begins when Amos, bored of trade talks, decides to blow off a little steam and runs directly into a web of crime and deceit tied directly to him! Now it’s up to him and the crew of the *Roci* to save the day! What's fun about this particular adventure is that it'll be co-written by Wes Chatham, who played Amos Burton in the TV series. BOOM! notes that while the series isn't being written by Corey, they've still been involved in guiding the story. Burton will join Andy Diggle (who co-wrote *Dragon Tooth*, while artist Francesco Pisa will also return. Backers can get the comic series through a series of tiers: $20 will get you digital editions of the comics, while you can get a slipcased trade paperback edition at the $25 tier. There are other perks the higher you go: a hardcover edition ($50), a complete hardcover collection of all four *Expanse* comics ($150), and a bunch of others the higher you go. While *The Expanse* series is over, fans of both the books and the show are certainly showing that they're around and willing to take in new stories and [merch](https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanse-action-figures-kickstarter-campaign-nacelle/) from this world. I'm glad to see it: it's a fun story and I'm eager to see what they come up with next. ### Nicola Griffith is the latest SF Grandmaster URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nicola-griffith-sfwa-science-fiction-grandmaster/ Last updated: 2025-04-01T19:45:53.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association ahs named author Nicola Griffith as the latest (41st) [Damon Knight Grand Master](http://www.sfwa.org/2016/02/35732/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), joining the company of such authors as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Joe Haldeman, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Connie Willis, and a number of other notable figures. Griffith was born on September 30th, 1960 in England. She began publishing in the 1980s, and published her first novel, *Ammonite*, in 1993\. The book earned a considerable amount of acclaim, winning the James Tiptree Jr. and [Lambda Literary ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda%5FLiterary%5FAward%5Ffor%5FLesbian%5FScience%5FFiction/Fantasy?ref=andrewliptak.com)awards, and was nominated for the 1994 British Science Fiction Association, Locus, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. In the years that followed, she published an additional eight novels, including *Slow River, So Lucky, Hild*, and *Spear*. She published her latest novel, *Menewood*, in 2023\. Her work pays particular attention to themes around gender and sexuality, and she earned her PhD in 2017 University of East Anglia with her doctoral thesis, "[Norming the Other: Narrative Empathy Via Focalised Heterotopia](https://nicolagriffith.com/2017/06/30/my-phd-thesis-norming-the-other-narrative-empathy-via-focalised-heterotopia/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." SFWA President Kate Ristau said in the announcement that Griffith "challenges us to reconsider the past and imagine a better, more inclusive future. She is the perfect Grand Master for our present moment, demonstrating through her life and work how to find one’s self, one’s purpose, and one’s community in complicated times, and to embrace those things joyfully and fully." On her blog, Griffith [wrote](https://nicolagriffith.com/2025/04/01/shock-joy-and-o-my-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "yes, I’ve had a few days to sit with this. No, I *still* can’t wrap my head around it. I will, I just haven’t yet. !!!!!!! WOW !!!!!!!" The award is presented annually to a living author in recognition of their lifetime of achievements within the field, and 2025 marks the 50th year for the honor. It was originally awarded to Robert Heinlein in 1975, and has been handed out (mostly) annually ever since. Susan Cooper was [awarded the prize in 2024](https://nebulas.sfwa.org/grand-masters/susan-cooper/?ref=andrewliptak.com), while Robin McKinley [was named grandmaster in 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-robin-mckinley-grand-master/). Griffith will be presented with this year's award during the 60th Annual Nebula Awards Conference, which will be held between June 5th and 8th in Kansas City, Missouri. ### 11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this April URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-new-books-april-2025/ Last updated: 2025-04-01T16:37:24.000Z Over the weekend, I headed down to Concord, NH to Gibson's Books to see John Scalzi. He just released his latest book, [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com), and given that he isn't in this neck of the woods all that often, I figured it was a good time to get some copies signed and to get out of the house for a quick day trip. It was a fun afternoon: he read from his upcoming *Old Man's War* novel, [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com) (due out in September), read a story about Wil Wheaton getting killed by Crocs (the footwear), and answered some audience questions before signing copies. I got my ARC of this latest book (I should have a review put together in the nearish future) signed, as well as my copy of *Redshirts* and *The God Engines*. All in all, a fun time. 📚 Here's my usual pitch for your support: **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- Support TO with a one-time tip, which you can do by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-march-2025-scalzi-kowal-dinniman/#/portal/support). Thank you: it really does help keep this newsletter up and running. This is the first of two lists this month: I'll have another one headed out the door for you in a couple of weeks. As always, you can see prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. Okay, here are 11 new SF/F books to check out in the first half of this month: ### [*Gateway*](https://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Expeditionary-Force-Book-18-ebook/dp/B0F1TZDB9L/ref=tmm%5Fkin%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Craig Alanson (April 1st) Craig Alanson adds an 18th installment to his military science fiction series *Expedition Force*. The series follows a group of humans who're conscripted into a long-running, interstellar war, and have branched off into their own adventures in deep space. In the last book, [*Task Force Hammer*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DF86MTXF?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F16&storeType=ebooks&ref=andrewliptak.com), the Merry Band of Pirates suffered a crippling setback, and their fight is potentially over, unless they can perform a miracle. [Expeditions in self-publishingHow Craig Alanson forged a new path a a self-published author![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-75.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3522-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) ### [*A Drop of Corruption*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723821?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Robert Jackson Bennett (April 1st) Robert Jackson Bennett kicked off a new trilogy last year with [*The Tainted Cup*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820716?ref=andrewliptak.com), about an eccentric investigator, Ana Dolabra and her assistant, Dinios Kol, who're looking into the mysterious death of an imperial official. In this followup, the pair are dispatched to Yarrowdale, where an Imperial treasury officer has vanished from a locked room without any trace. Ana quickly discovers that the officer didn't vanish, he was murdered, and by someone who can apparently pass through doors like a ghost. Their assassin appears to be targeting a special, high-security facility called the Shroud, where the Empire keeps fallen titans to extract the magical components in their blood – something that it relies on to keep the world in order. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593723821?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Bennett skillfully integrates humor and magic into the complex puzzle plot and plays fair with planting clues for the reader." ### [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (April 8th) Matt Dinniman's *Dungeons Crawler Carl* series continues with its fifth installment (it's preceded by [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* and [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and will end next month with [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*.*) The series takes place after aliens radically transform Earth into a series of dungeons as a sort of test, and follows Carl, a Coast Guard veteran and his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut as they make their way through each challenging dungeon. In this installment, they've reached the sixth floor of the dungeon: the Hunting Grounds, where they face dangerous jungles, dinosaurs, and more. There are new challenges: the crawlers who've been fighting their way through the levels are now joined by outside tourists, including those willing to join in on the hunt. ### [*When We Were Real*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668060049?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daryl Gregory (April 1st) Two best friends, JP and Dulin go on a road trip after JP has an aggressive form of cancer. The two decide it's a good time for one last trip: a bus tour across America that follows a series of glitches that exposed the world as a digital simulation seven years ago. As they embark on their trip, they're accompanied by a strange group of people who're undertaking their own journeys: a nun looking for an absent God, an influencer who wants to make sure her soon-to-be-born child is too famous to be deleted, a group of elderly who are living their best lives, and a professor who's trying to escape from sociopaths who look at *The Matrix* like a holy text. As they take in each strange stop, they're coming closer to meeting the people behind the simulation. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daryl-gregory-2/when-we-were-real/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "It’s a testament to Gregory’s skill at character development that the people in this novel, and not the bizarre phenomena they’re observing, are the most fascinating part. This is a marvel." ### [*A Palace Near the Wind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803369389?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ai Jiang (April 8th) Liu Lengeng is the oldest princess of the Feng royalty, and is slated to be the next bride to the human king. The Feng are people who live closely with nature, but their lands are threatened by human expansion. Her arranged marriage is one way to slow down the encroachment, and she plans to kill her husband and stop the practice. In the days ahead of her wedding, Lufeng is trapped in the human palace and begins to discover some hidden secrets about her people's origins and the threats that humans represent. ### [*The Book That Held Her Heart*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437971?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mark Lawrence (April 8th) This is the third installment of his *Library* trilogy (following [*The Book That Wouldn’t Burn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437926?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Book That Broke the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437940?ref=andrewliptak.com)), about a boy named Evar, who was trapped for ages in an ancient library and is trying to unravel its mysteries, and who encounters Livira, who arrives and gets entangled in his quest. In this installment, the fate of the library hangs in the balance, on one book that holds incredible powers. Everyone who's important to Livira is scattered across time and space, and she has to find a way to solve the long-standing issue that has caused so much conflict in the library. Writing for *Grimdark Magazine*, John Mauro [raved about the book](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-book-that-held-her-heart-by-mark-lawrence/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "*The Book That Held Her Heart* is the perfect conclusion to Mark Lawrence’s most ambitious trilogy to date. Altogether, the *Library Trilogy* is one of the most profound and wholly original works of fiction that I’ve read in the past two decades." ### [*The Price of Everything*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862351?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jon McGoran (April 8th) A courier named Armand Pierce started off with his job a decade ago with an attaché case surgically attached to his wrist, and lives by a code: "the delivery is everything." He'll do whatever he needs to do to get his package safely to its destination. It's an important job: the internet no longer exists and all business depends on the Guild and their couriers. When Armand arrives at a destination and finds that he case he's been carrying is empty, something strange is afoot, and it's already cost the lives of three prior couriers. He'll have to figure out what's going on before the Guild catches up to him. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-price-of-everything-1816193?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the combination of climate apocalypse and political side effects, layered in levels of intrigue and mystery and leavened by romance, makes for an engrossing novel." ### [*Where the Axe Is Buried*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Nayler (April 1st) This is one of my most anticipated reads of 2025: a new novel from Ray Nayler, whose novel [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com) absolutely blew me away. In the nearish future, Europe is ruled by a series of artificial intelligences, while the Federation (in what was once Russia) is ruled by a president who's held onto power by downloading his mind into a series of new bodies. We follow a programmer named Lilla, who's devised a new technology that allows for people to enter one another's minds – and which might play a role in toppling the Federation's brutal leader. When she visits the Federation to visit her dying father, she's arrested, leaving her technology in the hands of a friend in London who now has to figure out what happened with her, all while Europe's leaders have begun to act irrationally, threatening to upend the established order of the world. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ray-nayler/where-the-axe-is-buried/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable." [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-38.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2079-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) ### [*Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780226837970?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ada Palmer (March 28th) Ada Palmer is known for science fiction series *Terra Ignota* ([*Too Like The Lightning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378019?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Seven Surrenders*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378033?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Will to Battle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378057?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Perhaps the Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378071?ref=andrewliptak.com)), but she's also an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her next book comes out of that world: an examination of the rise of the Renaissance era and how the conception of it as a golden age for Europe isn't entirely accurate: she explores how the story of the period has evolved through fifteen portraits of notable figures that provides a more nuanced look at the story. ### [*One Level Down*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964306?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mary G. Thompson (April 1st) For decades, Ella has been trapped in a simulation by the founder of a simulated colony-planet, where she's forced to pretend to be his five-year-old daughter. He controls every aspect of her reality, controlling the colonists and running experiments. His need for control is becoming more and more dangerous, and Ella realizes just how perilous her existence is: she watched him delete her stepmother and anyone else who tried to help her. A Technician is scheduled to visit the world every 60 years, and Ella has been waiting, hoping for a way to escape before she takes drastic measures that could have consequences that impact the entire universe. [Writing for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2025/02/one-level-down-by-mary-g-thompson-review-by-gary-k-wolfe/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Gary K. Wolfe says "the question of how to escape a simulation, or to gain control of one’s own programming, can make for a narrative strategy as familiar and yet original as a good locked-room murder mystery. In Thompson’s case, it can also serve as a suspenseful and often provocative exploration of obsession, control, and the search for freedom in a world that seems to be aligned against you." ### [*Choir of Hatred*](https://www.amazon.com/Choir-Hatred-Yudhanjaya-Wijeratne-ebook/dp/B0DYG2V6KQ/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=3BR7JM8GL03TK&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dWPxah3BS9m0V-5SPJbF22KlBoZYaLviPfrnE4y3xIY.UeCsSJVcAfyFgWfEnIEuJEgizSlBm40UjNB%5FgT0XMbM&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=Choir+of+Hatred+by+Yudhanjaya+Wijeratne&qid=1743188548&s=digital-text&sprefix=choir+of+hatred+by+yudhanjaya+wijeratne%2Cdigital-text%2C114&sr=1-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (April 15th) One of my favorite books of 2024 was Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's novel [*Pilgrim Machines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798338880302?ref=andrewliptak.com) (set in the same world as his earlier novel [*The Salvage Crew*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781949890709?ref=andrewliptak.com)). The book followed an intelligent spaceship as it traveled further and further from Earth, learning more about the larger universe and the nature of intelligence as it did so. It's a spectacular read, and I was thrilled to see that Wijeratne is returning to the same world with another book: *Choir of Hatred*. [Sailing off the edge of the map: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s Pilgrim MachinesYudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel Pilgrim Machines is a everything I think of when I try and imagine what science fiction can and should be: an optimistic and beautiful journey![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-114.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1455-1-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-book-review-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-pilgrim-machines/) This one looks like it'll be something different from those two prior books: Wijeratne's dipping his toes into the military science fiction genre with this one. The Rubber Ducks is a crew that's on paper listed as a catering company, but they're really the team that you'd want to hire when you really need some fighting to be done. This is an insta-buy for me: I'm really excited to see what this one brings. --- That's it for today. What are you currently reading, and what catches your eye this month? Let me know in the comments. ### Fractal steps URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dante-lauretta-osiris-rex-asteroid-hunter-book-review-space-astronomy/ Last updated: 2025-03-27T17:41:49.000Z I've been reading a lot about astronomy and the solar system recently for a writing project I've been working on, and one of the books that I recently picked up was *The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist's Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System*, by Dante S. Lauretta, the Principle Investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission that recently visited an asteroid and returned to Earth with some samples of its surface. It's an engaging and breezy read, one that sheds not only light on the nature of asteroids in our solar system and this mission, but also the complicated process that it takes to put such a massive undertaking together. Lauretta moves through his career as an scientist, detailing how his early love of science fiction and the promise of the search for alien life through programs like SETI helped lead him to begin studying chemistry and eventually, to the composition of asteroids and the possibilities that they hold some of the critical organic building blocks that possibly led to the emergence of life on Earth. It's a complicated subject, and he uses this book to neatly break down the chain that takes you from organic chemistry to the rocks – or really, piles of loosely-consolidated rubble – that are floating out there in our solar system, and how he went from studying and collecting meteorites in Antarctica to leading a $1.6 billion mission to the asteroid Bennu, for a novel sample recovery mission. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/bennu_dec10.png) 101955 Bennu. Image: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona That mission, OSIRIS-REx (**O**rigins, **S**pectral **I**nterpretation, **R**esource **I**dentification, **S**ecurity, **R**egolith **Ex**plorer), launched in September 2016, and made its way out to an asteroid called 101955 Bennu. It arrived in December 2018, and began mapping the surface of the body to find a suitable sampling site. After two years of exploration, the spacecraft dipped down to impact the asteroid's surface in October 2020, and bounced off with some precious fragments of asteroid regolith – twice the amount they'd hoped to get, before returning to Earth and dropping off its sample canister to Earth in September 2023\. The spacecraft has since been retasked and is now headed for an extended mission to 99942 Apophis, the asteroid that made headlines twenty years ago when it was discovered and believed to be a potential threat to the planet. It'll arrive in 2029\. --- Lauretta uses this book to showcase the advances we've made in the study of our solar system, now even more useful after the [recent headlines about 2024 YR4](https://www.space.com/180-foot-asteroid-1-in-83-chance-hitting-Earth-2032?ref=andrewliptak.com), an asteroid that was believed to be on course for Earth in 2032\. (The chances of it hitting Earth have dwindled down to almost nothing.) Space and astronomy are complicated topics, and our awareness of the fields are often shaped by dramatic headlines around successes, failures or random discoveries, PR and publicity stunts, or by the pictures that get sent back to Earth by our robotic emissaries. What's often left out of those stories is the work that goes into those programs, and this is where Lauretta really shines a light into just how immense these programs are. He goes back to the initial meetings that led to the OSIRIS-REx project: aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin had a spacecraft design that they wanted to pitch to NASA, and Lauretta was brought on by his mentor and project Principle Investigator Michael Drake because it aligned with his research goals. What struck me about this book is how it's a story of a project that where you scratch the surface, there's more complexity and challenges lurking underneath. It took Lauretta and Drake and their team three tries before they had refined the outlines of their proposal to the point where it was approved by NASA. Each time, NASA pushed back on various things that they took issue with: their initial target asteroids, the design and equipment on the spacecraft, and so forth, prompting them to go back to the drawing board and make adjustments. But even after the project was approved and the spacecraft was designed, they faced other issues: design and engineering problems that emerged as they built the spacecraft, all with the memories of spacecraft and probes that had failed because of human errors, like that time the [Mars Climate Orbiter](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbiter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) burned up in Mars's atmosphere because one team used metric measurements while another used imperial ones. Once the probe arrived at Bennu, Lauretta plays out a fascinating story of scientific discovery and adaptation. The asteroid is hard to see: he described it as being about the same color as fresh pavement, and the team really didn't know what to expect when they arrived on the asteroid. Their initial thought had been that it would be almost sandy – Lauretta had described it as a trip to the beach. But as OSIRIS-REx approached and began taking images, they discovered that the surface was incredibly rocky, littered with hundreds of massive boulders: the smooth landing surface that they'd hoped for just didn't exist. They planned for that contingency, and had Lockheed Martin's engineers devise strategies to map out the surface and better understand what Bennu is like. Lauretta laid out some interesting tactics for eventually tackling this problem: pulling together his entire team to eyeball the images that came in, looking for potential landing sites, and then whittling down the list until they had four. As those sites had their plusses and minuses, they worked to figure out additional strategies for potential errors that came up, like the spacecraft deciding to abort a landing if it detected a problem, and how they'd mitigate it. The contact on October 20th, 2020 brought its own surprises: where they expected to hit the surface, snag some samples and bounce right off, the probe ended up sinking about the length of one's arm into the surface before blasting back off again. The probe collected more than twice the amount that they'd hoped for, and when it took off, it left behind a considerable crater and cloud of debris. What they ended up recovering from the asteroid was a lot of carbonate minerals, lots of water (about 700,000 metric tons of it), and that the surface is constantly emitting plumes and clouds of debris. It's essentially a big pile of mud that an astronaut would sink into if she stepped onto the surface. What I appreciated the most about this book is how it illuminates how the processes that Lauretta's describing are sort of like a [fractal pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal?ref=andrewliptak.com): you can endlessly zoom in and get ever-greater detail as you do so. Each step along the way of this particular journey, Lauretta and the rest of his team started the program with some basic assumptions about Bennu and the spacecraft, and as they came closer and closer to the asteroid, they adjusted their plans and adapted. This is what I get the most excited for about science: that simple process of discovery and seeing how it does – or doesn't – line up with the predictions that you've formulated. Reality is what it is: every new datapoint or discovery adds to our picture of the world. When you figure in the costs of a space probe that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, you have to balance the need to preserve that investment by eliminating as much risk as possible, while also remaining flexible to tackle those unexpected things that crop up. This is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately: the point where the rubber meets the road, and where abstract theory meets cold, hard reality: we can imagine and predict how the world operates based on what information we have and extrapolate accordingly, but it's how we react when we encounter those things that change how we see the world around us. This book provides a good window into not just the science and things that we learned, but how an operation with a ton of moving parts can not only function, but thrive as it sets out to explore beyond our world. As such, it's a fascinating, optimistic, and accessible read, one that has my head spinning with a better understanding of how much we've learned – and how much we have yet to learn about solar system. ### Interview with Garrett M. Graff URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/garrett-graff-vermont-oral-history-covid-19-interview/ Last updated: 2025-03-25T13:22:49.000Z In 2022, the Vermont Historical Society launched a major project: [*Collecting COVID-19*](https://vermonthistory.org/collecting-covid-19/?ref=andrewliptak.com), thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services \[Grant Number MA-251676-OMS-22\], and involved the collection of more than 100 oral histories to preserve and bring to the public the stories of Vermonters during the public health crisis, particularly those who worked on the front lines and shaped its response. The project will include a podcast and access to those oral histories through our website, as well as a book that compiles those interviews, *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*. To tackle the formidable challenge of organizing those interviews and stories into a cohesive narrative, VHS turned to an expert in the field: acclaimed journalist and author Garrett M. Graff. Graff grew up and resides in Vermont, and has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. He's a columnist for *The Washington Post*, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the history podcast, *Long Shadow*, which received a 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award. He's the former editor of *POLITICO Magazine* and is a longtime contributor to *WIRED* and CNN and has written for publications like *Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair,* and *Foreign Affairs.* He's the author of nine books, including the #1 national bestseller *The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11* and the award-winning *When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day*. His *New York Times* bestseller *Watergate: A New History* was a finalist in 2023 for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Here's our Q&A with Graff about his work on this project. ### **Can you introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about how you became a writer?** My name is Garrett M. Graff and I’m a third-generation Vermont writer and journalist. I grew up in Montpelier and my father was the longtime head of the Associated Press here in Vermont and the host of *Vermont This Week* that ran on Vermont PBS. My mother is a Vermont historian and former editor for *Vermont Life* magazine and my grandfather was a journalist with the *New York Herald Tribune*, a drama critic for many years. So, I grew up in a family of writers with writing as the family business. ### **You’ve written books like** [***The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11***](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Only-Plane-in-the-Sky/Garrett-M-Graff/9781501182211?ref=andrewliptak.com) **and** [***When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day***](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/When-the-Sea-Came-Alive/Garrett-M-Graff/9781668027813?ref=andrewliptak.com)**. What about the oral history format that you appeals to you and to readers?** I've written book- and magazine-length oral histories over the last decade and what I find so fascinating and important about this format is the way that it allows you to look at historic events knowing only what the people knew at the time. One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time. When you look at the September 11th attacks, the version of the event that we teach in history books 25 years later is this neat and simple story: the attacks begin at 8:46 in the morning, there are four planes, four attacks in Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington D.C., the whole thing is over 102 minutes later with a collapse of the second tower, and around 3,000 people were killed. For anyone who was watching 9/11 unfold, that’s not the day that we remember: we didn't know when the attack began, when it was over, how many attacks there were, or how many people died in those first few hours. Similarly, if you look at something like D-Day, we now view it as this Herculean triumph, but when you go back to the letters and the memories of the people involved on the night of June 5th, they don't know that they are about to embark on something that is historic and tragic. You know they are concerned about whether they're going to live to see the end of the next day and whether they are going to live up to what the next day requires for them, whether they will let down their comrades, and that they're not feeling particularly heroic in the moment. Oral history allows you to see that human, up-close experience of these events, and that’s certainly true with the COVID-19 pandemic. So much of the national reaction in those first couple of weeks of March and April 2020 is the uncertainty of what comes next. ### Your next book is *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*, part of our [*Collecting COVID-19*](https://vermonthistory.org/collecting-covid-19/?ref=andrewliptak.com) project that we launched in 2022\. What drew to this project? Amanda Gustin invited me to participate in it, and what was interesting to me was the chance to revisit and capture (as contemporaneously as possible) some of the history of this giant moment that we are still very much living through. Usually, I'm returning to events years or decades later, and the legacy of those events is much clearer. I think one of the things that's challenging for our country and our politics right now is that we're not really clear what the legacy of the pandemic is going to be and so capturing those experiences and memories while they're fresh I think is an important historical exercise. ### You mentioned how in the moment we can’t really see a full picture of an event, so when you look back at the pandemic through this project, what are some of the things that became clear for you? I think I would answer that question by answering a slightly different question: the thing that really startled me in going through the interviews for this project was realizing how much of the pandemic I have already forgotten. We are just five years after the start of the pandemic and reading through these interviews, I kept saying to myself “oh wow, I'd forgotten that happened” or I remembered a particular phase or moment of the pandemic. There were so many political, social, and health developments that unfolded across those first two years, and part of what I think is hard to remember now was how many different parts and phrases we got in those early years, like “stop the spread” or “flatten the curve.” Just a couple years later, I sort of forgotten about that. ### VHS’s field interviewers conducted more than a hundred interviews over the course of this project, so how do you go about producing an oral history volume like this? The thing that I always talk about in the context of doing oral history is that you're always on the lookout for the most ordinary, representative experiences and the most extraordinary ones that stand out. Looking back, I think one of the real challenges with the pandemic is that there really wasn't an ordinary experience for most people. Your experience during the pandemic was so contingent upon so many different factors: your family, living, and health situation, your race, socioeconomic class, and financial cushion, whether you had children at home, and what your work status and flexibility was. I think you could have done a project like this just focused on a single block or a single street or a single town and still have not found two or three personal stories that really lined up with one another. What was universal or nearly so that came through in these interviews is the anxiety, stress, uncertainty, and the sense of being pulled in all of these new and challenging directions. ### How do you go about organizing all of these different interviews for a project like this? For this project, one of the things that I did was really try to group speakers by theme and really try to think about even if there weren't ordinary experiences, there were representative, large-scale experiences that certainly shared themes that came through across them. Trying to organize the quotations and speakers into those overarching themes was my main challenge in pulling this together. One thing that I admired about this project was the way the Historical Society and field interviewers found people that you never would have known to ask about their stories. The stories that I will remember from this are the Vermonters that I’d never heard of before, people who were far from the spotlight who helped keep our state functioning in one of its most trying times in recent memory. ### Was there anything that you were surprised to learn about the pandemic through these interviews? One of the few universal themes from the interviews was the pride that people had in living in Vermont during the pandemic, the way that the state, their communities and their neighbors responded, and the way that the collective spirit of Vermonters shown through in their stories. It’s really striking, given how polarizing the national debate and discussion around the pandemic has become and how a lot of states ended up or emerged from the other end of the pandemic more polarized and more divided than they were at the beginning. ### What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book? I don't know, in part because the strength of this project as conceived of by VHS is that we don't know where the story is going. Going through these interviews, one of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about was the memory of the flu pandemic in 1918-1920, and how quickly forgotten that national pandemic was. I do hope this book will provide a snapshot of how people reacted in the moment to the specificity of the COVID pandemic and will help inform and educate readers long from now who find themselves confronting crises that we can't think of or imagine today. ### After this book, what do you have coming up next that we should look for in bookstores? I'm actually in in the midst of working on my next book, [*The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668092392?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will come out in August of this year. It’s an oral history of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, and the war in Japan. **You can now** [**order *Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont* through the VHS bookstore**](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/life-became-very-blurry-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-in-vermont/1443?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Anatomy of a cover URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-historical-society-covid-19-garrett-graff-book-cover/ Last updated: 2025-03-20T19:22:35.000Z Over at my [day job](https://vermonthistory.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), we have a new book coming out: [*Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/life-became-very-blurry-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-in-vermont/1443?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com). It's part of a [larger oral history project that we launched back in 2022](https://www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture/vermont-historical-society-to-create-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-36178971?ref=andrewliptak.com) that sought to document the experience and approach to the pandemic here in the state. As part of the project, we collected more than 100 oral histories from Vermonters of all types: from high-level state officials coordinating the response to folks in nursing homes, contact tracers, essential workers, and so forth. We invited author and journalist Garrett M. Graff (no big deal, just a guy nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his history of Watergate) to compile those oral histories into a cohesive narrative, which is this book. My role at VHS is PR & Guest Services Coordinator, which means I run all of our press relations and bookstore, and thus, I've been heading up the effort to publicize and sell this book. I talked a bit about how this worked in a prior post (about last fall's release, [*Ira Allen: A Biography*](https://vermonthistory.org/ira-allen-biograpjy-kevin-graffagnino-vermont-history-book?ref=andrewliptak.com)by J. Kevin Graffagnino) but my role here was a little more involved and hands-on. [Paper grinderA look into marketing and selling a history book![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-89.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9685-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-biography-publishing-cover/) I write a lot about cover art and book covers in general as part of the larger package of bookselling. With *Ira Allen,* I drew some inspiration from the books that are out there about other biographies of other historical white guys, which basically boiled down to a portrait and some sort of background. this book presented some interesting challenges for us: how do you convey something like the COVID-19 pandemic to a book-buying audience? Part of the problem is that the pandemic is now endemic: it's never gone away, and as such, there's not a weird grouping of books that are out there covering this topic. There are the broader histories of pandemics that incorporate COVID-19 as an example of their larger topics, policy / topical books from experts that publishers have rushed out for audiences looking to understand what's going on, and sensational conspiracy books published by cranks. None of those are quite what we've put together here, but there are some similarities: lots of whites / blacks / reds minimalist covers that lets the title do the talking. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/91-Si5V4gFL._SL1500_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/912TjOfWK0L._SL1500_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/812aPtyxqfL._SL1500_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/713mc8g5yXL._SL1500_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/81OqGAK8RKL._SL1500_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/61o-t8AHDkL._SL1500_.jpg) This book doesn't quite fall into those categories, and while we have some items in our collection pertaining to the pandemic, a minimalist cover didn't feel like it quite conveyed what this book was. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to be mixed up with a popular science or crank book, with say, something like a photograph of a vaccine vial or a mask. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/IMG_3093.JPG) A vial of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine used in Vermont in 2021\. Image: Vermont Historical Society My first thought was to try and put something together that was a bit more historical-looking: I selected some landscape paintings of Vermont and isolated the mountains, and to convey the looming threat of COVID-19, I found a graphic of a virus particle and stuck it up in the sky. In the back, I used a historic map of Vermont. This version was never intended for publication: it was more a proof of concept to see how folks would respond to it. I particularly liked it, but internally, we weren't huge fans of the COVID virus itself (the feedback I got was that it was "icky".) I also wasn't a huge fan of the versions that we ended up trying with usable features: a realistic graphic of a virus particle clashed with the historic feel to the book, and we ended up ditching this direction altogether. I started chatting with Graff in the fall about his work on the book. "Pandemic in the Green Mountains" started out as a placeholder title, but it always felt a little too sterile and bland for me. Graff had a short list of suggestions based on quotes that he'd pulled out of the manuscript, and the one that spoke to us the most was "Life Became Very Blurry", which came from Dan Daltry, the infectious disease program manager at the Vermont Department of Health. It ended up sticking. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/Copy-of-COVID-19-book-cover-prototype.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/COVID-19-book-cover-prototype.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/Copy-of-COVID-19-book-cover-prototype--3--1.png) With the historical version axed, I began working up an alternative. At the start of the pandemic, we'd opened a [crowd-sourced archive](https://covid-19.digitalvermont.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) where people could submit their photographs, diary entries, and more for preservation. I started looking through the photos, but I didn't find many that really conveyed what we were looking for. Some [where kind](https://covid-19.digitalvermont.org/items/show/828?ref=andrewliptak.com) [of vague](https://covid-19.digitalvermont.org/items/show/812?ref=andrewliptak.com), [of signs](https://covid-19.digitalvermont.org/items/show/823?ref=andrewliptak.com), or [weren't positioned well](https://covid-19.digitalvermont.org/items/show/806?ref=andrewliptak.com) to accommodate the things that a cover needs, like lots of air and negative space. (That's not to say that they aren't great photos: they're invaluable for historical purposes, just not for book covers.) I realized that I had some photos that might work. When the pandemic began in 2020, I began taking pictures on my walks: images of the signs and indications of the pandemic's impact, and the emptiness that I felt during that time. I had collected them into a folder on my phone, and began flipping through. Some basic criteria emerged: I needed negative space, something that conveyed the pandemic, and something fairly minimal, but to the point. I downloaded a bunch that might work, and began experimenting with variations. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/Copy-of-COVID-19-book-cover-prototype--7-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/Copy-of-COVID-19-book-cover-prototype--4-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/Copy-of-COVID-19-book-cover-prototype--9--1.png) Images: Andrew Liptak This felt like a better, modern approach that conveyed what we wanted with the book. None of these really worked well for what I was looking for though. The vaccine hub photo just felt bland: there was no urgency to it. The masked cut-out felt a little too creepy, but the background was also a bit too noisy. The empty playground was my favorite of the lot, but it didn't really convey *COVID* all that well. There's a sign on the swing, but it's impossible to read. There was an image that popped out for me: one that I took of a sign in Norwich, Vermont on December 1st, 2020, warning visitors to the state that they would need to isolate for a couple of weeks upon entering. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/blurry.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak It had plenty of negative space, the subject is right in the middle, and the sign itself is direct and to the point: YOU MUST ISOLATE. Internally, we really liked it, and we handed the concept over to a designer who helped enhance the image on the sign, do the layout and text. We ended up adding some drop-shadow effects to the title and a minimal amount of color correction, and we had our final cover. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/Blurry-Cover.jpg) The final cover. Image: Vermont Historical Society Once the image was in place, that allowed me to begin generating some of the images that we'd need for marketing the book: graphics for our social media feeds and website, as well as a [short teaser trailer](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFtA2NuMNo4/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I generated in Canva and was a fun experiment. These all serve different purposes: the one with the blue background is one that we've been using for retailer pages and for social media, where we don't want the book cover itself cropped in a feed. Various banners are used on the website or for thumbnails, and another is a poster that we can physically print out and display at our locations and elsewhere. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/Blurry-Book-Graphic.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/Blurry-Book-Poster.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/Life-Became-Blurry-Banner.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/LIFE-BECAME-VERY-BLURRY.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/Untitled-design--5-.png) Various marketing images for Life Became Very Blurry. Images: Vermont Historical Society Now the fun part begins: selling the book to bookstores and buyers around the state. This is the third book that I've worked on for VHS, and it's not quite like the others. The first was [*"Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/-vermont-for-the-vermonters-the-history-of-eugenics-in-the-green-mountain-state/1253?ref=andrewliptak.com), which we weren't entirely sure how well it would do, given the subject matter. But it sold really well (we've had to reprint it a couple of times), and still moves briskly off the shelves here. I sort of expected *Ira Allen* to be a bit of a sleeper, but it's probably sold the best out of all of our books: we keep running out of it. This one feels like it'll be a bit of a toss-up. It's an important topic, but it's also pretty fresh in people's minds. I'm really happy with how this came together. Like the *Ira Allen* biography, this was a really fun challenge to tackle. And now that we have copies in hand and headed off to readers and bookstores, it'll be time to start work on the next book. It's something in the true crime variety, and with that comes new challenges that I'll be working on tackling this spring and summer ahead of its release this fall. Stay tuned. ### 21 more SF/F books to read in March 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-march-2025-scalzi-kowal-dinniman/ Last updated: 2025-03-18T19:07:46.000Z It seems like spring is upon us here in Vermont: we had a huge storm pass through and in its aftermath, we're left with warmer temperatures and a lot of mud. Hopefully, things will begin to dry out soon. I'm looking forward to some reading time in the sun as the temperatures begin to climb. 📚 **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. This newsletter is supported by you, the reader, and there are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- Support TO with a one-time tip, which you can do by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-new-releases/#/portal/support). Thank you! As always, you can find the prior monthly lists under the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag, and you can read the first March list here: [15 new SF/F books to check out in the first half of March 2025New releases from Katherine Addison, M.R. Carey, Arkady Martine, Amal El-Mohtar, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and many more to add to your TBR pile!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-106.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2678.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-new-releases/) Okay, here are 21 new books that you should check out for the rest of the month. ### [*Dissolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593852163?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicholas Binge (March 25th) Maggie Webb is caring for her elderly husband, who's been slowly losing his memory. When a stranger named Hassancomes to her door, he brings some shocking news: his memories aren't being lost to disease; someone is stealing them, in order to prevent a long-held secret from being unburied. He helps Maggie break into her husband's mind to try and save him, only to discover a mystery that stretches back centuries and across the world, and that the stakes are higher than she ever could have thought. [*Kirkus Reviews* says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nicholas-binge/dissolution-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It’s all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending. ### [Tideborn](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564946?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eliza Chan (March 25th) Eliza Chan follows up last year's [*Fathomfolk* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564922?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a sequel, *Tideborn*. The books are set in the half-submerged city of Tiankawi, which had been a peaceful place where humans lived alongside fathomfolk – sirens, seawitches, kelpies and kappas. They've been largely at peace, but tensions had begun to rise. That rift exploded after a fathomfolk princess was exiled to the city, and Mira, a half-siren activist has uncovered a conspiracy while the princess Nami undertakes a daring voyage to try and convince a Titan to spare the city. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316564946?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Though the story can be dense, readers will be captivated by Tiankawi’s atmospheric, postapocalyptic universe." ### [*Sunrise on the Reaping*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781546171461?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suzanne Collins (March 18th) Suzanne Collins returns to the world of [*The Hunger Games*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781339030609?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a new, fifth entry: *Sunrise on the Reaping*. She released her first prequel, [*The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781339016573?ref=andrewliptak.com) back in 2020, which was set 64 years prior to the events in that first book. This one is set 24 years prior to that book, just as the 50th Hunger Games begin, which Haymitch Abernathy will eventually win – but at a considerable cost. ### [*The Mune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915983244?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sue Dawes (March 25th) Thirty women are picked up from asylums, streets, and workhouses of Victorian England and are dumped onto an island in an alternative universe. There, they're forced to rethink their lives and the structures of their world while they're forced to survive and form a new society as they're surrounded by strange landscapes and dangerous creatures. ### [*The Gate of the Feral Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955970?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (March 11th) Matt Dinniman continues the adventures of Carl, Princess Donut, and Mongo as they make their way through a dungeon constructed by aliens to test humanity. This is the fourth installment of the series, following [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* with the next two installments coming later this year: [*The Butcher's Masquerade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593955994?ref=andrewliptak.com)(April) and [*The Eye of the Bedlam Bride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593956014?ref=andrewliptak.com) (May). In this installment, the crew have to contend with a new level that features four castles: one occupied by warrior gnomes, one made of sand, a submarine, and a haunted crypt, all of which they need to capture within 15 days, and this time, Carl has to rely on some of the other crawlers who're also fighting to survive – if he can learn to trust them. ### [*The Third Rule of Time Travel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572514?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Philip Fracassi (March 18th) In Philip Fracassi's new novel, time travel has been invented, but there are some strict rules: You can only travel to a point within your lifetime, you can only be there for 90 seconds, and you can't do anything but observe. That's it. Is that really it though? A scientist named Beth Darlow travels back in time, and has been observing her past, only to have her project taken from under her, even as she's on the brink of a breakthrough. The people funding her project aren't interested in her discoveries, just how they can make a profit off of it, and the decision will drive her to make some desperate choices. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*rekt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661597?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alex Gonzalez (March 25th) 26-year-old Sammy Dominguez has grown up around the darker places on the internet and is particularly drawn to the bloody and violent urban legends that pop up on obscure forums. After surviving a car accident that kills his girlfriend, he's invited by a user called Haruspx to a disturbing site called chinsky, where he finds a deepfaked video of the car accident and becomes obsessed with it as he tries to track down its creator. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645661597?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the intense ugliness of the subject matter and dark sense of humor won’t be for everyone, but extreme horror fans who grew up on the internet will find plenty to hold their attention."[ ](https://www.facebook.com/kensingtonpublishing) ### [*Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/life-became-very-blurry-an-oral-history-of-covid-19-in-vermont/1443?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Garrett M. Graff (March 25th) The COVID-19 pandemic started in earnest in the U.S. 5 years ago this month, and in conjunction with that milestone, we at the Vermont Historical Society are publishing a new book that brings together more than 100 voices from our oral history project about the pandemic. Back in 2022, we launched a major oral history project to capture stories about the COVID-19 pandemic, and tasked noted Vermont author and journalist Garrett M. Graff with compiling the interviews we collected (more than 100 of them!) into a cohesive narrative. The result is this book. It's a difficult read of a grim time in our lives, but it's an important work that looks back at the community's response here in the state. (If you're in Vermont, we'll be holding a [book launch for it at Bear Pond Books on March 27th](https://vermonthistory.org/calendar/book-launch-for-life-became-very-blurry?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Stay tuned: I'll have a couple of posts that I'll put up about this in the next couple of days. ### [*The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668075081?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Stephen Graham Jones (March 18th) Stephen Graham Jones has been steadily knocking books out of the park, such as [*The Only Good Indian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982136468?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)and [*My Heart is a Chainsaw*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982137649?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*.* His next is *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, a historical horror novel set in 1912, following a Lutheran priest who took down the story of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man who haunted a reservation looking for revenge. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephen-graham-jones/the-buffalo-hunter-hunter/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "While a vampire Western could easily have become a farce, Jones crafts it into a rich tapestry that winds around questions of identity, heritage, and historical truth, all pivoting on a real historical atrocity, the Marias Massacre, where almost 200 Native people were murdered by the U.S. Army in January 1870." ### [*Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517919108?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Kotsko (March 25th) *Star Trek* has been a huge presence in the world of science fiction media, and this new book from Adam Kotsko looks like it'll be an interesting examination of the franchise's recent history, starting with the live action series *Enterprise* and up through the trio of Kelvin-era films and the recent spate of shows streaming on Paramount+, as well as the books and comics. But more than this franchise, it's an examination of the larger idea of these inter-connected worlds that drive the franchises that have taken over popular culture. ### [*The Martian Contingency*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250237040?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Mary Robinette Kowal (March 18th) Mary Robinette Kowal has written some of my favorite near-future, hard science fiction stories in the form of Lady Astronaut series. The first three books, [*The Calculating Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*The Fated Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765398949?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and [*The Relentless Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250236968?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) explore an alternate history where an asteroid impact caused a runaway global warming scenario, prompting humanity to stand up a space program and begin looking to not only go into space, but to build colonies on the Moon and Mars. In this final installment of the series, we've set up a colony on Mars, and when Elma York off to help with its construction, she realizes that something's a bit off: something has been hidden about the nature of the first expedition, and when they try and find details, they're stonewalled. Left unexposed, those secrets could have a devastating impact on the future of humanity. [Interview with Mary Robinette KowalA couple of years ago, Mary Robinette Kowal published a pair of books that utterly blew me away \[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review\] : the first two installments of her Lady Astronaut series: The Calculating Stars \[https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385\] and The Fated Sky \[https:![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-33.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_bda06a81-0101-4019-9254-d6a71e163c37_2448x2448.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-mary-robinette-kowal/) ### [*A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063285767?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ursula K. Le Guin, illustrated by Fred Fordham (March 11th) Ursula K. Le Guin's *A Wizard of Earthsea* is one of my favorite fantasy novels, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that her estate has authorized a new adaptation of the book: a graphic novel illustrated by Fred Fordham. I'm looking forward to checking this one out as soon as I get my hands on it. ### [*Transmentation Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212185998?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Darkly Lem (March 18th) One of the projects that I've been fascinated by is [Many Worlds](https://www.manyworldsforum.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), a collaborative writing group that includes Cadwell Turnbull. It inspired a neat anthology, [*Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737718437?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and members of the writing group have come together as "Darkly Lem" to produce a new novel: *Transmentation Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds*. Over millennia and across thousands of worlds, societies of interdimensional travelers and explorers have worked to explore the cosmos. When a training mission goes wrong, two such societies are brought into conflict: intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade of the Burel Hird group is blamed for an assassination attempt, while the Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara also find themselves swept up in it. Their involvement sets into motion plans that could ripple across the Many Worlds. ### [*Splinter Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250349309?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Ludington (March 18th) In this debut novel, an archeologist named Rabbit Ward accompanies expeditions back in time to try and locate and preserve artifacts before they're lost to history. It hasn't always been successful: two decades ago, he lost both a precious menorah and his mentee, Aaron. When evidence appears that the artifact might not have been destroyed, it's a rare chance at redemption and he heads off to 6th century Constantinople. Things start to go wrong: he finds that there's someone else after the menorah and the Jewish population in the city are under considerable pressure: a revolution is brewing, and it's going to take all of his skills to survive the trip. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250349309?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Rabbit’s quick wit and fast fists make him a winning protagonist, and though the book’s home stretch feels a bit rushed, Ludington demonstrates a knack for fleet action sequences." ### [*The Expert of Subtle Revisions: A Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593798300?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kirsten Menger-Anderson (March 18th) I always find meta-texts to be really fascinating, and this one looks to be particularly interesting. In 2016, a woman named Hase was set to meet her father in Half Moon Bay in California. When he didn't show, she went to plan B: to to the Berkley library, find a book and follow the instructions that she finds. Jumping back to 1933, a man named Anton arrives in Vienna to start his job as a mathematician and finds himself part of an group of scholars who've been targeted by an anti-intellectual mob. Hase spends her time editing Wikipedia entries and is soon contacted by someone looking for her father. He's a representative of an organization called the Zedlacher Institute, and they're working to figure out the mysteries of time travel, and that she's tied up in this larger story somehow. Writing for *The Los Angeles Times*, Ilana Masad [says](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2025-03-14/expert-of-subtle-revisions-review-kirsten-menger-anderson-time-travel?ref=andrewliptak.com) "As Hase herself knows from editing Wikipedia, neither history nor language are neutral, and Menger-Anderson superbly demonstrates how a writer needn’t shy away from the political tensions of a historical period but can use them to heighten and contextualize setting, character and plot. ### [*Perdido Street Station* (Limited Edition)](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/perdido-street-station-limited-edition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by China Miéville (March 18th) The Folio Society's next limited edition release will be of China Miéville's acclaimed novel [*Perdido Street Station*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345443021?ref=andrewliptak.com), the first of his *Bas-Lag* novels (it's followed by [*The Scar* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345454898?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Iron Council*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345458421?ref=andrewliptak.com)). Like many of Folio Society's other limited editions, this one will feature a special box as well as artwork by Doug Bell. This one goes on sale today and it seems to have been selling quickly. ### [*Space Brooms!*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915998507?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. G. Rodriguez (March 25th) Johnny Gomez is the one guy on Kilgore Station that is having a rough time. The station is a luxury resort where humans, augmented people, and aliens kick back and relax. Johnny's the one that has to clean up after them. He had originally set out for the station in search of adventure and fortune, but didn't quite find it. All of that changes when he comes across a glass data drive, something that everyone in the solar system is also trying to get their hands on. Aided by a couple of friends, Johnny sets off for the Moon, hoping to sell the chip to the Obinna Crime Syndicate, but will first have to contend with everyone coming after him – and his own past. ### [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Scalzi (March 25th) I've long been a fan of John Scalzi's novels, from his serious space operas like [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*The Collapsing Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388902?ref=andrewliptak.com), to his comedic, lighter reads like [*Fuzzy Nation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250174642?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com). His latest looks like it'll be both fun and somethin of an experiment: the moon turns into cheese and humanity has to figure out what to do. It's a funny premise, but what has my interest piqued is the structure of this book: it's divided up into chapters that surround this event, sometimes with their own characters, sometimes with some throughline, all playing into a bigger narrative. It's something I've liked about his books like [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765369550?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-scalzi/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Scalzi’s premise is absurd, but it’s merely the pretext to take a multifaceted, satiric look at how Americans deal with large-scale crisis, something we’re abundantly and recently familiar with, and will no doubt experience again in the not-so-distant future." [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-107.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5405-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) ### [*Murder by Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250342249?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Olivia Waite (March 18th) Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a new body aboard an interstellar generation ship, the HMS Fairweather, where the minds of the passengers are uploaded into the Library while they make the long journey. She's one of the ship's detectives and has been awoken because another passenger was murdered – and chillingly, their mind has been deleted out of the Library as well. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/olivia-waite/murder-by-memory/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "intelligent and always surprising, Waite’s book artfully weaves a queer love story into a unique mystery/science fiction hybrid form that is pure entertainment from start to finish." ### [*The Prince Without Sorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063420557?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maithree Wijesekara (March 18th) Maithree Wijesekara kicks off a trilogy with *The Prince Without Sorrow*, inspired by the [Mauryan Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurya%5FEmpire?ref=andrewliptak.com). It follows Prince Ashoka, the youngest son of a brutal emperor, Adil Maurya. Ashoka went against his father's crusade against witches, and has been cast out of the royal court. When his father dies, he's dispatched to a remote part of the empire to try and quell some of the problems there that are being caused by spirits. At the same time, a mayakari (a witch) named Shakti has been bound by a pacifistic code, but after her family is murdered by the emperor's forces, she's bent on exacting revenge. The two will eventually collide, and each have to contend with the nature of power and its consequences. ### [*First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780810148185?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Zac Zimmer (March 15th) I'm always interested to find new books that explore the nature of speculative fiction, and this volume from Zac Zimmer seems like it'll do just that: it's an examination of the colonization of America through first-contact narratives, examining the types of artwork that tackle this gigantic topic. --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments what you're reading and what catches your eye on this list. ### Destination: Venus URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:54:35.000Z From antiquity, we have watched Venus from afar. Often praised for beauty, its close position to Earth and its reflective atmosphere made it stand out amongst the stars. Like Mars, Venus has played into our stories, becoming a destination for many science fiction authors. Unlike Mars, however, the planet has never quite matched that of its colder, smaller sibling, and has provided a different vision for human habitation in the solar system. The present state of Mars allows for some hope for human habitation and numerous science fiction authors have lovingly detailed the mechanics and engineering of how a human settlement might look, alongside fantastic imagery of space-suit clad colonists exploring the wonders of the Red planet as they might the American Southwest. Habitation on Venus, on the other hand, is far more unlikely. With an atmospheric pressure over ninety times that of the Earth’s, the surface temperature hovers around a balmy 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F), enough to turn solid lead into liquid. The atmosphere is acidic and completely blocks light from the sun from reaching the surface. It is one of the most hellish locations in the solar system. But, science fiction is an optimistic genre, and even as we’ve learned about the true nature of Venus, we still visit on occasion. Venus provides an interesting counterpoint to Mars: it’s the only planet in the Solar System named for a female goddess, who represented such themes as love, sex, fertility, and desire, due to the planet’s brilliant appearance in the sky. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, depictions of Venus have been closely linked to: “Athanasius Kircher's *Itinerarium Exstaticum* (1656), Emanuel Swedenborg's *The Earths in our Solar System* (1758), and George Griffith's *A Honeymoon in Space* (January-July 1900 Pearson's as “Stories of Other Worlds”; exp 1901), and were influenced by the planet's longtime association with the goddess of love.” By the mid-to-late 1700s, astronomers were beginning to examine the planet in earnest. Venus’ atmosphere was first discovered in 1761 by Mikhail Lomonosov of Russia. Thirty years later, German astronomer Johann Schröter directly observed the planet’s atmosphere with a telescope and documented several anomalies that led him to correctly guess that the planet was home to a thick atmosphere. While the presence of such an atmosphere hindered direct study of the planet’s surface, it provided wonderful fodder for authors: with clouds hiding the planet’s surface, anything could exist on Venus. Depictions of the world often included oceans or vast, steamy marshes, but always habitable, something that even scientists studying the planet couldn’t definitively rule out. It wasn’t just artists imagining this possibility: scientists such as Svante Arrhenius, who is known for his research into carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, pushed a theory that Venus was an ideal candidate for harboring life, noting that a warm, wet environment might be similar to time periods in Earth’s past. Clouds potentially meant moisture, and a complete cloud cover might mean a lot of water. Charles Greeley Abbot, who directed the Smithsonian Observatory, believed that Venus was essentially a twin of Earth. With plenty of moisture and similar temperatures, it was likely habitable. Should there exist life forms, humanity could enter “into fluent communication by wireless with a race brought up completely separate, having their own systems of government, social usages, religions, and surrounded by vegetation and animals entirely unrelated to any here on earth. It would be a revelation far beyond the opening of Japan, or the discoveries of Egyptologists, or the adventures of travelers in the dark continent.” Thus, the idea of a wet Venus was grounded with some scientific backing: speculation from scientists, which in turn helped to inform public opinion and perceptions of the planet. For science fiction authors, looking to write stories about plausible science, this was a crucial component. This piece is part of a series that I originally published in **Clarkesworld Magazine*: \- [Destination: Mercury](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Venus](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Luna](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Mars](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mars-history-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) These perceptions carried over into the science fiction magazines. Pulp authors churned out a precursor to space opera called planetary romance, stories which featured adventures on our neighboring planets. The first to really use Venus as a setting was *Planet of Peril*, by Adelbert Kline, published in 1929, in which a man telepathically travels to Venus and goes on a variety of adventures. Fellow author Edgar Rice Burroughs also went to Venus with his *Amtor* series. The books followed the model of his well-known *Baroom* novels, but took place on Venus, following the adventures of Carson Napier. Early in the first entry in the series, *Pirates of Venus,* published in 1934, Burroughs introduces the planet: “Yes, and I would prefer going to Venus,” he replied. “Enveloped in clouds, its surface forever invisible to man, it presents a mystery that intrigues the imagination; but recent astronomical research suggests conditions there inimical to the support of any such life as we know on earth. It has been thought by some that, held in the grip of the Sun since the era of her pristine fluidity, she always presents the same face to him, as does the Moon to earth. If such is the case, the extreme heat of one hemisphere and the extreme cold of the other would preclude life.” Here, he hits all of the right notes, indicating the mysterious surface (and how it stimulates the imagination!), that it supports life, and that the planet is referred to in feminine terms. Other authors followed in Burroughs’ footsteps with planetary romance stories: Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, each covered the planet in their proto-space opera fiction, and incorporated these early preconceptions into their fiction. Moore’s 1934 story, “Black Thirst,” originally published in *Weird Tales*, depicted Venus as a planet populated with beautiful aliens: > “A long black cloak hid her, but the light fell upon her face, heart-shaped under the little three-cornered velvet cap that Venusian women wear, fell on the ripples of half-hidden bronze hair; and by that sweet triangular face and shining hair he knew her for one of the Minga maids—those beauties that from the beginning of history had been bred in the Minga stronghold for loveliness and grace, as race-horses are bred on earth, and reared from earlier infancy in the art of charming men.” This ties in nicely with the perceptions of the planet, and its classical history: Venus, a planet revered for its beautiful appearance in the sky, passed along these virtues to its inhabitants. Leigh Brackett, in her story, ”The Enchantress of Venus” (*Planet Stories*, Fall 1949), followed with her own conventions: she focused not only with the climate, “The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the muddy fecundity of the land that brooded westward behind the eternal fog,” but also with the sense of mystery and unknown: “Even on its own world, the red Sea is hardly more than legend. It lies behind the Mountains of White Cloud, the great barrier wall that hides away half a planet. Few men have gone beyond that barrier, into the vast mystery of Inner Venus. Fewer still have come back.” Ray Bradbury, another practitioner of the Planetary Romance subgenre, visited the planet on occasion. One notable entry is “The Long Rain,” published in *Planet Stories* in May 1950\. Four astronauts crash-land on Venus and seek safety amidst Venus’ endless rainstorms: > “The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.” As scientific interest began to heat up for the planet in the 1950s, so too did our perceptions of the world begin to change. After the initial discoveries of the planet’s atmosphere in the late 1700s, astronomers conducted little research on the planet. It wasn’t until the 1940s that researchers took another look. There were indications that the authors were correct: in the late 1930s and early 1940s, astronomer Rupert Wildt studied the Venetian atmosphere and concluded that there was likely a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet, caused by high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Later that decade, Harry Wexler, the head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, began a study of planetary atmospheres, and helped push research that established that Venus’ atmosphere was not breathable. Further studies published in the late 1950s found that not only was the composition of the atmosphere toxic to human life, it was incredibly hot. “It was very disappointing to many people,” one of the discoverers recalled, “who were reluctant to give up the idea of a sister planet and perhaps even the possibility of life.” Interestingly, 1953’s novel *The Space Merchants* was also ahead of the curve on the popular perception of Venus and its atmosphere. With their novel Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth shifted away from the imaginative vision of Venus that other authors had played with. And the closing question of their youngest babbler (“Mommy, when I grow up kin I take *my* littul boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?”) cued the switch to a highly imaginative series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up—verdant valleys, crystal lakes, brilliant mountain vistas. “The commentary did not exactly deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working on Venus’ unbreathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry.” Kornbluth and Pohl’s novel does two things simultaneously: one, it recognizes the popular image that science fiction itself had created: an aspirational destination for spacefaring adventurers, and a potential new home to escape from Earth’s problems. Two, it introduces a reality check. *The Space Merchants* is a satirical novel, taking a number of science fiction’s tropes and inverting them. The Venus imagined by science fiction authors never existed, except in speculative stories, written either by the aforementioned authors, or by marketing agents. *The Space Merchants* predicted this to some degree—it’s unclear how: if it was dumb luck, or if Pohl and Kornbluth had been paying attention to the cutting edge research that had been conducted by Wildt. Either way, theirs was one of the first that depicted Venus accurately: inhabitable. Other stories began to pick up on the science: Arthur C. Clarke’s short story ‘Before Eden’, published in the June 1961 issue of *Amazing Stories*, described the planet as having a “green auroral light, filtering down through clouds that had rolled unbroken for a million years, gave the scene an underwater appearance, and the way in which all distant objects blurred into the haze added to the impression.” By the 1960s, research on Venus was beginning to heat up, and was about to shatter our collective image of the planet. NASA’s Goldstone Observatory carried out the first radar studies on the planet, discovering that the planet rotated in the opposite direction of its orbit around the sun, and confirmed its size and axis—Venus boasted a 6,052 kilometer radius, a near match perfect for Earth’s own 6,371 radii. During this time, the space race was beginning to heat up between the United States and the Soviet Union. While popularly seen as the race to the moon, each superpower was intent on leaving their mark on other locations around the solar system—namely, Mars and Venus. When it came to exploration, “Venus actually made good sense,” notes Jay Gallentine in his book *Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft*. “Every eighteen months the two planets are closest, and flights between them only take about one hundred and fifty days.” This made Venus a much better candidate for the earliest space probes. The first probe to be attempted was Sputnik 7, launched on February 4th, 1961\. The rocket reached orbit, but failed to leave, and eventually burned up in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union was undeterred, however: Just days later, on February 12th 1961, they successfully launched the Venera 1 probe. The probe failed just weeks before it reached Venus, and eventually passed the planet in May. NASA had similar bad fortune with its first mission as well: Its Mariner 1 probe launched on July 22nd, 1962, and was destroyed 294.5 seconds into its launch when it began to veer off course. It was on August 27th that the first mission to Venus succeeded when Mariner swept past Venus in December, coming within 22,000 miles of the plant. It provided us with our first look at our closest planetary neighbor. Venus, as it turned out, was a hellish world. The probe discovered that Venus was home to very high temperatures, high surface pressures, an atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide, and no magnetic field. Any thought of easy human habitation went right out the window. The United States might have had the honor of being the first to pass by the planet, but it was the USSR who landed hardware on the planet: They launched Venera 3 in November 1965, with a mission to land on the surface. The probe’s communications system failed before it reached the planet, and it likely crash-landed. The USSR’s next probe, Venera 7 was more successful: it crashed down on December 15th, 1970 and transmitted some data back, reporting temperatures of 887 °F on the surface before it failed. More than just being the first probe to land on Venus, it was the first probe to land *anywhere*. Two years later, Venera 8 touched down, and sent back even more information. NASA’s Mariner 10 followed, passing by Venus on its way to Mercury in 1974, sending back some pictures of the planet and additional information about the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Over the next couple of years, the USSR sent a battery of probes to the planet and in 1978 with varying degrees of success NASA followed with two additional probes: the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. The orbiter arrived on December 4th and sent back observations on the atmosphere and surface until 1992, while the Multiprobe launched four small probes into the atmosphere on December 9th, one of which landed on the surface. In more recent years, NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency launched orbiters in 1990, 2006, and 2010, respectively. Magellan orbited the planet for four years and sent back detailed images of the surface of the planet and information about its geology. The result of all of this exploration was a completely new vision of Venus. Like the revelations that Mars was inhospitable, stories about Venus began to adapt to the new reality. While Mars can likely be inhabited by people, Venus presents much greater challenges for human habitation, and even remote exploration. As a result, Venus has become a far less hospitable destination for science fiction authors, especially when compared to Mars. Some books do use the planet for their stories. One notable example is 2000’s *Venus*, by Ben Bova. In this story, the son of a space transportation company died on a mission to Venus. A massive reward is offered to anyone who can recover the remains of the man. Another son, Alex, takes his father up on the reward, traveling to the planet to recover the reward. Bova plays with the possibility of life existing on the inhospitable planet, but incorporates modern research into his story. Another author, Kim Stanley Robinson, is known for his realistic portrayal of the solar system, and he takes a more optimistic view of the state of Venus in his 2012 novel, *2312*: “Venus’ atmosphere was now so reduced in density from its native state that it was transparent, and even though the whole planet was in the shadow of its sunshield and therefore in perpetual night, one could make out the dim white dry ice seas, and the black rock of the two continents partially blown and scraped free . . . Venus and Titan were really the best remaining candidates to join Mars as fully terraformed worlds—shirtsleeve worlds, as some called them, with free atmospheres humans could breathe.” As with most of Robinson’s novels, he takes a technologically optimistic view of the future. Here, even the solar system’s most hellish world can be bent to the will of humanity to become a habitable world that would fulfill the earliest imaginations of the early science fiction authors. Despite these advances in our knowledge of Venus, the image of the planet as a mysterious world persists in science fiction. S.M. Stirling’s 2006 novel *The Sky People*, takes an alternate universe in which the solar system of the pulp stories really existed, including a populated Venus. This pull towards nostalgic images is due in part to the attention that the planet gets: Mars and the outer solar system have been visited often and recently by robotic probes, while Venus has had a much smaller share of visitors. Yet, there is an allure to the romance of the image that we have of Venus. Writing in the foreword for his anthology *Old Venus,* Gardner Dozois notes that “There have been plenty of stories about the New Venus in the last couple of decades . . . but some of us missed the Old Venus, the Venus of so many dreams over so many years.” There’s a sense of nostalgia for the stories of old, and Venus, ever the mysterious planet underneath its perpetual cloud cover. 🌌 This essay was [originally published](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F05%5F16/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in May 2016 in **Clarkesworld Magazine*. ### Neill Blomkamp's directing Starship Troopers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/starship-troopers-neill-blomkamp-military-sci-fi-film/ Last updated: 2025-03-14T22:21:18.000Z Robert Heinlein's [*Starship Troopers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441014101?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a divisive book and the 1997 adaptation by Paul Verhoeven is even moreso. The novel helped to kick off the military science fiction genre by showcasing a future where humanity was at war with an alien foe, all while Heinlein, through everyman character Johnny Rico, muses about the responsibilities of citizenship and fascism. And there's power armor. The book has been enormously influential, with books like John Scalzi's *Old Man's War*, Kameron Hurley's *The Light Brigade*, Orson Scott Card's *Ender's Game*, and Joe Haldeman's *The Forever War* or games like [*Helldivers 2*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/helldivers-2-cosplay-making/) and *Halo* taking cues from it. Heinlein's novel can be endlessly argued over when it comes to his politics and intent: I've generally come to think of it as a provocative book, but not one that's necessarily advocating for an all-out fascist society. Verhoeven's adaptation went in a different direction, playing out as a satire. I watched it not too long ago and was amused at how outlandish it was, and how plenty of viewers seemed to miss that. It's since spawned a small franchise, with a handful of sequels. [The art of future warThe evolution of military science fiction![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-111.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3828-2-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-science-fiction-halo-starship-troopers-history/) With the advances in CGI and a writing environment in Hollywood where screenwriters pay a bit more attention to the books, I've been wondering when we'd see a new take on Heinlein's novel. There was an [attempt back in 2011](https://www.vulture.com/2011/12/starship-troopers-remake-is-in-the-works.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) with *Thor* and *X-Men: First Class* writers Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz were tapped to write the screenplay, while Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (*Baywatch*) had their own attempt. Neither seemed to get anywhere beyond that. Now, we've got a new contender, and it's one that I'm particularly keen on: Sony has hire Neill Blomkamp, the director behind *District 9, Elysium*, and *Chappie*, to write and direct a new adaptation. [*The Hollywood Reporter* says](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/new-starship-troopers-movie-in-the-works-1236163598/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'll be producing the film along with his wife, Terri Tachell (who co-wrote *District 9* and *Chappie*), which won't be a remake of Verhoeven's film, but an adaptation that goes "back to the source material." Blomkamp has a kinetic filming style that feels like it would lend itself really well to this sort of adaptation. And he's very familiar with military SF: his debut film would have been *Halo,* had studio problems not killed it, while enhanced and cybernetic soldiers have popped up in some of his other projects. And he did get something of a *Halo* project filmed: *Halo Landfall*, a 7-minute commercial for *Halo 3* that doubles as a neat short film within the franchise itself. Watch that and tell me he wouldn't be able to grapple with the complexities that *Starship Troopers* brings up, alongside the slick gear porn, industrial design, and power armor that the film would require. And I think he's one of the most conscious filmmakers out there: between his better known films and his more [experimental projects like Oats Studios](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/28/15868788/oats-studios-neill-blomkamps-experimental-short-film-rakka-firebase?ref=andrewliptak.com), he has a good bit of messaging that runs through his works. *District 9* was a fantastic film that explored apartheid in a science fictional structure, while *Elysium* remains one of those films that feels criminally underrated to me: a great take on class that only feels like it's gotten more relevant with each passing year. [The billionaires of LEONeill Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium is an underrated film that continues to grow in relevance![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-110.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/ko2b4zFXUX3UVZcotqu6fT.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neill-blomkamp-elysium-sci-fi-private-spaceflight-bezos-musk-branson/) Obviously, this might not get made. Blomkamp's *Halo* film never made it over the finish line, as well as the *Alien* and *Robocop* films he had worked on, and the same with his adaptation of Tom Sweterlitsch's [fantastic novel](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/3/17070658/tom-sweterlitsch-the-gone-world-complicated-time-travel-mystery-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) *The Gone World.* That's the nature of the film industry. Hopefully, this one will hit theaters down the road. ### Here are the finalists for the 2025 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-nebula-awards-finalists-sfwa-2025/ Last updated: 2025-03-15T12:16:56.000Z This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Nebula Awards, the annual prize for excellence in the science fiction and fantasy genres. The award comes from the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, who annually nominate and select their favorite stories published in the last year. Here are the winners from [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-awards-2021/). Here are the finalists. This is one of those random years where I haven't read a ton of these stories: I have some reading to do! I've dropped links where stories are available online: ### **Nebula Award for Novel** - *Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory* by Yaroslav Barsukov - *Rakesfall* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Asunder* by Kerstin Hall - *A Sorceress Comes to Call* by T. Kingfisher - *The Book of Love* by Kelly Link - *Someone You Can Build a Nest In* by John Wiswell ### **Nebula Award for Novella** - *The Butcher of the Forest* by Premee Mohamed - *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler - *Lost Ark Dreaming* by Suyi Davies Okungbowa - *Countess* by Suzan Palumbo - *The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain* by Sofia Samatar - *The Dragonfly Gambit* by A. D. Sui ### **Nebula Award for Novelette** - “[The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F05%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Thomas Ha - “[Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka](https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/katya-vasilievna-and-the-second-drowning-of-baba-rechka/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Christine Hanolsy - “[Another Girl Under the Iron Bell](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/another-girl-under-the-iron-bell/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Angela Liu - “[What Any Dead Thing Wants](https://psychopomp.com/what-any-dead-thing-wants/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aimee Ogden - “[Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prihandita%5F11%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by A. W. Prihandita - “[Joanna’s Bodies](https://psychopomp.com/joannas-bodies/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou - “[Loneliness Universe](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/loneliness-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou ### **Nebula Award for Short Story** - “[The Witch Trap](https://smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2024/09/01/lady-churchills-rosebud-wristlet-no-48/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jennifer Hudak - “[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rachael K. Jones - “[Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim%5F02%5F24/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Isabel J. Kim - “[Evan: A Remainder](https://reactormag.com/evan-a-remainder-jordan-kurella/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Jordan Kurella - “[The V\*mpire](https://reactormag.com/the-vampire-p-h-lee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by PH Lee - “[We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will-teach-you-how-to-read/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Caroline M. Yoachim ### **Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction** - *Daydreamer* by Rob Cameron - *Braided* by Leah Cypess - *Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed* by José Pablo Iriarte - *Puzzleheart* by Jenn Reese - *Moonstorm* by Yoon Ha Lee - *The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts* by Vanessa Ricci-Thode ### **Nebula Award for Game Writing** - *A Death in Hyperspace* by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and Merc Fenn - *Wolfmoor* by Infomancy.net - *Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree* by Hidetaka Miyazaki - *The Ghost and the Golem* by Benjamin Rosenbaum - Pacific Drive by Karrie Shao and Alexander Dracott - 1000xRESIST by Remy Siu, Pinki Li, and Conor Wylie - Restore, Reflect, Retry by Natalia Theodoridou ### **Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation** - *KAOS* written by Charlie Covell and Georgia Christou - *Doctor Who: “Dot and Bubble”* written by Russell T. Davies - *Wicked* written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox - *Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5* written by Mike McMahan - *I Saw the TV Glow* written by Jane Schoenbrun - *Dune: Part Two* written by Jon Spaights and Denis Villeneuve ## Other Awards #### Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award - C. J. Lavigne What have you read on this list, and what did you enjoy the most? ### Mush! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-admiral-richard-byrd-antarctica-museum-object/ Last updated: 2025-03-07T18:19:01.000Z Admiral [Richard E. Byrd](https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/b/byrd-richard-e.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) was a decorated American naval officer and explorer who earned fame for his expeditions to both the North and South Poles. Born in 1888, he joined the Navy in 1908 and trained as an aviator during the First World War. On May 9th, 1926, he was part of a crew that was the first to reach the North Pole by airplane and became a national hero upon his return. In the years that followed, he made an early transatlantic flight and led a trio of expeditions to Antarctica in 1928, 1933, and 1939\. After being recalled to service during the Second World War, he led two additional missions to Antarctica in 1946 and 1955\. He died in 1957. ![Dressed in furs, with his dog "Igloo", outside a hut during his first Antarctic Expedition, 12 April 1930. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, National Archives collection](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/Richard%20Byrd.jpg) **Dressed in furs, with his dog "Igloo", outside a hut during his first Antarctic Expedition, 12 April 1930\. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, National Archives collection.* Vermonters were well aware of Byrd’s exploits through newspaper reports and films. Following his 1933 expedition, Byrd visited Vermont for a pair of speaking engagements. According to *The Burlington Free Press*, a 1935 stop in Burlington attracted 3,500 attendees during two lectures, in which he spoke about his exploits and showed off images. Byrd had become a national hero for his exploits, and at a time before the internet, television and modern popular culture, these types of talks and lectures served as a form of entertainment and education for the general public. In the early 20th century, numerous polar expeditions utilized dogsled teams to move people and supplies across the ice. These objects are a depiction of a such a team that Byrd used on one of multiple Antarctic expeditions. The sled itself is made of a wooden base with side rails, and rope secures a rectangular package covered in orange fabric to show how supplies would have been transported while in Antarctica. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/assets/image-cache/Blog/cdv_photo_1643905089.9e2f64df.jpg) **Object #1960.26.10, a sled made of wood and orange fabric. Image: Vermont Historical Society* Each of the nine cast iron dogs is molded to appear in motion and is equipped with a cotton harness. Completing the set is a cast-iron figure of a man dressed in a brown parka, green pants, and black boots. The set is accompanied by a sign that reads “Scale Model of Admiral Byrd's Dog Team in the Antarctic, Designed in Vermont.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/cdv_photo_1643905454.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/cdv_photo_1643905540.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/03/cdv_photo_1643906162.jpg) **Items #1960.26.6, #1960.26.9, and #1960.26.1, made of cast iron.* Images: Vermont Historical Society This team might have a Vermont connection: one member of Byrd’s 1933 expedition was Fred Dustin, of Morrisville, Vermont. He brought with him the People’s Academy Banner and flew it at the expedition’s headquarters, “Little America” in 1934\. A litter of husky puppies were born during that expedition, and Dustin adopted one of them, Rickey. You can [see all of these items in our online museum catalog](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1960.26&ref=andrewliptak.com). ⛰️ This post was originally published to the Vermont Historical Society's blog. You can support our work by [becoming a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### 15 new SF/F books to check out in the first half of March 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-new-releases/ Last updated: 2025-03-05T16:50:19.000Z March is turning out to be one of those months where we're just packed with new books coming out: I'm splitting this month's list into two parts, with the next one set to drop in a couple of weeks. 📚 **Transfer Orbit* is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- Support TO with a one-time tip, which you can do by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-recommendations/#/portal/support). Thank you. This newsletter is supported by you, the reader! Here are 15 SF/F books for you to check out in the first half of this month: ### [*The Tomb of Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250816191?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katherine Addison (March 11th) Katherine Addison continues the story that she began back in 2014 with her critically acclaimed novel [*The Goblin Emperor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250303790?ref=andrewliptak.com). Originally a standalone, she returned to the world in 2021 with a new trilogy, starting with [*The Witness for the Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765387431?ref=andrewliptak.com)and continuing with [*The Grief of Stones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250813916?ref=andrewliptak.com). She's now finishing up the story with *The Tomb of Dragons*, in which Thara Celehar can no longer speak to the dead, and without that ability that defined him, he has to figure out how to go about his duties. Fortunately, he's joined by a handful of friends and allies. Writing in *Locus Magazine*, [Liz Bourke says](https://locusmag.com/2025/02/the-tomb-of-dragons-by-katherine-addison-review-by-liz-bourke/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "This is a measured, meditative novel, as much concerned with introspection as with action. It reminds me – more strongly than any of its prede­cessors – of *The Goblin Emperor*, intimately fo­cused on questions of integrity and responsibility, on duty and self-knowledge and the difficulty and reward of human connection." ### [*The Hampdenshire Wonder*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262551410?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J. D. Beresford (March 4th) MIT Press's Radium Age series continues with a new installment: *The Hampdenshire Wonder* by J.D. Beresford. This novel was originally published in 1911, and is about a boy named Victor Stott, who was mutated in the womb and who grows to become a super-intelligent child. It's introduced by Ted Chiang. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-103.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Blank-8-Grids-Collage-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) ### [*Cold Iron Task*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593440452?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James J. Butcher (March 4th) James Butcher brings out another installment of his *Unorthodox Chronicles* series (preceded by [*Dead Man's Hand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593547083?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Long Past Dues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593440438?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which follows the adventures of Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby, a fresh-out-of-the-academy auditor, working for the Department of Unorthodox Affairs in Boston. He's made a handful of mistakes in his career thus far, and when he's invited to join in on the heist of an otherworldly vault, he doesn't ask a whole lot of questions. Problems arise when he learns that his partner, Mayflower, has been keeping some secrets about his past from him, and he soon learns that he probably should have been asking some more questions. ### [*Once Was Willem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316505024?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.R. Carey (March 4th) In this Medieval fantasy set in England a little after 1100 AD, two grieving parents, Jon and Margaret Turling, lost their 12-year-old son Willem to a fever, and ask a local sorcerer, Cain Caradoc, to bring him back from the dead. He resurrects their son for a cost: part of his soul, and the newly-risen child isn't exactly welcome in their small farming village – he'd been dead for more than a year. His body is inhabited by a creature that calls itself Once Was Willem, and begins making friends with some of the strange creatures and monsters that live in the countryside. When his village of Cosham is threatened by the sorcrer and some of his horrific plans, they turn to Once Was Willem to try and save them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mr-carey/once-was-willem/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Carey demonstrates again that he contains multitudes, jumping from subgenre to subgenre." and that it's "a dark and hopeful fable with obvious contemporary resonance." ### [*The Radiant King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316576673?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Dalglish (March 4th) David Dalglish kicks off his Astral Kingdoms trilogy with *The Radiant King*, which follows six immortal (through reincarnations) siblings who wield extraordinary powers, and they've ruled the world for hundreds of years. After a catastrophe that nearly ruined everything, the six pledge to remove themselves from human affairs and won't pass along their gifts. One of the siblings, Faron, reawakens to discover that his brother Eder has decided to regain power, appointing himself Voice of Father and sets himself up as a ruler to be worshiped by humanity. Faron has to ally himself with his other siblings to try and stop him. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316576673?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Readers will need a tolerance for gore to get through some of the reincarnation scenes but will be rewarded with a solid saga full of loneliness and longing." ### [*The King of Elfland's Daughter*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/elflands-daughter.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lord Dunsany (March 4th) The Folio Society launches its annual Spring Collection on March 4th, and this year's batch includes a new edition of Lord Dunsany's *The King of Elfland's Daughter*, one of the seminal early works of fantasy literature. Originally published in 1924, it's about the Lord of Erl who's told by parliament that they want to be ruled by a magical lord, and he sends his son Alveric to Elfland to bring back Lirazel, the daughter of the King of Elfland. The Folio Society's edition comes with illustrations from artist Julie Dillon, and an introduction by Erin Morgenstern. This looks like a really nice edition, and it'll run you $95\. ### [*Rose of Jericho*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250874719?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Grecian (March 11th) Alex Grecian follows up his novel [*Red Rabbit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250874696?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a sequel, *Rose of Jericho.* In that novel, a witch named Sadie Grace is hunted by a posse in Kansas when a bounty is put on her head, and a mismatched group of strangers come together to join in on the hunt. In this follow up, strange things are happening in the village of Ascension: a woman dying of cancer is suddenly better, a boy injured in an accident miraculously survives, and a hanged man is still able to speak, despite a broken neck. When Sadie and Rabbit arrive in the town, they discover that the dead aren't dying, and that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by ghosts. It's up to them to figure out what's going on in the town before the greater forces behind the strange happenings comes for them. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Dune: House Atreides Limited Edition*](https://grimoakpress.com/products/dune-house-atreides-limited-edition?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (March 5th) In 1999, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson released *Dune: House Atreides*, the first new *Dune* novel since Frank Herbert published *Chapterhouse: Dune* in 1985\. The book is set in the years before the novel *Dune*, following the stories of Leto Atreides, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Imperial Crown Prince Shaddam IV. The book has gone through a handful of different covers and treatments over the years, but this month, Grim Oak Press has announced a new, limited edition of the novel, with art by Marc Simonetti. It's limited t0 750 copies, and is bit pricy at $195, while the [52 copy lettered edition](https://grimoakpress.com/products/dune-house-atreides-lettered-edition?pr%5Fprod%5Fstrat=e5%5Fdesc&pr%5Frec%5Fid=bf66698dc&pr%5Frec%5Fpid=9815492067640&pr%5Fref%5Fpid=9815502651704&pr%5Fseq=uniform&ref=andrewliptak.com) will run for $500\. But for those dedicated *Dune* fans out there, this seems like a nice edition to snag. The book will be shipped later this year. ### [*Burn to Shine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250892669?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jonathan Maberry (March 4th) Jonathan Maberry adds a new installment to his Rogue Team International series (Preceded by [*Rage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250303578?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Relentless*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250619303?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Cave 13*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250619327?ref=andrewliptak.com)) which follows Joe Ledger and his team as they confront some of the world's strangest and most troubling problems. In this new installment, a secretive group has begun infiltrating bioweapons research programs, and have been infecting people by turning them into walking disease bombs. Ledger and his team are called back into action, even as they're still dealing with the fallout of their last mission. ### [*Rose/House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250387486?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arkady Martine (March 11th) Arkady Martine originally published this novella a couple of years ago through Subterranean Press, and I picked it up immediately: her novels [*A Memory Called Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186447?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*A Desolation Called Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186478?ref=andrewliptak.com)blew me away. This isn't a big space opera novel, but a small, intimate story about an detective investigating the mysterious death of an eccentric architect named Basit Deniau. His final project was Rose House, a smart home in the middle of the Mojave desert, and after his death, his protégé, Dr. Selene Gisil, is permitted inside, kicking off an intriguing locked room mystery that explores the uncanny nature of AI. [Review: Arkady Martine’s Rose/HouseAn intriguing locked room mystery that explores the uncanny nature of AI![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-23.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2888.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/review-arkady-martini-rose-house/) ### [***The River Has Roots***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250341082?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) **by Amal El-Mohtar (March 4th)** Amal El-Mohtar's debut novel brings us to the town of Thistleford, which sits on the edge of Faerie. It's the home to a mysterious family who tends to and harvests enchanted trees, and they're bound by an ancient pact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. Two of the family's daughters, Esther and Ysabel, are the most devoted, and when Esther rejects a suiter from Faerie, it'll test the bond between both of their sisters and will put both of their lives at risk. ### [*Luminous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668021668?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Silvia Park (March 11th) In the near future, North and South Korea have reunified, and an 11-year-old named Ruijie has been looking for parts that can support her failing body. While searching, she finds a lifelike robot boy. Meanwhile, siblings Jun and Morgan have been estranged for years following the disappearance of their brother Yoyo – a prototype robot that their father created. Morgan has followed in her father's footsteps as a robot designer, while Jun is a detective with the Robot Crimes Unit, and has begun discovering some secrets that have long been buried. It's Ruijie's discovery that brings them back together. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/silvia-park/luminous-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Stay with this one for the big philosophical questions it asks about the nature of God, souls, humanity, politics, power, purpose, consciousness, memory, death, and, of course, love. Park is nothing if not ambitious, and the sheer scope of the endeavor is the reward. While stylish, the single word title doesn’t do the breadth of the novel justice." ### [*The Sea Eternal*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316391696?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emery Robin (March 11th) One of the more anticipated books of the year comes from Emery Robin. I missed their first book when it came out last year, [*The Stars Undying*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316391399?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is about a princess, Altagracia, whose twin sister has forced her out of power and taken control of their planet Szayet, and who decides to ally herself with their rivals, the Empire of Ceiao, and has to throw her lot in with a dangerous commander, Matheus Ceirran In this followup, Matheus has been killed, and his captain, Anita, has been working for the past year to hunt down those responsible. She's infatuated with Szayet's queen, Altagracia Caviro Patramata, and as she crosses interstellar boundaries in search of her targets, she discovers a dangerous secret that could upend the balance of power in the galaxy. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-sea-eternal-1813389?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Robin writes another queer space opera (a sequel to *The Stars Undying*) that showcases complex characters inspired by ancient history and set in the stars. This science-fiction interpretation of Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship is woven together in a tight plot of false gods, technology, and legacy." [Here are my most anticipated books of 202525 new science fiction, fantasy, and horror books that I’m looking forward to the most this year![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-105.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled-design.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2025-anticipated-books-scalzi-okorafor-cosby-kuang/) ### [*Days of Shattered Faith*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035901524?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Adrian Tchaikovsky (March 4th) Adrian Tchaikovsky continues his prodigious output with a third installment of his *The Tyrant Philosophers* series (preceded by [*City of Lost Chances*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781801108447?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*House of Open Wounds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035901388?ref=andrewliptak.com)). Loret is a new Cohort-Invigilator of Correct Appreciation, Outreach department, and is the aide to the Palleseen Resident, Sage-Invigilator Angilly. Pallesand is a nation run on rationalism and logic and is vehemently anti-religion and Outreach is part of the political machine that deals with the imperfections of the world. As a succession crisis looms in the city, a long-running experiment comes to fruition, bringing pirates, armies, and demons together to threaten the established order. Russell Letson [reviewed the book for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2025/01/days-of-shattered-faith-by-adrian-tchaikovsky-review-by-russell-letson/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "a complicated, interwoven, mul­tiviewpoint plot dotted with many back-story re­veals, rich in intra- and interpersonal conflicts and fraught relationships. The overarching story of succession via usurpation and fratricidal civil war invites comparisons to both *A Game of Thrones*and the Wars of the Roses, while Pallesand’s geo­political machinations and ideological rigidity carry a strong whiff of the Cold War." ### [*The Greatest Adventure*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262551427?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Taine (March 4th) MIT Press's other installment of its Radium Age series continues with *The Greatest Adventure* by John Taine, which was originally published back in 1929\. It follows an expedition to Antarctica, which discovers an ancient civilization that used advanced technologies, and had been destroyed by their own creations. This one comes with an introduction by S.L. Huang. ### ### Here's a free military science fiction anthology about the future of special forces URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ficint-useful-fiction-military-sci-fi-special-forces-free-anthology/ Last updated: 2025-03-03T14:00:23.000Z I've long been fascinated by military science fiction: some of my favorite and formative books include the likes of Orson Scott Card's [*Ender's Game*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250773012?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Robert Heinlein's [*Starship Troopers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441014101?ref=andrewliptak.com), while I've also loved more recent entries such as [Linda Nagata's *The Red* trilogy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-linda-nagata-red-trilogy-interview/) and Kameron Hurley's [*The Light Brigade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481447973?ref=andrewliptak.com). Stories about the future of war can go far beyond entertainment. Militaries and specialists around the world have been looking at how they can use science fiction as a way to imagine the future, and put that thinking to use as they prepare for the conflicts just over the horizon. Authors such as P.W. Singer and August Cole ([*Ghost Fleet*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544705050?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Burn-In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358508618?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)* and Admiral James Stravridis and Elliot Ackerman ([*2034*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984881274?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*2054*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593489864?ref=andrewliptak.com)) draw on current trends, technologies and politics and use them to build their stories. As Singer once noted, governments provide plenty of white papers that seek to predict the future, but described them as "paper Ambien", while a novel is far more likely to grab a reader and connect them to their subject matter. [How the US military uses sci-fi to imagine the future of warHow the military is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-96.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/9BAC815C-2EA7-45F5-9DAE-13C400808157.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) Since 2020, Singer and Cole have been running Useful Fiction, a consulting firm that works with various military organizations in the US and other NATO countries to use storytelling and writing to train officers and leaders in how to better envision and prepare for the futures that lie ahead of us. They've just released a new project, an anthology called *The Fourth Age: The Future of Special Operations,* [which you can read for free](https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/239?ref=andrewliptak.com). In its foreword, General Bryan P. Fenton, commander of the United States Special Operations Command, writes that the goal of this project was to use this framework to "create near-future narratives envisioning how our Nation may use its special operations forces in the decades to come and demonstrating the unique value proposition these forces bring to the Nation." SOF hosted Singer and Cole for a pair of sessions in 2022 that brought more than 40 individuals together to take part, with nine of them selected to write a story in this anthology. The eleven stories in the anthology take place all over the world: Russia, the Port of Haifa, Tanzania, Lebanon, Washington DC, Ukraine, Kentucky, Argentina, and the South Pacific, dealing with a range of topics about the future of warfare. These specific scenarios might never come to pass, but the act of creating these stories is a good way to get officers and leaders to think about the challenges that they might eventually face in the future, according to General Fenton: these "stories incorporate the full array of joint, interagency, intergovernmental, multinational and commercial elements leveraged by various state and non-state actors in this era of strategic competition." [Looking for future warsAn excellent look on the opportunities and challenges of FicInt![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-97.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/e92464bd-3a64-446d-813e-cece94a28727_2048x1152.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-science-fiction-ficint-mark-jacobsen/) These stories aren't exactly what you might find in the pages of magazines like *Analog* or *Asimovs* or *Lightspeed*: they drop in a lot of technical jargon and phrases or sentences like "With a quiet demeanor that seemed to go with his technical role, Goodman was responsible for the team of small bots that supported the unit. Depending on the need, they served as tools projecting out its eyes and ears, teammates supplementing their capabilities, or even disposable swarms operating on their own. Goodman had been one of the first in the Command to earn the new 'Centaur' tab, befitting his tactical expertise with robotics and autonomous systems learned at Fort Moore’s Operational Robotics Course." But what I find fascinating about this particular strain of science fiction is that they're stories that really lean into reality. These stories aren't designed to predict the future, but they are looking closely at the present day and extrapolating from there in a grounded way. While I'm not exactly their target audience, I've found these types of stories to be useful to understand how the military is looking at the world and trying to figure out how to anticipate and tackle the challenges that they see coming down the pipeline. The goal isn't to find new and innovative ways to kill our fellow humans: it's to give people who'll be in leadership roles the tools to try and find better ways to lead, with the idea being that they'll be able to make better decisions on the battlefield that'll lead to fewer casualties and deaths. ### Transition points URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-james-bond-films-content-streaming-creativity-fandom/ Last updated: 2025-02-28T20:04:10.000Z Two big stories hit the entertainment world in the last couple of weeks: [Amazon-owned MGM studios acquired the creative rights to the James Bond franchise](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond?ref=andrewliptak.com), while another report claimed that Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy was [planning on stepping down at the end of 2025](https://puck.news/kathleen-kennedy-to-step-down-at-lucasfilm/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Kennedy has since pushed back against that report [in an interview with *Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2025/02/kathleen-kennedy-clarifies-lucasfilm-exit-star-wars-future-1236304421/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The first story feels like a huge sea change on par with news that George Lucas was selling sold Lucasfilm to Disney. For more than 60 years and 25 movies, James Bond has been an institution in Hollywood, a classic hero that has evolved throughout the cold war and defined the spy genre for generations of moviegoers. The franchise has been tightly controlled by the Broccoli family through their holding company [Danjaq](https://www.eon.co.uk/about/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Each Bond film is an *event*: a career-defining role for the title role (and for most of the cast), and throughout the years, the family has taken their time to hone the story, action, and drama. Amazon acquired MGM back in 2021, and its motivations were pretty clear from the onset: [acquire the studio's vast catalog of films and television shows](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-prime-mgm-acquisition-creativity-jeff-bezos-television/), which included the likes of not only the Bond series, but also [franchises like *Stargate*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-mgm-stargate-sg1-atlantis-universe-scifi-franchise/)*.* This was at the height of the streaming wars, where every media company was trying to attract as many subscribers to their rosters as possible, and one way to do that was to make sure that you had lots to offer them. While Amazon had the distribution rights to the Bond films, the Broccolis had been able to hold onto the creative side. Nobody was going to make a film without them, and we haven't seen a film since 2021's *No Time To Die*, Daniel Craig's final appearance as Bond. In December, [*The Wall Street Journal* reported](https://www.wsj.com/business/media/james-bond-movies-amazon-barbara-broccoli-0b04f0db?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the relationship between the Broccoli family and Amazon had fallen apart, with Amazon frustrated at the slow pace of development for a new film, and with Barbara Broccoli irritated at the studio's plans and algorithmic approach to the point where she apparently said "these people are fucking idiots." A key point of contention was Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke referring their work as "content" and their intent to produce a range of spinoff projects that would essentially transform the series into a larger media franchise like Disney has done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. *The New Yorker* summed this up nicely with a cartoon from [Ellis Rosen](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/ellis-rosen?ref=andrewliptak.com): ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/image-3.png) It's certainly a concern, and there are plenty of filmmakers and critics who've opined about the way franchises and cinematic universes have taken over Hollywood. It's not always smooth sailing, and I don't think that we can point to the series as something that's knocked every single hit out of the park. As my dad (our family's resident Bond expert) pointed out, "it's been a good run \[but\] there were times it stunk." But there's still something that feels special and unique about the Bond films, and it's a vestige of Hollywood that seems to be vanishing. Lucasfilm was another one of those shops that really felt different: George Lucas made his six little indie space films, as well as the *Indiana Jones* series, *Willow*, and *American Graffiti*, while Disney announced its plans to release a ton of new films, kicking off its spree with *The Force Awakens* and following it up with three additional films, two standalones, and a whole bunch of television projects, as well as a whole list of other films that they're hoping to make. All of that recent activity has been under Kathleen Kennedy's leadership, and on paper, it's been an enormous success: all of those films have earned a lot of money for Disney, even as there's been a string of problems along the way when it comes to story. Like Bond, there's been some bright points (*The Last Jedi, Rogue One, Andor, The Mandalorian*), and some duds (*Rise of Skywalker, Book of Boba Fett*), which is what you'll have when you start to churn out material. This isn't exactly a new thing with *Star Wars*: the franchise is synonymous with branding and merchandizing, and over the course of the 1991s, Lucasfilm was happy to provide fans with a flood of stories that continued the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo. Some [where](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-a-stackpoles-rogue-squadron-novels-unlocked-star-wars-vast-potential/) [excellent](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-heir-to-the-empire-thrawn-trilogy/), some weren't. Kennedy in particular has become something of a boogieman for the idiot YouTuber demographic, who've been predicting for *years* that she's about to be forced out of a job because she's ruined the story for any number of unlikely reasons. She's had the unenviable job of continuing Lucas's story while balancing Disney's desire for as many additional films and stories that they can turn out – she talks specifically and clearly about the work that she's done: > "You’re trying to look forward. And at the same time, you’re trying to create stories that feel familiar. So you’re moving into the future, but you’re maintaining a sense of familiarity. I think that’s the hardest balance." [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-104.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816-2.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) While the *Star Wars brand* has been doing well under Kennedy's tenure, there are plenty of *actual* missteps that Lucasfilm has made over the years. Chief amongst them is not going into the sequel trilogy with a plan, and now that episodes 7, 8 and 9 are done, figuring out what direction to take *Star Wars*. This wasn't an easy job: Kennedy had to resurrect the brand after its punishing reaction to the prequel trilogy. *The Force Awakens* had to simultaneously reintroduce audiences to the story and take it in a new direction, and it fulfilled that job nicely. But *The Last Jedi* and *Rise of Skywalker* had to fill out the story started in episode 7 *and* both the prequel and original trilogies. They didn't really do that, because Lucasfilm didn't really go into the project with a plan: Rian Johnson was given free range to take the story in whatever direction he wanted, and J.J. Abrams had to go from there to cap it all off. My impression is that this came down to a lot of improvisation: director Colin Trevorrow had dropped out late in the game and Abrams came in to come up with *something.* At the same time, both *Rogue One* and *Solo* were thrown into the mix to hit theaters between those saga films, and each had their own production issues, and they were both films that didn't really do anything *new* with the franchise: they were backfilling story without really changing what we fundamentally knew about their characters or the situations they set up. Neither are bad films: *Rogue One* is really excellent, and *Solo* is a lot of fun. The only film that really pushed the envelop was *The Last Jedi*, in which Johnson really sought to upend the tropes and conventions of *Star Wars* by pushing audiences to rethink about the films in new ways. I've grown to love it and what he was trying to do, but a lot of fans didn't, and when you're a media company looking to cash in on a profitable franchise, you don't want to leave fans with something that they don't enjoy. The backlash has been loud and obnoxious, with Kennedy at the center: she's blamed for any misstep, and word of her departure seemed to fulfill what YouTubers have been prophesizing: that she was about to be forced out for her sins. Kennedy pushed back against that original report, saying that she's going to die making movies, but that they have been thinking of a succession plan: more power to her. --- Both of these stories dovetail in one place for me: we've reached a tipping point from where you have a creative enterprise that's been pushed from creating art into products. There's an interesting line when it comes to commercial art. *Star Wars* is patently a merchandizing machine, and James Bond has been running for decades. These are films that make a lot of money, but I also see them as projects with a lot of creative intent behind them. The original and prequel *Star Wars* trilogies are famously independent films because Lucas wanted a lot of creative control. Love them or hate them, the Prequels are the stories that *he* wanted to tell in the way that *he* wanted to tell them. As studios have consolidated and a small handful of media companies have begun to gobble up studios and talent, the entire film industry has reoriented itself around the factory-like output that we see with the enormous franchises like Marvel, DC, *Star Wars, Star Trek,* and others, with little space for the smaller stories that have to exist between them. Those franchises can tell *good* stories: [*Andor* is one of the best *Star Wars* stories to date](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) (you have no idea how excited I am for [the second season](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-trailer/)), and films and shows like *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds*, *Daredevil, Black Panther*, or *Wonder Woman* can tell compelling stories with compelling characters. But there's still that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that these are stories that have been constructed into existence because a financial report for investors dictates that it must exist. That artificialness feels like it's growing more apparent in these larger franchises. Films like *Thor: Love and Thunder,* *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels,* and *Captain America: Brave New World (*I haven't seen this one yet, but reviews haven't been great), *Star Trek: Section 31*, *The Flash, Black Adam*, *Shazam! Fury of the Gods*, and *Rise of Skywalker* are all just kind of ... forgettable. Some of this is down to how they're filmed: [*MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781631497513?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)by Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales, and Joanna Robinson provides a good window into how these films are essentially mad to formula and constructed on the fly, leading to issues with VFX, costly reshoots, and massive changes, while in other cases, they're projects that are designed to fit into a larger story that just keeps going. HBO's recent series *The Franchise* was a fun satire on this entire industry is just people holding their place until they can move onto something else. The notable entries in these long-running franchises are the ones where the studios empower their creators to work to their best. James Gunn's Marvel and DC films really stand out, while Johnson's *The Last Jedi* and Tony Gilroy's *Andor* really feels like the only entries in the Disney era that *did* anything to push *Star Wars* in a meaningful direction. But even when you're hiring creative people, it's not a silver bullet: there's been plenty of talk about how young, promising directors are hired by these studios only to have their talents winnowed down to bland compromises. Look at how different Taika Waititi's two *Thor* films are. The technological revolution that social media and streaming has brought gives companies and studios plenty of insights into what audiences are watching, and what their preferences are. Netflix and other streamers famously churn through as much data as they can hoover up to understand what their audiences want, and have used those metrics as tools to develop their stories: *House of Cards* was famously [identified as a series for the streaming service to produce because the data suggested it would be popular with their users](https://web.archive.org/web/20130126061225/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/netflix-show-house-of-cards%5Fn%5F2545332.html). And as studios create new shows, those audience preferences loom over them. *The Mandalorian* succeeded because it takes the franchise to some familiar-but-different ground that fans were looking for, while shows that really struck out to to tell a different story, like *The Acolyte* [were hounded by fans who didn't want to have their view of the world challenged or questioned](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/). As a population, fans enjoy what they've seen, and their viewing habits and behaviors will reinforce the types of stories that they want to see, and they don't really like changes. We want the familiar formulas that come with the classic *Star Trek* or *Next Generation* or *Stargate SG-1* episodes. A vocal component of the *Star Wars* fandom didn't want Luke to turn his back on being a Jedi, or for someone else to take up the mantle and complained. Fans didn't like George Lucas's vision for what the story for the prequel trilogy would be and complained. Readers thought that Frank Herbert wrote Paul Atreides to be the hero of *Dune*, to the point where he ended up writing a followup that hammered the point home even further. (I can't wait for *Dune 3* to hit theaters and to see what reactions will be like.) Fans have been complaining about some of these stories: an argument that I frequently see is that they're boring, or that they're just not interesting, and there are elements of truth to that: there's a lot of potential for entertainment products to be boring! But what's ironic is that as the architects of these franchises *do* try and change things up by updating or modernizing elements of them, they're hit with "they're not sticking to the lore!" which seems to be the new buzzword from the YouTube contingent right now. Where I'm going with this entire rant is that by and large, fans desire comfort from the stories they're fans of. They'll be attracted to creative and unique and well-executed stories, but as soon as there's a demand for more of that type of story, they'll be happy with the products that the authors, companies, and studios, turn out for them. This isn't always a bad thing: you can have good products. But the longer this runs, your chances of having a so-so products tossed out into the mix rises. And then another and another, until it's rare that one of those great ones comes along. I've had commenters tell me that studios and directors and writers should be listening to the fans because they're the ones that are ultimately footing the bill, but I think creators need to do the opposite: put fan desires aside when they're embarking on telling these stories, and figure out what the story requires. Tell a good story, and people will find it. The more we go down these paths of fan service and inserting references and recycling the same backgrounds and planets and ships and characters, and there's less that delights and amazes us, because they rarely meet the expectations that we set up for ourselves. We can always go back and rewatch the films that we love to see the characters as they are, or write fanfiction to play out the scenarios that we'd love to see. But talented, creative people can *lead* us to new delights and destinations. *That* is where this franchise studio model has let us down, with a long string of films that leans on nostalgia and familiar scenes, while rarely advancing the world or challenging out conceptions of it. This brings us all the way back to Bond, and Amazon's seemingly expansive plans for a lot more of him. Now that Amazon has taken over creative control of the franchise, it's got the infrastructure to begin turning out new Bond films, TV shows, streaming specials, and tie-in whatevers to an audience and fan base that wants to see more shaken-not-stirred martinis, gadgets, action scenes, and implied sex scenes between the A-listers they pick for Bond and his latest female friend. I'd love to see a Bond that pushes the boundaries of the spy genre – much like the *Bourne Identity* and *Bourne Supremacy* films did before Daniel Craig's tenure reinvented the franchise. What would Bond look like in the world of 2025, influenced by the war on terror and the growing global domination of China and removed from the trappings of the Cold War that defined those earlier entries? Would Amazon dare update or transform to see where they can take it? Probably not. Amazon will no doubt pay attention to the legacy of the franchise and move forward carefully with its next first couple of films, all while building out a larger and grander story that won't push the boundaries too much. Much as *Star Wars* feels like it's become a stream of *content*, the future of James Bond feels like it could be headed in much the same direction. Hopefully, as audience fatigue builds and the endless box office expansion stagnates, it'll force studios to take a step back and really take a look at the stories that they've been telling. I've been happy to see that Kennedy talk about how they are working on approaching the future of the franchise, with some new films that'll take place in the post-sequel trilogy era. Hopefully, she'll be able to position the studio in such a way that they can walk that fine line of content and stories that continue to push and expand what *Star Wars* can be, because that purpose and desire to explore this story is what will keep it going long into the future to delight audiences like the first films did when they were released. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/image-4.png) ## Currently reading I usually have a small stack of books that I'm working through, but at the moment, I've had one that I've been working my way through: Nnedi Okorafor's [*Death of the Author*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391147?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This is a really interesting book, and as I've spent a good chunk of time ranting about creative art vs. products, Okorafor is an author that I've been drawn to when I think about raw creative vision. It's an interesting book so far (I'm almost done) that deals a lot with telling stories that are true to one's self and vision, alongside a compelling family drama that stretches between the United States and Nigeria. It's been an interesting ride, and I'll likely jot down some thoughts about it when I finish it. Other books on the to-read list? Samantha Harvey's [*Orbital*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780802163622?ref=andrewliptak.com), which earned the Booker Prize last year, which I'm enjoying. After that? I'm not totally sure: probably Alexander Freed's new Star Wars novel [*The Mask of Fear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723463?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- ## Further reading Here's what you might have missed: **Allegations**. Neil Gaiman was in the news after some horrific allegations surfaced last year, and rather than recount what people have reported he did to them, I [wanted to talk about how the news works](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neil-gaiman-allegations-media-literacy/) and why it's taken a while for this story to gain traction. ***Andor* Season 2**. Lucasfilm [released the first trailer](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-trailer/) for its upcoming second season of *Andor*. I'm excited. **Born Again**. Marvel is finally bringing Daredevil back to small screens with a reboot of the original Netflix series they ran years ago. The release of a first trailer for *Daredevil: Born Again* was a [good opportunity to talk about why the show works so well](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mcu-marvel-daredevil-born-again-trailer-watch/) in the larger MCU and a bit of background about the character. **Colorful futures**. [I spoke with Adam Rowe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-worlds-beyond-time-70s-scifi-art-book-interview/), the guy behind 70s SciFi Art, and the author of Worlds Beyond Time, an excellent survey of the art of the 1950s-1990s that graced the covers of SF/F books. [Colorful futuresAn interview with Adam Rowe, the guy behind 70s Sci-Fi Art project and author of Worlds Beyond Time.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-102.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2541.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-worlds-beyond-time-70s-scifi-art-book-interview/) **Conventional Boy**. While on a reading break at the end of January, I blew through Charles Stross's novel *A Conventional Boy*, and [had some thoughts about fandoms](https://www.andrewliptak.com/charles-stross-laundry-files-conventional-boy-litrpg-gaming-book-review/) in my review. **Culture Clash**. Another book I finished was Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Alien Clay*, which was an [intriguing look at authoritarianism and how fragile it can be](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-alien-clay-sci-fi-book-review/). **Finalists**. Committees and conventions have been unveiling their finalists for the [The Philip K. Dick Award](https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-k-dick-award-2025-samatar-tchaikovsky/), [the Compton Crook Award](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2025-compton-crook-awards/), and [the LA Book Prize](https://www.andrewliptak.com/la-book-scifi-fantasy-prize/). **Lightning in a Bottle**. January marked the 20th anniversary of John Scalzi's debut novel, *Old Man's War*, and to mark the occasion, [I took a deep dive](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) into how he wrote that first book and its sequels. [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-101.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) **Locus Award voting open**. *Locus Magazine* [has opened voting](https://poll.voting.locusmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for this year's Locus Awards. Anyone can vote! **RIP Joann**. [Joann Fabrics is going out of business](https://www.andrewliptak.com/joann-fabrics-cosplay-bankruptcy-closure/), and I'm bummed about that: it was a great place if you were a cosplayer. **Second attempt**. Amazon is [developing a new series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-culture-iain-banks-consider-phlebas-adaptation-scifi/) based on Iain M. Banks' *Consider Phlebas*. Hopefully it'll get made this time. **Two takes on Tolkien**. In January, I was working my way through a re-read of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Two Towers* and *Return of the King*, and had a couple of posts that I put together about them. In the first, I mused about [man's tendencies toward corruption](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-two-towers-grima-wormtongue-corruption/), and in the followup, I looked at how the [Palantírs proved to be a good stand-in for propaganda campaigns](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-return-of-the-king-lotr-propaganda-disinformation/) and Tolkien's experiences during the First World War. And in other Tolkien/Middle-earth stuff, a costume company [picked up the license to produce Lord of the Rings costumes](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-burgschneider-cosplay-costumes/). **Vermont stories**. At the day job, we've been putting a little more focus on our blog, so I've got a pair of stories that I wrote for it: one about the [evolution of the snowshoe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-evolution-of-the-snowshoe/) (looking at it through the items in our collection) and another about a [trio of Purple Heart medals](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-purple-heart-world-war-one-two/) that we hold. Expect some more of these in the nearish future. --- ### Middle-earth garb URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-burgschneider-cosplay-costumes/ Last updated: 2025-02-27T14:30:41.000Z Burgschneider, a Germany-based clothing company that specializes in medieval and fantasy costuming [has announced](https://burgschneidergroup.com/pr-burgschneider-and-middle-earth-enterprises-announces-partnership-for-new-costumes-and-events.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's gained a license from Middle-earth Enterprises to produce a line of replica costumes from J.R.R. Tolkien's novels *The Hobbit* and *The Lord of the Rings.* The company has been around for nearly two decades and says that it's the largest manufacturer of medieval clothing in the world. Chatting with a couple of friends who are deeply involved in the Renaissance Faire world, they noted that they not only owned several garments from the company, but that they both praised the company's quality and affordability. The company also runs a series of Live Action Roleplaying events that's attracted thousands of players from around the world. In its announcement, Burgschneider says that it will create a range of costumes and run "immersive" LARPing events from Tolkien's fantasy world. The company says that the first collection of costumes will arrive in Fall 2025, and while it namechecked Gondorian warriors, Hobbits, and Rohan adventurers in its press release, it didn't say what items would be part of that collection. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/6161E559-0404-4E77-8C81-965C964D07C7.jpeg) A garment from Burgschneider. Image: Adam Baker-Siroty The company already sells a wide range of [medieval-inspired clothing](https://burgschneider.com/collections/medieval-clothing?ref=andrewliptak.com) and accessories, as well as collections of [class](https://burgschneider.com/collections/ranger?ref=andrewliptak.com)\-[specific](https://burgschneider.com/collections/landsknecht?ref=andrewliptak.com) garments, [replica weapons and shields](https://burgschneider.com/collections/weapons-and-shields?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [armor](https://burgschneider.com/collections/armor?ref=andrewliptak.com). The company has recently branched into licensed properties; it launched a line of [*Dungeons & Dragons*](https://burgschneider.com/collections/dungeons-and-dragons-call-to-arms?ref=andrewliptak.com) costumes last year, and this March, it will [unveil a line of Warhammer costumes](https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-the-old-world/cosplay-historical-research?ref=andrewliptak.com). We'll have to see what the company eventually delivers this year from Tolkien's world, but [speaking with *PopInsider* in October 2023](https://thepopinsider.com/nycc-burgschneider-dungeons-and-dragons-costumes/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the company's Chief Creative Officer, Thomas Miller, said of their Dungeons & Dragons line that "these costumes are designed to be worn and used and abused. They’re not meant to be things that are flimsy, light, and destroyable over one weekend at a con. We want you to be able to run around in the woods with your friends or sit at a table and spill something on it and it’s still going to be the same the next day.” This isn't the first time we've seen officially-licensed cosplay-level products from Middle-earth. Wētā Workshop's store sells a [handful of replicas](https://www.wetanz.com/us/shop/prop-replicas?ref=andrewliptak.com), including [Gandalf's hat](https://www.wetanz.com/us/shop/prop-replicas/the-hat-of-gandalf-the-grey?ref=andrewliptak.com), [gloves](https://www.wetanz.com/us/shop/prop-replicas/gloves-of-gandalf-the-grey?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [scarf](https://www.wetanz.com/us/shop/prop-replicas/magical-scarf-of-gandalf-the-grey?ref=andrewliptak.com). 🧙 Want to learn more about the world of cosplay? I wrote a whole book about it, **Cosplay: A History*! You can snag a copy through [Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com), or reach out to me directly for a copy! While costume companies have produced garments for adults for decades, they're largely focused on the Halloween market, producing items that are suitable for only a couple of of uses. The growth of the markets for high-end collectors and cosplayers, a number of companies have begun to lean into higher-end wearables, such as Master Replicas, [ANOVOS](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-anovos-deuno-novo-cosplay/), Denuo Novo, and others. This Middle-earth line comes at a time when Tolkien's world has begun to expand at an increasing rate. In 2022, Amazon's Prime Video released *The Rings of Power*, [a prequel spinoff set in the world's Second Age](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rings-of-power-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-amazon/), while Warner Bros. also released an animated film, *Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim* in December 2024 and [plans a pair of live-action films](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warner-bros-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-films/), one about the hunt for Gollum to be released in 2026\. Behind the scenes, J.R.R. Tolkien's estate has been licensing more of its intellectual property. In 2022, the Saul Zaentz Company, which held some of the crucial film rights to *Lord of the Rings* sold its Middle-earth Enterprisesto a Swedish company called Embracer Group. At the time, it explained that it would be able to exploit those rights in through additional films and "continue to provide new opportunities for fans to explore this fictive world through merchandising and other experiences." [Middle-earth real estateThe rights holder for J.R.R. Tolkien films and other projects is changing hands![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-81.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/6BFDE9F6-CA8C-4EE8-B537-73331C5B57EB.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-middle-earth-embracer-group-rights/) "Providing new opportunities" to explore the world through merchandise and experiences seems exactly in Burgschneider's wheelhouse, and this partnership appears to be an example of this change in ownership coming to life. To me, this feels like another indication that immersive entertainment is something that isn't to be ignored, and goes hand-in-hand with the growing popularity of cosplay as a hobby and vocation. Fans crave experiences with the worlds that they love, and dressing up in the costumes of one's favorite characters and taking part in adventures in those worlds is a way to get closer to them. I, for one, am intrigued by this new partnership: one of the costumes that I've been eyeing in recent years is that of Gandalf the Grey. Maybe this'll be a good way to kickstart that journey. --- ### RIP JOANN Fabrics URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/joann-fabrics-cosplay-bankruptcy-closure/ Last updated: 2025-02-26T14:30:41.000Z JOANN Fabrics, one of the country's biggest fabric and crafting retailers, [will shut down in the coming weeks](https://apnews.com/article/joann-closing-bankruptcy-crafts-retail-b83c68fb641fad18cd6c8be925c6d90b?ref=andrewliptak.com). The news comes shortly after the [company announced](https://cdn.builder.io/o/assets%2Ff055e11a16744705a9517be4d1a9dacb%2Fbfee251961864002b382dfd415e7ceea?alt=media&token=02b487bd-bf13-4a65-8660-2e67f2eb73e4&apiKey=f055e11a16744705a9517be4d1a9dacb&ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and [that it would close 500 stores](https://apnews.com/article/joann-store-closings-list-bankruptcy-filing-485cf78c580331beb6c58c2ae4f8fbfe?ref=andrewliptak.com). Now, it's gone further, [saying that it will close down entirely](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/67817680c8de2134544a40cd/67bb41d2ff81f49ddc0c825f%5FCompany%20Statement%20on%20Winning%20Bidder.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) after a company purchased its assets. The company was founded in 1943 by a pair of German immigrants and grew from there. It became a publicly-traded company in 1969, and in 2010, went private again when it was sold to a private equity firm. The company has struggled in recent years, losing more than $500 million in 2019, but was able to sort of right the ship during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to file for bankruptcy last year and now again this year. The first time, the company didn't close down any stores, but this time, they're closing down entirely. This is upsetting news, especially within the cosplay community, because the outlet has been an outstanding place to get materials for costumes, and because it embraced cosplayers and the cosplay community by specifically stocking specialty fabrics and materials that cosplayers used. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0455.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0903.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0848.jpeg) My son dressed as a Ringwraith, Hylian Link, and a Jawa, all made with fabrics purchased at JOANN Fabrics. Images: Andrew Liptak JOANN has been a presence in my life for as long as I can remember. I remember walking through the store as a kid as my mother shopped for fabric for quilting, sewing supplies, and for the clothes that she made us, and since joining the 501st Legion 20 years ago, it's been a a place where I can reliably find the fabric and other bits and bobs that I've used in costuming projects over the years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0296-1.jpeg) A section devoted to cosplay at JOANN Fabrics in Berlin, Vermont. Image: Andrew Liptak The elastic bands and snaps that I use in my stormtrooper and shoretrooper armor? I know exactly where to find them. Monkscloth and heavy cotton weaves for kids costumes? The last time I stopped by was back in October, when I had to pick up some cloth that I was using for my son's Ringwraith costume for Halloween. A friend and fellow 501st member and cosplayer Jen Markham [voiced her frustrations on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DGD-D9CpVyq/?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that it was incredibly frustrating to see the chain close down (at the time of the video, the chain was just closing 500 stores, not shutting down completely), because other retailers like Michaels and Dollar General have been stocking plenty of craft materials, which suggests that there is still demand for these products. And JOANN's recognition of cosplay as a vocation and hobby was a huge help towards bringing it into the mainstream. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_3018.jpeg) A display for Yaya Han's brand of cosplay EVA foam at JOANN Fabrics in Berlin, Vermont in 2021\. Image: Andrew Liptak There are plenty of outlets where cosplayers can still find specialty fabrics, but there's something specifically useful about being able to go to a store and being able to put your hands on the fabric that you're looking to use, something that you can't do with an online storefront. 800 stores also meant that there was likely one near you, and when you might need something in the middle of a project, heading over to a store to pick up that item then and there was a huge help. What set JOANN's apart for me from a number of the handful of craft outlets out there is that the DIY ethos – a central part of cosplay – really felt like it was front and center in everything they did. It's a store that really embodied this idea of "you can make this yourself, and here are the supplies that can help you do that." Cosplay provides you with a set of skills that really feel like they're falling out of the public's knowledge base: how to sew, how to make repairs, and how to see the world in a creative way. A couple of weeks ago, I [posted to Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/andrewliptak.com/post/3lhtnmwm6ik2o?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that a "fun, knock-on effect of cosplaying \[is\] fixing things!" and that in a world where we're surrounded by disposable things, cosplay helped me overcome this tendency to just *replace* stuff when it broke. I ended up fixing my snow rake with a short work session. I recently took a pile of torn jeans home to my mother, who sewed them up and saved me a couple of hundred dollars in replacements. I've got some fabric dye (purchased at JOANNS) that I'm planning on using to bring some new life back to some pants that have faded with time. That's the value that the store has brought to me and plenty of other cosplayers: it's more than just an outlet where I could buy fabric around Halloween or con season: it's a place that reinforces and supports our creative tendencies, and losing it means one less place that encourages this mentality. Hopefully, other places and organizations will step up and take its place. In the meantime, it's probably a good time to stock up on anything you might have needed for your next costume. ### Amazon wants to adapt Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-culture-iain-banks-consider-phlebas-adaptation-scifi/ Last updated: 2025-02-25T17:30:24.000Z Amazon is taking another swing at adapting Iain M. Banks' long-running space opera series, The Culture. [*Deadline* reports](https://deadline.com/2025/02/consider-phlebas-amazon-charles-yu-chloe-zhao-1236300861/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Prime Video is developing an adaptation of [*Consider Phlebas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316005388?ref=andrewliptak.com), the first installment of the series that Banks published, with *Interior Chinatown* author Charles Yu set to write and serve as executive producer, and with director Chloé Zhao (who directed Marvel's *The Eternals*) also tapped to serve as executive producer. This isn't the first time that Amazon has taken a swing at the series: it [announced that it was developing](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17035618/amazon-culture-series-iain-m-banks-television-show?ref=andrewliptak.com) an adaptation of the novels series in 2018 with Dennis Kelly (creator of Channel 4's *Utopia*) as part of a [broader mandate from Amazon's then-CEO Jeff Bezos to find](https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/amazon-studios-jeff-bezos-roy-price-zelda-1202552532/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) "big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world." Part of that push included Prime Video's adaptation *Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power* (which was just [renewed for a third season](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-rings-of-power-third-season-renewed/).) That attempt [came to a close in 2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazons-culture-tv-series-no-longer-in-the-works/) when the Banks estate opted to pull out. At the time, Kelly noted that he thought that "the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material. They hadn’t seen anything \[he had written\], it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason." Banks' estate [told *The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/26/amazon-tv-adaptation-of-iain-banks-culture-series-is-cancelled?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that the “timing wasn’t quite right,” and that it’s “hugely grateful for all the care and creative energy that went into the early stages of the project.” Fast forward six years, and it looks like the timing might be a bit better. The 40th anniversary of the series *is* coming up in a couple of years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/image-2.png) Image: Andrew Liptak *The Culture* is an enormous space opera series that Banks wrote between 1987 and 2012\. The first book out of the gate was *Consider Phlebas*, and he followed up every couple of years with nine additional installments: [*The Player of Games*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316005401?ref=andrewliptak.com) (1988), [*Use of Weapons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316030571?ref=andrewliptak.com) (1990)*,* [*The State of the Art*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565646?ref=andrewliptak.com) (1989)*,* [*Excession* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553575378?ref=andrewliptak.com)(1996), [*Inversions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982156107?ref=andrewliptak.com) (1998)*,* [*Look to Windward*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982156060?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2000)*,* [*Matter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316005371?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2008)*,* [*Surface Detail*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316123419?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2010) and [*The Hydrogen Sonata*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316212366?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2012). Banks died in 2013, and in 2023, his estate released a [book of the drawings](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572873?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he created while writing the series. He was also a prolific author of literary fiction, distinguishing his genre and non-genre work with his middle initial (he published his SF works as Iain M. Banks, literary as Iain Banks.) The series is set in a post-scarcity future, in which the people within live on giant space habitats called "Orbitals" and enormous space habitats, largely governed by artificial intelligences known as Minds. Banks set out to create a world that really went against most conventional space operas at the time, imagining a future where conflict isn't driven by resources. In *Consider Phlebas*, we follow a character named Horza, a shape-shifting mercenary as he's hired to track down a Mind that escaped in the midst of a war between The Culture and their adversaries, the Idirans. The Mind ended up on a planet run by beings known as the Dra'Azon, who won't allow either side onto the planet, and the Idirans task him with retrieving it, along with a captured Special Circumstances agent, Perosteck Balveda. The book is a tremendous, action-packed read, with space pirates, strange worlds, heists, and quite a bit more. There's no guarantee that this'll be made: development is just one early step in the process, and as we've already seen, this work might not end up going anywhere. I'm a big fan of Yu's work: he's an excellent storyteller and novelist, and I'd be really interested in seeing what he and Amazon have planned for it. Hopefully, all of the pieces will line up this time. ### Colorful futures URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adam-rowe-worlds-beyond-time-70s-scifi-art-book-interview/ Last updated: 2025-02-25T15:15:56.000Z For a number of years, I've been following 70's Sci Fi Art, a project by Adam Rowe, on [various](https://bsky.app/profile/70sscifiart.bsky.social?ref=andrewliptak.com) [social](https://www.facebook.com/70sscifiart) [media](https://x.com/70sscifi?ref=andrewliptak.com) [platforms](https://www.instagram.com/seventiesscifiart?ref=andrewliptak.com). In 2022, he released a fantastic art book, [*Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com), which collected those various online musings into one place. (You should also sign up for [his fantastic newsletter](https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/?ref=andrewliptak.com).) If you haven't come across the project before, it's a great distraction on social media: picture after picture of the genre's most colorful and psychedelic age, with some great insights into the artists, editors, and works of the period around the 1970s, with some bleed-over before and after. Adam wasn't deterred by my tardiness, and agreed to answer my questions about it. Here's my interview with him. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2542.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Your project started off as a Tumblr account called [70s Sci-Fi Art](https://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Was there a particular cover that grabbed you and started you down this path? I started my Tumblr way back in April 2013, when I was in the final weeks of a Spring semester at college and had a little free time to mess around online. I found a [Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/yuzcz/today%5Fmy%5Fdad%5Ftold%5Fme%5Fthat%5Fin%5F1977%5Fwhile%5Fstationed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) featuring an uncredited, unpublished artwork done by a soldier stationed in Germany in 1977\. I loved the style, and I tried finding more similar art. It’s kind of a familiar origin story for online creators: When I couldn’t find the exact blog I wanted, I decided to just create my own. That uncredited artwork was my first post. 12 years and 33,000 posts later, I’m still finding interesting new art. ### What was the early response to the blog like? My Tumblr took off pretty quick! It turns out that a lot of people liked the same era of art that I did, and I think it really helped that my handle doubled as an explanation of what people would get if they followed: “70sscifiart.” I also posted a lot! I was posting at least seven times a day for years and years, although I’ve cooled down a lot recently. It turns out getting hyperfixated on a special interest is really the cheat code to social media success, or at least it was in the 2010s. ### You expanded this project onto Twitter and a bunch of other social media platforms and you've gained a pretty big following: what is it about this project that appeals to so many people? This era of art just resonates with a lot of people. Some of it’s standard nostalgia, some of it’s a nostalgia specific to a past in which we were a lot more optimistic about where the future could take us. And I think a lot of it is a response to the type of rich, thoughtful cover illustrations that the US could produce half a century ago, when it was at the peak of a pretty strong economic run. I get a lot of artists, designers and video game devs following me, too. I think a lot of art and media these days is based on remixing older styles and genres. But no one wants to get stuck making a copy of a copy of a copy, so having one art blog that pulls together the source material behind a certain style is a great resource. ### Despite the name, this project doesn't cover just art from the 1970s – artists like John Harris and Michael Whelan are still working – what is it about that particular time period that really stands out to you? Yeah, I named the blog "70s Sci-Fi Art" and then I kept finding and posting cool art that wasn’t from the 70s. Long-term followers of my blog will know that I’ve redefined “70s” to mean anything from about 1959 to 1991\. I can understand if that upsets anyone who feels that words should mean things. The truth is that I like a certain tough-to-define colorful, analog, science-fantasy vibe that felt more specific to the 70s than just “retro sci-fi” in general. I’m not nearly as interested in the science fiction magazine art that was around in the ‘20s-’50s, for instance, so I like centering my focus on the 1970s as a focal point, even though I’m interested in following the trends that were biggest in the 70s across the 60s, 80s, and beyond. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2543.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Something that I've noticed throughout the history of science fiction and fantasy is how people complain that the covers don't always line up with the text they're promoting – the unauthorized ACE editions of *Lord of the Rings* was one memorable example, while other covers are pretty abstract. There's something of a disconnect between the reader or author's image of the story and characters, and what the artists produce. Yeah, that’s a really interesting discussion! The truth is that you can’t really boil it down: There are a lot of factors that go into the differences between the covers and what’s inside them. Some of that is down to the artist. Some artists really do take a lot of care to represent the story as closely as they can - Michael Whelan has done that his whole career. Other artists are too busy to read the stories they illustrate - Chris Foss has been pretty vocal about rejecting the hypothesis that he should be expected to (and it’s hard to argue with that, given he was creating a blistering two or three covers per week back in the day). Most of it is just how the art director or publisher wants the book to be marketed, of course. The conventional wisdom for selling science fiction in the 1970s was to focus on spaceships or planets, even if the stories didn’t. Sometimes artworks that were clearly designed for a specific story would be recycled for another one they didn’t fit at all - one infamous example being the 1975 Bruce Pennington [cover](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1364380&ref=andrewliptak.com) of Philip K. Dick’s *The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch*, which features the ornithopters and spiced-up blue eyes that Pennington had clearly painted for his *Dune* cover in 1968. Vincent Di Fate has a [fun story](https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/book-notes-the-science-fiction-art-0a2-6482e6a811ac16001b2b6d2d/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how the space station on his 1993 cover for Robert L. Forward’s *TimeMaster* would have looked “suspiciously like a garbage can” if he actually followed the dimensions in the text, so the publisher made sure they went with a “more conventional” torus shape in the end. Personally, I don’t care too much about book-accuracy. It’s always nice to see, but some of the best covers are completely original works. ### What is your process like for posting this artwork? Where do you source your images from, and what types of research do you do when you write up a post? I always try to cite the artist if at all possible, and often the author and title that the cover art was first created for. 99% of the time, I can find that information on [ISFDB.org](http://isfdb.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is a sort of a Wikipedia for sci-fi and fantasy books. It’s an incredibly valuable resource (I already linked to it once in this interview, which tells you how often I turn to it). Nearly all my images are sourced from somewhere online. Back in the day, I used to use Google’s Image Search for almost all my research: I’d find a trove of illustrations from one artist and save them all in my drafts, and then sprinkle them into my Tumblr queue so that I wasn’t focusing on only one artist for a long time. These days, Google isn’t quite as good at finding new art, though. They changed the whole process sometime around 2020 to use Google Lens instead, and these days there is a lot of AI slop that I have to avoid. ### How did the book come about, and what was the writing process like? My literary agent Sarah Bolling reached out to me first back in 2018, saying she liked my Tumblr and wondered if I’d ever consider a coffee table book on the subject. I had always thought a collection would be cool to do, but I probably wouldn’t have ever reached out to an agent about it myself, so this whole book wouldn’t have happened without her. She’s since left the industry, sadly! If any literary agents reading this wants to represent me, get in touch. We landed the book deal at Abrams in September 2019\. The actual process was tough for me, though, and I had to push the deadline quite a bit until I eventually finished in December 2022\. I just faced a lot of paralyzing anxiety over the process – I would find myself freezing up for months at a time. It’s obvious in retrospect that it was a form of anxiety, probably largely due to the huge number of artists that I needed to contact and win over in order for the book to work. But at the time, I had the impression that anxiety manifests as a frantic frenzy rather than a shutdown. Turns out it can be both or either! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2546.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### One of the things that I've been enjoying about the online project and the book is how you pull some really specific tropes out, like "reflections in spacesuit visors," "space skeletons" or "cats": what do these themes say about the types of work that this group of artists was producing, and what do you think it says about what fans were looking for? One of my biggest inspirations for the format and tone was Grady Hendrix’s *Paperbacks from Hell*, a rambunctious illustrated history of ‘70s and ‘80s horror novels. That book uses the same “goofy themes” concept to tie together a lot of wildly different books, and I really loved it. It’s such a smart way to efficiently condense a sprawling history while highlighting fun or outlandish tropes. As for what the themes say: Everything! It’s too much to sum up. You picked three of my favorites, though, and they demonstrate a good breadth of the meaning to be found in grouping tropes. Reflections in space helmets are a great way to put the viewer in the astronaut’s boots by depicting the astronaut and what they’re seeing at the same time; reflections are good visual storytelling. Skeletons in spacesuits are (in part) a holdover from the genre’s roots in adventure stories that would often include skeletons in deserts or long-lost islands. And then there’s Space Cats. I had a lot to say in my book about all the ways cats have turned up in sci-fi illustration, but at the end of day, not every trope has to have a deeper meaning behind it. A lot of people just really love cats. I can’t blame them. ### The art these artists produced isn't just art for the sake of art: there's a promotional component to it. How do you think that restricted or constrained these artists? Or did it? It definitely did constrain them! Plenty of great science fiction artists have been open over the years about enjoying steady work more than the genre itself, from Richard Powers to Chris Moore. Other artists loved the genre but chafed against the standard “spaceships or planets” box that some publishers would force them into. One example that always comes to my mind is Jeffrey Catherine Jones, who has talked about preferring muted colors rather than the industry-imposed bright, saturated look that publishers thought would draw a customer’s eye faster. ### Looking over this vast gallery of artwork, what do you think makes a good work of art for a book cover? In general, I love a lot of tiny details within a colorful, sweeping, epic scene of something truly alien, like whatever’s happening on Bruce Pennington's [1972 artwork](https://bsky.app/profile/70sscifiart.bsky.social/post/3jvwy433pak26?ref=andrewliptak.com) ‘The Plains of Tartarus’ or Roger Dean’s ‘[The Ladder](https://x.com/70sscifiart/status/1772467268502409631?ref=andrewliptak.com).’ That said, I’m constantly blown away by dozens of other types of illustrations. Rick Sternbach’s depiction of a dolphin in a functional spacesuit is hardly epic, but it’s so delightful I did a [whole interview with him](https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/interview-rick-sternbacks-dolphin-suit/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about it. I guess I just like seeing art that’s a little different from anything else I’ve seen before. ### Given the turmoil of social media, what is the future for this project? Do you have any other projects coming up next? I’m still posting occasionally on all my social platforms, but the most fun I’m having these days is with [my newsletter](https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/?ref=andrewliptak.com), where I’m posting a weekly roundup of art – mostly grouped around themes that are even *more* offbeat than the ones you’ll find in my art book! Spherical Red Aliens, Giant Teeth, etc. If anyone’s interested, [this link](https://linktr.ee/70sscifiart?ref=andrewliptak.com) has all my social media and ways you can buy my book. There is one art collection that I’d love to put together, and I think it could be an incredible book. It’s still very early stages, though, so I don’t want to say too much! It would be slightly outside my normal “retro science fiction” lane, though. It would focus on a single artist, too, which gets rid of all the licensing anxieties I had with *Worlds Beyond Time*. Or I hope it will. Fingers crossed. ### The revolution starts now URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-trailer/ Last updated: 2025-02-24T19:01:18.000Z The next season of *Andor* is 56 days away, and we finally have a first look at what it'll bring: revolution. Lucasfilm has debuted a trailer for Season 2 of the series, and there's a *lot* packed into it: a lot of familiar faces and plenty of action as the series races towards towards the events of *Rogue One*, when we were first introduced to Cassian Andor. Give it a watch here: *Andor* debuted back in 2022: it's a prequel to the first standalone *Star Wars* film, *Rogue One*, following its titular character as he goes from small-time thief to becoming radicalized into the growing rebellion against the Galactic Empire. That first season was fantastic: an engrossing story that really hammered home the brutality of the Empire on its citizens. It was a serious take on the story, and it's become one of my favorite entries in the entire franchise. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-100.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA-5.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) I've been waiting for a good first look at the upcoming season for a while now. Star Wars Celebration showed off a trailer last year, but it never made its way officially to the internet. This season will be the last of Andor. Where the first took place about five years prior to the Battle of Yavin, this next season is going to fill in the gap: every three episodes (Lucasfilm refers to them as "Chapters") will take place about a year apart, jumping forward until the minutes before we're introduced to Andor in *Rogue One*. And from the looks of this trailer, we're going to see quite a bit: plenty of action as Andor takes on a bunch of Stormtroopers and steals a TIE fighter. There's even a team of troopers in some new armor that I'm looking forward to seeing more of. We've got plenty of familiar characters popping back up, too: Revolutionary Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and his men crop up as they (or someone) escapes from their base, Imperial Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) is at work on his Death Star project, and K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk) pops in for a moment, all getting in place for where they'll be in *Rogue One*. I'm still holding out hope that we'll see Antoc Merrick (played by Ben Daniels) as Blue Leader. On a marketing side, this trailer is a pretty far cry from the [first teaser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5UX1Adanis&ref=andrewliptak.com) that debuted at Star Wars Celebration in 2022: a trailer that really ratcheted up the tension. It's always a little jarring when you hear a [rock song in a science fiction story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhFB%5FSoahLw&ref=andrewliptak.com), Steve Earle's "[The Revolution Starts Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP7Wqt9rEL0&ref=andrewliptak.com)" is a pretty apt choice, given that *Andor* is teeing us up for the rise of the Rebel Alliance, [complete with a killer manifesto](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/). April 22nd can't come soon enough. ### Three Purple Hearts URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-purple-heart-world-war-one-two/ Last updated: 2025-02-22T18:57:17.000Z In the waning days of the Revolutionary War, General George Washington faced a problem: after seven years of fighting, funding was running low, and his soldiers were exhausted. He decided to begin issuing an award that would recognize exemplary acts on the battlefield, [writing](https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/celebrate/purple-heart.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it would be for "not only instances of unusual gallantry, but also of extraordinary fidelity and essential service in any way shall meet with a due reward." He wrote on August 7th, 1782 that the badge would be in the "figure of a heart in purple cloth, or silk, edged with narrow lace or binding," and called it the "Badge of Military Merit". The award is [known to have been issued to three soldiers](https://www.thepurpleheart.com/history/?ref=andrewliptak.com): Sergeant Elijah Churchill of the 2nd Continental Dragoons; Sergeant William Brown of the 5th Connecticut Continental Line Infantry, and Sergeant Daniel Bissel of the 2nd Connecticut Continental Line Infantry. While Washington had intended the award to be a permanent award, it was wasn't [used again until the 1930s](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/winter/heart-of-purple?ref=andrewliptak.com), while other awards, [like the Medal of Honor](https://vermonthistory.org/medal-of-honor-civil-war-military-vermont-history?ref=andrewliptak.com), were issued instead. On February 22nd, 1932, the U.S. Congress reauthorized the award in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth. This new award also came in the shape of a purple heart, and featured a profile of Washington. Where the first award was for extraordinary acts, this new version would honor soldiers who had been wounded in the line of duty, and would be retroactively awarded to the soldiers who fought in the First World War. It's been in use ever since. The Vermont Historical Society holds three Purple Hearts in its collection. One of those early recipients was Guy Hiram Boyce of Waitsfield, who fought in the First World War. Drafted in the spring of 1918, he was first assigned to the 304th Infantry Regiment and then to the 76th Infantry Division, which deployed to France in July. While there, *The Waterbury Record* reported in February 1919 that he was gassed on September 3rd and wounded on October 14th. *The Barre Daily Times* first reported his injuries on November 7th, saying that he "had been slightly wounded in active service," and updated its reporting in February 1919 that he had been "wounded severely." He returned home in April 1919. Boyce would have been issued the Purple Heart after 1932\. He passed away in 1973, and the medal was given to his nephew, Warren Maxwell Boyce, who [gifted it to VHS in 1977](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1977.43.1a-c&search=Search&ref=andrewliptak.com). ![](https://vermonthistory.org/assets/image-cache/Blog/IMG_0028.6a8dce31.jpg) Louis Provost Peck's Purple Heart. Image: Vermont Historical Society Another recipient of the award was Louis Provost Peck of Montpelier, who served in the 17th Airborne Division during World War II. He fought in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and took part in [Operation Varsity](https://armyhistory.org/operation-varsity-the-last-airborne-deployment-of-world-war-ii/?ref=andrewliptak.com), an arial invasion in Germany that took place March 24th, 1945\. It was during this operation [that he was wounded](https://www.newspapers.com/image/360523490/?ref=andrewliptak.com): the glider he was in came under enemy fire, injuring his legs. He survived the crash, and while on the ground, he was hit by another glider. Peck spent the next two and a half years in hospitals recording, and after he returned home from war, he studied to become a lawyer and held roles in the Vermont Attorney General's office before being appointed to the Vermont Supreme Court in 1981\. He [donated the medal to VHS in 1999](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1999.23.8&search=Search&entry=f37e95f0-89a5-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com), and passed away in 2008. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/assets/image-cache/Blog/201460158ad.74d1cf82.jpg) Floyd A. Mitchell's Purple Heart. Image: Vermont Historical Society The third Purple Heart that VHS holds was awarded to Floyd A. Mitchell of Barre. Mitchell had graduated from Spaulding High School in 1920 and attended West Point before commissioning into the U.S. Army. When the Japanese launched its attacks against the United States in December 1941, Mitchell was a Lt. Colonel serving as an artillery officer on Corregidor in the Philippines. The island came under attack by the Japanese military in December 1941, and the Mitchell was part of the contingent of US troops who surrendered in April 1942\. Reports of Mitchell's capture came in December 1942, and in January 1945, word arrived that he had been killed on December 15th, 1944 when US planes attacked and sunk the ship he was on, unaware that it was transporting POWs. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and Silver Star medals. 🎖️ This post was [originally posted](https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-historical-society-snowshoe-evolution-abenaki-tubbs-collection-winter?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) to the Vermont Historical Society's blog. To support our work, consider [signing up as a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) of the society. ### Here are the SF/F finalists for this year's LA Book Prize URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/la-book-scifi-fantasy-prize/ Last updated: 2025-02-20T19:44:59.000Z The Los Angeles Times [has announced the finalists](https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/bookprizes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for its 45th annual book awards, which includes an award for the best speculative fiction novel of the year. This is the fifth year that the award has been handed out from the festival. It used to be called the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction, but that moniker seems to have been dropped as of last year. Here are this year’s finalists: - [*The Naming Song*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250907981?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jedidiah Berry - [*The Bright Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780735224049?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lev Grossman - [*The Book of Love*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780812996586?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Link - [*Absolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374616595?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeff VanderMeer - [*The City in Glass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250348272?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nghi Vo As I [noted last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/two-sets-of-awards/), I really like this awards list because it's nicely varied. I’ve only read one book on this list, Grossman's *The Bright Sword (*[which I really adored](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-bright-sword-lev-grossman-king-arthur-fantasy-book-review/)), but I have VanderMeer's *Absolution* on my short list to read. I've also heard excellent things about *The Book of Love*. Last year's winner was Tananarive Due for [*The Reformatory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982188344?ref=andrewliptak.com), and in 2023, Nicola Griffith won for her novel [*Spear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250819321?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This year's awards will be announced during a ceremony on Friday, April 25 at 7:00PM at USC Campus's Bovard Auditorium. ### Apple's Murderbot series debuts on May 16th URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-murderbot-martha-wells-streaming-series-sci-fi-release-date/ Last updated: 2025-02-20T18:44:54.000Z Apple has [announced that its upcoming adaptation](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2025/02/apples-new-sci-fi-series-murderbot-starring-and-executive-produced-by-alexander-skarsgrd-and-hailing-from-chris-and-paul-weitz-to-make-global-debut-may-16-2025/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of Martha Wells' *Murderbot Diaries* will debut on its streaming platform on May 16th, and unveiled a pair of images of Alexander Skarsgård as the titular character. The series will run for 10 episodes and was created by Chris and Paul Weitz. *(thanks to Max C. in the Transfer Orbit slack channel for alerting me to this.)* The company announced that it was [adapting the series in December 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/), and went into production last year. The show is based on Wells' novellas and novels ( [*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io),[*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229854?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Fugitive Telemetry*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765376?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)), which follow a security android that calls itself "Murderbot," after it hacked hacked its own programming and has gone rogue, but would rather sit around watching soap operas and avoiding people whenever possible. It's confused and sometimes annoyed by emotions, but begins developing feelings and connections with a handful of humans and ships that it ends up falling in with. Wells has earned enormous acclaim, and [revitalized her career](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-wired-profile-sci-fi/). *All Systems Red* earned the 2018 Alex, Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards (as well as a bunch of others), while *Artificial Condition* and *Network Effect* also won a whole host of awards. In 2021, the entire series earned the Hugo for Best Series. The show should introduce an entirely new audience to the Murderbot stories, and it joins a growing number of science fiction shows that Apple has commissioned for its streaming service, such as *Severance*, [*For All Mankind*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/for-all-mankind/)*, Monarch, Silo,* [*Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/)*,* and a [forthcoming adaptation of William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/021925_Murderbot_Big_Image_01_big_image_post.jpg.large_2x.jpg) Image: Apple There's a wonderfully delightful meta premise that comes with the series: an android that likes television is now the subject of a television show. But there's also a lot that the series can draw from the books (and plenty of material). Murderbot, at its core, is a series about an individual trying to understand the people around them, and dealing with extremely complicated feelings and emotions that it just doesn't have the tools to deal with. I spoke with Wells back in 2021, and in that interview, she made an interesting observation: > "The fact that it has anxiety and depression and everything that it goes through, the more specific you are, the more people find common ground with it. For a long time in media, there's been this idea that things have to be general and generic, so more people would be interested in them. But in practice, it's actually the opposite: the more specific something is, the more likely someone's going to feel kinship with something they feel or have done, and Murderbot is incredibly specific about its problems." [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-99.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) I think that's a key reason for why these stories have resonated so well with readers: it's easy to relate to Murderbot and the way they interact with the world. It can be a frightening, distressing, and convoluted place, but it's a story that really emphasizes something that we're all struggling to find and maintain: human connection. ### Evolution of the snowshoe URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-evolution-of-the-snowshoe/ Last updated: 2025-02-19T16:27:31.000Z This past weekend’s snowstorms left Vermont covered in a nice, thick layer of snow. After clearing our driveways and footpaths, it’s an excellent time to get outdoors for some recreation time. Vermonters have dealt with the snow for hundreds of years, and looking through the Vermont Historical Society’s object collection is a good way to see how one particular tool has changed with time – and remained largely the same: the snowshoe. Snowshoes have been used for thousands of years across the world. In a [paper published in 1911 in *The Museum Journal*](https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/184/?ref=andrewliptak.com), scholars noted that the snowshoe was a widespread tool amongst the tribes of North America. It had a basic form: a frame, usually made of wood, bone, or antler, with a web of hide stretched across it. The frame would distribute the wearer’s weight, allowing them to walk on – or at least not sink into – the snow. In his journals chronicling his expeditions, Samuel de Champlain [recounted seeing](https://archive.org/details/voyagesandexplo00chamgoog/page/n196/mode/2up) Native Americans use snowshoes during the winter months in the early 1600s: “In the winter when the Snowes are great they make a kinde of racket which is twice or thrice as bigge as one of ours in France, which they fasten to their feete, and so goe on the Snow without sinking.” ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/L2024.3.159.jpg) Item #L2024.3.159a-b. Image: Vermont Historical Society In the years that followed, the European colonists who began settling in the forests of North America adopted snowshoes for their own uses. VHS counts a number of snowshoes in its collection, and that basic form remains largely unchanged. The oldest set is #L2024.3.159a-b, a pair of square-toed snowshoes with rawhide (damaged) weaving. These recently arrived to our collection from the Abenaki Cultural Conservancy and are estimated to date back to around 1880\. They were handed down within a Missisquoi Abenaki family from Stanbridge, Quebec. Another set (#L2024.3.160a-b) from around the same period are described as “Abenaki-style snowshoes” and feature pointed, rather than squared tips. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/Blog/197482ab-2.JPG) Item #1974.8.2a-b. Image: Vermont Historical Society Moving into the 20th century, the general form remained the same: rawhide stretched across a wooden frame: one set dates back to around 1900 (#[1974.8.2a-b](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1974.8.2a-b&search=Search&entry=66d6b060-89a0-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com)), another from 1918 (#[2014.2a-b](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=2014.2a-b&search=Search&entry=7d2f11a0-89a4-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com)), used by a Theron Skidmore Dean while he worked along the Long Trail, while another (#L2024.3.158a-b) is described as being made by an Abenaki family in Fonda Junction (Swanton) in the 1950s. While snowshoes were made by craftspeople for centuries, the growing field of outdoor recreation saw the arrival of dedicated manufacturers at the turn of the century. Tubbs Snowshoes was founded in 1906 in Norway, Maine, manufacturing a variety of snowshoes from traditional materials, such as ash wood and rawhide. [According to an article in *Sports Illustrated* published in 1979](https://vault.si.com/vault/1979/11/19/shopwalk-at-vermont-tubbs-they-still-make-snowshoes-the-way-they-used-to?ref=andrewliptak.com), the company was eventually relocated to Vermont, where it made snowshoes for outdoorsmen and the US Army. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/assets/image-cache/Blog/cdv_photo_1680536183.fefc3428.jpg) Item #1996.37a-b. Image: Vermont Historical Society When the business [changed hands](https://brandonreporter.com/2024/10/17/from-vermont-tubbs-to-pittsford-village-farm-baird-morgan-has-left-his-mark/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1968, it continued to churn out snowshoes for a new generation of enthusiasts (item #[1974.38a-b](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1974.38a-b&search=Search&entry=e96de440-899f-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com) is such a pair, “Cross Country, 10 x 46”, made sometime around 1970) , and began making some updates to the as-of-then-unchanged form: it began introducing new materials like neoprene. Other updates included light aluminum frames and plastic bindings, represented by in our collection by #[1996.37a-b](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=1996.37a-b&search=Search&entry=e447af50-899f-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com). Tubbs relocated from Wallingford to Stowe and in 2003, the company [was sold to another firm, K2 Inc.](https://www.rutlandherald.com/news/vt-snowshoe-firm-sold/article%5Fb2ed4ce7-dd3f-58bc-927b-d3afaffc214e.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), which [moved its manufacturing operations to China](https://www.timesargus.com/news/tubbs-snowshoes-packs-up-for-china/article%5F16babf18-a94b-587d-8e05-307864b12b70.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) the following year. Tubbs wasn’t the only company making snowshoes in Vermont: another, Dion-NeviTrek, [manufactures its snowshoes in Pownal](https://www.wcax.com/2025/02/17/made-vermont-dion-nevitrek-snowshoes/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Tubbs and its advances didn’t completely replace the traditional snowshoe. Item #[2005.18a-b](https://vermonthistory.org/catalog?search%5Fcollection=2005.18a-b&search=Search&entry=4107f810-89a2-11ea-9760-cfd273e2ec6c&ref=andrewliptak.com) (once used by former VHS Executive Director Michael Sherman!) was [made in the workshop of Armand and Marie Boutin of Williamstown](https://web.archive.org/web/20150529171248/https:/www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/sports/othersports/leaving-waffle-prints-in-the-vermont-snow.html) out of traditional materials: ash and rawhide. Sometimes, those time-tested methods still work as well as they did hundreds of years ago. ❄️ This post was [originally posted](https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-historical-society-snowshoe-evolution-abenaki-tubbs-collection-winter?ref=andrewliptak.com) to the Vermont Historical Society's blog. To support our work, consider [signing up as a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the society. ### Destination: Mercury URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:54:41.000Z There is no better example of how science fiction’s tendency to try and imagine a plausible future is like throwing a dart at a moving target than Larry Niven’s 1964 short story “The Coldest Place.” Up to that point, astronomers widely believed that the planet Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun: its rotation matched that of its orbit and as a result, only one side ever faced the Sun, meaning that its dark side would have been much cooler. Niven took that bit of knowledge and incorporated it into his story—his first—and sent it off to Frederik Pohl’s *If*, where it appeared in the December 1964 issue. It was during the 1960s that the space race hit its stride, and while the Apollo missions to the Moon took up much of the attention of the general public and scientific community, there were plenty of scientists who were keenly interested in researching the nature of the solar system’s other bodies, including Mercury. In 1962, astronomers from the University of Michigan first observed our solar system’s smallest planet with a radio telescope and discovered something unexpected: the side facing away from the Sun was warmer, indicating that the planet wasn’t tidally locked. Further studies a couple of years later confirmed the finding: for every two Mercurian years (one year being the equivalent of eighty-eight Earth days), it experienced three Mercurian days (each rotation on its axis a bit under fifty-nine Earth days). Niven’s story was no longer scientifically accurate. This piece is part of a series that I originally published in **Clarkesworld Magazine*: \- [Destination: Mercury](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Venus](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Luna](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Mars](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mars-history-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Messenger to the Gods Ancient astronomers from all over the world have long been able to detect our solar system’s rocky bodies, and through centuries of observations, have incorporated them into their respective cosmologies. As these various ancient cultures charted the movements of our solar system’s most prominent astrological feature—the Sun—they took notice of another object that was closely associated with it: Mercury. According to NASA, Mercury popped up in Babylonian star catalogs, and that they named it Nebo/Nabu—a god of writing and records, and who served as a messenger to the gods. Mercury was often to be seen during the morning and evening hours, when the Sun’s glare wouldn’t overtake it. Greek astronomers also assigned Mercury with the role of messenger for its apparent speed. They called it Hermes, a quick-moving messenger to the gods who served as a conduit between the mortal and divine worlds who moved on winged sandals. Roman theology echoed that of Greece’s and named the god Mercury. Over time, ancient astronomers shifted their understanding of the cosmos. Writing in *The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars*, Jo Marchant writes that astronomer Ptolemy wrote an influential text on the nature of the cosmos, seeking to organize it into a rational system. But more importantly, he “differed from the Babylonians in that rather than seeing celestial signs as divine warnings, he believed powers emanating from the stars and planets, such as ‘humoral shifts’ could trigger effects on Earth, influencing everything from the weather to personality and health.” It was a line of thinking that still persists to this day, an idea that links our everyday lives with that of the cosmos above us. He believed that Mercury danced just beyond the orbit of the Moon. Chinese scholars associated the planet with water, while Northern Europeans claimed it for Odin. That thinking would again shift with time as new philosophers and thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo reset our thinking on the nature of the solar system: that the Sun was the center of our system, rather than the Earth, and that our home planet and its neighbors orbited it. ### A Rational Cosmos The development of the telescope brought the cosmos closer to early astronomers, and with it, a seismic shift in our understanding of our stellar neighborhood. The 1500s brought with it a series of early scientists who began to develop a heliocentric view of the solar system. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made several critical observations of supernovae and comets that revealed that the universe was much larger than previously thought and began to think that while maybe the Sun and Moon might revolve around Earth, the other planets might not. His protégé, Johannes Kepler, built upon his work and devised his three laws of planetary motion, which provided a model for how the objects in the solar system operated. The scientists who followed were able to directly observe Mercury. Using his calculations of planetary motion, Kepler predicted in 1627 that both Mercury and Venus would transit the Sun in 1631\. Unfortunately, Kepler died in 1630 and wasn’t able to make the observation himself. But others did: [a French astronomer and priest named Pierre Gassendi](https://epl.carnegiescience.edu/news/mercury-transit-history-and-future-measuring-transits?ref=andrewliptak.com) projected an image of the Sun through his telescope in a dark room and was able to see the tiny dot of Mercury cross the face of the Sun, and a couple of weeks later, viewed Venus doing the same. He recognized that the planets were much smaller than expected: Mercury was tiny, the smallest of the rocky planets. At least two other astronomers witnessed the transit, and others would follow. Italian astronomer Giovanni Zupi recorded Mercury’s phases (proving that the planet was indeed orbiting the Sun), and in 1676, English astronomer Edmond Halley traveled to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, where he recorded a Mercurian transit. This new understanding of the solar system provided astronomers with the ability to better understand the true nature of the universe—a rational, understandable, and observable world. Scientists weren’t the only ones drawing inspiration and insight from this mindset: the forerunners to the modern science fiction genre were also interested in the developments and changes of the world. *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* [notes](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mercury?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the first work to feature Mercury was likely Athanasius Kircher’s 1656 work *Itinerarium Exstaticum,* in which a man named Theodidactus is carried along on a journey through the solar system by an angel, Cosmiel. Mercury was also “generally included in other round tours of the planets,” writes Brian M. Stableford and David Langford in *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction*. Those works appeared in the coming decades, such as Emanuel Swedenborg’s *The Earths in Our Solar System*, George Griffith’s *A Honeymoon in Space*, and John Munro’s *A Trip to Venus*, while Le Chevalier de Béthune’s *Relation du Monde de Mercure* (translated as *The World of Mercury*) appears to be the first novel in which Mercury was the main setting. With the help of telescopes and new orbital models, astronomers were able to get a better look at the nature of the planet throughout the 1800s. In the 1840s, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier noted that there was a tiny discrepancy in Mercury’s orbits around the Sun: it seemed to be a little slower than could be accounted for. He theorized that there could be another, smaller body orbiting even closer to the Sun—something small enough to mess with Mercury’s orbit just enough to account for the slight delay. He attempted to track the theoretical planet down (he was good at this: he was the one who calculated the existence of Neptune before it was directly observed), working off of potential sightings from other astronomers, but in the years that followed, no such planet turned up. It wasn’t until 1915 when the discrepancies in the calculations were solved with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Since then, scientists have theorized the possibility of an asteroid belt or planetoid orbiting between Mercury and the Sun—Vulcanoids—although none have been discovered as of yet. But while Venus and Mars sparked the imagination of authors and storytellers throughout history, Mercury was largely overlooked. Part of this seems to have come down to size, location, and disposition. Venus provides a brilliant presence in the night sky; Mars shows up in grim red tones. Venus is nearly the same size as Earth, and its thick atmosphere shrouds its surface in mystery, while astronomers and the general public were mesmerized by Mars’ features, such as its channels, which were sensationally mistranslated as “Canals.” That intrigue led to both Mars and Venus as central destinations for the minds of early science fiction authors, such as H. G. Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs, who told sensational stories about alien civilizations and lost ruins, and the adventurers who encountered them. ### World of Extremes Mercury, given the more limited opportunities to view it, seems to have avoided that treatment, although *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* points out that the early pulp magazines included stories set on the planet by Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, and Clark Ashton Smith during the modern genre’s formative years. Scientists were discovering that Mercury’s nature likely led it to be an inhospitable location for life: over the course of his career, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used telescopes to map the surfaces of Mars and Mercury (he’s the one who named Mars’ surface features “canali”—leading to the idea that they were artificial channels, and thus life was there), and while mapping the surface of Mercury, he theorized that the planet was tidally-locked to the Sun: a day and a year were one and the same, and thus, only one of Mercury’s sides was exposed to the Sun’s intense light and radiation, while the other was left inhospitably cold. It’s an idea that stuck within the scientific community for decades, and the planet’s harsh extremes provided plenty of material for authors to play with as science fiction began to form as a distinct genre. As the world entered the twentieth century *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* notes stories with real scientific and realistic rigor were rare—but not unheard of—prior to World War II. One early example is Clifford D. Simak’s story “Masquerade” (published in *Astounding Science Fiction*’s March 1941 issue), which featured a group of astronauts using the planet as a base for collecting solar energy and running afoul of some of the planet’s native inhabitants. Isaac Asimov’s early Robot story “Runaround” (published in *Astounding Science Fiction*’s March 1942 issue) put Mercury’s hostile environment front and center. “The photocell banks that alone stood between the full power of Mercury’s monstrous Sun and themselves were shot to hell,” Asimov wrote, introducing a ticking clock story as the two astronauts figure out how to fix a malfunctioning robot before they were cooked to death by the Sun’s heat. Other stories that followed often set Mercury as a destination for stories of endurance, such as Alan E. Nourse’s “[Brightside Crossing](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49165/49165-h/49165-h.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com)” (published in *Galaxy* magazine’s January 1956 issue), in which an adventurer named James Baron planned a daring four thousand-mile trek across the planet’s bright side. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface,” says Major Armstrong, “If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” Nourse explicitly highlights Mercury’s rotational spin and describes the adventure as a “hellish trek.” Hugh Walters set his short novel *Mission to Mercury* on the planet in the same year and draws on that dual hot-and-cold nature as an expedition runs into trouble and is forced to touch down on the far side—where they risk freezing to death. Other authors, such as David Brin (*Sundiver*), Arthur C. Clarke (*Islands in the Sky, Rendezvous with Rama*), Hal Clement (*Iceworld*), Gordon R. Dickson (*Necromancer*), and Kurt Vonnegut (*The Sirens of Titan*), utilized the planet as a location over the years. Niven’s “The Coldest Place” follows a character who’s searching for alien life on the planet, and ultimately captures one that’s composed of a type of helium. But the story is best known for the abrupt shift as the reality underpinning the story is changed by new discoveries. In this case, astronomers using radar and radio telescopes discovered that the long-held assumptions about the nature of Mercury weren’t accurate: the planet did rotate, but slowly. These discoveries were later confirmed as NASA dispatched a probe, the Mariner 10, in 1973\. The spacecraft performed a trio of flybys of the planet between 1974 and 1975, taking photographs of half the planet’s surface and utilizing an array of sensors, including a charged particle telescope, an infrared radiometer, magnetometers, plasma detectors, ultraviolet spectrometers, and others to measure the planet’s radiation, magnetosphere, and other characteristics, giving scientists and science fiction authors their best look yet at the planet. What it found was a hellish world, pockmarked with craters, and surprisingly, a strong magnetic field, and that it was home to a thin atmosphere composed of helium. As was the case before, science fiction largely ignored Mercury. Its proximity to the Sun meant that it was too difficult to terraform like Mars or Venus, and as *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* points out, “recent SF employs Mercury as merely a convenient place to site bases for studying the Sun.” In 2005, Ben Bova set one of his Grand Tournovels, *Mercury*, about an entrepreneur named Saito Yamagata, who plans to set up a solar-harvesting operation to power deep space starships, on the planet. In 2008 and 2012, Charles Stross and Kim Stanley Robinson respectively imagined massive, tracked cities that traveled around Mercury in tune with its rotation, keeping their inhabitants out of the harsh Sunlight, demonstrating that humanity could adapt to even the most inhospitable regions of the solar system. It’s also been fleetingly seen in film and television—Danny Boyle’s 2007 film *Sunshine* saw an expedition to restart the Sun and stop by the planet to meet up with a sister ship, hiding behind it from the Sun’s energy, as well as the occasional visit in shows like *Star Trek, Futurama, Invader Zim*, and a handful of others, with varying degrees of realism. The most recent visitor to the planet was MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging), a NASA probe that was launched in 2004, and which arrived in 2011 to further study the planet after Mariner 10\. Unlike its predecessor, it was able to map Mercury’s entire surface, sending back stunning pictures of the planet’s pockmarked surface, and gathering information about the planet’s composition, the nature of its magnetic field, that the planet appeared to be tectonically active, and something surprising: that the planet was home to water ice and organic compounds, hidden in shaded craters at the planet’s north pole. The mission came to an end in 2014 when the probe ran out of fuel and crashed onto the surface in 2015. While Niven’s story has been reduced to a handy demonstration about the changing nature of our understanding of space and the universe, Mercury itself offers up plenty of examples of the same: observations of the planet helped to better firm up our understanding of the nature of our solar system, and more recent scientific missions have demonstrated that we should be careful with any firm assumptions that we might have for the little planet: MESSENGER’s discovery of water and ice hidden deep in craters shows that there are plenty of surprises waiting for us, and which could provide plenty of inspiration for future authors who want to stop by the world for visits in the future. This essay was [originally published](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F07%5F21/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in July 2021 in **Clarkesworld Magazine*. ### Here are the finalists for the 2025 Compton Crook Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2025-compton-crook-awards/ Last updated: 2025-02-14T14:27:11.000Z The Baltimore Science Fiction Society has announced this year's finalists for the 2025 Compton Crook Award. The award has been handed out since 1983 by members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society at Balticon. Named for author Compton Crook (the pen-name for author Stephen Tall), it award honors the "best of each year's English language first novel by an author in the field of science fiction, fantasy, or horror." This year's convention [Balticon 59](https://www.balticon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), will be held between May 23rd and 26th, 2025 in Baltimore. (via [*Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2025/02/2025-compton-crook-award-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Here's this year's finalists: - [*The Stars Too Fondly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320819?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emily Hamilton - [*Sun of Blood and Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063254312?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mariely Lares - [*The Book of Love*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780812996586?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Link - [*The Wings Upon Her Back*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964146?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Samantha Mills - [*Someone You Can Build a Nest In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418854?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Wiswell The winning author will be invited to Balticon for two years, and will be presented with the cash award of $1,000 and an award plaque. Last year's winner was Kemi Ashing-Giwa for her book [*Splinter in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668008485?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This seems like a solid list: *The Wings Upon Her Back* is one that I was looking forward to reading last year (and it's still on my TBR), while I've heard nothing but good things about *The Book of Love*. ### All the SF/F books you should check out this February URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2025-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-recommendations/ Last updated: 2025-02-13T17:01:05.000Z Winter has fully descended upon the hills here in Vermont. It's felt as though we've been having mild winters in the last couple of years, but last weekend brought a nice blanket of snow that covered everything and made driving difficult for a couple of days. I always like this time of year. It's a perfect time to bundle up in a heavy jacket and head out on a walk, watching my breathe in the cold air as I listen to an audiobook, or wrap up in a blanket on the couch while I watch the snow fall out the window. The snow brings a bit of tranquility and quiet to the world that I find myself really needing, and it's often the right mindset to delve into a story that I've been enjoying. 📚 This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Support TO with a tip:** Ghost now lets readers tip creators with a one-time payment. You can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/december-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/#/portal/support). Here are the 21 new SF/F books that you should check out this month: You can also check out past installments of this series by hitting up the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. ### [*The Fourth Consort*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250286338?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Edward Ashton (February 25th) I was a big fan of Edward Ashton's novel [*Mickey7*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/mickey7-edward-ashton/16721659?ean=9781250875280&ref=andrewliptak.com) (h[ere's my review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey7-edward-ashton-scifi-book-review/)), which is soon being made into a film, [*Mickey17*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey17-march-2024/)*.* While we wait for that, Ashton has a new standalone science fiction novel to delve into: *The Fourth Consort.* It follows Dalton Greaves, a human representative to an alien confederation known as Unity, which has a goal of bringing all sentient life into its ranks. Dalton has only met one representative of the group, Boreau, who doesn't seem all that interested in the harmony that Unity promises. There's another interstellar organization out there known as the Assembly, which opposes Unity and doesn't seem to like humanity all that much. When Boreau and an Assembly cruiser duke it out over a newly-discovered world, Dalton is marooned on a hostile planet and it's up to him to try and figure out the complicated politics between the groups before he's killed. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250286338?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Ashton strikes an impressive balance of humor, action, and thought-provoking sci-fi concepts. It’s a lot of fun watching his eccentric characters navigate sticky situations." ### [*The Miranda Conspiracy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668072400?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James Cambias (February 4th) In the distant future, Zee and his AI assistant Daslakh visit the ice moon Miranda, where they're hoping to make a good impression on his girlfriend's Adya's affluent parents. While they're there, they find that said parents have been targeted in a political conspiracy, and Adya works to find why they're being forced out of the moon's ruling class. Zee and Daslakh head off on a treasure hunt in deep space, and both find that they're running into interference from political operatives, mercenaries, gangsters and others. ### [*The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538113?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by André M. Carrington (February 4th) I was excited to see news about [this book when it dropped last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/library-of-america-afrofuturist-black-fantastic-andre-carrington/), a new anthology of Afrofuturist stories, edited by André M. Carrington, from the Library of America. It's a prestigious, nonprofit publisher that's steadily tackled the canon of American literature since the 1970s, and it's steadily been exploring speculative fiction as a topic in recent years. This volume looks neat: Carrington is an Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside and is the author of [*Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780816678969?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). This book will come [packed with an outstanding](https://bsky.app/profile/andrecarrington.bsky.social/post/3leddczupy22v?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) Table of Contents, including stories from from authors such as Nalo Hopkinson, P. Djéli Clark, N. K. Jemisin, Justina Ireland, Tochi Onyebuchi, Victor LaValle, Sofia Samatar, and many others. [My most anticipated books of 202420 new books that I’m excited to dig into this year![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-71.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Beige-Brown-Grey-Minimalist-Aesthetic--Inspiration-Moodboard-Photo-Collage--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/) ### [*Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316469951?ref=andrewliptak.com) by C.L. Clark (February 18th) C.L. Clark's next novel is a tie-in to the *League of Legends: Arcane* world, following Ambessa Medarda, a general and mother. She has a storied life as a monster hunter and led armies for the Noxian empire, and for her efforts, was granted a vision: one where she sees herself atop the Noxian throne. But before she gets there, she has to take over her own clan, and will have to go up against family to claim it. ### [*Casual*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781959790297?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Koji A. Dae (February 11th) After Valya got a neural implant installed in her brain, she's amazed at how it and its app, CASUAL has helped her manage her anxiety and depression: it also helped her get pregnant despite an infertility diagnosis. It's been a huge help, but a new law forbids its use while she's the only caregiver for her newborn. Her doctor tells her that she needs to wean herself off the app before her baby is born. When she does so, it kicks her anxiety into overdrive. Her doctor recommends enrolling in a controversial trial, one that would install an implant in her baby to keep hers active, but it raises some serious concerns about the technology and its impact on the two of them. ### [*Picks and Shovels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865908?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cory Doctorow (February 18th) Cory Doctorow continues his Martin Hench series (preceded by [*Red Team Blues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865854?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Bezzle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865885?ref=andrewliptak.com)), following his titular hero, a skilled forensics accountant. In 1986, Martin was in San Francisco where he invented the role, finding himself hired by a PC startup called Fidelity Computing. They'd like him to look into the activities of some disgruntled ex-employees who're starting their own rival company, only to realize that he's helping the wrong people. The folks he was targeting hated their former employer's business practices and decided to set off on their own to build better computers to beat them at their own game. In doing so, they didn't realize who they were dealing with and what lengths they'll go to shut out the competition. ### [*Brother Brontë*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374604165?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Fernando A. Flores (February 11th) Just over a decade from now, the town of Three Rivers, Texas was once prosperous, but now it's a wasteland. It's ruled by an authoritarian mayor who's outlawed reading and forced mothers to work in a cannery that's polluting the air. Two friends, Prosperina and Neftalí, have been hiding away books, particularly those of a mysterious author named Jazzmin Monelle Rivas. The well-read Neftalí has finally tracked down a copy of the author's last novel, *Brother Brontë*. After the town's authorities grow more violent towards its citizens, and the pair join forces with an eclectic group of citizens and rebels to rise up and retake the city, all the while figuring out what connection Rivas had to their their home. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fernando-flores/brother-bronte/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This is a wild ride of a novel, and a fascinating look at a future that, sadly, seems frighteningly plausible." ### [*Star Wars: The Mask of Fear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723463?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alexander Freed (February 25th) Another entry from my "most anticipated" list from earlier this year: regular readers know that I've been a huge fan of *Star Wars: Andor*, and I've sort of been waiting for the books to start exploring this same period around the series. *Mask of Fear* is the first entry in a new trilogy set during the early years of the Galactic Empire, this installment follows Mon Mothma as she navigates the halls of power in this oppressive new regime. She finds allies in the form of revolutionary Saw Gerrera and Senator Bail Organa, working out how to move forward to build a movement that could one day topple Emperor Palpatine and his forces. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-72.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA-4.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) ### [*Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798990705500?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell (February 11th) Authors Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell have launched a new indie publishing outfit, Stars and Sabers Publishing, and their first book out of the gate is Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers, an wide-ranging anthology with an impressive list of names in its table of contents. Authors include Gemma Amor, Paul Cornell, Stark Holborn, T.L. Huchu, Ai Jiang, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Greg van Eekhout, John Wiswell, and many more. ### [*The Black Orb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780778387343?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ewhan Kim (February 4th) A man encounters a strange spherical orb in downtown Seoul when it appears and sucks his neighbor up. Jeong-su flees, but it's unclear if he'll be able to escape the sphere: it sucks up everyone in its path, can move through walls, and all attempts to stop it fail. As it soon begins to split and multiply, terrifying the world, Jeong-su has to escape and track down his elderly parents to try and save them. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kim-ewhan/the-black-orb/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a bleak read that unerringly examines toxic self-isolation, both chosen and forced. ### [*The Bones Beneath My Skin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250890436?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T.J. Klune (February 4th) In 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything in his life: his parents, family, and his job. He decides that with nothing else to do, he sets off from Washington DC to his family's cabin in Roseland, Oregon. There, he finds a man named Alex and his companion, a 10-year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader, and she isn't what she appears to be. Faced with these new people, Nate has to figure out what do to next: wallow in his grief, or figure out how to protect the young girl from the forces that are after her. ### [*Histories Within Us*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/histories-within-us-matthew-kressel/22205465?ean=9780979624667&utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) by Matthew Kressel (February 11th) Matthew Kressel has earned quite a bit of acclaim for his short fiction over the years, and this debut collection brings together 18 of those stories. They include ones that follow people leaving their homes on Earth to reincarnation, escaping from a collapsing galaxy and unlikely heroes saving the world. ### [*The Desert Talon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837864027?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karin Lowachee (February 11th) Karin Lowachee continues her Crowns of Ishia trilogy (which she kicked off last year with [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *The Desert Talon.* In this alternate world, the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor have been at war for decades, and one woman, Méka, returns to her homeland after being driven out by the Kattakans to embark on a traditional rite: capture a king dragon of the Crown Mountains. In this sequel, Sephihalé ele Janan has been imprisoned in Mazemoror. He was a fighter for the Kattakans, and he's sponsored by a family member and fellow refugee, and works to rebuild his life amongst the dragons that his people worship. That peace that he's hoping to find is shattered when a dragon baron who wants to use Janan for his own purposes, threatening to bring violence to his new home. I really enjoyed *The Mountain Crown*, and I'm eager to dig into this one. The final installment of the trilogy is [*A Covenant of Ice,*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837865130?ref=andrewliptak.com) and it's due out in July. [Revealing Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain CrownA Q&A with one of my favorite writers![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-73.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_-1-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/) ### [*The Book of Atrix Wolfe: 30th Anniversary Special Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964009?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Patricia A. McKillip (February 25th) Patricia A. McKillip is one of the fantasy genre's most acclaimed authors, and 30 years ago, she published *The Book of Atrix Wolfe*. It follows a mage named Atrix Wolfe, who used his magical abilities to end a war, but who ended up walking away from his practice to live amongst the wolves in the mountains. Two decades later, the orphanedPrince Talis is supposed to be the savior of his realm, but he's not interested in that: he's obsessed with a powerful book of spells and the magic it contains. Talis is captured by the Queen of the Wood, who tells him that she'll return him to the human world if he can entice Atrix back in order to find her missing daughter. To celebrate the anniversary, Tachyon is publishing a new edition, which includes a new introduction to the book. ### [*Fire and Blood*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/fire-and-blood.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by George R.R. Martin (February 4th) The Folio Society has run out of the Song of Ice and Fire novels to produce (they're all very nice copies, too), so they've moved on to another book from the same world: *Fire and Blood*, the in-universe history of House Targaryen, set years before the events of *A Game of Thrones*. Like all of Folio Society's books, this one comes with original art (the illustrator this time is Audrey Benjaminsen) and comes in a nice slipcase. ### [*One Message Remains*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798891160101?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Premee Mohamed (February 11th) Premee Mohamed's star has been rising, with books like [*A Broken Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781781088753?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Annual Migration of Clouds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770415935?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Her latest is a collection of three shorter stories*.* In "The General's Turn," an officer leads his men through the post-armistice world of East Seudast where they're supposed to collect bones and souls of their enemies to repatriate them – only to find that those soldiers aren't quite done with their fight. In "The Weight of What is Hollow," Taya is tasked with building bone-gallows for prisoners of war, which sets her up on a fight between her family and her oppressors. The final story, "Forsaking All Others," follows an deserter named Rostyn, who has to escape form his pursuers by traveling through the little-known ways by night. When he's joined by another deserter in his grandmother's village, finding that some myths might be more true than he thought. ### [*Dance of Shadows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035900275?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gourav Mohanty (February 25th) In Gourav Mohanty's [*Sons of Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035900237?ref=andrewliptak.com), we followed the devastating war between the Magadhan Empire and the Mathuran Republic. Senator Krishna and his wife Satyabhama to try and protect their home from annihilation, only to discover that their plans are being thwarted. Now, an weak armistice has been established, but everyone knows that it could come to an end quickly. A Conclave of Peace has been established in the Tree Cities of the East to try and find a way to end the way, but everyone who's arrived – swordswomen, snakelings, princes, assassins, and apprentices – has come with their own agendas. [Writing in *Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-sons-of-darkness-by-gourav-mohanty/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Will McClelland says "a great joy in *Sons of Darkness* is that Mohanty has taken the grimdark genre he loves and reoriented its eurocentric origins to center the Indian stories, characters, aesthetics and magic systems that lay at the heart of the plot and his world building. " ### [*Halo: Empty Throne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668052129?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Patenaude (February 18th) In this new tie-in to the [*Halo*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/halo/)franchise, Jeremy Patenaude takes us to 2559 (after the events of *Halo 5*). The artificial intelligence known as Cortana has gone rogue and has taken control of The Domain, a construct in another dimension housing an information network. She has plenty of new Forerunner weapons in her arsenal, and is bent on imposing pace on the galaxy. The UNSC has dispatched its flagship Infinity to launch a strike against her at Zeta Halo, while another mission is dispatched to a small human colony where they might be able to access the Domain. All the while, a new leader has stepped up to take control of the Banished, a coalition of alien species, providing a new threat to the UNSC and their plans. ### [*Future's Edge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803368634?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth L. Powell (February 25th) An archeologist named Ursula Morrow was accidentally infected with an alien parasite, and she worries that her career might be over. Her career does come to an end, but in a different way when the Earth is destroyed. She's one of the survivors, and two years later, her boyfriend Jack finds her in a refugee camp on a distant world. He's now the captain of a warship, and is on a mission: find the alien artifact that infected her. It might very well be a critical tool in the fight against the aliens that destroyed Earth. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781803368634?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the result is a page-turning adventure for sci-fi fans who don’t mind tangled relationships and gruesome fights." ### [*The Last Colony*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359537?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Scalzi (February 25th) This year marks the 20th anniversary of John Scalzi's novel [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* For that anniversary, Tor has been re-issuing the novels in trade paperback format, with all new covers. The first two books were released last year, and the next two in the series, *The Last Colony* and *Zoe's Tale*, are up next. The latter follows John Perry who's retired to a colony on the planet Huckleberry with his wife, Jane Sagen, only to have their pasts catch up with them, while the former retells the story from their daughter's perspective. The next books in the series, [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359544?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359568?ref=andrewliptak.com)will get their updated covers in August, ahead of the release of the next installment of the series, [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359568?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is out in September. [The evolution of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War seriesJohn Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was published 20 years ago in January 2005, and helped him become one of the best-known writers working in the field. It was far from a certain trajectory.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-95.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1548-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/) ### [*Star Wars Legends: Scoundrels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974339?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (February 4th) Random House Worlds continues to re-release their back-catalog of Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. Timothy Zahn's Scoundrels was a fun adventure following Han Solo in the aftermath of *A New Hope*. In it, Han is still dodging a bounty placed on his head by Jabba the Hutt, and he has to assemble a team to perform a heist against the Black Sun crime syndicate. If they can succeed, the payoff will be enough to pay off the bounty. Another pair of Legends books that were rereleased include [*Star Wars Legends*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974315?ref=andrewliptak.com)*:* [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974315?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Force Unleashed II*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974315?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Sean Williams and [*Star Wars Legends:* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974322?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Dark Lord*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974322?ref=andrewliptak.com)*:* [*The Rise of Darth Vader*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593974322?ref=andrewliptak.com) --- ### ### Amazon's Rings of Power is coming back for a third season URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-rings-of-power-third-season-renewed/ Last updated: 2025-02-13T17:27:51.000Z Amazon has announced that it has renewed its Lord of the Rings series *The Rings of Power* for a third season. Set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*, it's about the rise of Sauron and how the rings of power were forged. Amazon [announced the show back in 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/13/16644782/the-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-television-show?ref=andrewliptak.com). The company said at the time that the series would be set far before the events of *The Hobbit* and *Lord of the Rings*, and that they might run a spinoff show as well. It was an expensive endeavor for the retailer: the rights (and just the rights!) for the story was reportedly in the range of a quarter of a billion dollars. By 2019, Amazon was putting the show into production, announcing that it would be [filmed in New Zealand](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-series-new-zealand/) and preemptively [renewing the show for a second season](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-series-season-two-renewal/). After some pandemic-related delays, the show – titled *The Rings of Power* – debuted in 2022, while the second season debuted in 2024\. *The Lord of the Rings* is a very small part of the larger world that Tolkien created. In addition to that and *The Hobbit*, he wrote reams of material that his son Christopher edited into a single volume, *The Silmarillion*, and a number of other supplemental works,which serves as a history for the world. Because of various rights issues, this series isn't based on the events of *The Silmarillion* (although there is some overlap) but is instead drawing from some material from *Lord of the Rings* – the appendixes that expand upon the world and story at the end of *Return of the King*. (The recent animated film *The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim* was also based on material from the appendixes.) [I rather liked the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rings-of-power-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-amazon/). I'm currently working my way through the second season, and after reading *The Silmarillion* recently, I feel like I've got a slightly better handle on some of the background that sort of comes through. The series has been taking some interesting liberties here and there with the larger story and world, but nothing that's really taken me out of the story. Back in 2022, we learned that the company had [planned out five seasons for the show](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/lord-of-the-rings-power-five-seasons-fully-planned-out-exclusive/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and despite some [doom and gloom](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/09/11/more-bad-news-for-rings-of-power-as-amazon-reveals-sharp-viewership-decline-from-season-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) reporting about viewership numbers for the series last fall, I'm glad to see that Amazon's still backing the series this far. It's certainly unheard of – Paramount+ dropped its *Halo* series after its second season ended – but I have to imagine that Amazon would have a high bar to walk away from this show given the amount of money it's poured into it. Amazon says that director Charlotte Brändström and Sanaa Hamri will return behind the camera for some of the episodes this season, while Stefan Schwartz (*Being Human, Fear the Walking Dead*, *My Lady Jane*) will join the team. The company didn't provide any sort of timeline for when Season 3 would begin streaming, but in an announcement post on the show's Facebook page, Amazon provided a brief hint at what's to come: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/image-1.png) Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, Season 3 takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war and conquer all Middle-earth at last. Given that we know the rough road map for the material in the books, we know we've got the forging of the One Ring, Sauron's imprisonment in Númenor, the destruction of the island nation, and the massive war against Sauron that kicks off the world's Third Age to look forward to, in this season and whatever else they have planned beyond that. ### Culture clash URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-alien-clay-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-02-12T17:09:32.000Z A couple of years ago, I got sucked into Adrian Tchaikovsky's breakout novel [*Children of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316452502?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've retained a fondness for it and some of the [other books that he's written](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-elder-race-science-fiction-fantasy-book-review/), like [*Elder Race*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250768728?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's got a wonderful sense of time and scale that translates well to science fiction, and that's on display in (one of) his latest books, [*Alien Clay*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316578974?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he plays with big ideas about science and alien worlds, but also about how authoritarianism collides with reality and biology in ways that that their leaders don't always expect. It's also a timely novel in an age where we're living under grim events and ideologies. [Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder RaceScience fiction and fantasy, side by side![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-94.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/C7ADA744-7679-4575-8A8E-1959914FA319.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-elder-race-science-fiction-fantasy-book-review/) Tchaikovsky introduces us to Professor Arton Daghdev, who had been part of a growing dissident movement against The Mandate, an authoritarian government that has taken over Earth, suppressing free thought and expression, and locking up those that step out of line. Arton was a minor player in that movement, but nonetheless, he's imprisoned, put into hibernation, and shipped off to a distant habitable world called Kiln, where agents of The Mandate have set up a prisoner camp slash research facility. The planet is home to a strange ecosystem with some extremely puzzling signs of a vanished civilization. Those shipped to the planet are used as expendable labor in this hostile environment, and as conscripted researchers who're put to the task of trying to figure out what its deal is. As it turns out, Kiln's life is really out there: it's biome has developed along a different path as Earth's, and rather than a Darwinian model, Kiln's life seems to be based a bit more on cooperation. Tchaikovsky spends quite a bit of time laying out the strangeness of this world's lifeforms, and the the weird structures strewn across the landscape, seemingly embossed with some sort of writing. The Mandate officials aren't exactly looking to colonize the world, but they are fascinated by it, and are looking for some sort of way to include it and its strangeness within their worldview. This cultural collision is what forms the heart of *Alien Clay*: it's a book that picks apart the worldview of authoritarians and fascists: people who prize order and rules and can't reconcile those bits and pieces that don't fit within that framework. The people behind the Mandate can easily lock up and shoot into space those who disagree with or otherwise don't fit within their worldview, but when they're confronted by an alien biome that doesn't fit, they end up spending their time and energy battering their heads against a wall while they try and find ways to subsume it into it. When inflexible ideologies encounter something they can't (or refuse to) understand, they inevitably shatter along the cracks that form. There's a tidy convergence here: the Mandate is imbued with this inflexible, authoritarian mindset and Kiln's lifeforms, with their cooperative evolutionary track, are completely antithetical to that. As Arton and his companions eventually discover, the biome here relies on interconnection, forming a not-quite hive mind. [Spiders! In! Space!Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-93.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time/) Readers who picked up *Children of Time* will recognize this trick: in that book, Tchaikovsky's emergent spider civilization and humanity eventually collide, but end up avoiding all-out war because of some biological trickery that changes them on a deep biological level. The change makes them receptive of cooperation and collaboration, and it's framed as an evolutionary step for humanity: get over your selfishness and tribalism, and you'll be able to advance ever further into the universe. Tchaikovsky is playing with some of the same themes here and it's a bit repetitive, especially if you've read some of his other stories. And the Mandate as an overarching antagonist feels a bit like any other authoritarian regime that you might have encountered in any number of dystopian stories. But it's not a bad journey, especially in 2025, where the world around us is demonstrating that not all slides into authoritarianism are subtle and set at a slow boil. Sometimes, you are getting hit over the head with the message. What I appreciate the most about this novel is Tchaikovsky's dissection of authoritarianism and its approach to the natural world, which he sums up neatly in a passage toward the end: "It's not all about the Great Man theory of evolution over here, all those neat trees of life the Mandate produces, where human beings are the pinnacle of the uppermost branch, closest to God." This is a theme that's echoed in everything from Michael Crichton's *Jurassic Park* to Jeff VanderMeer's *Annihilation* to Christopher Brown's *A Natural History of Empty Lots* to songs like AURORA's "[The Seed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FMc%5FOM5oNA8&ref=andrewliptak.com)": that we're a small part of a complicated, chaotic world, and that our attempts to tame or control nature can come back to harm us in unexpected ways. Tchaikovsky often takes a long view in the worlds of his stories, often by necessity, showing that while empires and regimes arrive and take over, their rule is often short in the greater (galactic or planetary) scheme of things, often because they make themselves too fragile to endure the marathon of time. It's a useful lesson to internalize in an age where it seems that we're all too eager to roll back environmental protections in the name of economic progress. Hopefully, our current mistakes will end up being short-lived. ### Catching lightning in a bottle: the story of John Scalzi's Old Man's War URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-sci-fi-book/ Last updated: 2025-02-01T20:49:29.000Z On January 1st 2005, Tor Books published a new military science fiction novel: John Scalzi's [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It follows a man named John Perry who joins a futuristic military, goes through training, and ends up involved in a much larger conflict. Scalzi put a twist on that formula: Perry is 75 years old, and in this future, the military recruits the elderly, putting them into enhanced, cloned bodies, and sends them out into a brutal interstellar war. It was an unassuming start that Scalzi has turned into a remarkable career. From its modest origins as a serialized novel on his personal website, *Old Man's War* has become in the last two decades a major part of his back catalog, serving as an accessible entry point for the 18 books that he's written since, and it's the first part of an ongoing series that has expanded over five additional (and often experimental) installments, with a seventh entry in the series, [*The Shattering Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389190?ref=andrewliptak.com) due out in September 2025\. 20 years later, Scalzi shows no sign of slowing down: last year, he [signed an extended deal with Tor Books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-starter-villain-book-deal/) that will see him write another 10 books for the publisher. The success of *Old Man's War* and its subsequent installments represent an interesting study in storytelling, and how Scalzi used his experience as a journalist, attention to tropes, marketing, and luck to guide his career over the last twenty years. --- John Scalzi was born on May 10th, 1969 in Fairfield, California, and grew up near Los Angeles. One of three children to a single mother, he grew up in impoverished surroundings, which he recounted in a 2005 post called "[Being Poor](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." In his collection of posts from his blog, *Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded*, he wrote that he had a supportive upbringing: his mother "made sure that when I *did* show an interest in something, she would help me take my interest as far as I wanted to take it." She enrolled him in The Webb School of California on a scholarship, and after graduating in 1987, he attended the University of Chicago, with the goal of becoming a writer. There, he served as the editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper, *The Chicago Maroon* and eventually settled on majoring in philosophy.Following his graduation in 1991, he went on to hold a variety of jobs as a journalist: a columnist and film critic for *The Fresno Bee* in California, and as a writer for AOL in 1996\. That job was ultimately short-lived: in March 1998, he was laid off, and deciding that he needed a place to showcase his work as he segued into life as a freelance writer, launched a blog in September, [*Whatever*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). It was a good time to launch a site: blogging was in its infancy in the mid-1990s, and as the internet began to seep into the homes of new users across the world during the Dot-com bubble, blogs and their writers became notable destinations for readers looking for new and regular content. Scalzi populated *Whatever* with a range of content, from political commentary to observations about the world to the minutia of his day, gathering a devoted group of readers and commenters. In 2023, [he recounted](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/01/13/whatever-twenty-five-part-one-introduction-scene-setting/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it helped him pick up work as a freelancer before becoming part of the larger blogging movement in the early 2000s. When he decided to publish his first novel, *Whatever* was an ideal outlet. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- After years of working as a journalist and columnist, Scalzi decided to try something new: write a novel*.* In 1997, he sat down and set about working on one*, Agent to the Stars.* "I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it – not the *selling* of it," he recounted in [his introduction to the book](https://www.scalzi.com/agent/?ref=andrewliptak.com), "which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was." [*Agent to the Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250176516?ref=andrewliptak.com) follows a Hollywood agent who was hired to represent an alien species that humanity found repulsive, a blend of science fiction and comedy. After completing it in a couple of months, he embarked on the usual process that most authors take: taking it to agents with the hopes that they would take it to publishers. "This was not particularly successful," he wrote, noting that while the people he showed it liked it, he was told that humorous science fiction was a difficult sell. He ended up shelving the book for a year before trying a different tactic: he had just launched his blog and had some readers: if agents weren't interested, maybe his readers would be. If they enjoyed it, he reasoned, they could mail him a dollar. He posted up his address. The scheme worked for him. Years later, he estimated that readers sent him nearly $4,000 before he turned off the solicitation. *Agent to the Stars* might have been his first novel, but it wasn't the first out the door into regular bookstores. His freelance work with AOL brought him to the attention of guidebook publisher Rough Guides, which reached out to him to invite him to write a guide: *The Rough Guide to Money Online: How to Bank, Invest, and Make Finance Work On the Internet in the US and Canada* came out in 2000, and despite flopping – it came out in the months after the burst of the Dot-com bubble and in the weeks after that year's contested presidential election, it led to other books from the company: *The Rough Guide to the Universe* (2003) and *The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies* (2005). --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_1557.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak With *Agent to the Stars,* Scalzi learned that not only could he write a novel, but there was something of an audience that would be willing to pay for his work. He decided that it would be time to try again. "The motivation was 'well, now I've written one novel, so I know I *can* write a novel, now I should write one to try to sell,'" he explained to me in an interview. Scalzi decided to begin work on this new book in 2000, starting with a bit of market research. He stopped by a local bookstore "to see what was selling, which appeared to be military science fiction, and then after that, figuring out what sort of military science fiction story I would want to write (and read)." To prepare, he read a handful of books, such as Orson Scott Card's [*Ender's Game*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250773012?ref=andrewliptak.com) and Robert Heinlein's [*Starship Troopers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441014101?ref=andrewliptak.com), but also military histories like Daniel Da Crus's [*Boot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250100085?ref=andrewliptak.com)and John Keegan's [*The Face of Battle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780140048971?ref=andrewliptak.com). After talking through the plot with his wife, he began writing in the spring of 2001 and finished in October 2001\. From there he sat on the story for a year. "Once I wrote it," he explained to me, "the thought of actually submitting it bored me, so that's when it was stuffed into a virtual drawer for a year. I really am that lazy." Scalzi decided to follow the path he took with *Agent to the Stars*: publish it on *Whatever*. Starting in October 2002, he began posting the book chapter by chapter, capping it off [with a post about what he learned about writing it](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/04/05/lessons-from-heinlein/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in December. *Old Man's War,* he explained, was "modeled" after Heinlein's *Starship Troopers* in a couple of ways, and Heinlein's popularity, he noted, came down to the quality of his writing and use of characters. His novels were accessible, presented a world where his characters can learn and grow, and where readers could see themselves as the characters. By emulating some of the elements of Heinlein's work, he was able to set up a small-scale human drama against the much larger backdrop of an interstellar war. "One of my favorite comments about the novel came my friend Erin," he wrote, "who read an early version of the novel and noted that the novel comes on like a sci-fi action thriller but is really a love story." With the book now online, Scalzi made a consequential step: he emailed an editor at Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, about it. In his [ten-year retrospective of the book](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/12/30/the-offer-on-old-mans-war-a-ten-year-retrospective/?ref=andrewliptak.com), he recalled that he'd been a regular reader of Nielsen Hayden's blog, [*Electrolite*](https://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and decided to forward the post after reading a discussion on characters, telling him that wasn't "a backdoor attempt to get you to read the novel itself." Nielsen Hayden read the post and novel and emailed him after he finished it: "It’s an interesting afterword, but it’s an even more interesting novel. I read the whole thing last night; as the blurb cliché goes, I couldn’t put it down." He went on to offer to buy the book for Tor, saying "this is exactly the kind of action-oriented-and-yet-not-stupid SF we never see enough of." Scalzi ended up accepting, saying in a [followup post](https://web.archive.org/web/20030204025314/http://www.scalzi.com/w030103.htm) that it wouldn't exactly be like Agent to the Stars, where readers could send him money*: "*The reason for this is that, well, I kind of *sold* it." Looking back on the book for its [10th anniversary in 2015](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/12/30/the-offer-on-old-mans-war-a-ten-year-retrospective/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Scalzi noted that the offer was a life-changing moment. "The eight novels I have written since are because of that offer and everything that’s resulted from it." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/image-1.png) Image: Tor Books, Art: Donato Giancola From there, Scalzi signed a deal with Tor Books: the publisher would take on *Old Man's War*, and an additional novel as well. Tor didn't need to do much to the book: it went through a formal copyediting process, and Scalzi says that they "literally changed three lines. That was it." While the story was complete, it still took the better part of a year to work its way through the publication process. The publisher commissioned artist Donato Giancola to produce the art for the cover and dated it for a January 1st, 2005 release. In the meantime, Scalzi continued to write for *Whatever* and other outlets, and began plotting out his next book. He released another nonfiction book, [*Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781607104681?ref=andrewliptak.com) in November 2003, and started a second one not too long after. In the months that followed, Tor was able to put into play its resources: its publicists solicited reviews and brought the book out to booksellers, got blurbs from authors (Cory Doctorow, Ken MacLeod and Robert Charles Wilson), set up promotional deals with the Science Fiction Book Club. At the same time, Scalzi set out to attend that year's WorldCon in Boston to meet and network with his fellow writers. By that fall, the book was available for preorders and the [major trade publications had begun to issue their reviews](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2004/12/03/the-publishers-weekly-review-of-old-mans-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the book. Scalzi noted that the [books began appearing in stores in the middle of December](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2004/12/13/omw-store-spotting/?ref=andrewliptak.com), while [Amazon made the book available around the same time](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2004/12/16/there-we-go/?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Publisher's Weekly* [described the book in its review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780765309402?ref=andrewliptak.com) as "like an original work by the late grand master \[Robert Heinlein\]" and that "this virtuoso debut pays tribute to SF's past while showing that well-worn tropes still can have real zip when they're approached with ingenuity." It was a glowing review that keyed plenty of readers to it. January 1st, Scalzi explained to me, "is legitimately the worst possible day to release a book. 'Let's release it on a national holiday, when no stores are open after everybody's spent all their money." Tor, it seemed, was willing to put some resources behind the book, but had low expectations. While Scalzi had an online following, it was just another book on their schedule for the year. Tor ordered an initial print run was for around 3,700 hardcovers, and as the release date came and went, it [became quickly apparent](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/01/06/omw-availability/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that that wasn't enough: readers had begun to report that they were having trouble finding it. "It’s never a good thing when people are looking for your book and can’t find it," Scalzi [wrote on January 6th](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/01/06/omw-availability/?ref=andrewliptak.com), "and it’s particularly not a good thing when the person in question is an editor of one of the most influential science fiction magazines out there." While scary for a new author, the scarcity seems to have been a confluence of positive things: the groundwork that Tor had laid down ahead of time, its positive reviews, networking at science fiction conventions, and Scalzi's updates over the course of the fall seem to have helped move the initial print run of copies from store shelves to readers quickly. The scarcity didn't go unnoticed by Tor Books. "Apparently \[when\] Tom Doherty \[the founder and CEO of Tor Books\] heard that \[the book was selling out\]" Scalzi said, "he basically stomped down to the department that does the hardcovers and trade paperbacks and basically said to them 'you done fucked up and now you owe me.'" The publisher quickly realized that it had a hit on its hands. "From Tor's point of view," Scalzi explained, "we're catching lightning in a bottle, let's go ahead and invest some promotional time \[for it\]." Tor was able to land reviews and profiles in *The New York Times Book Review* and *Washington Post*, and commissioned a new cover by John Harris "that said *this is space fiction*." [Sci-fi John Harris on creativity and finding spiritualism in the cosmosJohn Harris talks about finding inspiration in the beauty of space and why AI can’t capture creative imagination![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-90.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4554-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/) Tor also made the unusual step of reprinting the novel as a trade paperback, rather than a smaller and cheaper mass market paperback. "It went into trade paperback first because trade paperback and hardcover handled by the same people," Scalzi explained, "and basically Tom \[Doherty\] put a fire and under their asses to actually promote this because he was like 'we've got something here, now it's time to get it.'" That's the truth of it," Scalzi said, "*Old Man's War* really actually took off in the trade paperback edition as opposed to the hardcover because only 3700 hardcovers ever actually existed." The January release date also helped in some other ways. Scalzi pointed out that the book had a longer time to sit with readers when it came to the upcoming awards season. *Old Man's War* made those ballots: WorldCon members nominated it for a Hugo Award for Best novel, while it also appeared as a finalist on *Locus Magazine*'s awards for Best New Novel and Best SF Novel. While it didn't win those awards, it did earn Scalzi the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: a prize that honors rising professionals in the field, with authors such as C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Elizabeth Bear, and [plenty of others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astounding%5FAward%5Ffor%5FBest%5FNew%5FWriter?ref=andrewliptak.com) amongst their numbers. The book was a hit. Now, Scalzi had another job ahead of him: write another. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_1564.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Scalzi sold more than *Old Man's War* in that initial deal with Tor Book: he had another book to write. In the days after he made the announcement, he [noted](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/01/04/omw-followup/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that his next book wouldn't be a sequel: "I will say that it is science fiction, and involves a “diplomatic troubleshooter” who is called in to resolve tricky situations, usually through the use of action sequences and snappy dialogue." That book was *The Android’s Dream*, which he began writing in May 0f 2003 and completed in February 2004\. When *Old Man's War* took off in 2005, it [earned out both its advance and the one for *The Android's Dream*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/11/05/fun-with-royalties-and-other-book-news/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Tor went to Scalzi: they wanted him to write a sequel, and they wanted to put it out before *The Android's Dream* hit stores. He ended up signing a second contract with Tor for the book. "It wasn't too much of a problem to write it, because having the journalism don't-miss-your-deadlines-mentality. He wrote [*The Ghost Brigades*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359551?ref=andrewliptak.com)over the course of 2005, and the timing worked out well for him. In November, he [announced](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/11/30/what-ill-be-doing-in-2006/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'd signed a new deal with Tor for three new novels, including a third installment of the *Old Man's War* series: [*The Last Colony*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359537?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and to cap off the end of the year, Tor re-released *Old Man's War* in its trade paperback form with the new John Harris cover art. It also boasted a label: a "Sci-Fi Essential Book." The label was the result of a new partnership between the Sci-Fi Channel and Tor Books. The cable network had been on a critical upswing: it had launched a news website, the *Sci-Fi Wire*, and had released some major shows, like *Taken* (a 2003 Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries about UFOs), adaptations of Frank Herbert's *Dune* and *Children of Dune*, and a critically-acclaimed remake of *Battlestar Galactica*. Scalzi noted that the label was beneficial for the book's visibility with audiences, especially in the lead up to the next installment in March. February [brought another update](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/02/26/old-mans-war-and-the-ghost-brigades-e-books-the-semi-official-announcement-plus-a-long-writing-screed/?ref=andrewliptak.com): Tor announced that it was partnering with Baen Books to begin releasing some of its titles as eBooks. This was notable because the eBook market was still very much in its infancy: while there were a handful of dedicated eBook readers on the market, it wouldn't be until November 2007 that Amazon announced its own eReader, the Kindle. *Old Man's War* would be part of the first batch of titles included in the deal. In February, Tor released the next installment in the series, *The Ghost Brigades*. "What I was concerned about was having lived with the problem of the book not being available to people for about a month until they got the second printing done," Scalzi recounted. The delays meant the possibility of a second installment of a series that few people had read. "I wrote *The Ghost Brigades* specifically to be something that could be read even if you had not read the first one." Instead of picking up John Perry's story from the last installment, Scalzi shifted gears, following a character named Jared Dirac, a clone of one a Colonial Union scientist who had defected, Charles Boutin. Jared was something of a failed experiment and sent to serve in the Colonial Union's special forces division (introduced in *Old Man's War*) the Ghost Brigades. Tor appears to have been happy with the performance of both books, and on March 1st, Scalzi [revealed on *Whatever*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/03/01/three-quick-book-related-notes/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that he had officially begun writing the third installment of the series, *The Last Colony*. It would be a busy year for him: after being preempted by *The Ghost Brigades,* Scalzi's next book [*The Android's Dream*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250174758?ref=andrewliptak.com), hit stores that October, while in December, he [announced](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/10/10/the-last-colony-auction-winner-announcing-the-sagan-diary/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'd be releasing a novelette set in the series, The Sagan Diaries, through Subterranean Press in February 2007\. The third installment of the *Old Man's War* series, *The Last Colony*, hit stores in April 2007\. This entry returned the action to the lives of John Perry and his wife, Jane Sagan, who'd retired to a colony world, only to have their pasts in the Colonial Union catch up to them. Scalzi had noted earlier that he'd be taking a break from the *Old Man's War* universe for a short while. He explained that while Tor would have been content to have him only write new installments of the *Old Man's War* series, he didn't want to be pinned down with the series. "When Old Man's War took off, \[Tor\] said 'we want a sequel', and I was like 'Okay, what about this other book that you have me under contract for?' They were like 'whatever' They didn't care.'" Scalzi noted that the moment was eye-opening for him. "If you really are going to let me do whatever the fuck I want, then here we go." The first chapter of *Android's Dream* is "literally somebody farting somebody else to death because I'm like 'if you don't care, and I can do whatever I want, I'm going to take your word at that.'" "The whole idea that I could become the person who only writes the *Old Man's War* novels and every once in a while write something that wasn't in the series," he said. > "I thought about that, the idea of this 40-book series in the *Old Man's War* universe, and that would be the engine of my career, and the other stuff would be this side thing that happened. I have to tell you that that filled me with a deep existential terror, because on one hand, every novelist wants to be able to have the sort of career where you know that you won't ever be out of print. But the flip side of that is because you're chained to this universe that you might get sick of." Scalzi mused that it was ironic that he was saying that as the seventh book in the series is set to be published later this year, but that it was the 7th book in in the series over the course of two decades. "That's because we do Old Man's War books when I decide that there's a reason for me to get back into the universe as opposed to 'this is how we all actually make money'. And, writing standalone or non-*Old Man's War* books had worked out well for him: [*Redshirts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com) earned him a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2013, a while "[*The Interdependency*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250777812?ref=andrewliptak.com)series worked very well as a discrete three book series, the [*Lock-In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765381323?ref=andrewliptak.com) series did perfectly fine. It turns out that chained to *Old Man's War* in the way that I was worried I would be." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_1566.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Scalzi wasn't done with the series after *The Lost Colony*, but he wasn't interested in continuing the series with installment after installment. In July, he wrote a short story called "[*After the Coup*](https://reactormag.com/after-the-coup/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" for Tor.com, and in August 2008, he released a new entry, [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com). Like the other books, it was a jump in perspective, following Zoe Boutin Perry, the daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, during the events of *The Last Colony*. And, it was explicitly written as a YA novel. It "was the most difficult book I’ve had to write," he [reported on *Whatever*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/03/thoughts-on-zoes-tale/?ref=andrewliptak.com)after finishing it. "I wrote it from the point of view of a sixteen year old girl," he wrote, "I wanted to give the impression to the readers that the events of the book are having a profound effect on her and are, in essence, making her character’s voice mature through the course of the book. And on top of *that*, I wanted to be sure that Zoe reacted to her situation in ways that make sense — i.e., she can’t *just* be a Heinleinian “Competent Man” in cutesy gender camouflage. Think this is easy? Try it." And while it was taking place at the same time as its predecessor, he realized that he had to bring something new to the events taking place in it. And, it was something of an experiment for both him and Tor: "we wanted to make it accessible for teen readers...part of my mission with this book was to write a story that would give the longtime fans everything they come to the OMW universe for, and at the same time leave open the door to younger readers." It seems that experimentation didn't quite pan out: Scalzi noted that he had planned on continuing Zoe's story as a trilogy of books: "but they shoved it into the adult market, and it just became 'the original trilogy plus *Zoe's Tale*.'" From there, Scalzi took a break from the series, writing a string of other books: *The God Engines* in 2009, [*Fuzzy Nation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250174642?ref=andrewliptak.com) (a reimagining of H. Beam Piper's novel [*Little Fuzzy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781680576467?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in 2011, and *Redshirts* in 2012\. He also found himself busy with some other projects: in 2009, he was hired as a creative consultant for the Syfy Channel's new entry in its Stargate franchise, *Stargate Universe* (in which a copy of *Old Man's War* [made a brief cameo](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/John%5FScalzi?file=Old%5FMan%27s%5FWar.png&ref=andrewliptak.com)), and in 2011, Paramount Pictures optioned *Old Man's War* for a film adaptation, with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct. In 2012, Scalzi announced his return to the *Old Man's War* series with a new entry, [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765369550?ref=andrewliptak.com). He [explained](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/06/announcing-the-human-division/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he wanted to avoid churning out installment after installment: "I’d return to it when I had something new to say in it," and that after four years, "I knew what I wanted to do next in the universe." The problem was, he wasn't quite sure how to approach the story he wanted to tell: it didn't quite fit into the standard novel package. Five years earlier, Amazon had begun selling its Kindle device and the eBook format brought with it some enormous changes: not only new opportunity for authors looking for easy ways to publish their stories, but a new delivery method that meant that they could experiment with form and length in ways that weren't practical until that point. Amazon's store would prove to be incredibly useful for authors such as Andy Weir, who [began serializing his novel *The Martian* in 2014](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-martian-andy-weir-decade-10-years-short-fiction/), Hugh Howey ([who began serializing *Wool* in 2011](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugh-howey-wool-silo-apple-tv-streaming-history/)), and Craig Alanson ([who began self-publishing his *Expeditionary Force* series in 2016](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/)) This new book would be something completely different, however: rather than a straight-forward narrative, it would be an episodic novel made up of shorter entries. Tor would release 13 installments online as eBooks and audiobooks, and after the serialization was complete, it would release the entire package as a hardcover book. Each story was designed to stand on their own as a self-contained story, but when read in their entirety, would tell a complete story. In the [announcement for the project](https://reactormag.com/the-human-division-by-john-scalzi/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Nielsen Hayden described the book as an experiment: "an episodic novel, released initially in digital, serialized form." A new chapter would drop each week on eBook and audiobook platforms starting on January 15th, 2013 with "The B-Team." The unconventional story that Scalzi had in mind dovetailed nicely with some experimentation that Tor wanted to embark on. "The second arc of books," Scalzi explained, "were literally written, not only because I wanted to go back into the universe, but specifically because Tor was like 'we need to find out if we can sell stuff electronically and if people will buy it.'" The entire endeavor, Scalzi says, was a research experience. "My payment for those books came out of Tor and Macmillan's R&D budget, and I was assured that if they failed miserably, they absolutely would not blame me because it was literally an experiment." In April, with the conclusion of the first batch of installments, Scalzi announced that "*The Human Division* has been renewed for a second season," and that the series had thus far been a success. It was a good thing, too: the series ended on a cliffhanger. For the non-ebook reading crowd, Tor published a hardcover edition of the story on May 14th. Beyond successfully launching another installment of the series, "all that information just got bundled over into releasing novellas through Tordotcom," says Scalzi. In 2014, Tor Books [announced that it was launching a new imprint](https://reactormag.com/announcing-torcom-the-imprint/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Tordotcom. While the company's website [had been an outlet for news about the science fiction world alongside short fiction](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/8/17819652/tor-com-sci-fi-fiction-anthology-stories-publishing?ref=andrewliptak.com) (Disclaimer: I wrote for *Tor.com*–now *Reactor*–from 2019 to 2021), it would now begin releasing its own print novelette and novella-length books, with a focus on ebooks and print-on-demand titles. It's an imprint that has had an outsized impact in the science fiction publishing world, producing a number of enormously popular novellas and short novels like Martha Wells' [*Murderbot Diaries*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250784278?ref=andrewliptak.com). In 2015, the experiment continued: Scalzi picked up the story that he started in *The Human Division* with [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com), another episodic novel. This time, it was made up of four novella-length installments released in June and collected into a single volume that August. When [I interviewed Scalzi for *The Verge* in 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/14934064/john-scalzi-the-collapsing-empire-old-mans-war-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com), he noted the premise of the project was a real risk: how would readers respond to a novel that was published in an unconventional way? Serializations had [long been part of the science fiction literary world](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-writing-serialization-fix-up-novels/), but it was a form that had largely been overtaken by the conventional novel and a publishing industry designed to deliver it. Scalzi noted that was one reason why he opted to use the *Old Man's War* series to try it: "we were fiddling with format, and to compensate for that, to hold people’s hands while we did this weird stuff, we gave them *Old Man’s War*, which we already knew they liked and were comfortable with." Looking back on the two books, he characterized the project as a success: "We learned that there is an appetite for serialized fiction. We also learned that it’s possible to sell fiction in shorter lengths, that people will go, 'Sure, I’ll spend 99 cents on this, or $2.99.'" Since then, he's published a handful of other shorter works, such as his *Dispatcher* stories, while his next novel, [*When The Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com)is another similar experiment: a story about what happens when the Moon turns into cheese, told across a series of episodic chapters, each representing a day in the lunar cycle. Scalzi noted that he'd be taking another break from the series for the foreseeable future, although he didn't rule out a return to the series down the road. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_1567.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak In 2014, there were other developments in the works outside of the books for the series. After several years of development, the film adaptation of *Old Man's War* [morphed into a television project atthe Syfy Channel](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/syfy-adapting-futuristic-military-drama-723323/?ref=andrewliptak.com) under the title *The Ghost Brigades*, and eventually fizzled out. Three years later, Netflix [announced that it had picked up](https://deadline.com/2011/02/paramount-buys-old-mans-war-for-wolfgang-petersen-and-scott-stuber-108371/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the rights to adapt the novel as a film. (As of now, it's still in the works.) He also wrote for a Netflix series, *Love, Death + Robots*, an animated anthology show adapting a number of science fiction short stories. Scalzi busied himself with other projects in the meantime: In 2016, he released an audio story, [*The Dispatcher*](https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Dispatcher-Audiobook/B01KKPH1VA?ref=andrewliptak.com) (he published a sequel, [*Murder by Other Means* ](https://www.audible.com/pd/Murder-by-Other-Means-Audiobook/B08FCW35B1?qid=1738353402&sr=1-3&ref%5Fpageloadid=not%5Fapplicable&pf%5Frd%5Fp=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf%5Frd%5Fr=4G4Z80S35MQVYCVRAK2E&plink=TNFoWD4zc7Gl9bhY&pageLoadId=rJ91scE3UnTOXw9A&creativeId=0d6f6720-f41c-457e-a42b-8c8dceb62f2c&ref=a%5Fsearch%5Fc3%5FlProduct%5F1%5F3)in 2020). The following year, he launched a new space opera series *The Interdependency*, which kicked off with [*The Collapsing Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388902?ref=andrewliptak.com), and was followed by [*The Consuming Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388995?ref=andrewliptak.com)in 2018 and [*The Last Emperox*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389183?ref=andrewliptak.com)in 2019\. 2018 also saw a sequel to 2014's [*Lock In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765381323?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Head On*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250385529?ref=andrewliptak.com). Facing burnout and anxiety over the state of the world in 2020, Scalzi shifted gears and returned to his starting point: comedic science fiction in the form of a new standalone novel, [*The Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2022, which followed a character named Jamie Gray who's hired by a mysterious NGO that's tasked with protecting Kaiji in an alternate universe. He followed it up in 2023 with another comedy-thriller, [*Starter Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389220?ref=andrewliptak.com), about the heir to a supervillain organization. Each of those novels earned their spots on various bestseller and awards lists following their publication, helping to turn Scalzi's concerns about being chained to the *Old Man's War* series aside. 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of that first novel, and to prepare, Tor began re-releasing the novels as trade paperbacks with new minimalist covers: the first two installments (*Old Man's War* and *The Ghost Brigades*) hit stores in December with new introductions by Scalzi, with the next two (*The Last Colony* and *Zoe's Tale*) slated for February, and with the final two (*The Human Division* and *End of All Things*) in August, all leading up to the next and seventh installment of the series, *The Shattering Peace*. Like its predecessors, *The Shattering Peace* looks as though it won't quite fit the mold of what's come before. Not only will it jump forward in time and follow some new characters (as well as some familiar faces), it'll cover some new ground that Scalzi says that he's been mulling over for a while. "For a few years, Tor and I have been thinking we should do something with \[the anniversary\]," Scalzi explained. "One of the reasons I suggested it to them was that I had a story that I was thinking about. Without going into too much detail about it, it was looking at an aspect of the universe that has basically been taken for granted because we need it – the concept of the skip drive." In Scalzi's universe, his characters move from place to place not by travelling fast through space, but by appearing in alternate universes that are indistinguishable from our own, which solved the problem of breaking the light's speed limit. With the 20th anniversary coming up, Scalzi says that he wanted to "wrap a wrap an actual story around that, and basically explore some of the consequences of what it means for the characters." Set ten years after *The End of All Things, The Shattering Peace* will find that the universe has been largely peaceful between the Colonial Union, Earth, and the alien government known as the Conclave. But now, there's a new threat to that peaceful era: the Consu – a highly advanced civilization introduced in the first book, is falling into civil war, and threatens to pull the rest of the galaxy into that conflict. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/02/IMG_2093.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak The past two decades have been complicated and full of change and upheaval. Scalzi began writing the book that would kick off his career in the spring of 2001 – months before the world-changing events of September 11th, and has continued to publish through the ups and downs of everything that followed: devastating wars in the Middle East, economic recessions, political turmoil and the rise of authoritarianism, along with enormous technological changes in the publishing industry. I can't help but think back to something that Scalzi noted when I interviewed him in 2017 when he described himself as a cockroach: "what that means is that as a writer, you have to recognize that nothing lasts and things change, that there’s no one time in the history of publishing where everything was one way, and then all of a sudden there was change. It’s always changing. So we will definitely try new things to see if they work. And if they don’t, you don’t do them again, or you wait for the market to come around to them again, whatever." Looking back over the course of his career since *Old Man's War*, it's clear to see that Scalzi has experimented with publishing each step along the way: publishing his novels on his website, playing with the form and structure of the stories themselves, jumping on new technologies and formats as they emerge, and pushing against the expectation to churn out installment after installment of his series and even leaving it when he needs to. To be clear, Scalzi has a sales record that that most authors will never have, one that allows him an unusual amount of freedom to write what he'd like to. There's an enormous amount of luck at play: a book that readers gravitated toward even when copies were scarce, a publisher that recognized its potential and success, and a willingness to use it as a jumping-off point to try new things. Scalzi characterized the early success of *Old Man's War* was like catching lightning in a bottle: "they literally shoved me out on January 1st, they were not expecting for that to happen." "I do think that like the legend of lighting, it only strikes in the same place once," Scalzi explained, and "that what I did was a thing that happened to me; that isn't necessarily going to happen to someone like Travis Baldree, and the thing that happened to Travis Baldree isn't necessarily going to happen to Tamsyn Muir. We don't know how the next lightning in the bottle is going to happen. We know that it probably will and that in retrospect it seems inevitable, even if it wasn't." There's an adage in publishing that nobody knows what makes for a successful book or even how to build a career off of one. Much of the process is left to chance: that the right readers will find the right book at the right moment and tell the right people. Publishers can try and anticipate some of that: they know when they have a good or promising book on their release schedules and have budgets for marketing and promotions and networks of booksellers and reviewers to push it out to. But even then, there's no guarantee that a book will take off and earn out the advance the publisher paid to the author. Looking back, there are so many points where *Old Man's War* could have stalled: the lack of copies in stores in 2005, that his readers would recommend his book to others, that editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden didn't ignore an email in his inbox or that Tor CEO Tom Doherty didn't march down to an office and order a reprint. The success of *Old Man's War* isn't just down to the fact that they're good reads: it's that both Scalzi and Tor Books were able to recognize the moment they were successful, positioning their bottle just right to take advantage of the conditions and hope that they did it right. In the 20 years since, Scalzi has noted that *Old Man's War* has been a reliable and steady part of his backlist, consistently bringing in new readers not only to his own growing shelves of stories, but to other novels and authors in the genre as well. The breadth of Scalzi's career reveals a couple of things: that luck can be an important part of the publishing industry, but also being in the position to take advantage of those fortuitous moments is equally as important. As publishing faces an ever-uncertain future in a fragmented media environment where books face competition from movies, TV shows, Tiktok, video games, and other mediums, the ability to remain flexible and to adapt has never been more important, and could lead to the next big, unexpected hit. In the meantime, Scalzi has more stories to tell, in one form or another. ### Changing tastes URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-cover-artwork-john-harris-scalzi-old-mans-war/ Last updated: 2025-01-28T19:24:34.000Z John Scalzi revealed the cover for his next book, The Shattering Peace with art from series mainstay John Harris. It's interesting to see how the reactions have changed over the years. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Cultivating fandoms URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/charles-stross-laundry-files-conventional-boy-litrpg-gaming-book-review/ Last updated: 2025-01-22T15:33:13.000Z There's a certain magical quality to the written word. Where ideas are intangible and mutable when they exist as thoughts, they become anchored in reality when jotted down onto paper. Lines on maps fix geopolitical boundaries while sentences can lay down rules and principles that guide behavior. In the hands of a fantasy author, language altering reality becomes an intriguing plot device, as in Robert Jackson Bennett's [*Foundryside*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/foundryside-robert-jackson-bennett/10230868?ean=9780525573845&ref=andrewliptak.com) or P. Djèlí Clark's [*Ring Shout*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clarks-ring-shout-reimagines-lovecraftian-horror/)*.* A recent example of this is Charles Stross's latest novel, [*A Conventional Boy*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/foundryside-robert-jackson-bennett/10230868?ean=9780525573845&ref=andrewliptak.com). In it, he plays with the power of roleplaying games mixed with some Lovecraftian horror, with a bit of commentary about the state of the entertainment world thrown in for fun. [P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout reimagines Lovecraftian horrorReimagining Lovecraft, Robin Hobb on The Farseer Trilogy, and more Hello! I hope that you’ve been faring well in the last couple of weeks. One of the things that I’ve found myself doing the last couple of months is work around the house, activities that keep me focused![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-82.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_2ae0dc08-3c02-4c09-9d56-0734b834f7b4_4032x3024-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clarks-ring-shout-reimagines-lovecraftian-horror/) [*The Laundry Files*](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/the-laundry-files-an-updated-c.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) is Stross's long-running fantasy series that mashes up Lovecraftian horror and spy thrillers as it follows the exploits of the members of a secretive division of the UK's Special Operations Executive, nicknamed "The Laundry." Their mission is to protect the public from magical threats, utilizing mathematics to tap into otherworldly powers and the like. *Some spoilers for* A Conventional Boy *ahead.* In this latest addition to the series (which Stross describes as an interstitial novel set in 2010 between [*The Apocalypse Codex*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425256435?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Rhesus Chart*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425256565?ref=andrewliptak.com)) we follow a hapless gamer named Derek Reilly, who ran afoul of Laundry agents when he was scooped up during a raid while he was running a game of *Dungeons & Dragons* with some friends at the height of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The agency suspected that he had been tapping into some sort of occult power through the game, and shipped him off to Camp Sunshine, a sort of prison-turned-deprogramming center for cultists. Decades later, Derek's has been completely institutionalized, and deemed harmless enough to write a camp newsletter and run a play-by-mail roleplaying game. He's hasn't felt the need to escape until he learns that the camp is about to be completely renovated and with its shipped off to other places and that there'll be a gaming convention in a nearby city. He decides that it's time to enact a long-simmering escape plan so that he can check it out. After he slips out and heads into town, he discovers more of his people: fellow gamers, including several players who he's been corresponding with over the years through his game, *Cult of the Black Pharaoh*. He finds that he's got something of a following in the local gaming community, and he sets up an in-person game to run for the first time. There are some other, screwy things going on at the con, however: a mysterious gaming company, Omphalos Corporation, has swooped in to save the financially-strapped convention, ostensibly to launch its new game, *Bones & Nightmares*. As it turns out, the folks at Omphalos have other plans: their game is designed as a blood sacrifice to call an Elder God, with a built-in population of folks to play it. Derek and his new friends are the ideal folks to foil this plan: with the inside knowledge that gaming mechanics are perfectly suited for these sorts of rituals. At the same time this is happening, camp officials realize that Derek has slipped out, and quickly figure out not only where he is, but that there's some weirdness happening under their noses, and dispatch a team to contain it. All in all, it's a fun read: a nice primer on convention and gaming culture, with some fun characters and a neatly contained story. There was a line that really grabbed my attention while reading it, as Derek is learning about the convention and the mysterious company sponsoring it: > "They're tech evangelist types. Not real gamers, I mean they've got no heart," Ginger Beard had a definite [grognard](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=grognard&ref=andrewliptak.com) attitude. "The RPG they're pushing is just one corner of a franchise property along with the MMO, the LARP, the cosplay, and a bunch of tie-in novels. They're very corporate, deep-pocket stuff– there's some serious venture capital bankrolling them. It's like, imagine Games Workshop suddenly turned up twenty years ago with the entire 40K franchise fully developed, all the way to the movies and animated TV series? The free copies for congoers are a loss leader--they're counting on us to spread it by word of mouth. They probably plan to ride a commercial breakout into the mass market, IPO, then cash out. Is there any better way to describe the approach to entertainment that seems to be everywhere theses days? There's clearly an element of this embedded in the bigger legacy franchises like *Star Wars*, *Star Trek*, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where you have stories transformed into multimedia entertainment platforms, spread out across all of these different mediums, from games to toys to books to TV shows. Over the last decade, there's certainly been attempts from corporations to try and launch one of these things from scratch: look at the SyFy Channel's show [*Defiance,* which was a big, ambitious attempt to run a TV show and video game at the same time](https://www.andrewliptak.com/syfys-defiance-was-an-ambitious-cross-platform-experiment-that-failed/), or Netflix's *Jupiter's Legacy*, which felt like the streaming service's attempt to launch [its own MCU-style franchise](https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/12/05/mark-millar-gives-updates-on-netflix-movies-shows-and-comics?ref=andrewliptak.com), based on Mark Millar overarching comic book series. It lasted a season [before it was canceled](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-return-of-the-king-lotr-propaganda-disinformation/). At the same time, media companies like Warner Bros., and Amazon have picked up the rights to classic works like George R.R. Martin's Westeros-set stories, J.K. Rowling's *Harry Potter* series, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium for their own sprawling extended franchises. As media companies consolidate into bigger entities, they're increasingly focusing on mining their archives for familiar content: if their subscribers and viewers liked HBO's *Game of Thrones,* why not launch a spinoff ([or three](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hbo-is-considering-three-more-game-of-thrones-shows/)?) Or if a new corporation is trying to push its way into the entertainment environment, it's not enough to come up with just one story to headline their offerings: they have to have a whole franchise mapped out that has just enough to be familiar, but different from its competitors. Stross maps out the route that such a company would likely take: a story that's big enough to exist along all of those big product categories so that their hypothetical consumer base will have enough crap to buy to make it worth the expense and time it takes to launch such a story. It's a cynical way to look at the media world, but there's some truth to it. The eldritch angle is a fun one: there isn't a huge dividing line between true believers in a religion and the superfans of something like *Star Wars* or D&D, and Omphalos using this framework as a way to mine faith and devotion for a god-summoning ritual is a lot of fun to think about. But in doing so, Stross showcases why these primordial franchises rarely take the world by storm: the fervent fandom that you see with these legacy franchises are the product of not just good stories, but of a lot of time that's been invested by said fans to really form a bond with these types of stories. Sure, you can hook a lot of people with the right story: I've been a devoted *Star Wars* fan since I laid eyes on the franchise back in 1997\. In the book, Omphalos is trying to speedrun their product by copying and mashing together a whole bunch of tropes that their marketing department thinks their potential ~~audience~~ fans will like, hoping they can build a community around it before selling off their stake and living off the earnings for the rest of their lives. I have a feeling that if you could cultivate faith in this way, you wouldn't get much juice from *Bones & Nightmares*, but tapping into something like *Dungeons & Dragons* – with its decades of history and dedicated players – would be like trying to take a bite out of a transmission line. It takes time to develop those devoted superfans. I became a *Star Wars* adherent because I was able to pick up just about every book and tie-in published as a teenager, spent countless hours on message forums, helped run a fan website and [built a hall of armor in my basement](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-macys-day-parade-501st-legion/). It's organic growth that builds with time and contact, and that's something that's hard to replicate right out of the box. Indeed: even new franchises like the MCU and Westeros are built on foundations of dedicated fans that were there long before they were ever adapted. I don't know if Stross intended that sort of commentary with this particular story, but the book serves as a solid reminder that fandom isn't a body of people that a publisher or corporation can rope in to do their marketing for them. Fandoms are communities of people who stick by a story because they happen to *like* it and the people who share the same appreciation of it. You can set up a body of work and entice people to come and check it out, but a fandom is something that you have to cultivate like a garden: you have to tend to it and put the effort in to support its growth. In an age where our favorite stories are increasingly being wielded as tools to support a megacorp's bottom line, that long-term work is more important than ever. ### Middle-earth disinfo campaigns URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-return-of-the-king-lotr-propaganda-disinformation/ Last updated: 2025-01-20T16:05:02.000Z I accidentally ended up re-reading [*The Lord of the Rings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780618640157?ref=andrewliptak.com)recently. I started a re-read of [*Fellowship of the Ring*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780547928210?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2022 [for a short piece](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-audiobook-tolkien-alexa-andy-serkis/), and last fall, picked up the audiobook of [*The Two Towers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780547928203?ref=andrewliptak.com) when I needed something to listen to while between books and ended up going right into the [*The Return of the King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780547928197?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* (I've got Andy Serkis's audiobook edition of *The Silmarillion* queued up next-ish.) While reading it, I found another instance of a passage that really stuck with me as an example of how Tolkien was an excellent observer of human nature, and as a result, the books really endure, and I think it gave me a slightly better understanding of the entire work when it comes to how Tolkien saw the world. [CorruptibilitySome thoughts about how Tolkien portrayed power and how relevant it is today![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-76.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1606.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-two-towers-grima-wormtongue-corruption/) In the chapter "The Pyre of Denethor," Gondor's Steward learns that his son Faramir has been gravely wounded in battle, and grief-stricken, decides that he'll die along with him. As Gandalf tries to talk him out of this plan, he discovers that Gondor still possesses a [Palantír](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr?ref=andrewliptak.com), and that Denethor has been looking into it: > 'Pride and despair!' he cried. 'Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. To this City only the first finger of its hand has yet been stretched. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves?' There's a little bit of explanation needed here if you aren't familiar with the series. The Palantíri are crystal spheres that allow people to communicate with one another. Here's Gandalf's explanation to Pippin earlier in *The Two Towers*: > Each *palantír* replied to each, but all those inGondorwere ever open to the view ofOsgiliath. Now it appears that, as therock of Orthanchas withstood the storms of time, so there the *palantír* of that tower has remained. But alone it could do nothing but see small images of things far off and days remote. Very useful, no doubt, that was toSaruman; yet it seems that he was not content. Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze uponBarad-dûr. Then he was caught! One of the stones fell into Sauron's hands, which he used it to communicate with Saruman as he rose to power. There's a notable moment in *The Two Towers* when Pippin looks into it and is instantly connected to and interrogated by the Dark Lord about their plans. They're powerful devices, and hat struck me re-reading *Return of the King* was its impact on Denethor. A critical theme throughout Tolkien's work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors. Denethor is a good example here: as the Steward of Gondor, he's not the actual king, but someone charged with overseeing the city in the absence of the kingdom's true ruler. He's grown accustomed to his status, and is reluctant to give up that power, especially when it's clear that the true king (Aragorn) is being thrust into a position where he will be able to reclaim the throne and title. Denethor is described as possessing a brilliant mind, but he's also vain and weak: he's distraught over the death of his favored son Boromir, and while initially extremely dismissive of his other son Faramir, he's pushed to the breaking point when the former is wounded in the defense of the city. That brings us to Denethor's use of the Palantír: as Sauron grew in power and Gondor came under attack, Denethor began using it to find out more about his enemy, which had disastrous consequences: > 'In the days of his wisdom Denethor would not presume to use it to challenge Sauron, knowing the limits of his own strength. But his wisdom failed; and I fear that as the peril of his realm grew he looked in the Stone and was deceived: far too often, I guess, since Boromir departed. He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power, he saw nonetheless only those things which that Power permitted him to see. **The knowledge which he obtained was, doubt-less, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.** The emphasis there is mine: what really struck me about this passage is that it's so clearly what we'd now call a disinformation campaign. A key element when it comes to propaganda and disinformation campaigns are that they're a type of storytelling (Check out Annalee Newitz's recent book [*Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393881516?ref=andrewliptak.com)for a good overview of this.) They're designed to use a bit of truth to spin a story, feeding a population counter-factual information to demoralize a population, making them question or doubt the true nature of the world around them. That's exactly what Sauron was doing to Denethor, the leader of his greatest foe; feeding him a story of how Mordor was growing in power and that Gondor wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. It wasn't hard for Sauron to exploit Denethor's pride, ego, and insecurity to lead him astray. The result was Denethor falling to despair. Pippin notes that he saw how this impacted him after Faramir was wounded: "The Lord went away from the room where Faramir lay; and it was only when he returned that I first thought he was changed, old and broken." It's a telling moment about just how cunning Sauron is: Denethor wasn't a stupid man, but he did have weaknesses that his enemy could exploit. He had a lot to work with: Gondor was already stressed and in decline: Tolkien shows off a city whose population had cratered, its once-proud buildings fallen into disrepair. By the time the battle rolled around, Sauron's disinformation campaign has done exactly it needed to do: Denethor is barely able to mount a defense of the Minas Tirith. Sauron's efforts ultimately doesn't work. Denethor commits suicide and the defense of the city falls to Gandalf, Prince Imrahil, the remaining fighters, and some last-minute reinforcements from Rohan and Aragorn. But while the good guys prevail in the end, it's a good illustration from Tolkien that the forces of evil aren't necessarily present just on the battlefield: it's a fight for the hearts and minds of all involved. --- Tolkien would have been well aware of how propaganda worked. He was a signal officer in the British Army who served on the front lines in France during the First World War and watched as Nazi Germany rose and threatened Great Britain during the Second World War. Propaganda came into its own during this time, with both sides throwing information weapons at one another to try and destabilize and demoralize their foes. [Tolkien and the Horrors of the Great WarThe First World War left a lasting impression on Tolkien![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-77.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/BD329FBA-4493-470C-A2E9-63C78DEA2B42.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-and-the-horrors-of-the-great-war-2/) In a lot of ways, Mordor's rise during the Third Age in Middle-earth feels very much like Tolkien paying attention to Hitler's rise during the 1930s: an evil force that spreads while its foes aren't paying close attention. Tolkien has pushed back on claims that *The Lord of the Rings* is an allegorical tale of World War II, writing in the foreword to the trilogy that: > "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and *The Hobbit*." Indeed, Tolkien wrote some large chunks of the story prior to the outbreak of the war. While I think we can take him at his word that he wasn't writing a thinly-veiled narrative about the Second World War, it isn't too much of a stretch to see that the real world had its impact on his legendarium. (I mean, the love story of [*Beren And Lúthien*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328915337?ref=andrewliptak.com)is inspired by his own relationship with his wife*,* Edith!) In a note about W.H. Auden's review of *The Return of the King* (Number 183 in [*The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358652984?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Tolkien reiterated that "the story is not about JRRT at all, and is at no point an attempt to allegorize his experience in life." But he goes on to talk about how he *is* "historically minded," and that Middle-earth isn't imaginary, but a real place "a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time." He explains that he doesn't see his story as characters working to achieve political ends, but of how power affects character. Frodo's journey is one of necessity, not preserving the Shire, while Denethor, he writes "*was* tainted with mere politics: hence his failure...It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked." He goes on to talk about how politics can muddy the waters of *right* and *wrong:* > *"*Of course in real life' causes are not clear cut - if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have 'good motives', real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today. Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore *right* is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the *resentful* suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the *right* and the *wrong* in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict. There's a lot going on here, but at its core, he's pointing out that the motives of a country/kingdom/ruler can be spun to justify one's motives. He specifically notes that the "rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked, and that "though 'propaganda' may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact 'right,' that is not valid." It's easy to see how the complicated knot of politics and war mongering that led to the rise of both World Wars is present here: how people use stories – and propaganda – to justify their actions and motives, even if what they're doing is objectively bad. Look no further than how Hitler came to power with popular support, or any other time a terrible person ascends to power: it's usually because they've convinced a lot of people to follow them, and it's a powerful example of how leaders can use propaganda to demoralize their enemies – or to motivate their own followers. Tolkien might not have seen LOTR as a retelling of the modern day, but there were certainly things in human nature that he was seeing that were present during his lifetime – and which persist to today. --- So, this particular passage about Denethor and the Palantír really stood out to me: it's another instance of where Tolkien seems to have really understood human nature and how we don't change all that much. Middle-earth's Palantír viewings is yesteryear's propaganda campaign is today's disinformation campaign. Case in point: look at a recent development for online environments. Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) is adjusting its [policies towards hate speech towards marginalized groups](https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/meta-moderation-transgender-women-hate?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's framed as a tilt back toward a vision of social media where users have the complete freedom to say whatever they want, with the assumption that bad information will be countered with good. This isn't really how this works in the real world: people who're good at gaming and understanding how to stand out from the noise will get heard, and drown out everyone else. Those policy guard rails helped to keep those tendencies in check, and without them, you have an environment that's ripe for exploitation of bad actors, ranging from political misinformation and propaganda (just look at bad-faith posters who're talking about how the [ongoing LA fires are the result of DEI agendas](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5252757/california-wildfires-dei-diversity-influencers-firefighters?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to whiny fanboys who're upset about any hint of equality or diversity in the latest *Star Wars* and *Lord of the Rings* shows to the point where they can dominate any discussion or drive actors off of social media because they've made the environment unbearable. (Another good book to check out about this is P.W. Singer and Emerson T Brooking's [*Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358108474?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I recommend to anyone who spends any amount of time online.) [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-78.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) In a lot of ways, we have a Palantír in front of us most of the time, in the form of our phones, social media feeds, and media, and we're constantly looking into it as a way to understand the world, communicate with folks around the world, and learn about our surroundings. As Denethor discovered, these can be useful tools, but they can also be incredibly seductive and destructive. We can see horrifying images of the destruction in places like Gaza and Ukraine and L.A., but also more subtle things, like watching a handful of funny videos before a social media's algorithm begins pushing videos of crime and violence on you. It can be a conduit for bad actors to try and push and shape narratives, as we saw during the 2016 and 2020 and 2024 presidential elections: foreign governments nudging some of our more destructive divisions and tendencies to their own ends. These actions don't necessarily have to be as dramatic as a hack or brainwashing: just enough reinforcement to a narrative that makes you question what you're seeing or hearing. Build it up enough, and it's easy to fall into despair and depression at the state of the world. Like I [wrote about corruptibility](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-two-towers-grima-wormtongue-corruption/) the other week, I think this is a good example of Tolkien not writing allegory, but just being an astute observer of the world and human nature. People are people, and while we think we're advanced and smart with information at our fingertips, we haven't fundamentally changed all that much, leaving us open to making the same mistakes over and over again. That's one reason why I've really been impressed all over again with this story and why I think it remains so relevant seven decades after it was published: Tolkien isn't throwing up his hands and pointing out that the world is terrible: he's explaining that there are ways to avoid falling into despair: sticking to one's morals, distinguishing the things that are objectively good and bad in the world, and recognizing how to move on those instincts to do good in the world. It's an inherently optimistic story that serves as an excellent guide for us in the dark times ahead of us. ### Reading the news URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/neil-gaiman-allegations-media-literacy/ Last updated: 2025-01-18T17:43:14.000Z A new report detailing allegations against Neil Gaiman is a good opportunity to better understand how news works and spreads _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The devil's work is never done URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mcu-marvel-daredevil-born-again-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2025-01-16T16:54:58.000Z Earlier this week, Marvel released the first trailer for its upcoming superhero series, *Daredevil: Born Again*. It's been a while since I've been really jazzed for a new Marvel project: Daredevil has long been one of my favorite characters, and I still think that the Netflix series remains one of the MCU's stronger points. The trailer looks great: a reunion of Charlie Cox's Daredevil/Matt Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio as Kingpin comes with a bit of a wink and a nod that they've been apart for far too long. Give it a watch: --- One of the neat things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that there's a little bit of something for everyone. World-ending stakes? Check out the *Avengers* films. Chris Foss-infused space opera? *Guardians of the Galaxy*. Political thriller? *Captain America: Winter Soldier*. Over time, Marvel figured out how to lean into those sorts of subgenres when it came to translating their characters into big, blockbusters. It hasn't always worked, and when it hasn't, it's usually because the film drifts too far from some sort of core theme and just ended up becoming a bland affair. One of the franchise's more interesting experiments came in 2013, when Marvel Television and ABC [announced a partnership with Netflix](https://deadline.com/2013/11/disney-netflix-marvel-series-629696/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to produce a quartet of live-action shows, which would kick off with an adaptation of Daredevil (the rights for whom had just come back to Marvel from 20th Century Fox.) That initial show would be followed by *Jessica Jones* in 2015, *Luke Cage* in 2016, and *Iron Fist* in 2017, before all of those characters came together in a crossover series, *The Defenders.* Daredevil was a good starting point for this initiative. Created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, the character first appeared in 1964 and followed Marvel's usual formula for superheroes: a tragic accident leads to an unwitting everybody (Matt Murdock, in this case), who get some powers and strives to use them for good. In this case, Matt Murdock was blinded in a radioactive chemical spill as a kid, which enhanced his hearing and reflexes, abilities that he used to turn into a street fighter. He went on to fight against crime in his neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, while also dealing with his Catholic faith and his actions. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2025/01/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak Daredevil got a bit of a boost in the wave of gritty and realistic comics that came in the 1980s as [Frank Miller took over](https://www.marvel.com/comics/guides/1607/frank-millers-daredevil?ref=andrewliptak.com). Under his tenure, he infusing the series with pulpy crime fiction and violence with books like *The Man Without Fear* and a whole bunch of others that solidly placed the character as a troubled antihero. Since then, he's drifted back and forth, sometimes in goofy directions, but by and large, he's been a solid action hero. After the wild success of Bryan Singer's *X-Men* and Sam Raimi's *Spider-man*, 20th Century Fox released *Daredevil* in 2003, directed by Mark Steven Johnson and starring Ben Affleck as the titular character and Jennifer Garner as Elektra and Colin Farrell as Bullseye. It's goofy and not very good, but I have a weird nostalgic appreciation for it. Garner got a spinoff in the form of 2005's *Elektra* (and appeared in 2024's *Deadpool & Wolverine*!), but a sequel never materialized. Director Joe Carnahan put together an [intriguing sizzler reel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92cVd9HalHs&ab%5Fchannel=bastardoleonardo&ref=andrewliptak.com) for a gritty, 1970s-set film, but that never came together before the studio's rights ran out. By this time, Marvel had been on a hot streak after launching the MCU in 2009 with *Iron Man*. That success wasn't a sure thing: after facing bankruptcy in the 1990s, the company had sold off a lot of those film rights to studios, and was left with its second-tier heroes like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, who made up that first wave of films. Now, the studio was working to claw back some of those previously inaccessible characters. Up to this point, Marvel's strategy was to release big tentpole films that appealed to a wide audience: PG-13\. While the 2003 film had that same rating, the character had quite a bit more potential if they could lean into his grittiness and violence. Screenwriter Drew Goddard [initially pitched a darker version for a film, but](https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/09/29/drew-goddard-on-how-he-wouldve-made-the-sinister-six-movie-and-comparisons-to-suicide-squad?ref=andrewliptak.com) "what we all sort of realised is that, this movie doesn’t want to cost $200 million. The thing about Matt Murdock is, he’s not saving the world. He’s just keeping his corner clean," while at the same time, Marvel wasn't "doing R-rated movies." [Marvel then went to Netflix with a new model](https://collider.com/daredevil-tv-show-details-steven-deknight/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Where the studio's films focused on big drama and stakes, these four shows focused on "street level" drama: crimes that have more to do with stuff you'd find in your back yard, rather than the types that affect you on a national, galactic, or existential level. By not being constrained to film ratings, the show could also lean more on to those darker and more violent moments. *Daredevil* is darker and more violent than anything that had come out in the MCU to that point. Starring Cox as Daredevil / Matt Murdock, the first season loosely adapted *Daredevil: The Man Without Fear* for the character's origin story, before introducing another major antihero, The Punisher (played by Jon Bernthal) in the second season and roughly adapting parts of the "[Born Again](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born%5FAgain%5F%28comics%29?ref=andrewliptak.com)" storyline for the third season. If there's one element that really showed that this series was different from the MCU, look no further than the iconic "Hallway fight", a long, one-take fight scene in which Daredevil takes on a whole bunch of thugs. This was what fans of the character were really looking for when they wanted to see an authentic take on the character, and the television format really worked well for these types of stories, which Marvel followed with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Punisher. But while the shows had earned quite a bit of critical acclaim (and some [significant criticism](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/8/14848336/iron-fist-review-netflix-show-marvel?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Marvel began to wind the entire Netflix franchise down. *Daredevil* came to a close in 2018 after three seasons, and the last series in the franchise, *The Punisher*, ended after its third season in 2019\. Behind the scenes, there'd been some significant tension between Marvel's television and film studios. Jeph Loeb had long been in charge of Marvel's TV output and never really had the same acclaim or resources as the studio's film projects, and while everything was supposed to work in one, unified world, there wasn't a lot of cooperation or collaboration between the two. Thus, when just about every superhero that had appeared in the franchise showed up in [that big, culminating battle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1P4zDhhqw&ref=andrewliptak.com) in *Avengers: Endgame,* you didn't see Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the Punisher, or Jessica Jones anywhere in the crowd*.* But with the arrival of Disney+, [Leob left](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-television-jeph-loeb-stepping-dow-mcu/) and Marvel [merged its television studio into the larger Marvel Studios](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-tv-division-marvel-studios-mcu/). With everything now under one roof, a new slate of superhero shows could now work more closely alongside the films: shows like *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision,* and *Loki* now played a direct role in the coming films, setting up characters or stories in different ways. And, it began to fold in some of those previously unused characters: when Marvel released *Spider-man: No Way Home*, Matt Murdock [showed up for a brief, electrifying moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QP%5FiO0l%5FAA&ref=andrewliptak.com), and again in the [*She-Hulk* streaming series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRTJniHzW8&ab%5Fchannel=TheUniverseOfMarvel&ref=andrewliptak.com), while D'Onofrio's Kingpin showed up in *Hawkeye*. Ultimately, Marvel decided to reboot the series, [announcing in 2022](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/daredevil-disney-plus-series-matt-corman-chris-ord-1235272299/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the studio would bring back Cox and D'Onofrio for a new series, more explicitly adapting the "Born Again" storyline. Filming began in 2023, but quickly went off the rails: after shooting a handful of episodes, [Marvel stopped production and went back to the drawing board](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/daredevil-marvel-disney-1235614518/?ref=andrewliptak.com): the show wasn't coming together as well as they'd liked, and it was apparently a bit too far from style and tone of the first three seasons. Filming resumed in 2024, and everyone seemed to be much happier with the new direction. The overhaul brought back a handful of characters from the earlier seasons who hadn't been brought back, and rather than a series of episodic installments, the show's back to having more of a unified story from beginning to end. This new season (fourth season?) will begin streaming on Disney+ March 4th, 2025, and a second season is on its way. --- Since the trailer dropped, we've had an interesting discussion about it in the TO slack channel, and I realized why *Daredevil* really stood out for me: it injected a needed bit of variety into the larger MCU. The studio's films, like *Iron Man, Thor,, Captain America*, and *The Avengers* were all good, but they're dealing with characters called to do extraordinary things: saving the world from greedy weapons dealers, gods, Nazis, alien invasions, all things that affected the larger world. These make for great films, but as the franchise has dragged on well into the double digits, saving the world almost becomes a rote exercise. I have trouble remembering exactly who the antagonists were *The Marvels, Thor 4*, and a bunch of the others. [Marvel’s stumbling blocksA new report from Variety and a new book about the MCU detail Marvel Studios’ growing pains![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-79.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/F9C7in_XwAA3Kw4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/) Some of that comes down to the quality of Marvel's projects: the studio figured out a formula for making these films: get the characters, a rough script, and see what works when the cameras start rolling, with much of the film constructed, scripted, or retooled as they go. The result is lots of action, but the real work into the characters never feels like it quite connects like it used to. What the Netflix franchise did was open up a whole world of lower stakes for the franchise. Marvel has literally tens of thousands of characters at its disposal: not all of them are going to be up for saving the world. And, not every problem in the world is an existential one: all types of crime shows up all over the place. A while ago, I started to pitch an article somewhere that connected the rise of the super violent and gritty comics from the likes of Frank Miller and Alan Moore in the 1980s to the crime waves in New York City at the time. That era was something in response to the tamer 1960s and 1970s, but my gut feeling was that there was a realization and inspiration from some of those pressing problems at the time. That variety was needed: there's only so many times that you can save the world, and the MCU is well-structured to accommodate that wide range of genres: the aforementioned political thrillers, space operas, war films, and street-level action stories. Variety is good here: it can help keep the stories from becoming rote exercises in three-part story structure and action sequences, and can deliver some new stakes and challenges to one's characters. Daredevil (and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage) are all great examples of this: they're dealing not just with the problems at hand, but some of the ethical and moral issues that crop up when you're punching someone in the face. I'd love to see Marvel take Spider-man down to the street level (which feels like his natural zone anyway) rather than taking on alien invasions. We'll have to see how this new season of *Daredevil* picks up the baton: I can't wait to see what we have in store for us. ### Destination: Luna URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T14:54:58.000Z Throughout history, humans have been entranced by our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon. It provided the inspiration for countless stories over time, but it wasn’t until 1969 when a pair of astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the first footsteps on its surface. The last Apollo mission took off from the Moon in 1972, and in the fifty years since, it’s only received robotic visitors who probe its surface and take pictures from orbit. Now, it seems that we’re ready to return: China has recently landed several probes on its surface, while NASA has said that it plans to send astronauts in the coming years. They won’t be alone: the heads of private firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origins, have indicated that they intend to send people to the Moon, unveiling spacecraft and landers to take us there. Whoever sets foot on the lunar surface next, it’ll be the next chapter in a growing story of our relationship with the Moon. ### From Mythology to Literature Human societies from around the world have placed the Moon within their respective mythologies since their earliest days. Ancient artists depicted the Moon in cave artwork, while numerous ancient societies placed it within their pantheons of deities, much like the other bodies in our solar system, such as [Mars](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F05%5F15?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Venus](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F05%5F16?ref=andrewliptak.com). In his history of the science fiction genre, Adam Roberts writes that ancient astronomers devised models of the skies to account for the movements of the stars and planetary bodies, coming up with theories to explain the changing patterns. He notes that “Ancient SF, including voyages into the air and voyages to the Moon, are conceptually distinct from journeys to the stars; they connect with material, practical discourses, such as the science of navigation, rather than strictly theological idioms.” Early astronomers proposed numerous theories to comprehend the nature of the Moon. The Greeks thought it could be covered with a giant ocean, which would account for its reflective nature, while others thought it could be a mirrored surface, reflecting an image of the Earth back on itself, and still other philosophers disagreed. In his book *The Moon: A History for the Future*, Oliver Morton observes that the idea of the Moon as a mirror still holds true for many people—not necessarily literally. “But what people see when they look at the Moon is indeed, for the most part, a reflection of themselves—of their preoccupations and theories, their dreams and fears . . . The history of the Moon is a history of ideas about the Moon; and it is from those ideas that its future will grow.” Later scholars would recognize the true nature of the Moon: a body in space that orbited the Earth, lit by the Sun. Later scientists determined its distance from our home planet and how it affected the tides. In the 1600s, astronomers Thomas Harriot and Galileo Galilei took detailed drawings of the Moon’s surface, using a telescope, followed by numerous others, detailing the body’s mountains and craters. Theologically, the Moon helped prime the pump for the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe: if God had populated Earth with humans, other bodies around the universe must surely come with their own divine inhabitants. Philosophers and writers came up with their own stories that imagined potential believers living on the Moon, such as Francis Godwin’s *The Man in the Moone*. In the centuries since ancient times, the Moon has remained a fixture within literature, providing a fantastical destination for writers. Syrian author Lucian wrote *True Histories* in the second century*,* about a man who straps wings to his arms and flies to the Moon, where he “gains a splendid vantage point from which to survey the Earth below him,” according to Roberts. *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* cites works that date from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s. “The idea that travelling to the Moon might be a notion worth taking seriously first crops up in the 1640 appendix to John Wilkins’s *The Discovery of a World in the Moone.”* Wilkins’ work, along with others who would follow, formed the beginnings of a proto-science fiction genre of fantastical voyages that included intrepid explorers who reach the Moon by way of an invention that allows them to fly to it. These works recognize a couple of things: that the Moon was a distinct location within our solar system, and that people could conceivably visit it through technological means, coming at a time that society was rapidly transforming in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Explorers and merchants were heading out across the world on ships, and the notion that people would one day visit even more distant lands naturally follows. This piece is part of a series that I originally published in **Clarkesworld Magazine*: \- [Destination: Mercury](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mercury-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Venus](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/venus-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Luna](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/moon-solar-system-astronomy-science-fiction-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) \- [Destination: Mars](https://transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mars-history-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Origins of Science Fiction Society had begun to fully comprehend Earth’s place in the cosmos: Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno posited that we lived in a vast universe, with many planets; Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe argued that the Moon orbited the Earth, and it, along with its fellow planets, orbited the sun; German astronomer Johannes Kepler helped establish the models for which the planets orbited the Sun, and Galileo Galilei directly observed them all with a telescope. These advances helped underpin the larger scientific revolution that swept Europe, an enormous shift in worldview that catapulted society into the Modern Age, transforming the world from something that was largely unknowable into something that was recognizable, understandable, and tangible. Literature at the time reflected this shifting worldview as authors incorporated these ideas into their stories and helped bring about some of the earliest works of science fiction. The Moon was no longer an intangible light in the sky: it was a destination. While earlier stories had seen intrepid adventurers visiting it, authors were now able to draw on realistic details. American writer Edgar Allan Poe was one such author to look to the Moon for inspiration, publishing a short story in 1835 called “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.” Notably, this story appeared in the *Southern Literary Messenger*, and it purported to be a true story about a man who invented a new type of balloon and sailed to the moon to escape from creditors and authorities. Other Moon-hoax stories followed in the same year, like a series of articles that appeared in New York City’s *The Sun*, about an astronomer who witnessed fantastical creatures living on the Moon with a new type of telescope, written by Richard Adams Locke. Perhaps the most famous example of an early lunar exploration tale comes from French writer Jules Verne in 1865’s, *De la Terre à la Lune* (in English, *From the Earth to the Moon*). Verne was inspired to tell his own Moon story by Poe, eventually referencing Hans Pfaall by name in it. The story followed the exploits of the Baltimore Gun Club in the years after the American Civil War, who turn their attention and equipment to a new task: shooting an expedition to the Moon in a massive cannon. He would later pick up the story in 1870 with a sequel, *Autour de la Lune* (*Around the Moon*), following the astronauts as they went around the Moon and returned back to Earth. Verne and Poe weren’t alone in writing about the Moon: authors like Edgar Fawcett, George Griffith, W. S. Lach-Szyrma, and H. G. Wells all wrote a range of lunar stories that saw people visiting and exploring the Moon’s surface. In 1902, director Georges Méliès released *Le Voyage dans la Lune* (*A Trip to the Moon*), a silent film based on Verne’s lunar novels, which would go on to inspire future filmmakers and writers in the years to follow. While Verne drew on the scientific understanding of the universe of the day for his book, his novels had a notable, recursive influence on the scientific community: they inspired scientists who would later be the pioneers of rocket science from around the world, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and Robert Goddard, who cited the author as an influence, and whose work would be foundational for the field of space exploration. ### The Space Age The 20th century had brought with it a new age of technological advances, as scientists across the world made huge strides with the development of rocket engines. In 1920, Robert Goddard published [*A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes*](https://www2.clarku.edu/research/archives/pdf/ext%5Faltitudes.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) writing that “A further application of much general interest is the possibility of sending a mass beyond the predominating gravitational field of the Earth,” which Chris Gainor notes in *To A Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers*, that “no responsible scientist had ever seriously or so publicly suggested a feasible method for flying to the Moon and beyond.” It was during the Second World War that another such advance occurred. Nazi Germany unleashed a terrifying new weapon, something that had never been seen on the battlefield before: a long-range ballistic missile called the Retribution Weapon 2—more commonly known as the V2\. Its designer, a German rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun, had long been entranced with the idea of space travel, and of reaching the Moon. After Germany’s defeat, he and many of his companions defected to the United States, where they became part of the army’s own rocket programs. With the introduction of devastating nuclear weapons, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles became the next frontier for weapons technology. In her podcast *Moonrise*, *Washington Post* reporter Lillian Cunningham [outlines von Braun’s career](https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/moonrise/the-shapeshifter/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and the role that he played in the Space Race, both helping the US military develop weapons of its own, and later championing the potential that rocket technology held for space travel. Science fiction writers weren’t far behind. Pulp and genre magazines like *Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories*, and *Astounding Stories* had published numerous stories imaging what life might look like on the Moon, or of how to travel there, but the Cold War brought with it a new sense that the future—and travel to the Moon—was right around the corner. Von Braun’s missile technology could easily be repurposed for such a project, and in the aftermath of the US’s failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, President John F. Kennedy [declared at Rice University](https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-at-rice-university-on-the-nations-space-effort?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 1962 that the US would go to the Moon. Science fiction was about to become science fact. The science fiction community was already well underway with that concept. Authors such as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke had begun to write their own stories of plausible lunar travel. In 1947, Heinlein released his first novel, *Rocket Ship Galileo*, about the adventures of three teenagers who travel to the Moon. He later followed up with other stories, such as “The Man Who Sold the Moon” about an industrialist who sets up a project to reach the Moon and claim it for himself. A year later, an adaptation of *Rocket Ship Galileo*—now titled *Destination Moon—*hit theaters, the first film to try and accurately depict a lunar mission. As more scientific eyes turned to the Moon, the depictions began to shift away from the fantastical worlds featuring alien life in favor of more realistic ones. Arthur C. Clarke described a lifeless Moon in vivid detail in his 1951 short story “Sentinel of Eternity” (later renamed “The Sentinel”): > *“Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.”* The idea that a mission to the Moon might be possible wasn’t only sinking in for science fiction fans. The Soviet Union launched a satellite into space called Sputnik in 1957, a demonstration that space was reachable, while *Collier*’s magazine released a series of articles from notable experts—including von Braun—about the feasibility and structure of a manned lunar mission. The articles captured the attention of entertainers like Walt Disney, who would prominently feature the Moon in his parks, and would bring the scientist on as a consultant and host for several TV specials about the future of space travel. Science fiction and popular culture helped elevate the idea that a lunar mission was not only possible—but feasible. In the coming years, NASA definitively proved that it was possible. On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down, the first time any humans stepped on an extraterrestrial body. In his history, *Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction*, author Alec Nevala-Lee noted that it was “a moment in which reality and science fictions seemed close enough to touch.” Science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Frederik Pohl were in demand for news programs, using their expertise to talk about what they and humanity had long imagined. Heinlein watched the launch of Apollo 11 days earlier in Florida, and later wrote that “I do feel as if—not as if—I know that seeing the first Moon ship take off is the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life.” Clarke was nearby at CBS’s studios in Orlando, and watched the launch from outside the building, later remembering that “I hadn’t cried for twenty years.” It was a profound moment for the science fiction community: something that they had only written about for decades had come to pass. But in some ways, science fiction authors had already transcended the Apollo era of space flight. NASA’s astronauts flew to space in delicate and tiny spacecraft, taking short missions to test out all of the phases required for a lunar mission. [*The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction*](http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/moon?ref=andrewliptak.com) notes that “To the early Pulp writers this was an article of faith, so easily taken for granted that the Moon routinely became a mere stepping-stone en route to Mars,” but that while “the lunar voyage remained a constant theme of SF in the 1930s and 1940s, it was more peripheral than the hype surrounding the first actual Moon landing in 1969 suggested.” By 1972, the Apollo program ended, and human space flight has yet to return to the Moon, although returning to the Moon has been a regular sound bite for politicians for decades. Parts of the science fiction genre also advocated that a return might not be necessary: proponents of the New Wave movement felt that the genre should abandon outer space to concentrate on stories closer to home, focusing on the real and pressing issues the spectacle of a lunar mission distracted from. ### Home While NASA hasn’t returned to the Moon, the notion that the Moon is a mirror into which viewers gaze back upon themselves is an apt metaphor today. While the Apollo program might not have exactly had a lasting effect on the genre, science fiction never left. It remained a viable destination for countless authors in the decades after that last mission. But while Apollo took away some of the mystery of what the Moon held, it became the perfect setting for authors to play out a variety of political narratives, notably with Heinlein’s 1966 novel, *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*. Heinlein actively used the novel to explore his libertarian thinking. He had been plotting out a novel about economics, pulling in ideas about a revolutionary on the Moon, and drew some inspiration from the American Revolution for his tale of a lunar penal colony declaring its independence to form its own, free society. Devoid of native inhabitants, the Moon became a novel canvas for science fiction authors: a blank sheet upon which they could imagine brand-new societies modeled in the form of various political schools of thought. That has continued in recent years, as a number of notable lunar novels hit bookstores. Ian McDonald’s Luna trilogy (*New Moon, Wolf Moon*, and *Moon Rising*) depicts a savage power struggle between a handful of powerful families for control of the Moon’s resources, while John Kessel’s *The Moon and the Other* reveals a lunar surface that’s pockmarked with innovative societies—individual stations each practicing their own ideals, trying to figure out the ideal mode of life in a sealed environment. Other novels have drawn their inspiration from more tangible conflicts. David Pedreira’s novel *Gunpowder Moon* imagines a group of miners trapped between the US and China as the two seek to wage a geopolitical proxy war on the Moon as they try and outmaneuver each other on Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel *Red Moon* draws from similar inspirations—following a man named Fred Fredericks as he runs from the Moon, to the surface of the Earth, and back to the Moon as he runs from Chinese authorities and dissidents who are hot on his heels amidst a greater power struggle over the future of the country. In Mary Robinette Kowal’s novel *The Calculating Stars*, she recounts an alternate Space Race in which the US and allies attempt their own lunar project after a devastating asteroid strike in the Atlantic Ocean, using the story to examine the systemic inequalities in society that held back women in the real Space Race. Throughout its history, the Moon has proven to be an attractive destination for scientists, politicians, thinkers, dreamers, and writers. Despite the latest technologies and scientific understanding of its surface, the Moon will likely continue to play the same role that it’s held for humanity since its inception: a mirror, showing us our deepest fears and ambitions. This essay was [originally published](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liptak%5F10%5F19/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in October 2019 in **Clarkesworld Magazine*. ### Here are the finalists for the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/philip-k-dick-award-2025-samatar-tchaikovsky/ Last updated: 2025-01-10T20:42:07.000Z Gordon van Gelder, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and the Philip K. Dick Trust have announced the finalists for this year's [Philip K. Dick Award](https://www.philipkdickaward.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The award is a notable one: it's issued annually to honor "science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year." It's selected by a jury (this year's judges were Maurice Broaddus, C. S. Friedman, Rajan Khanna, Carol McGuirk, and Carrie Vaughn). The award has included some notable works since its inception in 1983: books like Rudy Rucker's *Software*, William Gibson's *Neuromancer*, Stephen Baxter's *The Time Ships*, and Richard K. Morgan's *Altered Carbon* – [and more](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip%5FK.%5FDick%5FAward?ref=andrewliptak.com). The most recent recipient of the award was Bethany Jacobs for *These Burning Stars* and Rebekah Bergman's *The Museum of Human History*, which earned a special citation. Here are this year's finalists (*usual disclaimer about Bookshop.org links and commissions*): - [*City of Dancing Gargoyles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781951631390?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Tara Campbell - [*Your Utopia: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643756219?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur - [*Time's Agent*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250854315?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Brenda Peynado - [*The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881809?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Sofia Samatar - [*Alien Clay*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316578974?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Adrian Tchaikovsky - [*Triangulum*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798986614601?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Subodhana Wijeyeratne It seems like a good list! I've heard good things about Sofia Samatar's book, and I'm in the midst of reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's book right now, which I'm enjoying. The winner will be announced at [Norwescon 47](https://www.norwescon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Friday, April 18, 2025. ### Corruptibility URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-two-towers-grima-wormtongue-corruption/ Last updated: 2025-01-03T19:02:36.000Z Some thoughts about how Tolkien portrayed power and how relevant it is today _This post is for subscribers only._ ### All the new science fiction and fantasy books to check out in January 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-january-2025-hendrix-okorafor-stross-wells/ Last updated: 2025-01-04T21:18:34.000Z Welcome to the first monthly book list of 2025! We've picked up some new subscribers in the last couple of days, so here's a bit of a refresher and introduction: I'm Andrew Liptak, a writer and journalist who's covered science fiction, fantasy, pop culture, and entertainment for a number of sites, including *io9, The Verge, Polygon, Reactor, Kirkus Reviews*, and more. This newsletter is my attempt to make sense of the world of science fiction (and fantasy) and its intersections with the real world. One of the regular features that you'll get is a monthly (sometimes twice a month) roundup of books that catch my eye that you might also enjoy. Earlier this week, I published my picks for the books that I'm looking forward to the most over the course of 2025, which you can read [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2025-anticipated-books-scalzi-okorafor-cosby-kuang/). You also can find prior lists and recommendations via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. 📚 This newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Support TO with a tip:** Ghost now lets readers tip creators with a one-time payment. You can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/december-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/#/portal/support). Here are the 18 SF/F/H books that caught my eye that are coming out in the month of January 2025: ### [*Old Soul*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593718292?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Susan Barker (January 28th) Two strangers, Jake and Mariko, are stranded after they miss their flight, and while chatting over dinner, they discover a strange connection: they both lost loved ones to a strange woman. Their encounter sends Jake across the world, trying to track this mysterious person down, listening to people who've encountered her, discovering a trail of bodies that stretches back centuries. When he eventually encounters Theo, a dying sculptor who knows the woman better than anyone else, and who might be his best opportunity to figure out who she is. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593718292?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Barker weaves an eerie and suspenseful narrative, alternating between Jake’s present-day pursuit and haunting flashbacks of the woman’s victims. The slow-burning tension and lush, atmospheric prose build a creeping sense of dread that lingers long after the final page." ### [*All the Water in the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250353528?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eiren Caffall (January 7th) In the near future, climate change has raised the oceans and flooded parts of the world. In the aftermath, a girl named Nonie, her family, and her parents' scientist friends have settled in an abandoned New York City on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. They've been working to save the exhibits and the knowledge the museum holds while they hunt and grow their own food in what remains of Central Park. When a massive storm hits and breaks through the city's walls, they flee north, carrying with them a book of records of the lost collections. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/eiren-caffall/all-the-water-in-the-world-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The narrative keeps pace with the sense of urgency created by the hypercane, and Caffall brings the terrifying realities of this near-future to vivid life through expert use of sensory language" and that it's "Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you." ### [*The Outcast Mage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316580823?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annabel Campbell (January 28th) Annabel Campbell introduces us to the glass city of Amoria in this debut. Naila is a student at the city's academy, where she's studying magic. If she fails, she'll be exiled where she'll be punished or consumed by her own powers. After an accident, she's saved by Haelius Akana, the city's most powerful mage. He recognizes something in her, and decides to help her learn to hone her abilities. But his tutorage comes with risk: it's not a popular decision and there are plenty of people hoping to see the two of them fail. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316580823?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "the captivating heroine and hints of even graver danger to come make for a thrilling series starter." ### [*Motheater*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661795?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Linda H. Codega (January 21st) I recently sent out my "most anticipated books for 2025", and this one was on it. I know of Linda H. Codega from their work as one of the better writers on of *io9*, and they've recently been working on this book. In it, we meet a woman named Bennie Mattox, who decides to investigate why the miners working on Kire Mountain have been dying in accidents. While there, she discovers a half-drowned white woman and takes her in. The woman tells her she's called Motheater and can't remember her real name or how she got there. She's a witch, bound to the land, and has vowed to preserve the mountain. The unlikely pair now have the opportunity to change the town forever. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645661795?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Codega weaves Appalachian magic and Southern cunning throughout their protagonists’ crusade and brings in an exploration of what it is to be queer in the South." ### [*Lightfall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250287731?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ed Crocker (January 14th) Ed Crocker kicks off his debut series with *Lightfall,* in which vampires roamed the world for centuries until the arrival of "Grays" arrived and wiped out half of their population overnight. The survivors fled to the city of First Light, and settled into a cast system: the wealthy could drink the best blood, while the poor only gets the weaker stuff. Nobody can leave the city, and Sam, a palace maid, has had enough of the oppression. After the son of a noble is murdered and she discovers some clues to his death, she has an opportunity to jump into the upper classes. In doing so, she discovers a conspiracy from the upper elites, one that could transform the city if uncovered. But first, she has to avoid a similar fate. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-250-28773-1?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the worldbuilding is classic paranormal fantasy, but the many players and complex politics lend this an epic fantasy feel." ### [*Level: Unknown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316586825?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Dalglish (January 14th) An alien artifact chooses a young researcher named Nick to explore a vast world that it's stored inside of it: the realm of Yensere, which contains lost empires, heroes with powers, strange monsters. He's transported there every time he falls asleep,, and he has to explore and grow his own skills to uncover the mysteries that it holds. Nick's seen by its inhabitants as a demonic threat, and each time he's killed, he's brought back to the real world, over and over again. There's only so much longer before death catches up with him, but he has to keep trying: there's a good chance that understanding Yensere can save humanity from a terrible end. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316586825?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Dalglish embeds naive gamer Nick in a simulation that’s out to destroy him while still making the gameplay feel believably fun for Nick and his fellow players. Dedicated RPG fans will be tickled, but even readers without a gaming background will find plenty to enjoy." ### [*Witchcraft for Wayward Girls*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593548981?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Grady Hendrix (January 14th) The Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida is a place where unwed mothers can give birth to their babies and give them up for adoption in secret before returning to their lives. When 15-year-old Fern arrives in the summer of 1970, she's alone and terrified, and meets plenty of other girls in the same situation from all walks of life. While there, every part of their lives are controlled by the adults who run the place. When Fern meets a librarian who gives her a book about witchcraft, she and her companions finally discover some agency and power that they can control. That power is dangerous though: it can take what it gives, and there's always a cost. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593548981?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The fantastical horror elements are uncharacteristically few and the pace occasionally drags, but Hendrix perfectly captures the girls’ youth and loss of innocence, as well as the power of their friendships." ### [*The Teeth of Dawn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250258786?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marina Lostetter (January 28th) Marina Lostetter closes out her *Five Penalties* series (preceded by [*The Helm of Midnight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250258748?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Cage of Dark Hours*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250258762?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which the theft of a magical artifact that unleashed a mythical killer and brought about a rebellion. Krona and her companions have survived the killer Louis Charbon and the Savior, and realize in order to free Arkensyre, they have to free some chained ancient gods and enlist them to their cause. ### [*Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250848338?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seanan McGuire (January 7th) Seanan McGuire's latest is the 10th installment of her Wayward Children series (which kicked off in 2016 with [*Every Heart a Doorway*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765385505?ref=andrewliptak.com)). This adventure follows Nadya was born missing an arm and was fine with that until her adopted parents fitted her with a prosthetic arm. She didn't like it: it felt wrong, like it wasn't *her.* Frustrated and wandering, she fell through a door into Belyrreka, the Land Beneath the Lake and discovered a water world filled with strange aquatic creatures, and discovers who she really is: a Drowned Girl. She finally feels at home, but it's still a dangerous place, and she'll have to fight to remain there. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250848338?ref=andrewliptak.com) "newcomers are sure to be sucked in, and though longtime readers of the series already know how Nadya’s story ends, they’ll enjoy seeing where it began." ### [*At the Fount of Creation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250908032?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tobi Ogundiran (January 28th) Tobi Ogundiran follows up last year's [*In the Shadow of the Fall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250907967?ref=andrewliptak.com)with *At the Fount of Creation*. In that first book, Ashâke grew up as an acolyte in a temple, awaiting the day that she'll be made a priest and will serve her order out in the world. Out of desperation, she tried to trap an orisha, and instead received a powerful vision that brought her to the attention of an ancient enemy that could destroy her world. In this concluding volume, Ashâke is carrying the spirits of the Orisha that remain after being decimated by the soul-stealing Godkillers their leader, and she's looking for allies to help her defeat a coming army. Over on Locus, Archita Mittra says that the book is a "thrilling conclusion" to the series, and that it's "an enjoy­able and engrossing book, filled with adventure and action sequences that unfold like a block­buster film, exploring the nature and relevance of divinity in an embittered world." ### [*Death of the Author*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391147?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor (January 14th) This is another one on my most anticipated books this year: I really like meta, books-about-stories novels and this looks like it fits in that category neatly. This book follows a woman named Zelu who finds her life turned upside down: she learns she's been fired in the middle of her sister's wedding, and her latest novel has been rejected from a publisher. She decides to write something completely different: a science fiction novel about a war between androids and AIs on a devastated Earth, *Rusted Robots*. When she finishes and publishes the book, it goes on to become a major bestseller, bringing her fame and attention that she never anticipated. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nnedi-okorafor/death-of-the-author/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Zelu’s story and the book-within-a-book echo each other, as characters in both narratives learn to overcome shame, reach forgiveness and self-acceptance, and commit to life-giving purpose; fundamentally, in both parts of the book, Okorafor explores what it means to be human." ### [*Dead Souls*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662507717?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Han Song, translated by Michael Berry (January 10th) Han Song finishes out the trilogy he began with [*Hospital*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542039468?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Exorcism*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542039505?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* about a man named Yang Wei, who woke up in mysterious hospital, from which he's been unable to escape before finding himself aged decades and in a geriatric ward on a massive Hospital ship. In this book, he's once again awoken in a hospital, trapped in an endless cycle of treatment, death, and resurrection. This time, he finds that the hospital has fallen into chaos as its patients revolt. It's so shocking that Yang Wei is beginning to question what is real and what is imaginary. ### [*A Conventional Boy : A Laundry Files Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357847?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charles Stross (January 7th) Charles Stross adds a new entry to his long-running [*Laundry Files* series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FLaundry%5FFiles?ref=andrewliptak.com). The books are a blend of horror tropes, following an IT guy-turned-field agent for a secretive government agency that deals with the supernatural. In this installment (number 13), Stross takes us back to 1984 to introduce us to Derek Reilly, a teenage dungeon master whose life is turned over when his house is raided by the government at the height of the satanic panic. Decades later, Derek is institutionalized at a deprograming camp for Elder God cultists. He's been cooperative, and has been running a D&D campaign by mail. When he learns about a local gaming convention, he wants to escape to check it out, only to find that there's actually a ritual at play designed to summon an evil god into our world, and it's up to him to stop it from happening. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250357847?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "this is urban fantasy with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and it reads a bit like Terry Pratchett trying his hand at Lovecraftian horror. The result will delight newcomers and longtime fans alike. ### [*We Lived on the Horizon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668049594?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erika Swyler (January 14th) The city of Bulwark is named for its walls that have held back a series of cataclysms, ruled by an AI that rewards sacrifice. A caste system has evolved over generations from the city's founders, known as the Sainted. Their numbers include Enita Malovis, who's enjoyed a luxurious life. She's coming to the end of that life, where she worked for decades as a bio-prosthetist, and to keep her legacy alive, has created a physical being called Nix, which contains all of her knowledge. While working on the project, a fellow Saint is murdered and the crime is covered up by the city's AI. Enita and Nix are soon drawn into a class war that could upend the life that they've known and the rigid structure that has kept the hidden underclasses in check. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/erika-swyler/we-lived-on-the-horizon/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The story transports and transforms, alchemizing a combination of mystery, romance, and science fiction into an impactful exploration of the importance of connection, the evolutionary nature of identity, and the inevitability of revolution. Affecting relationships and a sinuous, kaleidoscopic third-person narrative further define and develop the exquisitely rendered characters." ### *Murderbot Diaries* [*Vol 1.*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250389824?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Vol 2.*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250389831?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Vol 3*.](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250389848?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (January 7th) Martha Wells scored a huge hit with her *Murderbot Diaries* series a couple of years ago (*Wired* [recently ran an excellent profile](https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about her that you should read) and you'll see more of it in the nearish future: there's a [TV series in production with Apple TV Plus](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/). If you haven't picked these up yet, here's a good opportunity. The series is mainly novellas, with a pair of novels thrown in there, and Tordotcom is re-releasing them as omnibuses. Volume 1 contains *All Systems Red* and *Artificial Condition; Vol 2*. has *Rogue Protocol* and *Exit Strategy*, and Vol 3\. has *Fugitive Telemetry* and the novel *System Collapse.* (The first novel, [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229861?ref=andrewliptak.com), isn't included, and sits between *Vols. 2* and *3*.) It's a great series, and this is a good way to dig into it all at once. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-67.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) ### [*Hammajang Luck*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063430822?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by* Makana Yamamoto (January 14th) Edie is a criminal who was betrayed by a colleague and sent to prison on an icy prison planet. After eight years, the opportunity for an early parole arrives, and Edie is free, only to come face to face with the woman who betrayed them, Angel. She has an offer: one last job, another opportunity to take down a tech trillionaire that they attempted to take down last time. Arly Sorg [reviewed the book](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-hammajang-luck-by-makana-yamamoto/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *Lightspeed Magazine*, saying that "Yamamoto adds in the growth of challenging relationships and friendships, that sense of various kinds of family, punctuated by occasional humor. It’s a satisfying book, and far more nuanced than most heist stories, while still hitting the marks that readers expect. --- As always, thanks for reading. Please let me know what books in this list caught your eye, and what you've got on your to-read list. ### What I read in 2024 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-books-read-science-fiction-fantasy/ Last updated: 2025-01-02T15:35:44.000Z Now that the new year is upon us, I'm taking one last look back at the books of 2024: I've been keeping track of what I read on social media (chiefly on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/andrewliptak.com?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/)). I had a goal of 52 books to read this year, and came up short: I was only able to finish 42 before the end of the year, but that was better than last year, where I only got to 38\. That's okay though: I've spent less time stressing about hitting that number, and focusing more on the books that I'm enjoying. [My 10 favorite reads of 2024If there’s a thread that connects these reads, it’s the idea of power and how characters contend with it![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-70.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1554.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-best-books-2025/) Here are my lists from [2018](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2018/12/6/all-the-books-i-read-in-2018-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-history?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/what-i-read-in-2019-books-science-fiction-fantasy-history-reading?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2020/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2021-reading-list-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-books/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2022/), and [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2023/). Here's what I read: 1. *The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird* by Jack E. Davis 2. *The Mysteries* by Bill Watterson 3. *Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech* by Brian Merchant 4. *Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes from the 1900s to 1980s* by B. Dylan Hollis 5. *Locklands* by Robert Jackson Bennett 6. *The Tusks of Extinction* by Ray Nayler ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/)) 7. *The Art and Soul of Dune: Part 2* by Tanya LaPointe and Stefanie Broos 8. *Dune: Messiah* by Frank Herbert 9. *American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home* by Stephen Kurutz ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/american-flannel-steven-kurutz-textile-history-book-review/)) 10. *The Three-Body Problem* by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu 11. *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow 12. *System Collapse* by Martha Wells 13. *Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism* by Jeffrey Toobin 14. *Eruption* by Michael Crichton and James Patterson 15. *Soon I Will Be Invincible* by Austin Grossman 16. *When Among Crows* by Veronica Roth 17. *The Warm Hands of Ghosts* by Katherine Arden ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/)) 18. *Fight Me* by Austin Grossman ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/austin-grossman-fight-me-superheroes-book-review/)) 19. *The Bright Sword* by Lev Grossman ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-bright-sword-lev-grossman-king-arthur-fantasy-book-review/)) 20. *Untethered Sky* by Fonda Lee 21. *Moonbound* by Robin Sloan ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/robin-sloan-moonbound-sci-fi-book-review/)) 22. *Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again* by Shigeru Kayama, translated by Jeffrey Angles 23. *Nuclear War: A Scenario* by Annie Jacobsen ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/)) 24. *The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, an the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982* byChris Nashawaty 25. *The Mercy of Gods* by James S.A. Corey ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/)) 26. *Squire* by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas 27. *Navola* by Paolo Bacigalupi ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paolo-bacigalupi-navola-fantasy-book-review/)) 28. *Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster at the Edge of Space* by Adam Higginbotham ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/)) 29. *A Natural History of Empty Lots* by Christopher Brown (Review) 30. *Agony Hill* by Sarah Stewart Taylor 31. *American Scary: A History of Horror by Salem to Stephen King* by Jeremy Dauber ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/american-scary-jeremy-dauber-horror-history-book-review/)) 32. *Annihilation* by Jeff VanderMeer 33. *Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire* by Christopher Kempshall (Review) 34. *Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind* by Annalee Newitz 35. *S.Q.P.R.: A History of Ancient Rome* by Mary Beard 36. *Constituent Service* by John Scalzi 37. *The Mountain Crown* by Karin Lowachee 38. *Unexploded Remnants* by Elaine Gallaher 39. *Horror Movie* by Paul Tremblay 40. Livesuit by James S.A. Corey 41. *Pilgrim Machines* by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-book-review-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-pilgrim-machines/)) 42. *Old Man's War* by John Scalzi Now that we're a couple of days into 2025, it's time to reset the clock. Let's see if I can hit 52 reads in the next 12 months. What did you read this year? What books stuck with you, and what are your plans for this year? I've [listed the books I'm looking forward](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2025-anticipated-books-scalzi-okorafor-cosby-kuang/) to in 2025, and I'm hoping to actually spend more time thinking and writing about what I read this year. Stay tuned! ### Here are my most anticipated books of 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2025-anticipated-books-scalzi-okorafor-cosby-kuang/ Last updated: 2025-01-01T20:56:48.000Z We talk a lot about books here at Transfer Orbit, and this year, I've already been plotting out the next several months of book lists for you. Each year brings a ton of new books, and looking over the lists that I compiled for 2024, I included a total of 316 books. That's a lot! And while I select books based on what look interesting to me (and sometimes include more than just science fiction, fantasy, and horror books), there's always a smaller pile that I'm the most excited for, and accordingly, I'll round those up at the beginning of the year. (Here are my lists from [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/most-anticipated-sf-f-books-of-2020/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/my-most-anticipated-sf-f-reads-for-2021/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-anticipated-books-scalzi-darnielle-expanse-janelle-monae-sci-fi-fantasy/), [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-anticipated-books-2023/), and [2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/)) Looking back over those lists, there are a bunch that I did get to and did really enjoy, as well as a handful that looked excellent, but which I ultimately didn't like or finish. And there are plenty of others that I still haven't found the time to pick up that are still on my longer to-read list. Someday! Sometimes, I just need to be in the right mindset to get into a book. I write up this list and the others as a way to encourage people to look ahead to the coming year, and to think about what you're looking forward to. It's exciting to think about these reads coming up and the worlds that they'll introduce us to. I'd also encourage you to preorder those titles that you're excited for: preorders really help on the publishing side, because it provides them some indications of demand and excitement, and that always helps the author. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Here are 25 new SF/F books hitting stores in the coming year that I'm most excited to check out. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/january.jpg) ## January ### [***Motheater***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661795?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Linda H. Codega (January 21st)** In this debut novel from Linda H. Codega (formerly of *io9*), we're introduced to Bennie Mattox, who decides to throw everything aside to try and discover why miners working on Kire Mountain have been dying. While investigating, she discovers a half-drowned white woman and takes her in. The woman tells her she's called Motheater and can't remember her real name or how she got there. She's a witch, bound to the land, and has vowed to preserve the mountain. The unlikely pair now have the opportunity to change the town forever. ### [***Death of the Author***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391147?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Nnedi Okorafor (January 14th)** With books like [*Binti* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756416935?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Lagoon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481440882?ref=andrewliptak.com), Nnedi Okorafor has become one of those "must read" authors for me whenever I see that she's got a new book coming out. Her next looks like it's going to be an incredible read: it follows a woman named Zelu who finds her life turned upside down: she learns she's been fired in the middle of her sister's wedding, and her latest novel has been rejected from a publisher. She decides to write something completely different: a science fiction novel about a war between androids and AIs on a devastated Earth, *Rusted Robots*. When she finishes and publishes the book, it goes on to become a major bestseller, bringing her fame and attention that she never anticipated. I love these sorts of meta, books-about-stories like Gabriella Zevin's [*Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593466490?ref=andrewliptak.com) or Austin Grossman's [*You*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316198547?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* so this looks like it'll hit that sweet spot nicely. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/february.jpg) ## February ### [***The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538113?ref=andrewliptak.com) **edited by André M. Carrington (February 4th)** When [word of this book dropped last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/library-of-america-afrofuturist-black-fantastic-andre-carrington/), I was immediately intrigued: a new anthology of Afrofuturist stories, edited by André M. Carrington, who's an Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, and the author of [*Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780816678969?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). It looks like it'll be [packed with an outstanding](https://bsky.app/profile/andrecarrington.bsky.social/post/3leddczupy22v?ref=andrewliptak.com) Table of Contents, with stories from Nalo Hopkinson, P. Djéli Clark, N. K. Jemisin, Justina Ireland, Tochi Onyebuchi, Victor LaValle, Sofia Samatar, and many others. ### [***The Desert Talon***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837864027?ref=andrewliptak.com) **and** [***A Covenant of Ice***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837865130?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Karin Lowachee (February 11th/June 17th)** I read Karin Lowachee's latest book [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=andrewliptak.com) shortly after it came out and really enjoyed it: it's an engrossing story of colonization and tradition clashing against modernity. I'm eager to see where Lowachee takes the story. She'll round out the trilogy with *The Desert Talon* in February and *A Covenant of Ice* in June. [Revealing Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain CrownA Q&A with one of my favorite writers![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-48.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_-1-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/) ### [***Star Wars: The Mask of Fear***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723463?ref=andrewliptak.com) **Alexander Freed (February 25th)** I've largely fallen out of the habit of reading the latest *Star Wars* novel when they comes out, but this one looks like it'll break that streak. The first of a trilogy set during the early years of the Galactic Empire, this installment follows Mon Mothma as she navigates the halls of power in this oppressive new regime. She finds allies in the form of revolutionary Saw Gerrera and Senator Bail Organa, working out how to move forward to build a movement that could one day topple Emperor Palpatine and his forces. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-36.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA-2.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/march.jpg) ## March ### [***The River Has Roots***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250341082?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Amal El-Mohtar (March 4th)** Amal El-Mohtar's debut novel brings us to the town of Thistleford, which sits on the edge of Faerie. It's the home to a mysterious family who tends to and harvests enchanted trees, and they're bound by an ancient pact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. Two of the family's daughters, Esther and Ysabel, are the most devoted, and when Esther rejects a suiter from Faerie, it'll test the bond between both of their sisters and will put both of their lives at risk. ### [***The Martian Contingency***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250237040?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Mary Robinette Kowal (March 18th)** Some of my favorite near-future science fiction stories have been from Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series: [*The Calculating Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Fated Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765398949?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Relentless Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250236968?ref=andrewliptak.com). She's bringing the series to a close this year with *The Martian Contingency*, in which humanity is working to establish permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars. When Elma York heads out to Mars to aid with the construction of the planet's first colony, she realizes that something's a bit off: something has been hidden about the nature of the first expedition, and when they try and find details, they're stonewalled. Left unexposed, those secrets could have a devastating impact on the future of humanity. [Interview with Mary Robinette KowalA couple of years ago, Mary Robinette Kowal published a pair of books that utterly blew me away \[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review\] : the first two installments of her Lady Astronaut series: The Calculating Stars \[https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385\] and The Fated Sky \[https:![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-33.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_bda06a81-0101-4019-9254-d6a71e163c37_2448x2448.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-mary-robinette-kowal/) As a fun bonus, Kowal is releasing *Silent Spaces*, a collection of her Lady Astronaut stories in July after [successfully funding it via Kickstarter](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mary-robinette-kowal-lady-astronaut-silent-spaces-kickstarter/) ### [***The Buffalo Hunter Hunter***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668075081?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Stephen Graham Jones (March 18th)** Stephen Graham Jones has been steadily knocking books out of the park, such as [*The Only Good Indian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982136468?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*My Heart is a Chainsaw*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982137649?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* His next is *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, a historical horror novel set in 1912, following a Lutheran priest who took down the story of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man who haunted a reservation looking for revenge. ### [***Transmentation Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212185998?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Darkly Lem (March 18th)** One of the projects that I've been fascinated by is [Many Worlds](https://www.manyworldsforum.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a collaborative writing group that includes Cadwell Turnbull. It inspired a neat anthology, [*Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737718437?ref=andrewliptak.com), and members of the writing group have come together as "Darkly Lem" to produce a new novel: *Transmentation Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds*. Over millennia and across thousands of worlds, societies of interdimensional travelers and explorers have worked to explore the cosmos. When a training mission goes wrong, two such societies are brought into conflict: intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade of the Burel Hird group is blamed for an assassination attempt, while the Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara also find themselves swept up in it. Their involvement sets into motion plans that could ripple across the Many Worlds. ### [***The Sea Eternal***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316391696?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Emery Robin (March 11th)** This book captured my attention from the cover alone: it's the sequel to 2022's [*The Stars Undying*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316391498?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* about a princess who's lost everything after her twin sister claimed the throne and control of a system that contains the soul of their planet's god. She allies herself with the Empire of Ceiao and a dangerous commander named , Matheus Ceirran to try and retake the planet, which brings its own complications. In this sequel, Ceirran is dead, and his captain Anita has been hunting down those responsible. When her quest for vengeance brings her across the borders into a neighboring empire, she discovers a secret that could upend the fragile balance within the galaxy. ### [***When the Moon Hits Your Eye***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by John Scalzi (March 25th)** I'm a big fan of John Scalzi's books, ranging from his more serious space operas like *Old Man's War* or *The Collapsing Empire*, to his funnier reads like *Kaiju Preservation Society*. This new one looks like it'll be a really interesting read: the moon turns into cheese and humanity has to figure out what to do. While it's a funny premise, what has my interest piqued is the fact that each chapter is something different: a series of shorter episodes that are loosely tied together into a bigger narrative. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-34.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5405.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) ### ***Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont* edited by Garrett M. Graff (March)** This one's a little self-serving, because it's a project that I've been working on with my day job, but it's one that I'm eager to read. A couple of years ago, we stood up a big project to document the impact that COVID-19 had on the state of Vermont, collecting more than 100 oral histories from folks all over the state. As part of the project, we'll be releasing a book edited by Pulitzer finalist and Vermont author Garrett M. Graff, which will pull those oral histories into a narrative. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/april.jpg) ## April ### [***A Drop of Corruption***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723821?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Robert Jackson Bennett (April 1st)** Robert Jackson Bennett kicked off a new trilogy in 2024 with [*The Tainted Cup*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820716?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which has been high on my to-read list. I need to get to it soon: it's about the investigation into the death of an Imperial official by an eccentric investigator named Ana Dolabra at the edges of a fantastical empire. In this follow-up, a treasury officer has seemingly disappeared from a locked and guarded room. Ana and her assistant Dinios Kol soon discover that they're dealing with a murder perpetrated by someone anticipating Ana's moves, and that they have plans to target a high-security facility that holds secrets vital to the Empire's survival. ### [***Where the Axe Is Buried***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374615369?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Ray Nayler (April 1st)** With books like [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855527?ref=andrewliptak.com), Ray Nayler has become one of my favorite authors in recent years looking at what the near future has in store for us. His next book looks wild: under an oppressive Federation, there's an assassination attempt in the works to topple and replace the President, who's been holding onto power by downloading his mind into new bodies. At the same time in Western Europe, people have given over power to AI Prime Ministers, and one of these minds has begun malfunctioning, kicking off a chain of events that could spell trouble for the world. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-35.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/june.jpg) ## June ### [***The Folded Sky***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668078112?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Elizabeth Bear (June 17th)** I [really dug](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/elizabeth-bear-ancestral-night-book-review-space-opera) Elizabeth Bear's space opera novel [*Ancestral Night*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534402980?ref=andrewliptak.com)when I read it back in 2019, and I'm looking forward to a new installment of the series (there's one that I missed, [*Machine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534403024?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I need to get to), *The Folding Sky*. In this adventure, Dr. Sunya Song heads out on a journey across the Milkyway to reach an AI known as Baomind, which could hold the key to humanity's survival in a hostile universe. The intelligence is orbiting a dying red star, and it's up to her and her team to try and retrieve data from it before it's too late. As they head out, the research station and its ships are attacked by pirates who believe that the Baomind needs to be destroyed. This has everything I love: ancient technologies, pirates, space adventures, and historians saving the day. ### [***King of Ashes***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250832061?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by S.A. Cosby (June 10th)** S.A. Cosby blew me away with books like [*Blacktop Wasteland*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252692?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Razorblade Tears*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252715?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*All The Sinners Bleed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=andrewliptak.com)and I'm really looking forward to his next, *King of Ashes.* In this new crime thriller, Roman Carruthers is called home after his father is involved in a car accident, only to discover that his brother Dante is in debt to criminals and his sister barely holding everything together. He discovers that the crash was no accident and that Dante's troubles have brought their family into danger, and it's up to Roman to try and get his brother out of the deal. As he begins to figure out a way forward, those criminals soon realize that he's not the pushover they think he is, and that he'll do anything to protect his loved ones. If this is anything like his prior novels, Cosby has a real treat for us. [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668078112?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [***Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250320520?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by V.E. Schwab (June 10th)** V.E. Schwab has released a string of excellent fantasy novels recent years, such as [*A Darker Shade of Magic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250891211?ref=andrewliptak.com) (and its sequels) and [*The Invisible Life of Addie Larue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765387578?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Her next looks like a compelling (if somewhat cryptic) read, following three young women living in Santo Domingo de la Calzada in 1532, London in 1837, and Boston in 2019\. ### [***Shroud***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316579025?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 3rd)** Adrian Tchaikovsky has a new book about aliens and first contact, something that he's well-versed at by this point. An expedition arrives at a distant solar system, where it finds a moon humming with radio activity. It isn't habitable to humans: its gravity is too high and atmosphere is toxic for us, but it seems like a promising world for exploration. When an accident forces two members of the expedition's crew, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne, down in an escape vehicle, they have to make their way across the hostile environment to escape, learning about the world's unnerving alien species as they do so. [Spiders! In! Space!Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-58.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/49140346_2118732788440841_4967038534323011584_n.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-children-of-time/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/july.jpg) ## July ### [***The Bewitching***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593874325?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 15th)** Silvia Moreno-Garcia turns her attention to witches in her next novel, which follows Minerva, a graduate student studying the history of horror literature, and who's been researching the life of an obscure author named Beatrice Tremblay. In the midst of her work, she discovers that Tremblay's best-known novel, *The Vanishing*, was inspired by a true story: the author's encounter with a strange and otherworldly roommate at the same university she's now studying at. As Minerva delves into the manuscript, she begins to sense the same presence haunting the school, and discovers that there might be a personal connection to her family. ## August ### [***Lessons in Magic and Disaster***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867322?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19th)** In this new fantasy from Charlie Jane Anders, Jamie seems like she's your usual New England academic: she's got her dissertation underway, is in a stable relationship, and is dealing with a bit of generational trauma. She's also a witch. Her mother Serena has been hiding from the world after the death of her wife and abrupt disintegration of her career. Jamie has been trying to help, teaching her spells from a centuries-old spell book, and is trying to figure out what happened to her mother and how secrets from her past are coming back to haunt her before both of their lives are completely upended. ### [***The Possession of Alba Díaz***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593641071?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Isabel Cañas (August 19th)** Isabel Cañas came to my attention a couple of years ago when she released [*Vampires of El Norte*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593436738?ref=andrewliptak.com), an excellent horror / romance set during the Mexican-American war in the 1800s. Her next brings us to 1762 Mexico as a plague devastates the city of Zacatecas. Alba flees with her parents and fiancé to her family's mine to wait it out, but once there, she begins experiencing hallucinations, convulsions, and sleepwalking: she's possessed by something uncanny. At the same time, her fiancé's cousin Elías has escaped to the New World ahead of a troubled past, and begins noticing that there's something wrong with Alba. The two become entangled in a string of secrets and conspiracies that could spell their doom. [Monsters on the western frontierIsabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte is the perfect spooky read this October![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-37.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3333.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vampires-of-el-norte-isabel-canas-horror-book-review/) ### [***Katabasis***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021471?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by R.F. Kuang (August 25th)** R.F. Kuang has released a string of excellent books in recent years: I particularly liked [*Babel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021433?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Yellowface*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250833?ref=andrewliptak.com). Her next looks intriguing: Alice Law has been working on a singular goal her whole life: to become a master magician, sacrificing anything that stood in the way of working with Cambridge Professor Jacob Grimes, the greatest magician in the world. When he dies in a mysterious accident (that she might have caused), he's sent down to Hell, and she sets off after him, hoping to score a recommendation that will secure her future. She's accompanied by her rival, Peter Murdoch, and together, the pair need to rely on their knowledge of stories like Orpheus and Dante, whatever chalk they can carry with them to save someone they don't even particularly like. ### [***Automatic Noodle***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250357465?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Annalee Newitz (August 5th)** I'm always excited for a new Annalee Newitz book: not only was I someone who worked with them at *io9*, but their fiction and nonfiction books alike are always interesting. Their latest looks particularly good: it's about a group of food service bots in a war-torn San Francisco that have taken over their own delivery app account and have begun selling their own, high-quality noodles to customers. Standing in their way? Someone who's been review bombing their restaurant, which threatens to destroy everything they've worked to build. This reminds me a little of their short story "[When Robot and Crow Saved Saint Louis](https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/annalee-newitz-short-story-when-robot-and-crow-saved-east-st-louis.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)," which you should read right away. [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-27.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1166.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) ## September ### *The Shattering Peace* by John Scalzi (September 16th) The 7th installment of Scalzi's *Old Man's War* series comes as the [first novel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com) turns 20 years old in 2025\. Set after the events of [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com), where humanity had figured out a peace settlement with the Conclave, a consortium of alien civilizations that had been competing for galactic real estate. A decade into that peace, a new threat has emerged: the Consu, an advanced civilization (who we first encountered in *Old Man's War*) have descended into a jarring civil war, a conflict that threatens to drag the Colonial Union, Earth, and the Conclave into it. A former Colonial Union diplomat, Gretchen Trujillio (a familiar name from [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com)), is called in to assist with a diplomatic mission that could forever upend the balance of power in the galaxy. ## Beyond Publishing schedules get a little more slippery the further out you go, and beyond September, there'll be some additional books that will pop up with more exact release dates and covers later this spring or early summer. Some of the books that I'm anticipating arriving later this year that should be worth checking out? *King Sorrow*, a new novel from Joe Hill (and his first novel since 2016!). There's also *All That We See or Seem,* an AI thriller from Ken Liu that's due out in October),Travis Baldree's next cozy fantasy [*Brigands & Breadknives*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250334886?ref=andrewliptak.com) (November 11th), a new installment of Max Gladstone's *Craft Wars* series, and a second installment of James S.A. Corey's *Captives War* series. --- It's always interesting to look at these lists now and then later in the year: will I get to all of them? Probably not, but I'm looking forward to the possibilities that these books bring with them! Thanks for reading: what books caught your eye that are coming up? ### My 10 favorite reads of 2024 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-best-books-2025/ Last updated: 2024-12-31T16:06:27.000Z 2024 has been an interesting year: lots of good things, some bad, some meh, but always accompanied by books. They make good companions, and it's one of those activities that I really enjoy: sinking into adventures and new worlds to learn and to escape. My goal every year is to hit 52 books. I'm going to miss it this year (I'm currently at 42 books, which still isn't bad). Inevitably, there are some books that I enjoyed more than others, and from that pile, I've rounded up the books that I liked the most. This isn't a "best of the year" list: I don't know that I've read widely enough to really put something like that together – I have a big stack of books from this year in my office that I'd very much like to get to, and just haven't had the time yet to dig into them. Looking over this list, it's a little different than ones that I've had in years past: it's dominated by male authors, which surprised me a little – I'm always trying to expand my reading tastes a bit. That's not to say that I didn't read books by women, trans authors, and authors of color, but the ones that I gravitated toward just happened to be this makeup this year. We'll see what 2025 brings – and if any of the books that I end up reading in the coming months from 2024 might have ended up on this list had I gotten to them earlier. If there was one theme that I could extract from this stack of books, it's that most of them are about power, whether that's superpowers or political / interpersonal powers. They're predominantly about characters slamming into larger institutions or figures, and trying to find a way to survive or cope with the environment that surrounds them. In some cases, that's an alien invasion or a coup. In others, it's the political power structures around an organization or government, or in some cases, around individuals who hold the fate of characters in their hands. These aren't hard-and-fast boundaries that apply evenly across these books, but it does seem to be a thread that stretches across these various works in some form or another. I missed rounding up my favorite reads of 2023, but here are the lists for [2019](https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/13/21012122/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-2019?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [2020](https://www.polygon.com/22220762/best-books-2020-sci-fi-fantasy?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-2021/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-best-sci-fi-fantasy-books/). As always, you can find more books listed out on the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. Here are my 10 favorite books that I read this year: ### [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katherine Arden There's a phrase attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman that best describes warfare: "war is hell." That thought is at the center of Katherine Arden's latest novel, *The Warm Hands of Ghosts*, about a soldier trapped on the front lines of World War I by a horrifying presence, and his sister, who's doing everything in her power to try and find him. This is an engrossing, emotional read, one that not only delves into the supernatural, but pokes at the horrifying nature of warfare and its impact on those who wage it. [The memories that haunt the battlefieldsKatherine Arden’s novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of wartime trauma and memories, and of finding hope in darkness![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-64.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7838.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*Navola*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593535059?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Paolo Bacigalupi Paolo Bacigalupi's latest novel is a far cry from his novels about the effects of climate change: it's a fantasy set in a world inspired by the Italian Renaissance. Like those other books, it's a novel about power and the lengths that people go to hold onto it. It's a slow, rewarding burn of a novel, one that carefully sets up its characters and pushes them to their breaking points. [Review: Paolo Bacigalupi’s NavolaPaolo Bacigalupi’s fantasy novel Navola is a devastating coming-of-age story about the pitfalls of power and loyalty![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-63.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/458561592_1049000987226567_4564933445662445380_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paolo-bacigalupi-navola-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*A Natural History of Empty Lots*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643263366?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Brown I've long been a fan of Christopher Brown's newsletter, [*Field Notes*](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (and his novels!) and was thrilled to see it used as the basis for a longer work. This is an astonishing read: one that blends memoir and observations about the state of the world and our place in it. Part urban exploration, part self-discovery, and part call to action, it's a book about a world in flux, our hand in the destruction, and a meditation on the beauty of the natural world that surrounds us. ### [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey [With the *Expanse* novels](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/), James S.A. Corey plotted an epic story of humanity taking our first steps into the cosmos, and trying to not fuck it up too badly. Their latest, *The Mercy of Gods* is the start to a new series, *The Captives War,* which follows humanity after it's attacked by the Carryx, an alien empire that's devoted itself to conquering other worlds. Their characters have to figure out how to survive under this new regime, compromising their values before they lose who they really are. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-62.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229-4.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) ### [*Fight Me*](https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Me-Austin-Grossman/dp/0241555949?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Austin Grossman One of my favorite books of all time is Austin Grossman's [*Soon I Will Be Invincible*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307279866?ref=andrewliptak.com), a superhero novel ahead of the curve when it came to portraying superpowers in a realistic setting. Years later, Grossman has produced an excellent addition to that world, following a quartet of young super-powered heroes who've been reunited after a tragedy – a reunion that could tear them apart once again. It's a fantastic meditation on power and the responsibility that comes with it. [Review: Austin Grossman’s superhero novel Fight MeAustin Grossman’s Fight Me is an engrossing exploration of superheroes, power, and morality alongside a kickass time travel plot![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-61.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_7919.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/austin-grossman-fight-me-superheroes-book-review/) ### [*The Bright Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780735224049?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lev Grossman Lev Grossman's *Magicians* trilogy hit me at just the right time when they first came out: each fantastic deconstructions of some durable fantasy tropes. His latest is an astonishing book: a retelling of the legend of King Arthur, set during the aftermath of his demise. Grossman follows a knight named Collum as he and the rest of the Round Table try and figure out a path forward in a ruined England, touching on themes of transition, transformation, and temptation. It's one of those books where you sense that an author has really leveled up. [Review: Lev Grossman’s The Bright SwordLev Grossman’s The Bright Sword is an astonishing, thrilling take on Arthurian legend that explores the nature of power, transitions, and uncertainty in a troubled world![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-60.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8122.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-bright-sword-lev-grossman-king-arthur-fantasy-book-review/) ### [*Challenger*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982176617?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Adam Higginbotham I was too young to remember the Challenger disaster, but it's one of those incidents that's shaped the scientific and space communities in the decades since. Adam Higginbotham – who also wrote the excellent [*Midnight in Chernobyl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501134630?ref=andrewliptak.com) *–* explores the complicated story of how the space shuttle met its demise, and examines the underlying factors that made disaster inevitable. [Review: Challenger by Adam HigginbothamAdam Higginbotham’s Challenger is an engrossing overview of the failures that led to the 1986 space shuttle accident.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-59.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0631-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/) ### [*Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744098822?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kempshall Is there a book that was better tailored for my interests, military history and *Star Wars*? I don't think so: Chris Kempshall's book is a fascinating look at the story of the franchise through the eyes of an in-universe historian who's trying to convey how the galaxy fell into totalitarianism and a devastating civil war. This is a book that takes all of the disparate stories across film, television, print, and games and explores the nature of the story with a wide lens, driving home the underlying themes of fascism, corruption, and compliance – themes that feel all too relevant here on Earth. ### [*Moonbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374610609?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robin Sloan The second Arthurian-inspired book that I picked up this year, Robin Sloan's *Moonbound* is an kaleidoscope of optimism. We follow a boy as he embarks on a quest to escape from his tiny rural village and the malevolent wizard that rules it, and enters a vivid world that's been transformed by climate change and advanced technologies, all while exploring the nature of intelligence and the stories that shape our lives. [Sufficiently advanced technologyRobin Sloan’s Moonbound is an astonishing, gripping, and imaginative read![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-66.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8307.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/robin-sloan-moonbound-sci-fi-book-review/) ### [*Pilgrim Machines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798338880302?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne What do we hope to find when we journey out into the cosmos? Treasure, in the form of raw materials? Real estate for an expanding population? Adventure and thrills? In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's sublime novel *Pilgrim Machines*, we're taken on a journey into the depths of space as we follow a starship seeking all of those things, but which ends up on a path of enlightenment for itself and for humanity. [Sci-fi book review: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s Pilgrim MachinesYudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel Pilgrim Machines is a everything I think of when I try and imagine what science fiction can and should be: an optimistic and beautiful journey![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-68.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1455-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-book-review-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-pilgrim-machines/) --- Thanks for reading. Which of these did you read, and thinking back on your own year of reading, what were the books that resonated with you the most? ### Sailing off the edge of the map URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-book-review-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-pilgrim-machines/ Last updated: 2024-12-30T18:32:59.000Z One of the most interesting novels that I've read in recent years is Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's 2020 novel [*The Salvage Crew*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781949890709?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which the crew of a spaceship, along with their AI overseer are dispatched to a distant planet called Urmahon Beta. They're tasked with stripping an ancient, crashed UN starship of any useful parts. Complications ensue: the planet is inhabited by hostile creatures and another salvage crew shows up with some ill intentions. The book starts off as the sort of run-of-the-mill space adventure that I really like: starship, crew, adventures, go. Wijeratne's narrator is Amber Rose, a ship AI with a predisposition toward writing poetry and musing about the world, and is annoyed by the humans under its watch as they struggle to complete their mission on the planet. But over the course of the story, Wijeratne weaves in some threads that touch on deeper ideas about the nature of intelligence and sentience, and as the crew makes an incredible discovery, he opens the aperture of his world to reveal a profound intelligence floating out in the cosmos: we're not alone, and there's a lot for us to learn from our interstellar neighbors. For his followup [*Pilgrim Machines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798338880302?ref=andrewliptak.com), Wijeratne pulls on those threads, exploring the tantalizing thought experiment of humanity's place in the universe and how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. Humanity is coming to terms with the discovery of Beacon, this super-intelligence that's thrown us a lifeline, and we're introduced to a new ship's intelligence: *Blue Cherry Blossom 3110*, "one of the largest and most storied commercial long-haul cargo ships offered by Planetary Crusade Services." Like Amber Rose, BCB was a person once, uploaded and used as the basis for the AI that controls the massive ship. It's made its life – career? – hauling cargo and passengers on the long distances between Earth's extra-solar colonies. Beacon had provided Amber Rose with an interstellar map and some directions for some advanced technologies. It's a bit of a test: a gift from an advanced species and an invitation for humanity to not just expand further into space, but to go on an adventure. After BCB installs the right drives and figures out the maps, it sets off with its crew into the depths of space, first with jumps that take it dozens of lightyears into the galaxy, and then even further and further. We follow BCB and its crew as they sail into the cosmos, far off the edges of the maps as they explore the depths of space, eventually encountering an alien ship they dub "The Stranger", which appears to extremely advanced, technologically. It invites them to follow, and they do. *Pilgrim Machines* is a joy to read: Wijeratne weaves in scientific and philosophical concepts as BCB and its crew endure the long journey into space. This is space opera on a galactic scale, taking in the scenery of nebulas and the remnants of supernovae, its crew members sitting on the outer hull to take in things humanity has never seen before. They're transformed by the experience: BCB learns and grows as it figures out how to communicate with The Stranger, thinking over our place in the cosmos as it gets further and further from home, and as they all encounter other strangers. There are spectacular scenes of ancient, ruined planets, interstellar graveyards, and immense ships and civilizations as we pass through the cosmos, a rich feast for our eyes and imaginations. Their destination is the heart of the galaxy where an ancient alien presence lies, waiting and observing the state of the galaxy as time flows past. The further BCB travels from its home, it begins to recognize how small our affairs are, and that the commercial and political concerns it was once part of are irrelevant when you take in the larger picture. By heading off the edge of the map, we find that the world in which we exist is endless; beautiful and terrible all at once, and that if there's any meaning in our existence, it's not likely the amount of capital that we amass in our lifetimes. A journey of learning and growing and transcending to higher levels of understanding is rewarding, and few species, it seems, are able to undertake such a journey. As a genre, science fiction as a genre has long played with ideas of transcendence and superintelligence. H.G. Wells' stoked our fears of alien life in the opening lines of [*The War of the Worlds*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36?ref=andrewliptak.com) ("No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s...") to Olaf Stapledon's *Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future* to Arthur C. Clarke's *Childhood's End* and *2001: A Space Odyssey.* Wijeratne's well aware of this lineage (he sprinkles references to the science fiction canon throughout the book) and this journey provides his own spin on this idea: that the cosmos is vast and full of wonder, and that sometimes, we undertake these journeys as a form of faith that there are larger things than we can comprehend. It's by undertaking these pilgrimages and leaving behind part of ourselves that we can full comprehend. One thought that Wijeratne plays with is the "[Ship of Theseus paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship%5Fof%5FTheseus?ref=andrewliptak.com)" – if a ship sets out on a journey and slowly replaces each piece until none of the original remain, is it still the same ship? One of the superintelligences that BCB encounters laughs it off, noting that the idea doesn't take time into consideration – we're always changing and evolving, even if all the parts remain the same. As such, *Pilgrim Machines* is a journey about enlightenment, about discovery for the sake of discovery and transcendence for the sake of becoming better aware of our existence. It's everything I think of when I try and imagine what science fiction can and should be: an optimistic and beautiful journey into the cosmos that tells us something about ourselves. ### Sufficiently advanced technology URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/robin-sloan-moonbound-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-12-28T18:52:03.000Z The idea of the *quest* is something that feels firmly embedded in genre fiction. It's an easy tool for an author to grab for a story: a task for their characters that often takes them on a challenging journey to accomplish some sort of task. The best quests aren't really about what the characters are trying to find; they end up being the ones where they discover something intrinsically important to who they are – and by extension, imparts us with some new understanding of the world and the human condition. One of the best quests that I embarked on this year came through Robin Sloan's latest novel, [*Moonbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374610609?ref=andrewliptak.com), a rollicking journey set in the very distant future that blends Arthurian legend and post-humanism to imagine a spectacular adventure that takes a boy from his remote village into a wider, stranger world. Sloan introduces us to a fascinating world 11,000 years in the future. Earth has been utterly transformed: a long-ago battle with artificial intelligences known as Dragons has enveloped the world in an impenetrable sky. Life on the surface has regressed to a sort of feudalism, shaped by the after-effects of climate change in the 20th century and the transformation of the human race into something stranger. Narrated by an artificial intelligence, we follow the journey of a 12-year-old-boy named Ariel de la Sauvage, who's grown up in a feudal village in the countryside ruled by a wizard named Malory. The wizard tasks Ariel with recovering the legendary sword Excalibur. Ariel ventures out beyond his home and encounters something unexpected: a pod with the preserved body of Altissa Praxa, this fungus-based AI chronicler, and a *sword* \- a weapon that's decidedly not Excalibur. Angering the wizard, Ariel flees along with the AI chronicler and the sword, discovering that the outside world is far stranger than he ever could have imagined. We encounter intelligent beavers, robots, fungi, and more as Ariel sets to solve his problems by activating a beacon to call down an army from space, only to be greeted with a girl named Durga. She had been trained by humans long ago to take on the dragons in orbit, and she'll help him if he finds a way to help her. This is an astonishing, gripping, and imaginative read as Sloan carries us over this radically transformed landscape. As Ariel undertakes this mammoth task of trying to figure out what to do about Malory, Sloan feeds us a wonderful meditation that touches on the nature of intelligence and storytelling; how we use myths and legends to try and make sense of a world that we don't fully understand. Arthur C. Clarke's famous [adage](https://www.newscientist.com/definition/clarkes-three-laws/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" came readily to mind while I read this book: a world where technology has advanced in so many strange directions, it's largely gone beyond what they – and us readers – can really comprehend. There are strange distributed intelligences and advanced artificial intelligences embedded throughout the landscape that we meet along the way, and as we follow our heroes, another of Clarke's saying comes to mind: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Ariel's journey across the land on his quest takes him from his small world of the possible and into directions that vastly expand his understanding of the world around him. As we come toward the end and encounter the dragons he's after, Sloan's showing us that the quest isn't necessarily a search for an object: it's the knowledge and wisdom that we pick up along the way that's the ultimate goal. *Moonbound* has been on my mind ever since I finished it earlier this year: it's a brilliantly-constructed meditation on the nature of storytelling and our existence in this strange world that we inhabit. ### Power play URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/paolo-bacigalupi-navola-fantasy-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-12-12T19:17:28.000Z Over the last couple of years, I've become fascinated by the role that power plays in fiction. Sometimes, that's on a geopolitical (stellarpolitical?) stage, where we watch as political structures maneuver their way around the chess board; on the human level, where interpersonal relationships and the resources they draw on clash against one another; or financially, where economic disparities squeezes out conflict between classes. I'm convinced that stories like George R.R. Martin's [*A Song of Ice and Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345535566?ref=andrewliptak.com) or Susanna Clarke's [*Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781526681553?ref=andrewliptak.com)endure not just for their fantastical trappings and characters, but because they're exploring the relationship of people to the various power structures that exist in their worlds. Paolo Bacigalupi's fantasy novel, [*Navola*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593535059?ref=andrewliptak.com), brims with this mindset: a dense, intricate exploration of a merchant family's grip on power and how quickly it can unravel. Bacigalupi is probably best known for his near future thrillers like [*The Windup Girl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597808217?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*The Water Knife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780804171533?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which present bleak, climate change-infused futures for the world and the desperate fights over resources that follow. He's [noted that exploring those apocalyptic futures took its toll](https://www.cpr.org/2024/07/14/interview-paolo-bacigalupi-new-book-navola/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and when the opportunity came to visit Italy and learn Italian, he jumped at the chance for a change in scenery. *Navola* grew out of that experience, and while it's a novel wrapped in the trappings of a historical novel with some fantastical elements, there's still plenty that carries over. If *The Windup Girl* and *The Water Knife* are solid arguments against corporate greed and abuse of power, Bacigalupi continues many of those arguments in *Navola*, just in another set of clothes. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The book is set in the city of Navola, a Mediterranean-inspired society where the di Regulai family has carved out a profitable niche as merchant bankers. Through generations, they've worked to stretch their reach across the known world, financing corporations, merchants, and governments, and in doing so, extending their political influence just as far. We're introduced to the family's heir, Davico, a teenager being groomed to eventually take over the family business. Like any kid, he'd rather be hanging out with his friends in the countryside, playing with his dog, or sneaking glimpses of the pornographic sketches in his father's vast library. His father has plans for him and his future, and Davico is put to work studying the ins and outs of his family's business. His training goes far beyond memorizing figures and the nature of the goods that travel across the world: he has to begin to learn how to parse the relationships that he'll be engaged with, and the intricacies of mercantile intentions and diplomacy. Complications soon arise. As his father plots out the next phase of the family business, Davico chafes at his training and the restrictions and responsibilities that this world puts on him. He becomes infatuated with his adopted sister, Celia di Balcosi (the last member of a family who the di Regulai family destroyed), who herself is being groomed to serve the family's needs through an arranged marriage to a rival family. He's not well suited for this mindset: he's fascinated by sex and passion, but is ill-equipped to understand how these can be used as means to an end. As Davico's feelings grow and tensions in his world come to light, he's pushed to brutal and unthinkable limits that will forever transform him and the world that surrounds him. We've experienced a wealth of these sorts of dense, corporate thrillers in recent years: look no further than TV shows like *Succession* or *Game of Thrones*, where their cast of characters fight tooth and nail at the chance of attaining power for themselves. *Navola* feels as through it's a story in that vein, but with a reluctant protagonist who doesn't realize until it's too late that he's not quite out for the sort of court intrigue and backstabbing politics that are coming for him. He's saved only by chance by a fantastical object owned by his father: a fossilized dragon's eye that he forms a bond with that eventually gives him the insight and will to fight for his life. This is a slow burn of a novel: a densely-plotted and rich book that begs to be read deliberately and carefully, carrying the reader along as we sink into Davico's world and begin to realize just how dangerous it is. *Navola* is a masterclass in pacing as the we see the layers of characters and the tenuous bonds that hold them together pile up. Bacigalupi has never shied away from horrific things happening to his characters, and when Davico's eventual downfall comes with a horrific personal cost, it pays off handsomely, hammering home the lesson that in this mercantile world, there is nobody that you can trust. But this isn't entirely an exercise in masochism: Bacugalupi brings Davico to the absolute breaking point, before reshaping him from those shattered pieces. He slowly becomes the person that he needed to become in order to survive, and by the end of the novel, it's brought him to a point where he's ready to take on the world. *Navola* is a coming-of-age story with a devastating learning curve as Davico's comfortable and familiar life comes apart like the collapse of a earthen dam; first with a gradual trickle before a violent collapse. It's a hard and cynical lesson for all involved, but it's one that this hyper-capitalistic world has brought to their doorstep whether they were ready for it or not. Meeting that challenge means shedding every part of that comfortable life, no matter what the cost. ### Sprayed edges, unique covers, and ribbons: deluxe book editions are on the rise URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-publishing-sprayed-edges-reading-booktok-booksgram/ Last updated: 2025-10-10T13:12:04.000Z When I stopped by my local Barnes & Noble earlier this year, I encountered a new display: a tall set of shelves were loaded down with books, most of which had their spines facing in, rather than out. Where I'd expected to see the white paper facing me, I instead saw a riot of colorful designs: the edges of the pages printed with various colors and shapes. While readers and collectors alike have long gravitated towards special or limited releases from an array of specialty publishers such as [Centipede Press](https://www.centipedepress.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [The Folio Society](https://www.foliosociety.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), or [Subterranean Press](https://subterraneanpress.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), larger publishers have increasingly begun to turn toward releasing editions of anticipated new and classic books, often with extra features such as high-quality paper, bindings, and slipcases, additional artwork, endpapers, that makes these books stand out on a shelf This effort coincides with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which allows book collectors, readers, and reviewers to show off their latest acquisitions to their followers. Their rise and growing popularity are indications of an industry adapting to a new generation of internet-savvy readers and the stubborn allure of beautiful, physical objects in an age dominated by digital counterparts. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Decades into the onslaught of eBooks brought on by the likes of companies like Amazon and Apple, the physical printed book still holds considerable appeal for readers. It's a technology that's been refined over the centuries, distilled by market requirements and low margins into a form that stubbornly holds off [the attempts from tech bros](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/26/writers-condemn-startups-plans-to-publish-8000-books-next-year-using-ai-spines-artificial-intelligence?ref=andrewliptak.com) to fundamentally change or improve upon it. Pages of paper glued and sewn together still have their place in homes, offices, bags, planes, and everywhere in between. But while the underlying form of a book hasn't changed that much, good design is an essential part of the packaging. A stellar cover can make a book stand out and entice a reader to pick it out from the lineup on a shelf, while a crappy one can mean quick relegation to a remainders pile. And collectors might opt to shell out some extra cash for an edition that goes above and beyond what you'd typically find at on bookstore shelves. Bookbinders and publishers have long gilded book edges with gold or paint as a means to [protect the paper from acidification](https://multimindpublishing.com/2024/06/16/getting-sprayed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) over time, while specialty publishers have produced their own editions of books for decades. [Judging the coversGeorge R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is getting some new covers, and they’re a good example of the importance of striking art and the limits of minimalism design![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-1.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/ASOIF.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/) For some readers, a book isn't just its contents: it's an object that signals a lifestyle, a fixture in the home to show off in one's social media presence or as a [zoom background](https://x.com/ratemyskyperoom?lang=en&ref=andrewliptak.com). Publishers have begun to recognize that it's these extra features, such as special endpapers, sprayed edges (sometimes called spredges), bookmark ribbons, and special or one-off covers, along with additional content like bonus scenes, introductions, or author essays, that can be used as a tool to market a book and build hype for an author's new release or for authors to reward their existing fanbase. Increasingly, publishers and specialty subscription companies are leaning into special and collectors editions as ways to bring out limited editions of titles for the dedicated fans who want something that goes above and beyond what they can usually find in a store. While companies like [Book of the Month](https://www.bookofthemonth.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and The Folio Society have been sending books to subscribers for decades, a new crop of publishers are honing on on those groups of readers, enticing them with monthly deliveries of special copies with those extra bells and whistles. These specialty publishers, such as [The Broken Binding](https://www.thebrokenbinding.co.uk/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Owlcrate](https://www.owlcrate.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Fairyloot](https://fairyloot.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Illumicrate](https://www.illumicrate.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), generally offer a subscription model where customers receive a themed box with a book, sometimes with additional perks accompanying it. These subscription services have been able to carve out a business with a combination of special and limited edition covers and artwork, and perks that include everything from scented candles to mugs to bags, and more. They also typically offer up their limited editions directly to readers through their storefronts. [Tori Hart](https://www.instagram.com/torih%5Freads/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a fellow book reviewer (and my former boss at the Vermont Historical Society) noted that she's seen a rise in these sorts of special editions in recent years. "There's been a huge increase in the number of book boxes that offer specialized/customized editions of books at fairly reasonable prices," she explained to me in an email. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/IMG_8470.jpg) A selection of titles with the edges faced out on display at Barnes & Noble in South Burlington, Vermont. Image: Andrew Liptak Hart noted that the rise of communities like BookTok and Bookstagram have helped fuel the desire for readers and collectors to pick up these special editions, and that publishers are starting to recognize that there are opportunities that they can take advantage of. "I think the ease of access to these customized editions was driving people to purchase from book boxes rather than their Indie stores or places like Amazon/Barnes & Noble," she noted. "Publishers here needed to step up their game to keep up with outside competition." **"**We’ve seen a significant increase in demand for special editions, from hardcover editions with extra features to seriously deluxe collector’s editions," Tim Holman, the President and Publisher of Orbit Books told me in an email. "Orbit has published a number of special editions over recent years–including books in the *Witcher* series by Andrzej Sapkowski and [*The* *Expanse* series by James S.A. Corey, and Ann Leckie’s *Ancillary Justice*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/)–and it’s definitely an area of our publishing that’s expanding." Holman noted that Orbit has leaned into this demand with a new line of books they're calling Gold Editions, which saw [new, high-end editions of N.K. Jemisin's *Broken Earth* trilogy and Hannah Whitten’s *Wilderwood* duology](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-nk-jemisin-broken-earth-fifth-season-deluxe-edition/) released this year, and with more slated to arrive next year. He pointed to a handful of factors that he sees behind this initiative: the proliferation of book-oriented social media accounts, the rise of subscription boxes, and booksellers. And of course, readers wanting a high-quality book for their shelves: "I think what’s behind it, though, is a bit of a shift in the way a lot of readers appreciate books as physical objects–particularly when there’s an emotional connection involved." "It’s not just that people want a physical copy–they want a physical copy that feels special and is something to really treasure," he explained. "This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, of course, but it’s something that a lot more readers seem to be looking for–and finding." "When I first got involved with purchasing from book boxes," Hart told me "it seemed like any printing of special edges had to be done outside the US, as it was not something being offered by domestic publishing companies or printers." It's only been in the last year, she noted, that it seems that bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and the major publishers have really gotten in on the game, publishing a number of books and highlighting them in stores with dedicated displays. There are some indications that focusing on this group of readers is working. [According to *The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/sep/08/tiktok-meets-tolkien-how-the-folio-society-attracted-gen-z-readers?ref=andrewliptak.com), The Folio Society saw its sales grow by 55% since 2017, a huge turnaround after the company was in "freefall" for years. In that time, it's worked to release a steady stream of new editions of classic books with special artwork, slipcases, and other special features. Major publishers are also taking note and are beginning to release their own specialty editions or publishing programs: UK publisher Gollancz [released a limited edition of William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://store.gollancz.co.uk/products/neuromancer?variant=53500253340027&ref=andrewliptak.com) to commemorate its 40th anniversary, complete with with a slipcase, new cover art, and interior art while Orbit began releasing its aforementioned Gold Editions earlier this year. Macmillan has also joined in, launching a new "limited edition" imprint, called [Fablelistik Editions](https://fablelistikeditions.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). [According to *Publishers Weekly*](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96037-macmillan-launches-limited-editions-imprint-fablelistik-editions.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), will "publish limited editions of books drawn from the public domain as well as from Macmillan’s backlist" starting next year. The imprint's release will be a trio of limited editions of Washington Irving’s *The Legend of Sleepy Hollow*, which will see a [lettered edition](https://fablelistikeditions.com/products/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-by-washington-irving-lettered-edition?ref=andrewliptak.com) (26 copies at $3,950 each), a [numbered edition](https://fablelistikeditions.com/collections/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-by-washington-irving/products/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-by-washington-irving-numbered-edition?variant=51636390494573&ref=andrewliptak.com) (275 copies at $895 each), and a [collector's edition](https://fablelistikeditions.com/collections/collectors/products/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-by-washington-irving-collectors-edition?ref=andrewliptak.com) (2,500 copy run at $265 each). After that, it'll release [lettered](https://fablelistikeditions.com/collections/the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue/products/lettered-edition-of-the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue?ref=andrewliptak.com), [numbered](https://fablelistikeditions.com/collections/the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue/products/numbered-edition-of-the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [collectors](https://fablelistikeditions.com/collections/the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue/products/collectors-edition-of-the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue?ref=andrewliptak.com) editions of V.E. Schwab's *The Invisible Life of Addie Larue* – which already had a [special trade edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250830746?ref=andrewliptak.com) back in 2021\. As with Orbit's project, these copies will only be available through the imprint's website, rather than traditional retailer sites. (And presumably, some of these copies will quickly make their way to aftermarket retailers like eBay.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/IMG_1016.jpeg) A selection of Katherine Arden's special editions. Image: Andrew Liptak Last month, I visited Katherine Arden at her home here in Vermont, where she showed off a shelf containing all of her novels. She published her debut *Winternight* trilogy ([*The Bear and the Nightingale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101885956?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Girl in the Tower*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101885987?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Witch of Winter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101886014?ref=andrewliptak.com)) between 2017 and 2019, which became a runaway hit and which neatly align with the growing fantasy / romance / romantasy genres that book box companies have been selling, and as a result, her shelves are loaded down with a hefty stack of variant editions featuring sprayed edges and specialty covers. "I think sprayed edges and multiple fancy editions are somewhat (although perhaps not exclusively) a phenomenon of the fantasy market," she explained to me. "Fans in that space will certainly collect multiple beautiful editions of books they especially love, and there's a thriving world of book swapping where collectors offer editions in their collections in exchange for other editions." The wide range of editions comes with some added benefits: as customers turn to companies that curate their offerings, they can serve as a means to introduce their readership to new authors. "Having multiple special editions gives a wide potential readership the possibility of coming in contact with one of my books," Arden explained, and "because all those editions are posted to social media, \[they're\] are often given to members of book clubs and subscribers to book boxes as part of a monthly package." Arden echoed Hart's observations that social media is a huge contributing factor here. "People want books that they can take beautiful pictures of. I also think that in a very crowded marketplace for new titles, \[those\] special editions (the fancier the better) signal to readers that this is a book to pay attention to. People are drawn to bright, pretty things, and publishers are working hard to make their books look nice as a result." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/image-1.png) The recent special editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories. Image: Andrew Liptak Once the realm of specialty publishers and retailers, publishers are increasingly releasing their own special editions to the public, something that Arden speculated has been spurred on by lower printing costs, making it more economical for publishers to include them in their trade editions. In November, Harper Collins published an collector's edition of R.F. Kuang's debut novel [*The Poppy War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063413573?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)with an updated cover, while Gregory Maguire's [*Wicked*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391086?ref=andrewliptak.com) got a special collector's edition to tie in with the recent film adaptation. It comes with green stained edges, a ribbon marker, and an elegant foil-stamped cover. Other recent editions include Paul Tremblay's recent novel [*Horror Movie*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063070011?ref=andrewliptak.com), whichcame with stained red edges and a dust jacket made out of a very slick type of paper. J.R.R. Tolkien's novels [regularly](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jrr-tolkien-the-hobbit-illustrated-edition/) [get the](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-illustrated/) [re-release treatment](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jrr-tolkien-the-silmarillion-illustrated-edition/), with special editions featuring the author's original artwork, special sprayed edges, embossed foil titles, and pull-out maps of Middle-earth. Holman noted that Hachette has begun to "partner with retailers to produce exclusive special editions." > "Most recently with Barnes & Noble for deluxe hardcover editions of Rachel Gillig’s [*One Dark Window, Two Twisted Crowns*](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/two-twisted-crowns-rachel-gillig/1143031728?ean=9780316581745&ref=andrewliptak.com), and her new novel coming out next year, [*The Knight and the Moth*](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-knight-and-the-moth-rachel-gillig/1146221051?ean=9780316588447&ref=andrewliptak.com)–and we’re expecting there to be more retailer exclusives over the next few years." Are these additional features essential to readers or are they superfluous bells and whistles? Your milage will likely vary. For fans of a particular author or title, such editions can be something that simply looks good on a shelf, comes with a better cover, or contains additional art that adds to the reading experience. For others, it might just be something that simply looks good on a bookshelf, or makes for a gift that demonstrates a bit of additional thought and care directed toward the recipient. Or, you might see these special editions as a mere gimmick: an easy way for a publisher to entice some of their customers to purchase a second copy of a book they might already own, or as an opportunity to bump up the price for a "Collector's Edition." At the end of the day, any book might sit on a shelf between readings, blending into background as part of a home or space's decor and character. These special editions can serve as a visible badge of one's fandom and appreciation of those stories, the background of a photo on Instagram or Tiktok video, or just as a special copy for a reader to treasure. --- Thanks for reading. What special editions have you picked up over the years, and what prompted you to pick them up in the first place? ### Guiding the fans URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-doctor-who-science-fiction-knitting-cosplay-guide/ Last updated: 2024-12-07T17:18:09.000Z In the world of fandom, cosplayers are a step above your typical consumers: they're deeply engaged with the source material, often pouring over screenshots, photographs of screen-used props, and other reference material to replicate those costumes. Cynically, they're the types of ambassadors for a brand that these companies really want to harness: they bring enthusiasm and energy to those around them. This wasn't always the case: some companies were incredibly litigious and would work to stamp out any attempt on the part of fans to sell prop replicas, forcing some parts of that movement and community underground. For a long time, in order to get a suit of Stormtrooper armor, it was a sort of a "you have to know a guy who knew a guy." Nowadays, you can go onto any number of online marketplaces to easily buy a suit. A couple of years ago, one of the places that I wrote for was *Cosplay Central*, a now-defunct vertical run by ReedPop. It was in the span of time before I published [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com)and I would pitch them some ideas every couple of weeks about the world of cosplay. There were two stories that I was pleased with: [The Rise of Cosplay Guides: Star Wars](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-guides-star-wars-world-of-warcraft-cyberpunk-2077/) and [Microsoft Releases New Halo Cosplay Guide For The Mark VII Armor](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-halo-infinite-guide-spartan-armor/), both of which touched on an interesting development in the world of cosplay: companies using the field as a way to keep fans engaged, releasing detailed digital guides that showed off the costumes to help makers replicate the costumes for themselves. [Microsoft Releases New Halo Cosplay Guide For The Mark VII ArmorGet out your foam and 3D printers because there’s a new Halo armor cosplay guide.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-47.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/mkvii-cosplay-guide-blog-image-1-f4647ec6022d4c3cb74c928b4fc29d44.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-halo-infinite-guide-spartan-armor/) These types of guides are a good indication that these companies are recognizing that helping these fans can go a long way. Since I published those articles there have been a handful of others that have come out: one for [*Alan Wake II*](https://alanwake.com/story/alan-saga-cosplay-guides/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* another for [*Starfield*](https://bethesda.net/en/article/4DQeno0hXiBKiCFM9GOfov/starfield-cosplay-guides?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and some for [*Dead by Daylight*](https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/206-cosplay-guides?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* At the time, I thought that it was a fairly recent trend: companies recognizing that it's better to work with the community of enthusiasts. That's largely correct, but I recently came across an example that's much older, thanks to a [recent post on *Open Culture*](https://www.openculture.com/2024/12/the-bbc-creates-step-by-step-instructions-for-knitting-the-iconic-dr-who-scarf.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It highlighted an official guide that the BBC produced back in the 1980s for fans of the science fiction series *Doctor Who*: instructions on how to make the outlandish scarf worn by Tom Baker as the fourth incarnation of the show's titular character. The show is the longest-running science fiction TV show, thanks to a neat quirk: The Doctor is a time-traveling alien adventurer who periodically transforms into a new person, every time the lead actor decides to leave. Each version of the character has their own style and personality, and when Baker came on the show, his version featured this incredibly long, multicolored scarf. As *Open Culture* notes, this was a costume piece that would be pretty easy for someone to replicate: all you'd need was some knitting skills (or access to someone with them), and with time and materials, you could easily get one made up. To help with that process, the BBC created a document that detailed the steps and materials that you'd need: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/12/image.png) The article pointed to one example of this in action: a fan named [Jim recounted how he requested a scarf from his grandmother](https://carjackedseraphim.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-dr-who-cosplay.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), who used the directions to produce it. (There's a great letter from her to him about her progress.) There's even a [website devoted to the details and history](http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the scarf and its variations. Even decades after Baker put his character to rest, the item still has its appeal to fans around the world, with plenty of examples popping up on platforms like Etsy, [officially licensed products](https://www.lovarzi.co.uk/collections/doctor-who-scarves?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [community art projects](https://westonmuseum.org/the-doctor-who-scarf-project/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I really dig this early attempt to cater to the fans of the show: knitting is an excellent skill to learn, and the barrier to entry is pretty low, especially compared to costumes that require technologies like 3D printing or vacuforming. This scarf also isn't the only thing that I've seen fans knit: [Jayne Cobb's fantastic hat](https://glitzyfaery.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/the-ultimate-jayne-hat-pattern/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Firefly* is one example (a friend made me one years ago!), while plenty of fans have gone out to [recreate the house scarves](https://sheepandstitch.com/pattern/harry-potter-scarf-knitting-pattern/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the *Harry Potter* series. That low cost is something that I wrote about in the book: as the price goes down, the ease of access into the hobby rises. Knitting is one (early!) example of that, while innovations with EVA foam, the cratering price of 3D printers or laser cutters do much the same thing: they make it much easier for people to get into the hobby. I think it's a real reason for why cosplay has become so much more widespread in the last couple of decades: make it easier for people to participate (either by removing those economic barriers or by providing official guides), more people will want to take part. Even if you're not cosplaying one of the characters, these types garments make for excellent accessories out of costume. And with the holidays approaching, they make for some excellent gifts. ### 14 new SF/F books to check out this December URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/december-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2024-12-09T14:43:06.000Z December is usually a time of the year when we don't usually see a ton of books hitting stores (publishers usually want to get them out ahead of the holiday shopping season), but 2024 seems to be a bit of a different story: there are a whole bunch of new SF/F titles hitting stores in the coming weeks. A couple of other things: Audible is holding a big sale right now, with some huge discounts on books. If you use it and have been looking for a good time to pick up something on your TBR, this is a good time to do that. My own book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Cosplay-A-History-Audiobook/B09MDM493W?ref=andrewliptak.com), narrated by Eunice Wong, is marked down to just $8, a steal! I'm combing through my to-read list to snag a couple while they're cheap. *Cosplay: A History* is also [marked down on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Cosplay-History-Builders-Favorite-Stories/dp/1534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) to $18, which is an excellent price. I also have a bunch of copies at home: if you're looking for a good gift for someone, I'd be happy to personalize it for folks. Reach out to me directly if that's of interest. If you're looking for other gifts for someone, here's this year's gift guide: [Transfer Orbit’s 2024 holiday gift guideA whole bunch of items for the nerdy person in your life (Or for yourself)![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-44.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1102.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nerd-holiday-gift-guide-books-lego-games-scifi/) You can also check out past installments of this book list series by hitting up the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. 📚 As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Support TO with a tip:** Ghost now lets readers tip creators with a one-time payment. You can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/november-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-list/#/portal/support). Here are 14 books to check out this December: ### [*Queen of Fury*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837860630?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Natania Barron (December 3rd) Natania Barron continues her *Queens of Fate* trilogy (started with [*Queen of None*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837860616?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *Queen of Fury*, in which Hwyfar has returned to Avillion, only to find that her father, King Leodegraunce has gone mad and someone is attempting knock him off the throne. She takes up the title of Queen Regent to protect the kingdom, but needs allies. King Arthur has pledged his support, but only if she marries one of the members of the round table and she gives up her crown. Arthur's knight is Gawain of Orkney, who Hwyfar is soon drawn to. But there are some complications between their growing connection and Arthur's orders. ### [*Blacklight Born*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316493574?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alexander Darwin (December 3rd) Alexander Darwin closes out his *Combat Codes* trilogy with *Blacklight Born* (preceded by [*Combat Codes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316493000?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Grievar's Blood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316493239?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in which the Grievar War has overtaken the Empire of Kiroth. Silas the Slayer has begun a revolution to lead his warrior companions out of slavery, while Cego has been released from prison onto an alien world with choices a head of him: he can follow in his brother's footsteps, or remain with the family that he's surrounded himself by. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-316-49357-4?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The martial arts scenes are as expertly devised as ever, and the riveting plot keeps the pages flying. This sends the series out on a high note." ### [*Rebel Blade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316398435?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Davinia Evans (December 3rd) Davinia Evans also rounds out a trilogy with Rebel Blade (preceded by [*Notorious Sorcerer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316398039?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Shadow Baron*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316398237?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in which Siyon Velo has brought magic back to the Mundane, but that came at a cost: his actions have drastic consequences: monsters have reawakened and are chasing chaos in Bezim. It's up to him to try and contain the resulting mess before he's arrested and the city is burned to the ground. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316398435?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Gratifyingly, the breakneck plot leads to a thrilling climax where all three story lines beautifully converge. Series fans will be well satisfied." ### [*Neuromancer* (40th anniversary edition)](https://store.gollancz.co.uk/products/neuromancer?variant=53500253340027&ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Gibson (December 5th) William Gibson's *Neuromancer* celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, and to celebrate, UK publisher Gollancz is releasing a snazzy special edition. There are a couple of variants: the signed Emporium Exclusive boxed edition retails for £250, but this volume comes with a special box, is signed by Gibson, and is limited to 200 copies. The other Emporium edition runs £100 and is limited to 500 copies. Both editions come with a dust jacket and endpapers designed by Daniel Brown, 25 interior illustrations by Marco Luna, a holographic foil blocked real-cloth case, sprayed edges, and a bunch of other bells and whistles. I ended up splurging for the unsigned version, because up until now, I've never really found a copy of *Neuromancer* with a cover that I really liked. This one looks really cool, and I'm looking forward to adding it to my shelves. (And giving it a re-read to see how it holds up.) ### [*The Shutouts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250323484?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gabrielle Korn (December 3rd) In 2041, the United States is in upheaval: storms and wildfires cause plenty of problems, while political tensions have turned the country into a powder keg. It's a dangerous time for a road trip and Kelly is undertaking one regardless, trying to reach her estranged daughter after leaving her years ago for a cause that she's now having doubts about. Fast forward four decades and Ava and her daughter Brook are on the run from a climate change relief program that experimented on them. As they escape and meet a mysterious woman from Ava's past, they embark on a journey that'll take them into the wilderness, coming together with others in some unlikely circumstances. This is set in the same world as Korn's other novel, [*Yours for the Taking*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250283368?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gabrielle-korn/the-shutouts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) *"*Korn’s worldbuilding and character development (especially Kelly) breathe life into the novel as it explores societal collapse, political conspiracies, and the pliable nature of historical narratives. The novel ends with a perfect blend of sadness and hope that refuses to downplay the dangers of climate change nor discount humanity’s desire to survive.*"* ### [*Breath of Life*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/breath-of-life?ref=andrewliptak.com) by L.H. Moore (December 17th) This looks like a fascinating short story collection from L.H. Moore, which includes a number of her stories inspired by history and Afrofuturism, following characters who deal with strange crossings, underwater experiences, discoveries and family legacies. ### [*How to Steal a Galaxy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419486?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Beth Revis (December 3rd) Beth Revis follows up her novel [*Full Speed to a Crash Landing*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419462?ref=andrewliptak.com), with How to Steal a Galaxy, in which Ada Lamarr had been trying to salvage a wrecked spaceship, only to be rescued by a government salvage crew. She comes face to face with agent Rian White, who begins to think that there's more to Ada than meets the eye. There's some attraction there, but they both have their differing motives that put them at odds. In this installment, Ada had been hired to work for a rebel group to steal some secret government plans for a climate cleaner, but they've stiffed her on payments. She wasn't keen on pulling any more jobs for them until they offer another bit of compensation: a mission to infiltrate a gala where Rian will be attending. He's counting on her to arrive: he's set out some rare items that he hopes he can use to trap her in the act and bring her to justice. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7564-1948-6?ref=andrewliptak.com)"The result is an un-put-downable page-turner helmed by a lovable heroine who is clever and passionate beneath her armor of sarcastic quips." ### [*Wind and Truth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250319180?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Brandon Sanderson (December 6th) The fifth installment of Brandon Sanderson's *Stormlight Archive* has arrived. It's the latest doorstop in the epic fantasy series is set in his Cosmere universe following [*The Way of Kings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765365279?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Words of Radiance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765365286?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Oathbringer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765365293?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Rhythm of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765365309?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This book is the climax of what he's call the first arc of the series, and The Knights Radiant have only days to prepare for an epic conflict as Dalinar Kholin challenges the evil god Odium to a contest that will decide the fate of Roshar. ### [*Alter Ego*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250801777?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Segura (December 3rd) A while back, I picked up Alex Segura's novel [*Secret Identity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250801760?ref=andrewliptak.com), and really loved it: the story of a woman working for a second-tier comic book publisher called Triumph Comics in 1975 who dreams of writing her own line of comic books about a female heroine, the Lethal Lynx. She gets the opportunity when one of the publisher's writers brings her on to write the company's first female hero, only to insist that she work as a silent partner. When he winds up dead, she has to figure out what happened to him and keep working on the book. It was a fascinating read that involved intellectual property rights, sexism in the comic work, and a set of fantastic characters. In this next (standalone) sequel, Segura introduces us to Annie Bustamante, a filmmaker, author, and comic book artist, who's long wanted to take on the Lethal Lynx, now a cult comic that's hard to track down. When the rights become available, she's skeptical of the person behind it: Bert Carlyle, the son of the founder of Triumph Comics who claims ownership over the title. But when she gets anonymous messages urging her to not trust anyone about it, she has to raise her guard and figure out how to find a way to tell the story about her favorite character. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250801777?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Segura’s plotting is vivid and fast-paced, and his experience as a comics artist lends depth to the proceedings, with gorgeous excerpts from Annie’s in-progress Legendary Lynx comic sprinkled throughout." As a fun aside, Segura also wrote a [comic version of the Lethal Lynx](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781545814000?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*Dust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878731?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alison Stine (December 3rd) Thea and her family move to the Bloodless Valley in Southern Colorado after her father has a premonition. They're hoping to make a fresh start, even if the land has turned arid and barren. Her parents keep her trapped at home and isolated, afraid of the outside world. When she's allowed to work in a cafe in town, she meets a deaf kid named Ray, who begins teaching her sign language, and in doing so, introduces her to a new community that opens up her world. *Publishers Weekly* [notes that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250878731?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Stine pulls from personal experience, as detailed in an author’s note, to craft an atmospheric, speculative exploration of climate change through the lens of one deaf teen’s experiences." ### [*Mechanize My Hands to War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419349?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erin K. Wagner (December 17th) Decades in the future, artificial intelligence has become commonplace, and plays a pivotal role in a political crisis in the country. Wagner brings together a blend of stories in unconventional ways: Two farmers hire a pair of androids after their GMO crops have failed, a government raid against an extremist results in the death of a child, the acting director of the ATF navigates his connection to a political extremist, and an android named Ora has been trapped in a room for month refusing diagnostic tests. [](javascript:void%280%29)*Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419349?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Throughout, Wagner exhibits a flair for realistic worldbuilding, imagining a future in which, among other changes, health insurance companies charge lower premiums to those whose home health needs are provided by a skilled humanoid robot rather than another human being. The result is a sharply imagined and all too plausible exploration of the future of AI." ### [*Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316430609?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex White (December 3rd) Alex White follows up their novel [*August Kitko and the Mechas from Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316430579?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a sequel, *Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye.* In that first book, a jazz pianist named Gus Kito was preparing for the end of Earth at the hands of an invasion of extraterrestrial robots known as the Vanguard, only to be saved at the last minute, selected to join a group of mech pilots to try and save humanity. In this new adventure, Ardent Violet was hoping to get some alone time with their boyfriend August after they defeated the robot invasion, but the arrival of aliens at the request from their mecha allies has upended those plans. As humanity begins to set up relationships with the alien Coalition and the arrival of a new, all-powerful AI, a new discovery could turn the tide of the war. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316430609?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "White finds plenty of room for dry humor, tenderness, compassion, and fabulous music amid the chaos and violence." ### [*The Navigator's Children*](https://astrapublishinghouse.com/product/the-navigators-children-9780756418557/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tad Williams (November 12th) Tad Williams closes out his Last King of Osten Ard series with *The Navigator's Children* (preceded by [*The Witchwood Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756414399?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Empire of Grass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756416102?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Into the Narrowdark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756410650?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which the Norns have beseigned the Hayholt, a fabled castle once home to the imortal Sithi and which is now the capitol for humanity. While the eyes of the world are on that conflict, the Norn's witch queen Utuk'ku has turned her attention to a valley called Tanakirú—the Vale of Mists. As Queen Miriamele has fought to save the Hayholt and capture a traitor, Prince Morgan and Nezeru in Tanakirú have found that their bond has deepened into something more profound than they could have anticipated. As they go deeper in to the valley, they discover an ancient secret that had rekindled the war, something that could destroy both humans and immortals alike. Sarah Jones, [writing for *Vulture*](https://www.vulture.com/article/review-tad-williamss-the-navigators-children-is-a-comfort.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), says "To Williams, a wise ruler knows when to give up power, and he leaves readers to imagine what that new world might become. There’s something reassuring about that uncertainty. I don’t look to Williams — or to the fantasy genre — for easy comforts, and indeed there are none in Osten Ard. Instead I find a challenge, and that is useful now. When I feel the pull of despair, I remember the work of progress is long and uneven. Our happy ending might not be definite, but neither is our doom." [](https://www.amazon.com/Navigators-Children-Last-King-Osten/dp/0756418550?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Icarus Needle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193799?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (December 3rd) Timothy Zahn continues his *Icarus* series (kicked off with [*The Icarus Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553573916?ref=andrewliptak.com) back in 1999, and recently continued with [*The Icarus Plot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668072684?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Icarus Twin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193058?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Icarus Job*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193256?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Icarus Changling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193485?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)* with *The Icarus Needle, in which* Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene have been recruited to seek out ancient artifacts from a long-vanished alien civilization, the Icari. They've been working for the Icarus Group, and it's recently had a management shakeup, with new leaders that Roarke finds himself at odds with. When they're dispatched to a distant world with a handful of portals and some aliens known as the Ammei, they're faced with some new challenges: figure out what they're up to and hold off the alien Patth who want to control the portals for themselves. --- That's all for today: thanks for reading, and thanks for following along with this column of book lists over the past year. Let me know what books caught your eye over the last 12 months, and what you're looking forward to reading next. ### Transfer Orbit's 2024 holiday gift guide URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nerd-holiday-gift-guide-books-lego-games-scifi/ Last updated: 2024-11-27T16:13:59.000Z Are you ready for the annual onslaught of holiday spending ahead of the end of the year? As I've done the last four years, I've put together a gift guide for *Transfer Orbit* readers: a roundup of items that go a bit above and beyond the usual books that I throw your way, and neat things for your home or office that you or your nerdy friends and family members might like and enjoy this holiday season. As the shopping rush arrives, check with each retailer, as there might be some Black Friday or holiday sales coming up that you might be able to score some discounts on. As usual, any purchases made through Bookshop might result in a commission to *Transfer Orbit*. (Most aren't affiliates though.) Items from recent years also make great gifts! Here are the lists from [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-secret-commonwealth-bn-scifi-and-a-gift-guide/), [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2020-transfer-orbit-holiday-gift-guide/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gift-guide-books-music-tech-2021/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-sci-fi-fantasy-gift-guide/), and [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/transfer-orbit-2023-holiday-shopping-list/). You can also check out the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag to find other books that caught my eye over the course of the year. You can also find more specific recommendations under the [Reviews](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/reviews/) tag. Here's what I'd recommend this year: --- ## Reads ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1091.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Folio Society's [*Player of Games*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-player-of-games.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Iain M. Banks, $130 I really enjoyed Iain M. Banks' Culture novel *Consider Phlebas* when I re-read it last year, and it's had me wanting to return to the series. The next installment is *Player of Games*, which I've had more than one person tell me they enjoyed more than its predecessor, and I'm looking forward to digging into it. The Folio Society released its edition of the book earlier this year, and like the first, it's a really nice volume: I love the artwork and feel of this edition. [Imagining The CultureAn interview with artist Dániel Taylor about his work on the Folio Society’s editions of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/10/IMG_0832.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1090.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Folio Society's [*Weird Tales*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/weird-tales.html?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), $75 For the horror fan in your life: The Folio Society produced a neat edition of weird / horror stories, selected by critic Michael Dirda. I found this to be a really intriguing collection of classics, which includes authors such as Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and quite a few more. Each story comes with a neat illustration from artist Harry Campbell. [Scary storiesAn interview with Michael Dirda about his Folio Society collection, Weird Tales![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6153.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/weird-tales-horror-folio-society-michael-dirda-interview/) ### [*The Broken Earth* trilogy](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jemisin/the-broken-earth-trilogy/9780316574440/campaign/?lens=orbit&utm%5Fsource=Twitter&utm%5Fmedium=SocialOrg&utm%5Fcampaign=MultiTitle%5F9780316574440&utm%5Fcontent=na&utm%5Fterm=na) by N.K. Jemisin, $180 Earlier this year, Orbit [announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-nk-jemisin-broken-earth-fifth-season-deluxe-edition/) a new lineup of special editions of some of its classic books. One of the first books out of the gate is a fancy edition of N.K. Jemisin's outstanding *Broken Earth* trilogy (*The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate*, and *The Stone Sky*), which comes in a nice boxed set with new covers, silver edges, ribbons, and come signed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1096.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886630718?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Tanya Lapointe and Stefanie Broos, $60 One of the books I enjoyed reading last year was a behind-the-scenes companion to Denis Villeneuve's *Dune:* [*The Art and Soul of Dune: Part One*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-art-and-soul-of-dune-tanya-lapointe/14399449?ean=9781647221553&ref=andrewliptak.com). As Dune: Part 2 has since been released, it's been accompanied by another excellent behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film. It comes with plenty of great photographs and details about the film's production. It makes for a great book for the coffee table to page through for the devoted *Dune* or movie fan. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1113.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744098822?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kempshall, $30 One of my favorite reads of 2024 has been Chris Kempshall's engrossing, in-universe history of the *Star Wars* franchise, which takes a historian's perspective to put all of the books, comics, films, games, and television shows into a cohesive story of the formation, rule, and fall of the Galactic Empire. It's a gripping narrative that tells not only how the galactic Civil War occurred, but why the Empire quickly crumbled. It's something a little different from the flood of tie-in novels. ### [*The Force of Creativity*](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-force-of-creativity-5008878?ref=andrewliptak.com) by LEGO, $150 I distinctly remember when Lego announced it was producing *Star Wars* kits for the first time, 25 years ago, and I equally remember the day that I got and built the ones that I ordered. Lego has produced a new book that looks at that 25 year journey, looking at the behind-the-scenes process to create the toys and stay true to the look and feel of the franchise's characters, vehicles, and worlds. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1097.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### *The History of Middle-earth series* by Christopher Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien ([Part One](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063379848?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Part Two](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390836?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Part Three](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390843?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Part Four](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390850?ref=andrewliptak.com)) $100-$125 HarperCollins has been steadily releasing new editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories in a nice hardcover format for nearly ten years now, and as part of that program, it released new editions of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth series (in four boxed sets), which covers the conception, development and writing of this epic world. I particularly like this first boxed set in the series: it contains a great edition of *The Silmarillion*, *Unfinished Tales*, and both volumes of *The Book of Lost Tales.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1093.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Folio Society’s [*Children of Dune*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/children-of-dune.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Frank Herbert, $110 The Folio Society kicked off its run of science fiction and fantasy releases years ago with a nice edition of Frank Herbert's *Dune*, and last year, it followed up on that with a fine edition of *Dune: Messiah*. This year, the publisher has continued with a new edition of *Children of Dune*, bringing the entire first trilogy of stories together into a handsome set of editions. This volume comes with some great artwork from Hilary Clarq, and it looks great on my shelf. [Interview: Hilary Clarq on illustrating the Folio Society’s Dune editionsAn interview with Hilary Clarcq about her work on The Folio Society’s editions of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah and Children of Dune![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-29.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0694.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-children-folio-society-hilary-clarcq-artist-interview/) --- ## Watch / Listen ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1087.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Star Wars: Andor* Blu Ray](https://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Andor-Complete-Season/dp/B0CXXYX1D8?crid=KSNG03B4KTJ2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DNQXbWv2x84%5FyzArU6EKISf3U-7fA3%5F3xMKYW6J81RNPjGFvkAQ7ZX%5FUicprrukFTkOREwgYWqOrYm672SxB3Vmg-4R8bfLeyARkC24iP3lkU7ATOjASWVjeYYRtgyFuAtwV5%5F5IdEABYiz9itpX%5FA.mJuVPAHdi0ADSwtkro3QeQwBPJ1S0t7-OlPOhJeIGDU&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=andor+blu+ray&qid=1732114420&sprefix=andor+blu%2Caps%2C134&sr=8-3&ref=andrewliptak.com), $60 My favorite entry in the *Star Wars* franchise of recent years has been the streaming series *Andor.* I've rewatched it a handful of times, and every time, I come away with some new thoughts and appreciation for this grim, serious take on the franchise. I was thrilled to see that Lucasfilm has begun releasing physical editions of its streaming shows, and this was an instabuy for me. This steel book edition comes with a bunch of special features as well. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-41.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA-3.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) ### [Tickets, *Twenty-Sided Tavern*](https://thetwentysidedtavern.com/tickets/?ref=andrewliptak.com), $40-$70 This is a little more geographically-limited to folks near New York City (or who're willing to travel to the city), but if you're interested in *Dungeons & Dragons* and the theater (or know someone who is), [*Twenty-Sided Tavern*](https://thetwentysidedtavern.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) would make for an *outstanding* night out. It's a licensed D&D production, and you follow along as a party goes off on an adventure. The coolest part? You in the audience can help influence where they go and how successful they are at it. My wife and I attended a performance earlier this year and it was an incredibly fun time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1129.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Time Is The Playground*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/time-is-the-playground?variant=43985037459656&ref=andrewliptak.com), $10-$40 I just wrote about this album earlier this week, and I've had it on my mind for a while. If you're looking for a new album to add to your digital or vinyl collection, or if you have someone in your life who likes Alternative/Rock music, this would be one that I'd recommend. [Album Review: Carbon Leaf’s Time is The PlaygroundCarbon Leaf’s latest album Time Is The Playground is a moving meditation on time, nostalgia, and love![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-39.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0979.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carbon-leaf-time-is-the-playground-music-album-review/) --- ## Play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1085.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [LEGO Space Astronaut](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/space-astronaut-31152?ref=andrewliptak.com), $55 I've long been a fan of Lego sets, and while I've bought my fair share of sets for my kids, I'm always on the hunt for some neat ones for my office. (There's a whole article or business study to be written about how Lego has really embraced the adult collector's market.) I love this astronaut set: it's one of three sets you can construct here, but this one is just perfect: an astronaut floating through space. I love the detail on this one, and I'm enjoying having it perched on the desk in my home office. ### [LEGO *Dune:* Atreides Royal Ornithopter](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/dune-atreides-royal-ornithopter-10327?ref=andrewliptak.com), $165 When I first read Frank Herbert's *Dune* way back in high school, I never had an inkling that someday, Lego might make a detailed set of the Ornithopter that House Atreides flies over the sands of Arrakis on. But here we are: this is a really cool, detailed set from the company's Icons line, and should make for an excellent display piece for the *Dune* and/or Lego fan in your life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1086.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom*](https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/the-legend-of-zelda-echoes-of-wisdom-switch/?ref=andrewliptak.com), $60 In 2019, Nintendo released an updated version of *The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening* for the Switch. The game was one of the first ones I ever played, and I was thrilled to see it come to the console with some updated graphics: it brough back plenty of memories. Nintendo released a new entry in the series, this time featuring Zelda as the game's protagonist for the first time. It matches the same look as the updated *Link's Awakening*, and while I haven't gotten too far into it, I've really enjoyed the story and gameplay of this one. ### [*Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*](https://zelda.nintendo.com/tears-of-the-kingdom/en/buy/?ref=andrewliptak.com), $50 Somehow, I missed including another Legends of Zelda game in last year's gift guide: *Tears of the Kingdom*. The sequel to the critically acclaimed Breath of the Wild, this game expands the world even further, giving you a vast underworld and sky islands to explore. While *Breath of the Wild* remains a vivid and striking world that I continually return to, *Tears of the Kingdom* is just as much fun: there are new abilities, enemies, and places to climb up, swim around, fly, and build. I've been enjoying the journey in this one. --- ## Lifestyle ### [Maya Script Hand Carved 15 oz Ceramic Mug](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/kitchen/products/maya-script-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com), Cognitive Surplus, $20 Last year, I recommended the [Cuneiform Mug](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/mugs/products/cuneiform-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?variant=40090623541325&ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) from Cognitive Surplus, which I'm still using. It's a handsome black mug with etchings of Cuneiforms from ancient Mesopotamia. I ended up getting the [Hieroglyphics mug](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/sand-carved-mugs/products/hieroglyphics-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com) for my wife, and since then, the company has released a couple of other excellent-looking ones: one featuring Mayan script, taken from an inscription over a doorway in Yaxchilán, and depicts "a ritual of protection to keep the building and its occupants safe." They also have ones of [Norse runes](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/kitchen/products/norse-runes-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com), [cave paintings](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/kitchen/products/cave-paintings-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [oracle bone](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/kitchen/products/oracle-bone-script-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?ref=andrewliptak.com) scripts that are also quite snazzy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_1100.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Vario 1918 Trench Watch](https://vario.sg/collections/1918-trench-medic?ref=andrewliptak.com), $390 I featured a watch from AVI-8 last year, and that was my near-daily thing to wear until it had an unfortunate trip through a washing machine. (I'm waiting for it to come back from the shop.) I did finally save up to add a long-coveted watch to my collection this year: a watch inspired by the trench watches from World War I made by Vario. I love this watch: it's sturdy and practical, with fantastic lettering and comes with a great strap. I wear it constantly, and I've had a lot of people comment on it when I do so. It's a great accessory. [A brief history of a time(piece)Harold Hawes, World War I and the rise of the men’s wristwatch![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-40.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/4a-Harold-Hawes-Watch.JPG)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-watch-trench-watch-wwi-barre/) --- ### [*Cosplay: A History*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cosplay-A-History/Andrew-Liptak/9781534455825?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Andrew Liptak, $25 I'd be remiss if I didn't toss my own book onto the pile. This came out in 2022, and I'm still very proud of how this book turned out. Saga did a wonderful job with the design, and I've really enjoyed using it as an excuse to talk about the field of cosplay and where it came from. This book makes for a great gift: I envisioned this as a book that would appeal not just to dedicated cosplayers, but also to folks who like pop culture and science fiction history. It should make for a good gift to that nerdy person in your life,. It's available through all major retailers, but I also have a stack of copies! If you'd like a personalized copy, contact me directly! (I'm going to limit this to US shipping only: I don't have the bandwidth to process international orders at this time.) ### [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) edited by Andrew Liptak and Jaym Gates, $19 *Cosplay: A History* wasn't my first book. That honor goes to a project that Jaym Gates and I cooked up, an anthology of modern military science fiction stories: *War Stories: New Military Science Fiction.* It includes stories by authors like Ken Liu, Karin Lowachee, Linda Nagata, Maruice Broaddus, Joe Haldeman and more. I'm very proud of this little book: there are some incredible stories in here, and I think they hold up nicely, even as the battle lines around the world have changed since it first came out. I don't have copies of this on hand, I'm afraid, but it's also available from major retailers. ### [Transfer Orbit subscription](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), $40/year Know someone who likes science fiction and fantasy and who wants to keep up to date on the state of the genres? Consider gifting them a membership to TO. Not only would you help support this publication, but you'll give them access to a small community of like-minded fans and readers. --- ### Murderbot's origins URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-wired-profile-sci-fi/ Last updated: 2025-02-21T16:28:15.000Z Martha Wells has been vaulted into widespread acclaim and appreciation in recent years thanks to her Murderbot series. [*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=andrewliptak.com) exploded upon impact, and has led not only to [plenty of other excellent sequels](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250784278?ref=andrewliptak.com), but to an [audio drama](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-well-audio-drama-audiobook-graphicaudio/) and a [TV adaptation from Apple](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/). But that success has been a long time coming. A new profile of Wells by Meghan Herbst in *Wired* chronicles the real struggle that she faced throughout her career. A long-time science fiction fan, she worked in a toxic IT job, churning out a number of books before deciding to make the leap into writing fulltime, only to languish during the 2008 financial crisis. She was getting placed on uninteresting panels at conventions, and had trouble placing stories. [How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ LifeMartha Wells created one of the most iconic characters in 21st-century science fiction: Murderbot, reluctant savior of humanity. Then she faced an existential threat of her own.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-43.ico)WIREDMeghan Herbst![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/20240730_Wired_MarthaWells_0119.jpg)](https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com) What I appreciate about this profile is that is really showcases just how important luck can be to a writer's career. Wells was working on her *Books of the Raksura* series ([*The Cloud Wars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597802161?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Serpent Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597803328?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Harbors of the Sun*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597809337?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [The Edge of Worlds](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597808972?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which attracted the attention of N.K. Jemisin, which helped bring her work to wider attention. As she was finishing up that series, she had an inkling of an idea that eventually became Murderbot. In a lot of ways, I think this is a story that's worth remembering for authors in the field who've struggled with sales or trying to get attention for their work: it's a marathon, not a sprint, even as this hot author or the other gets a huge publishing deal or something. Building up a body of work – a body of excellent work – can pay off in the long run, even if things seem like they're bleak in the moment. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-42.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0255.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) ### Songs of memories and shadows URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/carbon-leaf-time-is-the-playground-music-album-review/ Last updated: 2024-11-25T14:00:28.000Z Every time I go to a concert, I find myself asking a question: what makes a band really *good*? What is it about their technical skills as musicians, the quality of their songwriting, the way the words interact with the notes, and how the group fits together? I've found an easy answer with [*Time Is The Playground*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/time-is-the-playground-digital-download?ref=andrewliptak.com), the latest album from Virginia-based rock outfit [Carbon Leaf](https://www.carbonleaf.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've been a fan of the band since around 2004, when a friend introduced me to their music by way of their then-latest record [*Indian Summer*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/indian-summer-revisited-2014?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I found in it a collection of songs that really spoke to me: music about joy, love, wandering, and quite a bit more. In the two decades since, the group released handful of albums that's seen them jump from genre to genre, from a sort of alt-pop rock ([*Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/love-loss-hope-repeat-reneaux-2015?ref=andrewliptak.com)2006, [*Nothing Rhymes with Woman*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/nothing-rhymes-with-woman-2016?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2009) to modern folk ([*Constellation Prize*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/constellation-prize-2013?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2013), Irish-infused rock ([*Echo Echo*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/echo-echo-2001?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2001 */* [*Ghost Dragon Attacks Castle*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/ghost-dragon-attacks-castle-2013?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2013), and Americana rock ([*How the West Was One*](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/how-the-west-was-vol-one-2010-cd?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2010 / *Gathering* [Vol.1](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/gathering-vol-1-2018-cd?ref=andrewliptak.com) & [Vol. 2.](https://shop.carbonleaf.com/products/copy-of-copy-of-gathering-vol-2-the-hunting-ground-2020-digital-album?ref=andrewliptak.com), 2017 & 2020). With this latest record, the band feels as though it's found a sweet spot between all of these various influences with an energetic and sweeping set of tracks that meditates on nostalgia, love, and the passing of time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/image-1.png) Carbon Leaf in concert, Higher Ground, November 2024 Something that I've always appreciated about Carbon Leaf is their songwriting skills. The band's lead singer, Barry Privett is responsible for most of their songwriting, and has a real talent for stitching together some wonderfully evocative lines: like from "[One Prairie Outpost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq%5FS0CrsJA0&ref=andrewliptak.com)": > "Scene after scene passes by my life > The window's a wound and the road is a knife > The irony, ask me, 'where have you been?' > I don't know, I don't know > Because I don't know where to begin" or from "[Lake of Silver Bells](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCLrdxuO6aI&ref=andrewliptak.com)": > "Life flickers by a hundred suns behind the trees > Melts us in a lullaby our eyelids are like movie screens > And we close our eyes and feel the warmth come into frame > We close our eyes until our dreams become one and the same > So much left for giving in, the year of living dangerously happy > On the lake of silver bells" Over the course of their career, the band has created a wealth of music, but there are themes that they've returned to again and again: the passing of time, to romance and all of its shades, nostalgia, wanderlust, memories, friendship, each with complicated lyrics loaded with metaphors and wrapped up in rich imagery, as in "[What About Everything?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BItUurqpsw&ref=andrewliptak.com)": > "Holiday quiet on these streets, except for some stubborn leaves > That didn't fall with the fall and now they clatter in vain > Holiday sky, midnight clear, wind is high, hard to steer > Old muffler rumbles like an old fighter plane > In search of some rest, in search of a break > From a life of tests where something's always at stake > Where something's always so far > What about my broken car? > What about my life so far? > What about my dream? > What about? What about everything?" Paired with the efforts from the rest of the band – guitarists Carter Gravatt and Terry Clark, bassist Jon Markel, and drummer Jesse Humphrey, who bring an atmospheric and sweeping sound to those words – I find myself fascinated by how well these two parts come together: Privett's vocals ride up and down the scales, supported by his bandmates, and the results are equal parts memorable and moving. The last decade has felt a little aimless for the band: albums and EPs like *Constellation Prize*, *Ghost Dragon Attacks Castle*, *Gathering,* and *How the West Was One* are solid albums with memorable tracks, but they never quite captured me as with *Indian Summer* or *Love Loss Hope Repeat*. That's why *Time Is The Playground* really struck me as something special: it feels like all of the band's strengths have come together into one sleek, entrancing package that I've had on repeat for weeks. It's an album that covers a range of familiar themes: the passage of time, memory, and of the various stages of one's relationships. When I saw the band play at South Burlington's Higher Ground last weekend, they explained that the album played out something of a story from beginning to end. The [album's title track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npn2DZv-oqQ&ref=andrewliptak.com) feels like an introduction: a recognition of life's complexities, that as time passes us by, we're looking back at our lives with new perspectives and experiences. > "Building rise and shadows fall > Sundial time, clock's on the wall > You can't go back and start again > You just start again from wherever you end" From there, we get what feels as though we're listening to a sort of autobiography of the band and its members. "[Blackmask 1983](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FkpzfxH4SVU&ref=andrewliptak.com)," is a Gen-X anthem of nostalgia for childhood in the 1980s, (a track that feels a bit like a companion to their track "[X-Ray](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq8WP7rBaAs&ref=andrewliptak.com)" off of 2009's *Nothing Rhymes with Woman,*) while tracks like "[You and Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qecx917-Nao&ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[Love for Sale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT0QDnpOlOQ&ref=andrewliptak.com)," and "[Me and Mick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=191mzoKFFFg&ref=andrewliptak.com)" deal with the ups and downs of love: the missed opportunities and pathways, loneliness, possibilities, and the hope and heartbreak it inspires. "Me and Mick" stands out right in the middle of the album: a perfect song that's driven along, heartbeat-like with lyrics that grab your heart and squeeze. > "Counting up all the moments in still life > She's puts them together 1000 times in her mind's eye > Strung together in still frames they glow in the dark > Moving out of the picture and into the part > Straight into the part" And: > Out of the shadows and into the sun > Can we make believe this day is the only one > Out of the shadows straight into the dream > Living a sequel we will never see > Steady as she goes when the morning comes > Nothing can wreck us but love" The band provided some clues into the work that went into this album [on its website](https://www.carbonleaf.com/about?ref=andrewliptak.com): Privett dusted off old demos and shut himself away for months to finish their stories, while also honing recent compositions," gathering "the best of songs written, in fits and starts, over 15 years." The rest of the album plays out variations on those themes of memories and uncertainty: "[City by the Sea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN4YPl0w0FA&ref=andrewliptak.com)" is a gentle, swaying melody about two lives coming together and the uncertainty that they'll face moving forward, "[Call Ahead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDxqgLH--WY&ref=andrewliptak.com)" delves into memories and reminders, "Catching Windmills" is an optimistic tune about joy and renewal, while others like "[Monday Night in Germantown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAuHMFdjBQo&ref=andrewliptak.com)" are nostalgia-tinged descriptions of playing before crowds in out-of-the-way bars. If nostalgia is looking back fondly at the past, it's an acknowledgement that times have changed and the album wraps up with a couple of tracks that lean into those memories. "[California Gold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfUb57Xi63I&ref=andrewliptak.com)" is a wistful, quiet, and lonely track that feels like it's a story about the miles one travels in life: looking back on the past, but moving along as we move forward. > And all we have is time > Lay it all down the line > Find the missing pieces as we go > We're taking the slowest road for now > Let the windows paint the scene > Living the fever dream > California gold The album closes out with "[Neon Signs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5H0ahwnHGo&ref=andrewliptak.com)," a bold and rich track that also looks back on the past: not only missed opportunities or dreams, but which ultimately concludes that we shouldn't be bound to these memories: "Just muscle cars rusting in the woods." --- Listening through all of the band's music in the last couple of weeks, this new albumfeels as though it's a counterpoint and companion to 2004's *Indian Summer*. Where that 20 year album feels like it's about standing on the precipice of early adulthood, and all the angst, potential, and excitement life ahead of you brings, *Time is The Playground* looks back and reflects on those intervening years. It's had me thinking about what's transpired in my own life over that time: the highs and lows of falling in and out of love, of those branching pathways where you see how your decisions directed you in one way or the other, and how quickly that time has passed. More than any other body of music, Carbon Leaf's songs are the ones that speak to me the most, bringing new revelations in times of need, new perspectives when I look back, or just simply reminders of the complexities and joys of life. I'm a different person in 2024 than I was in 2004, and I'm sure I'll be looking back from 2044 (at 59 😱!) with the same bemusement. As I found 20 years ago, Carbon Leaf's music is the perfect soundtrack for the journey and if there's any meaning to draw out of *Time is The Playground*, it's to enjoy the moment, our surroundings and companions. Thinking back on the past is a fun exercise, but it's easy to get lost in the thorny footpaths of our pasts, and dwelling on the what-might-have-beens that pass us by can get us stuck in an endless loop of regret for the life we miss as it passes us by. I've been realizing that I've needed that reminder lately, and listening to this album has been both cathartic and enlightening. While watching the band the other day, I realized what makes this band so good: over the last three decades of singing and touring, their technical skills as musicians and a band (watching and listening to Carter Gravatt on guitar is a thing to behold) has sharpened to a point, while their songwriting has only deepened and enrichened. It's a delight to behold: to see a band continually hone their craft and art and produce an album as enjoyable and thoughtful as this one. ### Amazon has snagged James S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods for a series URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/amazon-james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-streaming-adaptation/ Last updated: 2024-11-21T16:01:28.000Z Amazon is re-teaming with the folks behind [*The Expanse*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/the-expanse/)for a new streaming series, *The Captive Wars*, based on James S.A. Corey's novel [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=andrewliptak.com). Released earlier this year, it follows a group of humans who're captured by an alien civilization that quickly conquers their planet, and are forced to make some difficult decisions in order to ensure their survival. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-30.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229-3.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) [*Variety* ](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/the-expanse-captives-war-tv-series-amazon-expanding-universe-1236215983/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[broke the news this morning](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/the-expanse-captives-war-tv-series-amazon-expanding-universe-1236215983/?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that it's the first project from a new media company set up by some of the folks behind *The Expanse* series: authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, showrunner Naren Shankar, and director Breck Eisner. The company is called Expanding Universe, and it apparently has some other projects in the pipeline. According to the group, “Expanding Universe is focused on developing sci-fi narratives with sweeping world-building and elevated storylines, geared toward multi-platform expressions in filmed entertainment, gaming, and publishing.” Shankar will serve as an executive director, showrunner and writer for the series, along with Abraham and Franck, with Eisner tapped to direct if it gets to that point. In many ways, this follows the model that Abraham and Franck set when they began adapting *The Expanse* for television back in 2015 with the Syfy Channel. Franck began work on the story as an MMO game, before repurposing it as a roleplaying game, and then collaborating with Abraham to write a novel, [*Leviathan Wakes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316129084?ref=andrewliptak.com). From there, it grew into a 9 book series. The Syfy channel adapted the first three novels across three seasons with Alcorn Entertainment before the series jumped over to Amazon's Prime Video streaming service for another three seasons before ending in 2022\. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-31.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) The authors closed off *The Expanse* series in 2021 with [*Leviathan Falls*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316332941?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that they didn't have plans to continue or expand it, although there have been some [spinoff comics projects](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-dragon-tooth-kickstarter/). They [revealed in 2018](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/16962264/the-expanse-author-james-sa-corey-science-fiction-space-opera-book-series?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that they were working on a new series, and [formally announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-the-gods-scifi-expanse/) it last year: *The Captive Wars*, which kicked off with *The Mercy of Gods* in August. They also published a novella, [*Livesuit*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/livesuit/9780316575348/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in October, which continues the series. The next novel in the series has yet to be announced. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- I'm pretty jazzed to see this news: when I read the book, I wondered when we'd see word about an adaptation, given the success that they had with *The Expanse.* You don't run a TV series for six years without building up some infrastructure around it, and it would have surprised me if they hadn't at least been having some talks about it since 2018\. [A decade of The Expanse: an interview with James S.A. CoreyDaniel Abraham and Ty Franck look back on their epic space opera series, writing for television, and what they hope its impact will be a decade from now![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-32.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3157.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-interview/) I've interviewed Dan and Ty a number of times throughout the course of *The Expanse* novels, and I've found them to not only be good writers and storytellers, but pretty savvy and practical when it came to the business of writing and adapting their stories. That they've set up a dedicated media company speaks volumes of their recognition that storytelling takes a number of different forms and shapes. One story set in *The Expanse* universe might not actually work as a novel, but as a standalone novella or short story? I can see this type of setup allowing them to do a range of projects, from the beefier streaming shows to comics, books, or other things like films or short films. And above all: *The Expanse* series is *really* good. Setting aside that I've been a fan of the books from the beginning, they really did a good job realizing and adapting the world. I literally blew through 5-6 episodes last night and went to bed at 2AM before I was completely drawn in by them. (I just crossed into Season 3.) With this news, I can't help but wonder if they have plans to continue adapting the full *Expanse* story: the TV series only covered the first six books. *The Mercy of Gods* is another solid book from the duo, and while reading it, I couldn't help but think that they've got a story and characters that will lend themselves well to a screen adaptation down the road. Hopefully, it'll make it through that production process and onto screens before too long. ### A painted landscape URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-art-history-gilman-lucioni/ Last updated: 2024-11-19T13:59:59.000Z Vermont’s landscape is famed for its beauty. For centuries, it’s been both a destination and inspiration for artists of all stripes. Seen through their eyes, the Green Mountain State is many things: pastoral countryside dotted with idyllic towns and villages in oil landscapes, riots of color gracing the sides of buildings, and sculptures of stone hewn from the ground. It’s a canvas for artists to interpret who we are as a collective body of people living between the mountains and the forests. Understanding Vermont through the eyes of artists throughout the ages helps us to understand not just the physical dimensions of the landscape, but of how they saw themselves in it throughout the state’s history. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/image-2-1.png) Image: [Pbergstrom](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Pbergstrom&action=edit&redlink=1&ref=andrewliptak.com "User:Pbergstrom (page does not exist)") Some of the earliest-known artwork in the state can be found along the riverbanks of Bellows Falls and Brattleboro: [petroglyphs carved into the rocks by members of the Western Abenaki tribes](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bellows-falls-petroglyphs?ref=andrewliptak.com). In his 2001 PhD dissertation, *The Petroglyph Sites of Bellows Falls and Brattleboro, Vermont*, Dr. Thomas Earl Larose notes that this sort of rock art denoted “such things as sacred sites connected to mythology, crossroads, or historical events,” and that these markings were left in places where they were oriented in ways that travelers could see them, presumably communicating the stories to them as they passed. When settlers arrived in North America, they sketched the landscape in their own ways. Mapmakers reproduced the coastlines and political boundaries on paper, while others sketched out the landmarks and towns that they saw. “First Bridge at Bellows Falls” and “View of Bellows Falls,” drawn by an anonymous artist in 1805 shows off the buildings nestled alongside the trees and rivers, while another painted a bustling scene in 1825’s “View of Cavendish.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/image-3.png) "Vermont At Sundown" by James Hope Born in 1818, Scottish-born painter [James Hope](https://vermonthistory.org/james-hope?ref=andrewliptak.com) explained that the “exquisite scenery and lordly tales of my Scottish homeland sparked a lifelong attachment for reverent delight in Nature so Attuned,” and after arriving in Vermont as a teenager, he demonstrated his skill as an artist from a young age. After injuring himself chopping wood, Hope tried his hand at painting, soon establishing himself as a noteworthy portrait painter. In her 1984 dissertation, *James Hope: nineteenth century American painter*, Elizabeth Theriault Strum noted that Hope settled his family in the Rutland area likely “due to its natural scenery...the beauty of the area and the mineral spa of nearby Clarendon attracted tourists during the summer months.” Others followed: itinerant, self-taught painter [James Franklin Gilman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%5FFranklin%5FGilman?ref=andrewliptak.com) made a living travelling from house to farm, sketching and painting everyday scenes of 19th century Vermont life, prompting biographer Adele Godchaux Dawson to highlight the attention to detail he brought to those pieces: “his quiet assemblage of detail in the foreground, middle ground and far distance gives his paintings a quality of total recall rather than casual observation.” Italian-born artist [Luigi Lucioni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi%5FLucioni?ref=andrewliptak.com) began his career in New York City in the early 20th century, but began traveling to Vermont in the 1930s, writing “it was like seeing the mountainsides of my birthplace. I was reborn in this majestic setting and I fell in love with Vermont.” He returned year after year to render Vermont’s landscapes in oil on canvas. Vermont’s artists didn’t limit themselves to paintings to express themselves. [Rockingham’s Burial Ground](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P7VUeAr7As&ref=andrewliptak.com) is home to some of the oldest graves in the state, and it’s a wonder to behold. The slate gravestones feature intricate etchings created by a team of dedicated stone carvers who etched the names and beliefs of the early settlers who passed. Nearly a hundred miles away, Italian and Scottish stone carvers in Barre spent their lives honing their craft on the granite they hauled out of the hillsides, transforming the city into an outdoor sculpture garden with the statues and headstones they created. In 1968 and 1971, Vermont [hosted a pair of international sculpture symposiums](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ1eG7uRtSk&ref=andrewliptak.com), with artists from around the world creating abstract and brutalist sculptures out of marble and concrete, showcasing the materials and infrastructure of the state to motorists as they pass by on the highway. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak There is a tension that exists while living in the midst of a painting; the desire to maintain the natural beauty that surrounds us and the pressing concerns of everyday life play a role in the way that we have depicted and constructed the shared vision for the Vermont that we see. In his book[*Repeopling Vermont: The Paradox of Development in the Twentieth Century*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/repeopling-vermont-the-paradox-of-development-in-the-twentieth-century/870?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Paul Searls notes that over the course of the 20th Century, Vermonters “came to see Vermont’s rural character \[as\] the state’s greatest asset,” and that the state’s “traditional landscapes, physical and human, increasingly distinguished the state amidst a nation growing ever more modern.” On March 23rd, 1968, Governor Phil Hoff signed the State Billboard Act (10 V.S.A. § 495) into law, which prohibited billboards along Vermont’s roadsides. It was the culmination of decades of work to preserve the state’s scenic landscapes that has attracted so many artists. One piece by Phil Godenschwager, “[The Great Wall of Vermont](http://www.philgodenschwager.com/art-of-action.html?ref=andrewliptak.com),” part of *For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection*, neatly showcases this tension, featuring the state of Vermont with its idyllic landscape dotted with small towns and farms surrounded by a horror show of skyscrapers, advertisements, and industry, held at bay by a fortified green wall. 🏛️ This piece originally ran in the Summer/Fall 2024 edition of **History Connections*, VHS's member magazine. To get it and support the organization, sign up as a member [here](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). ### Underground stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugh-howey-wool-silo-apple-tv-streaming-history/ Last updated: 2024-11-16T01:58:31.000Z Today, Apple TV+'s series *Silo* comes back for its second season. It's an adaptation of Hugh Howey's *Wool* series, a post-apocalyptic story where humanity has burrowed underground in deep silos to survive, and where a woman named Juliette has found herself in the unlikely position to recognize just how badly broken her surroundings are and how to set about fixing them. Overnight success in the publishing industry is rare: authors often toil for years to not only write a book, but find an audience. Howey is one of those exceptions, part of a small cohort of self-published authors who found enormous success outside of the traditional publishing industry, and it's worth looking back to understand how and why this happened. ### Indie writer Howey explained that he'd been interested in writing since he was a child, [telling *Wired* in 2012](https://www.wired.com/2012/03/hugh-howey-interview-part-one-science-fiction-indie-writing-and-success/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he had trouble finishing what he started: he'd begin a chapter or a story and never complete it. It wasn't until he began writing for a book review blog that he began writing to a deadline, and explained that it was while attending a book conference that he received a jolt that steered him in the right direction: when a panelist was asked about the secret to writing, "she slapped the table and shook her fist and said, 'You just write! You stop dreaming of writing. You stop talking about writing. You stop wishing you were writing. And you write!'" > "Her passion startled me. It woke me up. It was the simplicity and logic behind what she was saying. I'd always wanted to write a novel – just as a personal accomplishment – so I went home after that convention and with the help of my new habit of writing professionally every day, I started a book that I knew I would finish." As he began writing, he would pass drafts to his friends and family members, recounting to [*Geek's Guide to the Galaxy* in 2013](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-hugh-howey/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "my idea was to polish it up and maybe serialize it on a blog or something," only to have them tell him that "I should explore publishing this because they liked it better than stuff they were reading out of the bookstore." He opted to begin publishing his stories on his own, noting that he didn't have any plans to become a full-time writer: "Self-publishing, for me, was a way of getting published and the other way took years of querying, trying to land an agent, trying to get a publishing contract, a year from the publishing contract to actual publication." The timing was perfect: while self-publishing online had been a thing for decades, the infrastructure to help it along was exploding. Amazon had released its first Kindle eBook reader in 2007, and with it, Kindle Direct Publishing, which allowed anyone to upload their own stories and publish them on the platform. Howey began writing a new story, serializing it on his website chapter by chapter: [*Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481222884?ref=andrewliptak.com), a novel about a girl named Molly who had been expelled from Flight Academy and who sets off to find her missing father after his spaceship turned up across the galaxy. "I had a lot of early readers who thought this Molly Fyde story was as good as anything else out there," he told *Wired*, and soon, a couple of offers came his way from publishers, and he accepted one from Broad Reach Publishing, which released the book in 2009\. He went on to write a handful of sequels: [*Molly Fyde and the Land of Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481222921?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481222945?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481222952?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Along the way, he published a handful of shorter stories and published them through Amazon: *"*Mouth Breathers,” "Nothing Goes to Waste," "The Automated Ones," "WHILE (u > i) i--;," and others. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- ### *Wool* Howey began writing the story that would become his best-known work in 2011: *Wool*. While writing his other novels, he had the burning idea for another story, about a group of people living underground in a silo, but didn't have the time to expand upon it. "I decided to write it as a shorter piece, and it ended up being about twelve and a half thousand words," he told *Geek's Guide to the Galaxy*. The story was inspired in part by his changing life experiences: he had gone from captaining a yacht and seeing the world to seeing it through the prism of media: > "Living in one place and relying on TV, the Internet, and newspapers to know what the world was like, and it was terrifying to see how different the picture was painted because of the filters." He decided to publish the story as a standalone short on Amazon, pricing it at $.99 and quickly began receiving word from readers that they wanted more. The story quickly topped the science fiction charts on Amazon. "I started selling dozens of copies a day, and it kept building," he told *Wired*. "Toward the end of the month, it looked like I might get close to a thousand total *Wool* sales for the month." > "I stayed up until midnight refreshing my KDP dashboard to see if it would happen. I pleaded on Facebook and Twitter for a little push. I think I sold 1,018 copies of a little 99 cent short story that month. I figured it was the apex of my career and that it would all be downhill from there. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until midnight. I could barely sleep afterward. Months later, sales were still going strong. Sales, [he told *Publishers Weekly* in April 2012](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/51416-self-made-bestseller-weighs-traditional-deals.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), had "seen a major uptick in the past few months; he made $19,000 from his fiction in January, $50,000 in February, and $70,000 in March." While that story was designed to stand on its own, readers began commenting that they wanted to see more of the world. As he realized there was demand to see more of this world, Howey began plotting out a larger story beyond that first standalone entry. "I figured they enjoyed it the first time, something you could finish in an hour, and I published the second story and started on the third, and wrapped it up in these five entries, and together they formed like a five hundred and fifty page novel." The success of *Wool* began attracting attention from the traditional literary community, and Howey noted that the daunting process that pushed him to self-publishing began coming to him. "The world is truly upside down when a self-published author finds himself fielding calls from literary agents and having to politely turn *them* down," he wrote on [*GeekDad* in March 2012](https://web.archive.org/web/20130415002035/http://geekdad.hotwired.com/profiles/blogs/reading-into-the-future). "It's not supposed to work this way, but that's old thinking. The world is shifting." Howey found himself in a rare position in publishing: a huge success in an industry that was slow to change. He signed with agent Kristin Nelson to help him navigate the offers that were coming in, and found that the traditional publishing environment would be a difficult sell: self-publishing offered him better terms and the ability to publish at the rate he was most comfortable with, even if it offered some advantages, like stocking his books in bookstores and expanding to readers beyond the self-publishing ecosystem. The attention brought more than just the interest of publishing: the success of the books brought Howey to the attention of Hollywood, and in 2012, [he sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox, Scott Free (Ridley and Tony Scott's production company), and Film Rites](https://deadline.com/2012/05/20th-century-fox-spins-wool-for-scott-free-and-film-rites-270955/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). According to the [*Wall Street Journal* in 2013](https://web.archive.org/web/20141224023445/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324678604578340752088305668), Howey had made more than a million dollars from sales from *Wool*, and ended up turning down "multiple seven-figure offers from publishers," before ultimately signing with Simon & Schuster for a print-only deal that allowed him to continue self-publishing the eBook editions. Howey wasn't done with the world of *Wool*: in 2012, he turned once again to self-publishing with a trio of new stories: "Legacy" arrived in April 2012, he published "Order" in November 2012, and completed the story with "Pact" in January 2013, publishing the trio as [*Shift*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544839649?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Together, they made up a prequel to *Wool*, exploring the changes to the world that brought about the post-apocalyptic environment that readers fell in love with. The novel came at an good moment: Simon & Schuster published its first edition of [*Wool*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358447849?ref=andrewliptak.com)as a hardcover in April 2013, where it began climbing up the bestseller lists. He capped off the year with another installment: [*Dust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544838260?ref=andrewliptak.com), which built on the storylines of the first two novels and brought them to a close. Howey also joined forces with anthologist and editor John Joseph Adams in 2014 for a trilogy of post-apocalyptic anthologies, *The Apocalypse Triptych* ([*The End is Nigh*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781495471179?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The End is Now*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781497484375?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The End Has Come*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781497484405?ref=andrewliptak.com)) which included three new stories in the Wool universe: "In the Air," "In the Mountains," and "In the Woods." Somewhere along the way, Howey jumped publishers with the series: first to John Joseph Adams' imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [in 2020](https://reactormag.com/cover-reveals-hugh-howey-silo-saga-box-set/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and then to Harper Collins, under its William Morrow imprint, which earlier this week published a "[Collector's Edition](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063391864?ref=andrewliptak.com)" featuring new endpapers, sprayed edges, and a poster featuring a blueprint of the silo, as well as a new essay from Howey about the creation of the series. --- 📝 Delving into the stories behind science fiction books and television is a useful exercise: it helps to explain the factors that lead to the narratives and characters that fall in love with. These types of articles are the ones that I really enjoy writing, and I'm planning to do more of them. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce. Some of the things that goes into an article like this include researching and reading up on plenty of old interviews and background material, acquiring books, taking photographs, editing, copyediting, transcribing interviews, and sometimes, travel to subjects to chat with them in person. It takes time and resources. If you aren't a supporting subscriber for Transfer Orbit, [****please consider signing up as one**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)****.** Your support helps keep this newsletter running and sponsor-free. You can also make a [one-time payment](https://www.andrewliptak.com/november-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-list/#/portal/support) to show your support. --- ### Adaptation In 2012, 20th Century Fox had outbid a handful of its rival studios for the rights to Howey's trilogy, and it entered the adaptation and development pipeline. It was a busy period for science fiction and fantasy films: Ridley Scott (a producer on the project) had just released his long-awaited return to the *Alien* franchise with *Prometheus*, while comic book films like Joss Whedon's *The Avengers*, Marc Webb's *The Amazing Spider-man,* and Christopher Nolan's *The Dark Knight Rises* dominated theaters alongside other big adaptations like the first installment of *The Hobbit, The Hunger Games,* and *Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2* charted well. The next couple of years would bring other big SF/F films to audiences: *Oblivion*, *Elysium*, *Gravity*, *Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy,* the next two installments of *The Hobbit* trilogy, and plenty more. Ridley Scott also seems to have found another passion project from an indie-to-blockbuster success adaptation: *The Martian*, which arrived in theaters in 2015 to solid acclaim and which was based on Andy Weir's self-published 2011 novel by the same name. It was a good time for high-concept, non-franchise adaptations: audiences were clearly turning out for these types of films. Work on an adaptation of *Wool* moved along: the [studio even had a director lined up for the project](https://www.vulture.com/2012/11/fox-looks-to-j-blakeson-for-adaptation-of-wool-self-published.html?ref=andrewliptak.com): J. Blakeson (*The Disappearance of Alice Creed).* Those initial efforts seem to have fallen through. It always seems that Hollywood productions move in one of two ways: everything lines up quickly because of the fervor around a project, or they linger in development hell for years. That seems to be the case here, because by 2015, Blakeson appears to have fallen off the project and the [studio tapped](https://www.thewrap.com/guardians-of-the-galaxys-nicole-perlman-to-rewrite-sci-fi-movie-wool-for-20th-century-fox-exclusive/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) Nicole Perlman (coming off of *Guardians of the Galaxy* the year before) to rewrite the original script for the adaptation. The project didn't move much beyond that point: in 2017, [Disney acquired 20th Century Fox](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a28657256/fox-movies-cancelled-disney-ben-affleck-taika-waititi-flash-gordon/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and ended up axing a number of the films that had been in development at the time. Its death was temporary: the following year, AMC and LaToya Morgan (*Shameless, Turn: Washington's Spies*, and *Into the Badlands*)picked up the rights to adapt the novel as a TV series. Where genre films had exploded over the 2000s and into the 2010s, high-budget genre TV had grown substantially as well, thanks to the critical and commercial success of shows like *Battlestar Galactica* (2003), *LOST* (2004), *The Walking Dead* (2010), *Game of Thrones* (2011), and plenty of others. *Wool* could prove to be a solid show for AMC to add to its growing lineup of genre shows, especially those interested in post-apocalyptic narratives. The show didn't remain at AMC, however: in May 2021, the news broke that [Apple had scooped up the rights to *Wool*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-picks-up-hugh-howeys-wool/), run by Graham Yost (*Justified*). The tech company had launched its dedicated streaming service in 2019 and already had a solid number of genre titles under its belt, like the post-apocalyptic *See* and adaptation of Isaac Asimov's famous novel [*Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/). (Since then, we've seen Apple pick up a whole bunch of other adaptations of well-known genre titles, like [William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/)and [Martha Wells' *Murderbot Diaries*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/).) Production moved along quickly as Rebecca Ferguson was cast as Juliette Nichols, the show's lead, and was joined by Common (Robert Sims), Rick Gomez (Patrick Kennedy), Rashida Jones (Allison Becker), Avi Nash (Lukas Kyle), David Oyelowo (Holston Becker), Tim Robbins (Bernard Holland), Chinaza Uche (Paul Billings), and Harriet Walter (Martha Walker.) Now titled *Silo*, the series debuted on the streaming service on May 5th, 2023\. [Writing on his blog](https://hughhowey.com/the-silo-premiere/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Howey noted that it was hard to believe that the moment had arrived: "For twelve years, I haven’t really let myself believe that a TV show or a film based on one of my novels would ever get made." After it premiered, he was [thrilled at the response](https://hughhowey.com/we-are-live/?ref=andrewliptak.com): > "Up until two weeks ago, I was still scared. But then early reviews leaked out, and I watched episodes with people who adore the books and people who haven’t read any of it. The consensus has been that this show is great. The reviews from critics are over the moon (95% on RT!). My social feeds are awash with readers and new folks gushing over the show. My heart is so full and happy right now." In June, [Apple announced](https://deadline.com/2023/06/silo-renewed-season-2-apple-tv-plus-1235416567/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it would bring the series back for a second season, which went into production in June 2023, just as Hollywood writers went on strike in July, pushing production back to December. After cameras wrapped in March, the show's second season debuted on Apple TV+ on November 15th, 2024. While the show hasn't been renewed for a third season as of yet, [Ferguson noted in April 2024](https://collider.com/silo-season-3-4-filming-schedule-explained-rebecca-ferguson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the show's creators were not only planning on an additional season, but that it would wrap up with a fourth, with both being shot at the same time. [](https://collider.com/premium/?ref=ad%5Fremoval) > "I believe that the show has an ending, and I know when that is. So that's the answer. You will find out when the show is done. To be honest, I don't think it's a secret. The books are the books. It's three books, and the three books are divided into four seasons. So I believe, unless any Apple person is gonna jump on, I think we're absolutely fine with saying Season 1, we've done. Season 2 is shot and coming out, and we're now looking at green-lighting Seasons 3 and 4\. And I think we would film them maybe together, and that would be the end." Despite the lack of a formal announcement, it [seems that production has already begun](https://www.kftv.com/news/2024/10/22/apple-tv-silo-series-three-begins-filming-uk?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- Howey's career is remarkable, coming at a moment in time of great upheaval in the publishing and storytelling industry. It's a telling indicator of how small technological changes and advances can shape up and undermine an entire industry, and how creators can take advantage of those advances in unexpected ways. Looking back over Howey's publishing career, two things stand out to me: first, he's pointed to a personal passion for wanting to tell his stories, regardless of the audience and commercial expectations that seems to guide so many acquisitions these days. He knew he had narratives that appealed to his circles of friends and family members, and followed his instincts to just put them out into the world. He's not alone here: authors like Andy Weir and John Scalzi have followed similar paths, with Weir publishing *The Martian* online chapter by chapter, and Scalzi [serializing](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/12/30/the-offer-on-old-mans-war-a-ten-year-retrospective/?ref=andrewliptak.com) *Old Man's War* on his website. In each of these cases, these books caught on with audiences: their readability and characters prompted readers to recommend it to others, allowing them to not only reach more people, but to the larger publishers that helped them bring the books out through the traditional bookstore route. That type of virality is hard to replicate: it's difficult to say exactly what type of story/characters/prose will reach the right combination of readers. Howey was able to recognize and take advantage of an entirely new publishing ecosystem that the more established traditional publishers weren't able to adapt as quickly to. His close contact with readers – replying to reviews, comments, and emails – allowed him to quickly understand what readers were enjoying, and provide insights and updates to his new fans. [Expeditions in self-publishingHow Craig Alanson forged a new path a a self-published author![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-28.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3522.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) A couple of years ago, I spoke with Craig Alanson about his process writing his *Expeditionary Force* series, and one thing that I came away with from that conversation was the flexibility that self-publishing afforded him: he could write three massive books a year (and did) to keep his audience engage and reading. Other successful authors, like Brandon Sanderson, also seem to understand the value of not just producing stories for readers, but also [providing the framework to encourage fandom and community amongst their numbers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/). While most of these authors have dipped into the traditional publishing world for many of their books, it's clear that they understand some of the limitations and remain somewhat flexible around them. Howey was able to understand and recognize what his longer-term priorities were, and accordingly, how bringing in traditional publishers and film studios fit into the puzzle, rather than the other way around. This is a story that likely isn't repeatable in the same way: audiences, platforms, publishers, and technologies have all changed. Howey had the right combination of story, luck, and wits to take his story to extraordinary heights. But Howey's underlying motives–to tell a good story–feels like it remains the most important part of the puzzle, and while it's trite to say that everything fell into place, I do think that having a good product on your hands makes the journey much, much easier. --- If you're a fan of the novels, I'd be interested in hearing what attracted you to them, and how you've found the show so far. Let me know in the comments! ### Envisioning Arrakis URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-children-folio-society-hilary-clarcq-artist-interview/ Last updated: 2024-11-13T14:01:02.000Z Earlier this summer, The Folio Society announced its [Fall Collection](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/new?ref=andrewliptak.com), and as in years past, it's a nice, varied stack of titles. The new volumes this time around include reads from [Cormac McCarthy](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/all-the-pretty-horses.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Agatha Christie](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/murder-is-easy.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Albert Einstein](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/relativity.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and one that I've been looking forward to, Frank Herbert, in the form of [*Children of Dune*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/children-of-dune.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Dune* has been a big part of The Folio Society's plans in the last decade: the publisher launched Herbert's classic in 2015 and with it, kicked off a flood of [high-end science fiction classics](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/). [The Folio Society’s Dune is the definitive edition for fansA fine volume for collectors![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-2.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9249.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-folio-society-dune-frank-herbert-sam-weber/) That first edition of *Dune* set a high bar what Folio has released in the years since: it features some beautiful artwork from Sam Weber, comes on excellent paper and includes an introduction from critic Michael Dirda and an afterword by Herbert's son Brian. It's been a couple of years since that first book came out, and I thrilled when Folio [published the second installment ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/)[of the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/), *Dune: Messiah,* last year. They seem to have put the work in to ensure that this follow up is on par with the first book, tapping artist [Hilary Clarcq](https://hilaryclarcq.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to illustrate both editions. Based in Colorado, Clarcq works primarily in oil on panel, and earned her degree in English and Fine Art from the University of Colorado, Boulder. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_0697.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak I had a chance to chat with Clarcq recently about her work on the *Dune* novels. Here's our conversation: ### To start, can you tell me about your background? When did you realize that you wanted to become an artist? I’ve been making art since I can remember. But even though I have a degree in Fine Art and English, I didn’t go to an art school or have an art career in mind until much later. In fact, I really had no idea what to do when I graduated. I worked as a waitress for a while and then found my way to graphic design. Ultimately, design wasn’t a good fit, but it took a while for me to identify why and then have the confidence to shift to illustration and gallery work from there. A turning point was learning how to paint in oils around 2017\. Something “clicked” for me with oils, and it’s become my favorite medium. ### Were there any particular artists or works of art that inspired you and your style? I think my art style is in a constant slow state of change in response to zeitgeist, personal taste, and personal growth. So, if you ask me next year, my response might be different. But I’ve lately been inspired by film and photography, and in particular, the way that lighting can create vastly different moods. It’s exciting to find moments in a book where I can exploit the lighting or composition to underscore a narrative, character, or emotion as a director would. One thing that draws me to painting vs other artistic mediums is the ability for the mark-making itself to contribute meaning. For example, a viewer will absorb a different message if the artist’s hand is visible or hidden, or if an area is highly detailed vs loosely suggested. That aspect of painting fascinates me, especially because I see so much room for myself to grow in that area. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_0699.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### I'm always curious about how the work you're imagining impacted you: were you a fan of the books *Dune* prior to this assignment? What did you come away with from the books when you first read them? I first read books 1-3 about 20 years ago, and the remaining books a while later. Science fiction and fantasy have been my favorite genres since childhood, and I loved *Dune* for the story and characters straight away. But in addition to a captivating world and plot, Herbert gives us intriguing philosophical concepts. My favorite science fiction is a kind of mirror on reality, but with enough distance that you gain new perspective on your own world. Taking the concept of Abomination as one example: I can’t say I’ve experienced an overwhelming flood of genetic memory as Alia does in *Children of Dune*. But inner voices fighting for dominance of my psyche? I think we all know that feeling to some degree. So when Ghanima comments about Alia’s condition, I consider how it might apply to my own reality: “Alia denied what she was and became that which she most feared. The past-within cannot be relegated to the unconscious.” That’s just one example of many where Herbert reflects on our world using seemingly far-out concepts. With my most favorite books like *Dune*, my partner and I will have conversations that start from something specific in the text but spin off in all sorts of directions from there — and I love that. ### *Dune* was one of the first big science fiction books that Folio did, illustrated by Sam Weber. His paintings are a mix of fairly realistic portraits and scenes, and your illustrations feel congruent, but not identical. What was the process like to follow up on Dune and to both keep some continuity and your own style? In large part, the credit for congruity goes to the Art Director, Sheri Gee, for recognizing a shared sensibility between my work and Sam’s illustrations for Dune. Sam is one of my favorite artists, and I’d mentioned that to Sheri during a prior Folio assignment. I was intimidated to take the project, but Sheri encouraged me by saying something like, “Don’t stress over continuity. Just do you, and it will naturally come together.” This was wonderful advice and an incredible level of trust, and it made me even more determined to give the project my all. That said, we did consider two overarching aspects to preserve continuity. The first was maintaining the design elements from *Dune*, such as the monochromatic cover with a dominant focal element and single accent color, the linear landscape for the slipcase, and the black and white chapter headings. The second component was making sure that the costumes, settings, and props felt like they all came from the same world. I stayed away from recognizable close-ups of most of the characters we see in the *Dune* illustrations, which prevented disparities in that regard. In some ways, the pre-existing framework was a relief and gave me time to focus elsewhere. One fun thing was doing callbacks to images from the first book. For example, Alia’s veil on the cover of *Dune: Messiah* ties back to Sam’s final illustration in *Dune*, which also depicts Alia wearing a veil. In *Children of Dune*, I riffed on Sam’s version of the Baron’s smiling face, and also gave Alia a large ring similar to the rings in Sam’s version, hinting at the Baron’s growing influence on her. While it did require special care and attention to persevere continuity, the project challenged me in the right kind of ways and didn’t feel restrictive. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_0700.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Tell me a bit about your process: how do you go about selecting, designing, and illustrating any given scene? While reading, I record passages that jump out to me, such as an iconic moment, a unique lighting opportunity, or a scene that captures something significant about a character. I also keep a document with any important physical descriptions that I come across throughout the book. Along with the above, I note recurring themes to use as inspiration for elements like the cover and slipcase, which aren’t specific scenes. In *Dune: Messiah*, for example, Herbert frequently uses water-related imagery to describe the desert landscape, prescience, and more. This overall theme inspired the slipcase, which hints at Arrakis' transformation into a water-rich paradise, but also the political and religious wave sweeping the empire. The next step is to narrow the list of options down based on the best pacing, variety, and what excites me most. I test potential compositions through tiny sketches. Recently, I’ve started jumping to 3D software at this point. I create rough 3D objects for the characters and setting, and I can then move around the scene to try different camera angles. After a sketch has been approved, I use a combination of 3D maquettes and photography to collect reference, paying close attention to details from the text. Last I move to the oil painting, making any final edits or revisions digitally. ### You provided the illustrations for both *Dune: Messiah* and *Children of Dune*. What did you come away with in the first book that you were able to implement in the second? With the second book, I had a little more time and a lot more confidence. I also had a solid foundation of research and reference built up. All of that allowed me to let loose a bit and try a few ideas that I wasn’t certain would work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/11/IMG_0701.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### The *Dune* novels famously get ... weird the further you go, and your art in *Children of Dune* begins to stray into some surreal elements. How did you approach some of the more psychedelic scenes? I mentioned being inspired by film and photography, but I also think illustration has a special capacity to reach “beyond the real” and impart layered meanings in a way that strict realism cannot. I’m quite drawn to scenes with ambiguity, where a character is teetering on a figurative precipice, or where we as readers might be uncertain how to feel. Herbert often presents multiple faces of the same concept, whether it’s charismatic leaders, the trap of prescience, or the Golden Path. For all these reasons, it seemed important to include scenes that invited a darker, nuanced look at the superhuman “gifts” of the Atreides. My approach for these surreal scenes is pretty intuitive and non-linear. I use digital collage to move towards a composition that feels right (before painting the final in oils). With Leto and the sandtrout, for example, the passage that jumped out to me is, “Leto…lay naked upon the sand, his gloved arm outstretched into the path of migrating sandtrout.” This line led me to draw Leto laying down in a savior-martyr pose (recalling Christ on the cross), but I eventually landed on an off-kilter version that makes the heroic aspect feel less certain. The surreal scenes were some of the most satisfying to illustrate because I wasn’t exactly sure how the compositions would unfold. ### What are you working on at the moment that we should look forward to? Unfortunately, I can’t share most of what I’m working on at the moment! But I look forward to sharing on social media when I’m able. So stay tuned [there](https://www.instagram.com/hilaryclarcq/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com), or via the [mailing list on my website](https://hilaryclarcq.com/about/?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- ### Andor Season 2: April 22nd 2025 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-april-22nd-2025/ Last updated: 2024-11-09T21:24:42.000Z We finally know when we'll get to see the next season of *Star Wars: Andor*: April 22nd, 2025\. Lucasfilm [revealed the news today](https://www.starwars.com/news/d23-brasil-andor-season-2-premiere-date-announce?ref=andrewliptak.com) at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event in Brazil, along with some other tidbits about the next live-action series, *Skeleton Crew* (which got a [new trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f19gfOMZTtg&ref=andrewliptak.com) last week), and got a quick update and sizzle reel of the upcoming film *The Mandalorian and Grogu*. Of all those updates, I'm particularly excited to see news about *Andor*. If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you'll know exactly why: I think it's one of the best stories in the franchise ever told, because it brings new depth and nuance to the fight between the Empire and Rebellion in ways that the films never quite reached for me. It's political, gritty, exceptionally well-written, and unlike most of Disney's Star Wars output, it's something that I've gone back to watch multiple times. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-24.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) The first season followed Cassian Andor (who we met in 2016's *Rogue One*) and follows him as he's sucked into the rebellion. It's an outstanding character study of a person who was somewhat willing to lay low into radicalized member of the revolution against the Empire. This next season will be formatted a little differently from the first season. Written by Dand and Tony Gilroy, Beau Willimon, and Tom Bissell, every couple of episodes will take place in a different year, filling in the five-year gap between Season 1 and *Rogue One* (with the final three episodes taking place in the leadup to that standalone film.) [The frontier of the rebellion is everywhereAn excellent video to be inspired by![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-25.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/0C8A4261-792F-4E8C-A8B2-B4190EECED49.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/) I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out. Presumably, we'll be seeing Alan Tudyk's K-2SO join Cassian this season, and I'm holding out hope that we'll get Ben Daniels back to reprise his role as [General Antoc Merrick](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Antoc%5FMerrick?ref=andrewliptak.com) (if anything, because I cosplay that character) The season went into production back in November 2022, and hit some delays because of the 2023 Writer's Strike: the show was expected to return this year, but production didn't wrap until February. But now, we at least have a date to look forward to. ### 22 new SF/F books to distract you from a terrible November URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/november-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-new-books-list/ Last updated: 2024-11-08T20:37:08.000Z Well, this week hasn't been the best ever, has it? It's a reminder that the world and society require constant work, and I often find that when we're in the midst of bleak times, I can find some good inspiration from the stories I read. They don't necessarily have to offer a roadmap, solution, or fix for my problems, but a good story can brighten even the darkest of days. November (with a couple of holdovers from October) brings a ton of new books about people saving the world from doom, dealing with the changes that inevitably come, and the tough decisions that characters have to make to accomplish their goals. As always, you can find the prior lists through the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. 📚 As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Ghost has a new way to support newsletter writers:** you can now tip creators with a one-time payment and you can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-books-vandermeer-stephenson-solomon/#/portal/support). Thanks to the folks who tried this out during the last list! I usually do two lists a month, but this time around, I've gotten everything into a single list: here are 22 new SF/F books to check out this month: ### [*Star Wars: Solo Command*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726112?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Aaron Allston (November 5th) Random House Worlds continues its re-release series of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The latest is *Solo Command*, the final installment of Aaron Allston's arc following the zany Wraith Squadron as they work to take down Imperial warlord Zsinj and his flagship Iron Fist. To do that, they need some help from a familiar face: Han Solo. These books are funny, heartfelt, and excellent. I'm glad to see that they're getting a refresh and can find new audiences. Also rereleased: Sean Williams' novelization of [*The Force Unleashed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726136?ref=andrewliptak.com) and Brian Daley's collected [*The Han Solo Adventures*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726129?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101367?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yaroslav Barsukov (November 12th) Minister Shea Ashcroft is banished from his kingdom after refusing an order from the queen to kill a crowd of protesters. He's exiled to the border where he's to oversee the construction of a new defensive tower. When he arrives, he discovers that it's utilizing some new technologies that'll make it dangerous to the locals. When someone tries to kill him, he needs to confront his own convictions, an ancient legend, and a portal to a dead world in order to survive and come through with his sanity intact. ### [*Breath of Oblivion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250265128?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maurice Broaddus (November 12th) Maurice Broaddus follows up his 2022 novel [*Sweep of Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250264947?ref=andrewliptak.com), with *Breath of Oblivion*. The latter was an ambitious and exciting space opera about a handful of people in the Muungano Empire – a breakaway government from old Earth that's created a coalition of states across the solar system. In it, a young leader had to contend with power plays to figure out the direction of their people, a soldier and her unit fought on a distant world, and a starship captain charted a new course to help find a path forward for her and her friends. In this sequel, Broaddus picks up the various story threads following a range of characters as they try and chart the course for the diaspora on Earth and far beyond, facing off enemies familiar and alien. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250265128?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Broaddus continues to center Black people and culture within his vibrant transglobalist future, creating a vast and immersive galaxy and probing the transformative philosophy of Muungano society. The results allow for deeper explorations of the nature of empire and the costs of exodus, without veering into didacticism." ### [*Usurpation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250809162?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sue Burke (October 29th) A number of years ago, I picked up Sue Burke's debut novel [*Semiosis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765391360?ref=andrewliptak.com) and was blown away by it (here's [my review](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/10/16994952/sue-burke-semiosis-first-contact-science-fiction-intelligenet-plants-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) from when it was published.) It was an excellent exploration of colonization and the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence. She continued the series in a followup installment, [*Interference*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250317810?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now has a new sequel, *Usurpation*, which I'm eager to check out. In the first book, colonists from Earth reached the planet Pax and encountered its strange, plant-based lifeforms there, including Stevland, a dominant, highly-intelligent entity, which secretly sent some of its offspring to Earth to explore and report back. They found a world in chaos: rebellions, uprisings, and pandemics have upended social order, and as the violence spreads, Stevland's children have begun working in the background to try and bring humanity's behavior under control. ### [*The Incubations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589292?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ramsey Campbell (November 26th) Ramsey Campell is a well-known and prolific horror author and critic, and his latest novel is *The Incubations*, which follows a man named Leo Parker. He's been staying in the idyllic Alphafen, but when he leaves, the world becomes strange: the airport becomes a labyrinth, his photographs contain strange creatures, and his own words have become treacherous and lethal. He seems to have picked up some sort of strange entity and as he begins to understand what he's brought back with him, he has to now figure out how to overcome it. [](javascript:void%280%29) ### [*The Last Hour Between Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316303477?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Melissa Caruso (November 19th) An investigator named Kembral Thorne just got a much-needed break from her newborn child, and is trying to enjoy herself at a New Year's party. When people start dropping dead, she discovers that there's a mysterious force that's taking people through different levels of reality, each one increasingly more dangerous. To survive and save her city, she'll have to partner with a notorious thief. [Writing for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2024/08/liz-bourke-reviews-the-last-hour-between-worlds-by-melissa-caruso/?ref=andrewliptak.com#:~:text=The%20Last%20Hour%20Between%20Worlds%20is%20a%20breath%20of%20fresh,I%20really%20can't%20wait.), Liz Bourke says "This is a gorgeous, witty, fast-paced and atmospheric novel. Caruso gives Kem, with her first-person narrative, a wry and compelling voice with very relatable concerns, and her complicated, fraught, awkward, semi-adversarial relationship with Rika adds an extra layer of emotional complexity to Kem’s very trying evening." ### [*Dead Girls Don't Dream*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250791405?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nino Cipri (November 12th) As a former mall worker, I was drawn to [*Finna*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250245731?ref=andrewliptak.com), Nino Cipri's slim novella about retail drudgery and multiverses, and their latest, *Dead Girls Don't Dream* looks like it'll be just as interesting. Cipri tells the story of Riley Walcott who knows better than to wander alone and after dark in Voynich Woods. When her younger sister Sam sets off to track down a local legend in the woods, she discovers a knife-wielding assailant. She's killed in a ritual but is soon resurrected by Madelyn, who lives in the forest under her mother's strict rules. The pair of rule-breakers are thrown in together and together, discover ways to confront the nature of the world around them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nino-cipri/dead-girls-dont-dream/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Cipri’s young adult debut is a coming-of-age tale that’s dripping with dark magic, steeped in mother-child trauma, and brimming with feminine power. Readers get a strong sense of place and characters from the text, which candidly reveals the two protagonists’ complicated inner emotional lives." [Retail drudgery and multiversesReview: Finna by Nino Cipri![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-22.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/84346925_2418640625116721_2393997779899777024_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/retail-drudgery-and-multiverses/) ### [*Steel Lobsters: Crown, Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472863584?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Myke Cole (November 5th) I've been a fan of Myke Cole's recent military histories, such as [*Legion Versus Phalanx: The Epic Struggle for Infantry Supremacy in the Ancient World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472841124?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472843760?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472858665?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* His latest looks just as intriguing: an examination of Sir Arthur Hesilrige and his Regiment of Horse, the last, fully-armored knights who served in England in the 17th century, exploring how the evolution of warfare meant that Hesilrige and his men had to eventually shed their armor. ### [*The Relentless Legion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250851253?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.S. Dewes (November 12th) J.S. Dewes continues her series *The Divide* with a third installment (preceded by [*The Last Watch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250236340?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Exiled Fleet*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250236364?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which Adequin Rake has rallied the the Sentinels under her command, while Cavalon Mercer has discovered that his grandfather is about to unleash some horrifying genetic experiments on the outer colonies. The pair will need to collect all of their allies in order to save the universe once more, and this time, it might not be enough. ### [*Believe: The Untold Story behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way Into Our Hearts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476062?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Egner (November 12th) I've covered Apple's streaming service, Apple TV+ for a while here, and one of its huge, breakout successes was *Ted Lasso*, a heart-felt, optimistic fish-out-of-water series about an American football coach who was hired to coach an English football league. This book, written by *The New York Times*' TV editor Jeremy Egner, features interviews from a ton of people involved in the series to see how the story went from zany commercial to blockbuster TV show, and how and why it captured the hearts of audiences. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jeremy-egner/believe-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "striving to go beyond straightforward hagiography, Egner catches up with just about every relevant figure on the show, arguing that the show’s animating spirit of optimism was reflected in its leads." ### [*Black Days*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798989178452?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jackson Ellis (October 22nd) I'm always excited to see a new book from a Vermont writer: in this case, it's *Black Days* by Jackson Ellis, which takes some inspiration from a local legend, the “[Frozen Hill People](https://vtdigger.org/2017/02/05/then-again-bizarre-tale-of-hibernation-is-a-mystery/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” from the 19th century. In it, Daniel Fassett crashes into the Mad River in December 1992 and while he survives, falls into a coma and loses out on his pension. Depressed and desperate, he enlists the services of a local doctor to get him to hibernate through the long Vermont winter in a casket, and while he tries to keep this scheme a secret, word soon leaks out, causing all sorts of issues. *Kirkus Reviews* [says that](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jackson-ellis/black-days-novel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this is a strange and marvelously unpredictable tale, one that raises provocative questions about the tension between scientific progress and moral goodness. The narrative is intelligently conceived and executed, and refreshingly original." ### [*The Legacy of Arniston House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883094?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T.L. Huchu (November 12th) I really enjoyed T.L. Huchu's debut novel [*The Library of the Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250767783?ref=andrewliptak.com), a fantastic urban fantasy set in a near-future Scotland, following a ghostalker named Ropa Moyo who discovers that someone has been bewitching children. He's published a couple of other installments, [*Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883063?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883063?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now continues the series with a fourth installment. Ropa is still training to become a magician and is now an intern, working for the English Sorcerer Royal, only to have her world upended when an enemy reveals an old secret about her Gran. When she arrives home, she finds her grandmother murdered, and that she's the prime suspect. She has to race against time to stop an cult from resurrecting an ancient power to save the world and clear her name. . [Review: The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu’sA slick, urban fantasy mystery that kicks off a promising series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/02/FL0jFSsXoAEZ5sY.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tl-huchu-library-of-the-dead-urban-fantasy-review/) ### [*The Republic of Salt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660958?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ariel Kaplan (October 22nd) Ariel Kaplan follows up her novel [*The Pomegranate Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660941?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a sequel, *The Republic of Salt*. In the first book, she followed a woman named Toba Peres in a fantasy inspired by Jewish folklore and the Spanish Inquisition. In this installment, Toba and Asmel have been trapped on the human side of a magical gate, pursued by the Courser and an Insuisitor. On the other side in the realm of Mazik, Naftaly has been getting increasingly frightening visions of the city of Zayit being overrun for its supply of salt – a toxin to the inhabitants of the magical realm. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ariel-kaplan/the-republic-of-salt/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the plotting of this Jewish-inflected trilogy’s middle volume is complex and almost defies summary, given the intricate backstory. And, as is the curse of most middle volumes, this is clearly the setup for the series conclusion, and so very little gets resolved. But the chase is thrilling, the worldbuilding is unique, and characters are an intriguingly gray-shaded bunch who must constantly weigh principle against expedience. ### [*The Poppy War (Collector's Edition)*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063413573?ref=andrewliptak.com) by R.F. Kuang (November 26th) With books like [*Yellowface*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250833?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Babel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063021433?ref=andrewliptak.com), R.F. Kuang has rocketed into the forefront of literary stardom from already lofty heights from her first trilogy of books. She's now returning to her debut novel *The Poppy War* with a new collector's edition that looks like it's worth picking up. She [announced this back in April](https://rfkuang.substack.com/p/the-poppy-war-beckys-version), noting that it's got a new cover that better depicts her characters, while every chapter has illustrations from artist [Rola Chang](https://www.instagram.com/jungshan/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*Interstellar MegaChef*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862337?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lavanya Lakshminarayan (November 5th) This looks like quite a bit of fun based on the cover alone: Saras Kaveri steps off of a star freighter from Earth with just her clothes and personal robot with her as she accepts an invitation to compete in the galaxy's most-watched cooking show, *Interstellar MegaChef.* She's the first person from Earth allowed to compete in the series, and she happens to meet an inventor named Serenity Ko, who wants to start a new project: a food simulation, and needs to find someone to teach her how to cook. Their meeting sparks a fruitful conversation, one that could change the future of food – and their lives – forever. ### [*Seaborne*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035905751?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Livingston (October 1st) For centuries, the seven houses of the Seaborn have traded between the Fair Isles for centuries, dealing with pirates and other problems. When a new enemy, the Windborn, appear, Shae, the first mate of the Bone Pirate, launches a plan to board one of the enemy ships, who discovers that the captain is a man. Along with another woman, Bela, they soon learn that the Windborn and Seaborn are descended from the same people, broken apart by a magical ritual enacted by a race of mechanical men who betrayed their makes. Now the three must undertake a desperate journey to fix the world. ### [*The Shiver Tree*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212437721?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Holly Searcy (November 12th) The land of Amarra was once guided by five Druid orders: Jade, Ice, Spirit, Sky, and Sun. Those protectors have long since broken apart, leaving the world vulnerable to blights, monsters, and pirates. Kiana Paletine believes that if the orders can be brought back, the world can return to its peaceful state, and sets off to try and enlist the help of her estranged sister, Ravaini. When she learns of an ancient artifact called the Shiver Seed, which has fallen into the wrong hands. If she can recover it, maybe she'll have a chance to save the world. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-shiver-tree-2242166&ref=andrewliptak.com) "Searcy’s debut novel is a fun romp that will feel nostalgic to players of Dungeons & Dragons, as it seems to be the first adventure in a larger campaign." ### [*The Lotus Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316538602?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tasha Suri (November 12th) Tasha Suri brings her Burning Kingdoms trilogy (preceded by [*The Jasmine Throne* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316538510?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Oleander Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316538565?ref=andrewliptak.com)) to a close with *The Lotus Empire*. Malini has reclaimed her title as the Empress of Parijatdvipa as foretold, and she now must try and win over the priesthood who remain loyal to her predecessor. Do to that, she has to make a terrible bargain: claim the throne and burn, or find someone else. At the same time, Priya has survived the deathless waters and is now imbued with magic in her veins, and when she encounters a spirit under the waters that promises protection for Ahiranya, it comes at a cost: Priya has to offer up a sacrifice. As Priya and Malini stand against one another, they'll have to find themselves working together to defeat a common enemy in order to save their kingdoms and their lives. *Publishers Weekly* gave this a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316538602?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The pitch-perfect balance of action and sapphic romance will keep readers eagerly turning the pages until the remarkable conclusion. This sends the series out on a high note." ### [*Firefly: Aim to Misbehave*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789098396?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rosiee Thor (November 12th) *Firefly* the series might be long over, but Titan Books has been steadily bringing out new adventures in book form. The latest is Rosiee Thor's *Aim to Misbehave*, which follows the crew of Serenity after they're paid in geese for their latest job, effectively stranding them without fuel on the planet Brome. Fortunately, the foreman of a local refinery, Lyle Horne, is willing to help them, if they give him a hand. A local authority known as The Governess has been kidnapping his workers and wants the crew to help him. Unfortunately, Lyle and Shepherd Book share a past that neither want to talk much about. They hatch a plan to retrieve the workers, but as is wont to happen, the plan never quite works. ### [*And the Mighty Will Fall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063115248?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K.B. Wagers (November 19th) K.B. Wagers continues their NeoG series with *And the Mighty Will Fall* (preceded by [*A Pale Light in the Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062887795?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Hold Fast Through Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062887825?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Ghosts of Trappist*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063115170?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in which Commander Maxine Carmichael and Lieutenant Commander Saqib Vahid of the Near Earth Orbital Guard are operating above Mars to hand control of the Mars Orbital Station to civilian hands, and have to contend with extreme factions from the Martian independence movement. An attack against them kicks off a chain of events that could shatter the fragile peace that they've worked hard to forge. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/and-the-mighty-will-fall-1810061?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "With the found family of *Zuma’s Ghost* as the foundation of the series, the internal conflicts are just as compelling as the external high-stakes action." ### [*Wheel of the Infinite*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250861375?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Martha Wells (November 19th) After updating and re-releasing her novel [*City of Bones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250861672?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Book of Ile-Rien*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250873132?ref=andrewliptak.com)in the last year, Martha Wells has a new novel for you to rediscover: Wheel of the Infinite. Originally published in 2000, it follows Maskelle, a murderer and traitor who has been summoned back to help put the world in order: the Wheel of the Infinite must be carefully remade every century to ensure that the Celestial Empire remains in balance. A black storm has been spreading across the wheel, threatening the stability of the world. Along with a mysterious swordsman named Rian, the two must figure out a way to find the source of the problems, or watch the world come to an end. *Kirkus Reviews* said in its 2000 [starred review for the original edition](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/martha-wells/wheel-of-the-infinite/?ref=andrewliptak.com): "in a field teeming with clones, retreads, and solipsistic doorstoppers, Wells dares—and, gloriously, succeeds—to be different. What more do you need?" ### [*The Naturalist Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662519031?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carrie Vaughn (November 1st) I've been a big fan of Carrie Vaughn's short fiction and recent novels, and this one looks particularly interesting. In 1880, Beth Stanley's husband Harry dies, putting her life's work into jeopardy: the field of Arcane Taxonomy is one in practitioners label every natural thing, thus tapping into some of their unique powers. But only men are permitted to operate here, and Beth, who worked with her husband in the field, is suddenly cut off. At the same time, taxonomists Brandon West and Anton Torrance are working to set up an expedition to the South Pole, where they hope to be able to tap into the world's magnetic forces. Harry would have been useful on the endeavor, but when they begin to look into his work, they discover that it was Beth's all along. They have to find a way to bring her along and in doing so, confront the forces in the world that would lay claim to her potential and knowledge. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781662519031?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Vaughn spins a moving tale about the hardships that women faced in the late 19th century, while also introducing an inventive magic system that hinges on the pursuit of knowledge. The result is an adept and provocative feminist fantasy." --- ### A new Star Wars trilogy on the horizon URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-trilogy-simon-kinsberg-news/ Last updated: 2024-11-07T19:10:37.000Z *Deadline* [broke some interesting news today](https://deadline.com/2024/11/star-wars-trilogy-simon-kinberg-movies-1236169916/?ref=andrewliptak.com): Lucasfilm has tapped Simon Kinberg to create a new trilogy of *Star Wars* films. The publication notes that he's going to develop, write, and produce the trilogy, and that it might be considered episodes 10, 11, and 12 of the Skywalker Saga, which came to an end back in 2019 with *The Rise of Skywalker*. The publication also notes that there's some dispute over this, that it's essentially setting up a new saga alongside the other projects that are in development out there. (More on that in a moment.) Setting aside Lucasfilm's track record when it comes to new *Star Wars* projects, Kinberg feels like a pretty safe choice to bring in for the franchise. He was involved in the creation of the animated series *Star Wars: Rebels*, and has a long track record of action-adventure franchise films under his belt, both as a writer, producer, and director. What stands out for me is his work as a producer on quite a few films that I really like, such as Neill Blomkamp's *Elysium* and *Chappie*, Ridley Scott's *The Martian*, and Matthew Vaughn's *X-Men: First Class*. He's someone who can put together a solid and competently film, even if some of those entries in his history are a little questionable. The caveat here is that we don't know what this films–if they're made–will be about, but I can't help but think that this signals that Lucasfilm is looking for something familiar to audiences, and is setting aside some of the more experimental, throw-everything-to-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks types of projects (which I'd describe projects like *Rogue One, The Last Jedi, The Acolyte,* and some of the other announced films.) If that's actually the case, I'll probably have some mixed feelings about it: I think *Star Wars* has excelled when it's been pushing the line against what fans want and expect. *The Empire Strikes Back* was tonally very different from its predecessor, the entire Prequel trilogy struck a very different tone and style, and *The Last Jedi* went out of its way to really poke at the story and tropes that make up the franchise's films. I've long had a thought about how the sequel trilogy stood out and failed at this. J.J. Abram's *The Force Awakens* had to lean into the familiar, both to entice old fans who felt burned by the prequels, and new viewers who might be somewhat familiar with *Star Wars*, and needed something familiar and different to start off with. I've long felt *The Last Jedi* was where the trilogy should have been headed, both story-wise and in its approach, with a middle entry designed to bridge the gap. That way, they would have been able to ease viewers and fans into some new territory, but also end the larger saga in a new place. Fans are persnickety and don't like change: if given the chance, they'll just eat the potato chip-equivalent of *Star Wars* content that doesn't push or change or challenge what's come before, and instead, we'll get recycled storylines, tropes, and action figures until the sun dies. And I think with the decision not to continue *Acolyte* and some other moves here and there, we've seen Lucasfilm take steps to avoid antagonizing some of their more vocal fans. I don't think that's entirely the best course of action–you'll never satisfy those segments of fandom–but you also don't want to turn out something that's unrecognizable. It's possible to balance all of that: *The Mandalorian* falls a little more into fan service than I'd like, but it's captured a spirit of the stories that people relate to while playing out some new and interesting adventures. *Andor* took some of the familiar building blocks and put together some excellent storytelling. But shows like *Ashoka* have at times felt like you need some extended homework to really get what's going on, and that they're essentially designed for a preexisting audience. So: we'll see. The franchise has a ton of building blocks at its disposal, and they can certainly set up a story that features lightsaber duels, a titanic fight of underdog rebel against evil authority, and spaceship battles that would resonate with fans and critics with just enough tweaks so that it doesn't feel entirely like they're retreading old ground. At worst, it's another installment of the franchise that doesn't rise beyond the level of commodity. At best, it's the start to a new story. We'll have to see how it shakes out. --- Now that we've seen word break of this project, it's a good time to check in and see where we are with the *other* announced film projects. ### In production/development - Jon Favreau*'s The Mandalorian and Grogu*. A spinoff from *The Mandalorian* series [announced in January](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/), this film is actually in production. It's slated for a May 22nd, 2026 release date. - Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's Rey film. [Annonced in 2023](https://www.starwars.com/news/swce-2023-new-star-wars-films?ref=andrewliptak.com), this is a film that'll be set post-*Rise of Skywalker*, and will follow Rey's attempts to rebuild the Jedi Order. This seems like it's the next one to go into production, if they can figure out the script. Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson co-wrote a script, but [then left right before it was announced](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/star-wars-steven-knight-damon-lindelof-justin-britt-gibson-1235560466/?ref=andrewliptak.com), then Steven Knight came on to write it, but [he just departed](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/star-wars-daisy-ridley-steven-knight-1236190522/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and filming is apparently slated to start next year. - Dave Filoni Mandoverse finale film. This film was [announced back in 2023](https://www.starwars.com/news/swce-2023-new-star-wars-films?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a sort of culmination of the various post-*Return of the Jedi* era shows like *The Mandalorian, Ahsoka*, *The Book of Boba Fett*, and *Skeleton Crew*. He's [currently working](https://comicbook.com/starwars/news/star-wars-dave-filoni-offers-status-update-on-his-announced-movie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on *Ahsoka* Season 2, but this is still in the works. - James Mangold's *Dawn of the Jedi*. Another [2023 announced-film](https://www.starwars.com/news/swce-2023-new-star-wars-films?ref=andrewliptak.com), this is one of the more out-there projects, set 25,000 years before the Imperial era and following the discovery of The Force and founding of the Jedi Order. *Andor*'s [Beau Willimon is co-writing this as of April 2024](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-wars-beau-willimon-to-co-write-james-mangolds-movie-exclusive-1235867598/?ref=andrewliptak.com), so it seems like it's still inching forward. - Taika Waititi's film. No idea what this would be about, but it's another project [announced in 2020](https://www.starwars.com/news/taika-waititi-announce?ref=andrewliptak.com) that's had some fits and starts. Last I read, he was still writing this, although there's been some rumors that it's been put on hold. - Donald Glover's Lando film (?). This was originally announced as a series, with [Justin Simien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin%5FSimien?ref=andrewliptak.com) tapped as showrunner. Last year, he left and was replaced with Donald and Stephen Glover and redeveloped as a film. [As of earlier this fall](https://www.thewrap.com/donald-glover-lando-star-wars-prequel-movie/?ref=andrewliptak.com), they're still working on it. - Patty Jenkins' *Rogue Squadron.* Lots of starts and stalls since this was announced back in 2020, but as of [earlier this year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-rogue-squadron-patty-jenkins-development-update/), it seems like Jenkins is still actively working on it. So... fingers crossed? - Simon Kinsberg trilogy. And now, we can add this one to the list of stuff in the works. We'll see if it stays in this column or gets relegated to purgatory. ### Announced but in limbo? - Rian Johnson's trilogy. This was announced way back in 2019 as a trilogy that would break some new ground. It's since been put on the back burner because Johnson's been doing really well with *Knives Out, Glass Onion*, and the forthcoming *Wake Up Dead Man*, so it might be a while before he gets to it. - Shawn Levy's film. Levy's coming off of a big hit with *Deadpool & Wolverine* and an episode of the upcoming final season of *Stranger Things*. It sounds like the [2023 Writer's Strike derailed this](https://collider.com/new-star-wars-movie-update-shawn-levy-comments/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - *The Mandalorian*: The Movie. We've had three seasons of *The Mandalorian*, as well as the 2026 film and Filoni's wrap-up film. While Lucasfilm had scripted out a fourth season for the series, it [sounds like](https://collider.com/new-star-wars-movie-update-shawn-levy-comments/?ref=andrewliptak.com) they're thinking of redeveloping it as a feature film, depending on how well Favreau's film does when it's released. That makes sense, given that the fervor for streaming content has died off a bit and there's more demand for theatrical releases. ### Canned - D. B. Weiss & David Benioff film series. [Dropped in 2019](https://deadline.com/2019/10/star-wars-setback-game-of-thrones-duo-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-exit-trilogy-1202771184/?ref=andrewliptak.com) when the pair made a big deal with Netflix. [Earlier this year](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/david-benioff-dan-weiss-star-wars-movie-the-first-jedi-1235784437/?ref=andrewliptak.com), they noted that it was going to be about the origins of the Jedi. - J. D. Dillard / Matt Owens film. [Development ended in 2022](https://www.thewrap.com/jd-dillard-star-wars-movie-update-rocketeer-sequel/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - Kevin Feige film. [Development e](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/star-wars-kevin-feige-patty-jenkins-movies-shelved-1235545774/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[nded in 2023](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/star-wars-kevin-feige-patty-jenkins-movies-shelved-1235545774/?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- ### A fearful nation URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/american-scary-jeremy-dauber-horror-history-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-11-01T18:10:44.000Z One of the most influential courses I took while in college was Gothic Literature, taught by my then-professor, now-friend/mentor Dr. Brett Cox, in which he ran through the history of horror fiction by looking at works by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Joe Hill, amongst others. I'd never been much of a horror fan before that – I'd read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe's work as a teenager, but not much beyond that. The course awakened a new interest for me: Prof. Cox really emphasized that the horrific events and actions at the center of the stories weren't always the point: it was the atmosphere, environment, and the ways that the authors interpreted the world that were really important. I've read a small share of horror since, and a new book brought the memories of what I learned in that class flooding back: [*American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643753560?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jeremy Dauber. Dauber's the author of another excellent genre history, [*American Comics: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324036098?ref=andrewliptak.com), and in that book, I found an excellent survey of the genre that went far beyond the confines that a genre provides to try and explain the wider influences that buffered the direction that it's taken. With *American Scary*, he takes much the same approach, and in doing so, makes a compelling argument that America's tradition of horror fiction is rooted in our own inequities and the real-world horrors that are part of the country's foundation. Dauber kicks off the book by looking back at the country's early years: exploring the arrival of European colonizers and how they confronted the dark woods of North America with trepidation. Those Puritanical founders found plenty to be frightened of, whether it was from the notion that they were doomed to hell or the threat of attacks from indigenous Americans. These conditions helped reinforce the idea that they were surrounded by a frightful world, and that in order to survive, they'd have to take desperate measures. Early examples of that are familiar incidents like the Salem Witch trials. People being singled or cast out of their communities, Dauber argues, is a foundational part of this larger canon, and it's those experiences that not only provide plenty of inspiration for horror authors, but also the thought process that's been continually running under the hood. Another essential influence, Dauber argues, is the country's original sin: slavery. He points to some of the obvious influences: the brutality of the practice, the violence inflicted against those held in captivity, how it as an institution dragged the nation into war. In doing so, he points to an overarching component: the fear that it instilled in the country writ-large. The anxiety of the Southern whites who feared the consequences of these practices, the fear imparted by slave catchers, of those being torn away from their homes and families, and the apocalyptic horrors that industrialized warfare inflicted on the lands and bodies of the people involved. Zooming out further, slavery and the war fought over it is part of a much larger picture: the South's economy depended on the practice because it made those industries ever more profitable. Capitalism, Dauber argues, provides the conditions for no shortage of everyday horrors. He makes a point that resonated with me: "perhaps the most omnipresent horror, in those first decades of the century, was the explosion of an industrial capitalism that chewed up waves of workers, Hawthorne's *Notebooks* on steam engine-steroids." Along the way, these horrors influenced plenty of early writers – not just genre practitioners like Poe, but the writers at publications like *Harpers* and *The Atlantic*, who were watching and reporting on the changes that the nation was undergoing. The modernizing world brought with it plenty of new things to be fearful of: industrial processes that spat out rancid and toxic food, poisoned landscapes, outsiders from strange countries, and "immoral" arts and behaviors that challenged the established norms. Along the way, Dauber runs through the works (fictional and non) that was being produced along the way: everything from Poe's "Cask of Amontillado," to Frederick Douglass's *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,* Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", Robert Chambers' *The King in Yellow,* the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and more. This isn't an exhaustive, year-by-year examination: it's an eminently readable book that doesn't get bogged down in minutia and rabbit holes, and as such, the first half of this book is a good overview of the foundations of the modern horror genre. Dauber pivots a bit in the second half of the book. He still keeps a close eye on the larger, horrific events that define the real world, like the First and Second World Wars, the tensions of the Cold War, the red scare, Reaganomics, and other notable influences that continued to nudge a more defined "horror" genre in various directions. But he also looks at how the modern genre takes shape, not just in novels and short stories, but across film and television as well, pointing to the rise of Hollywood and the adaptations of classic stories like Frankenstein and Dracula as major touch-points that helped influence how we saw horror, running up all the way to the modern day with streaming services and the proliferation of cheap-but-super-popular horror films that rule theaters when fall comes around. In many ways, *American Scary* isn't just a history of horror fiction and storytelling: it's an examination of our nation's flaws, our fears, and our anxieties, and how scary stories are one of the ways that we collectively address them. There are plenty of those problems to be addressed, and if history is anything to go by, there'll be plenty to influence and inspire the next generations of horror creators in the years and decades to come. ### Rutland's Halloween Parade and the comics world URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/rutland-halloween-parade-vermont-history/ Last updated: 2024-10-26T16:26:44.000Z Marvel has been publishing comics since it was founded in 1939, and you’ve probably heard of some of its most famous characters, like Captain America, Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Black Panther, and plenty of others. The stories of these characters were created by teams of writers and artists, often working off of outlines and story beats conceived of by Marvel editor Stan Lee. Individual comic characters often headlined their own series of comic books, where they’d go off on their own adventure for that issue. In 1960, DC comics, Marvel’s rival publisher, decided to bring together a bunch of their popular characters in a team it called The Justice League, launching its own series. Those comics sold well, and Marvel decided to adopt the same idea. It brought some of its existing heroes together for a team called The Avengers. Since then, team-ups have been an enduring trope in the world of comic books: who doesn’t love to see their favorite heroes working side by side? These comics have been the basis for a massive superhero film franchise called the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you might be thinking: much of the action takes place in New York City or in far-flung places around the world. What does this have to do with Vermont? That’s where these two items that we hold in the Leahy Library come in: *The Avengers* issue 83 from 1970 and 119 from 1973, which are set in the Green Mountain State, specifically in Rutland. While these comics might have featured fantastical adventures around the Earth and beyond, the fans of the comics were everywhere, including in Vermont. There was one fan from the Rutland area named Tom Fagen, who was a huge fan of the comics from both Marvel and DC comics. For years, Rutland had gotten into the Halloween spirit, and in 1960, the City of Rutland’s recreation department decided to put together a Halloween parade, which included bands and marchers dressed in costume. It was a huge success, and Fagen approached a friend at the rec department to suggest that a big comic book character like Batman would make for a bigger draw. In 1961, Batman made an appearance in that year’s parade. Fagen was heavily involved in comics fandom, and began writing letters to fanzines and to the letter columns published in the comics about the event. He also wrote to one of Marvel’s in-house writers, Roy Thomas, whom he’d met at a convention, and invited him to the parade. Thomas and some of his fellow writers made the trip up to Rutland for the 1964 parade. Batman and comics hit their stride in the 1960s, and the Rutland Halloween parade continued to grow each year, with a whole host of comic book characters taking part. In 1970 and the 10th anniversary of the parade, the story turned full circle: Thomas decided to include the Rutland Halloween Parade in one of his upcoming comics, Avengers 83\. This wasn’t an advertisement for the parade: the event was part of the story itself. The story revolves around a supervillain who is plotting his revenge against the avengers team, who happen to be in Rutland for the parade. A fight ensues, and just as he’s about the beat the avengers, an all-female team of superheroes called the liberators shows up to save them. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/images/rutland_1.jpg) Image: Marvel Comics Rutland and the Halloween parade showed up in a handful of other Marvel and DC comics over the years, and Fagen himself showed up as a character in a couple of issues. The city’s most recent appearance was in the DC comic Superboy and the Ravers #16 in 1997\. Fagen was a fixture in the parade for decades, but eventually stepped back and handed over the reins to others int he mid-2000s. He died in 2008, just days before that year’s parade. In 2023, Rutland unveiled a monument honoring the legacy of the parade, featuring Fagen shaking Batman’s hand. 🏛️ This post was originally published as a [Collections Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhAlMORV8BI&ref=andrewliptak.com) and [blog post](https://vermonthistory.org/rutlands-halloween-parade-and-the-comics-world?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the Vermont Historical Society. To support VHS and its work, [consider signing up as a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Murders in the farmlands URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sarah-stewart-taylor-agony-hill-vermont-history-interview/ Last updated: 2024-10-26T13:00:38.000Z I'm a big fan of mystery novels, especially ones set in Vermont. For decades, Brattleboro author [Archer Mayor](https://archermayor.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) produced a new entry in his Joe Gunther series annually, delving into some sordid part of the state's culture for a thrilling adventure. These books were incredibly influential for me, and I was bummed to hear that he [was taking a break](https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2022-07-15/time-to-recharge-and-take-a-deep-breath-archer-mayor-takes-a-break-from-mystery-writing?ref=andrewliptak.com) to focus on his *other* career as a Death Investigator for the Windham County Sheriff's Department in southern Vermont. So I was excited when I learned that local author [Sarah Stewart Taylor](https://www.sarahstewarttaylor.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) was focusing on Vermont in latest novel: [*Agony Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826626?ref=andrewliptak.com). Set in the fictional town of Bethany, Vermont in 1965, it's the first installment of a new series following Vermont State Police Detective Franklin Warren. He's transferred to Vermont from Boston just in time to be called to an investigation: a farmer is killed in a barn fire, and it quickly becomes apparent that the situation is more than just an accident. It's a fun, breezy read: Taylor draws on real incidents in Vermont's history, such as the [counter-culture movement that sprang up during the Vietnam War](https://vermonthistory.org/back-to-the-land-communes-in-vt-1968?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Romaine Tenney's suicide after his farm was taken over by the state to construct I-91](https://www.vermontpublic.org/programs/2019-10-29/interstates-burning-farms-eminent-domain-remembering-romaine-tenney?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the ways that the state was changing during that time period, all wrapped up into a mystery with some interesting and eccentric characters. In the acknowledgements, Taylor thanked the organization I work for, the [Vermont Historical Society](https://vermonthistory./?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that she spent a considerable amount of time conducting research for the book. So, I reached out to her to chat a bit about how she used our resources and how she wrote the book to bring Vermont's past to life. *This interview ran in VHS's bi-weekly newsletter* History Happenings*, which you can sign up for* [*here*](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/taylor.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak / Vermont Historical Society ### **First off, can you introduce yourself to our readers?** I live in Hartland with my family and I've been writing crime novels for twenty years now. I've also worked as a journalist and writing teacher, among other things. My first series was set in New England (including Vermont) and featured an art historian who specializes in gravestone and funerary art. Even though the novels had a contemporary setting, they frequently looked to the past and featured old mysteries surfacing in the present, so I think that was when I got the historical mystery bug. I wrote middle grade novels for a bit and then in 2020, I published the first novel in my [*Maggie D'arcy*](https://www.sarahstewarttaylor.com/maggie-d-arcy-series?ref=andrewliptak.com) series, about an American homicide detective in Ireland. And now, I've launched a new series set in Vermont, with *Agony Hill*. ### You set *Agony Hill* in the summer of 1965 in the fictional Vermont town of Bethany. What prompted you to write a historical mystery? I love historical mysteries and the way they take a familiar literary structure and set it at some point in the past. It's such a great way to learn about a different era of history. I think I saw it as a challenge too. After writing contemporary mysteries, I relished writing a crime novel in which no one has cell phones or doorbell cameras or geolocation. My characters have to rely on more basic forensic science, their interview and observation skills, and good old intuition. ### Vermont of 1965 was a period of transition, and you not only include some back-to-the-landers that were part of the counterculture movement, but also the ongoing work for the interstate highway system: what attracted you to those parts of Vermont’s history? Living here in the Upper Valley and serving as a school board member and library board member, struck me how many of the thorny issues we're dealing with right now in Vermont really resonate with what was going on here in the 1960s. Things were shifting so monumentally during that time, from the construction of the interstates, changes in farming, industry and land use, and a wave of school consolidations to Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of communes and arrival of new Vermont residents. I loved the idea of exploring this period through the lives of people in one small town and setting mysteries in this familiar but also dynamic and evolving place. ### In your acknowledgements, you talk a bit about the research that went into getting the setting right: what type of work goes into recreating the past in this sort of book? I did research on a few different fronts in order to immerse myself in the time period and get the details of mid-1960s Vermont right. The first — and my most favorite — mode of research was talking to people who remember this time period in Vermont and the Upper Valley. I had so much fun hearing stories and firsthand accounts. I also did a lot of research in newspaper archives. Beyond current events and inspiration for plotlines, I found so many wonderful details in the pages of the many daily and weekly newspapers that were thriving here in Vermont in the mid-60s. National news, television schedules, social columns, advertisements for clothes and turkey and cars — reading newspapers all the way through gave me so much specific information about what people's lives were like. I also found the various resources of the Vermont Historical Society incredibly useful. A number of my ideas for the series and the kinds of historical events I plan to take on across what I hope will be many novels were sparked while strolling through the museum. The digital resources, archives and online exhibits provided lots of inspiration and I hope to do some research in the library for my next book. Finally, another of my favorite ways of researching *Agony Hill* was studying vintage community cookbooks from the 1950s and 60s. I have quite a large collection now and I've loved learning about the daily lives of home cooks from this period, the ingredients they used, and the food they made for daily meals and for special occasions. ### What do you hope readers of this book will take away from this historical perspective of the state? First and foremost, I hope readers will enjoy the mystery and getting to know my characters. But I also hope that they'll see some of the parallels between this period of history and our current one. Doing a deep dive into the issues people were thinking about and talking about in 1965 made me think a lot about the areas in which we've made progress and the areas in which we still have a long way to go. Most of all, I hope readers will fall in love with Bethany (though it's a fictional place) and the people who live there. --- ### Imagining The Culture URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-folio-society-daniel-taylor-art-interview/ Last updated: 2024-10-22T13:14:17.000Z Years ago, I wrote a column on the history of science fiction for *Kirkus Reviews:* it was a fun series to write and research, because while I was a science fiction fan, it introduced me to a ton of authors that I might not have come across otherwise, and provided me with some great context for how the genre evolved, author to author. One of the most interesting columns that [I wrote was about Iain M. Banks](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/iain-m-banks-culture-novels/?ref=andrewliptak.com). He wasn't an author that I'd read much from at the time, but I was fascinated by his reputation and really enjoyed the first installment of his long-running Culture series, *Consider Phlebas*. When The Folio Society announced last year that it would begin publishing its own editions of *The Culture* series with [*Consider Phlebas*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), I was thrilled (you can see my prior coverage, reviews, and interviews related to the company [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/)). They have an excellent track record producing some excellent volumes for readers, and it was a good excuse for me to return to the series. Earlier this year, the company released the second installment of the series, [*The Player of Games*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-player-of-games.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and for both editions, it brought in artist [Dániel Taylor](https://danieltaylor.hu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to bring the world of Banks' Culture to life. Based in Budapest, Hungary, he's been illustrating since the age of 14 and has been working as a full-time artist since 2015, with clients including Marvel, Mondo, New Scientist, Outside Magazine, and plenty more. You can follow him on Instagram [here](https://www.instagram.com/danieltaylorart/?ref=andrewliptak.com). After reading and enjoying *Consider Phlebas* last year and picking up *The Player of Games* earlier this summer, I reached out to Taylor to chat with him about how he went about approaching the artwork for these two volumes. Here's our conversation. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.* ### **To start, can you tell me a bit about your background? When did you first begin pursuing art, and who were some of the artists who inspired you to pick up the pen/pencil/paint?** It started as something of an escapism for me when I was a kid, perhaps 10-12 years old, and I was naturally attracted into just sketching things, mostly Pokémons, cartoon characters etc. This eventually led to more complex graphite pencil drawings that took me weeks to complete. I was about 15 when I got one of my friends digital drawing tablet as a gift, and this led me into digital art and illustrator as a full time job in 2015, which I still pursue to this day. Only I’ve learned a lot more skills, and softwares including 3D to help me lay out difficult environments, and its also a perfect way for me to explore different lightning scenarios during the early stages. As for inspirations, with no particular order, were Dan Luvisi, Dave Rapoza, Agnes Cecile, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Moebius, James Jean, Sergio Toppi and many more. Also games like World of Warcraft and Diablo played a big role when I was starting out, I wanted to be like the artist who did all the concept art for the games, thought its the coolest job ever. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0835.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Iain M. Banks' *Culture* series has long been a favorite of science fiction fans: when did you first read the series, and what were your impressions when you read through them? Well, to be honest the first time I read an Iain M. Banks book is when Folio Society reached out to me about illustrating *Consider Phlebas*, the first of the series. I liked it very much, the world he imagined was amazing, but I personally became a big fan after finishing the 2nd book, *The Player of Games*, which was perfect in my opinion. I rarely get the feeling when I just can’t put a book down, but here it was certainly the case. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0838.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### What is your decision process when it comes to determining what scenes to portray, and how do you go about conceptualizing them? For the Folio Society books, when I read them, I have a notepad or something where I can note interesting parts, which I can already quite vividly imagine in my head as an illustration. I write down the page number and a few words of what peeked my interest at the time. I only revisit the list when I’m done with the book, as there’s usually 30+ scenes written down, and need to shortlist it, keeping in mind that there should be a few pages between the 7 illustrations, so they’re not all piled up too closely. I then send the shortlist over to Folio Society and get their thoughts before moving on. ### What types of things are you looking for in a text to guide you when you're envisioning a scene? There are two types I enjoy, but for different reasons. One is where the scene is written down to every single, even minor detail, which doesn’t leave that much to your imagination. This is good in a way that you can’t “mess it up” and draw something that other readers imagined completely different. Second version is the opposite, that sometimes you’re a lot more free in terms of how that sci-fi object, environment etc. looks, as the description can be pretty vague, but it has the issue of someone not liking your interpretation. This is also part of the reason that in *The Player of Games,* most of the characters’ faces are hidden, or they’re just silhouettes, so there’s a bit of room for other readers imagination. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0842.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Something that struck me with both your art in *Consider Phlebas* and *Player of Games* is how warm the scenes feel: they're blown out with yellow light. What steered you in that direction? It was the general art direction that was requested for *Consider Phlebas*, along with not including any characters, so if you look closely there aren’t any at all in the environments. They were only introduced in *Player of Games*, which I was happy about as I reckon they make the scenes a bit more interesting. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0844.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### One of my favorite illustrations between the two books is "Yay followed every move," because it feels like it has a lot of contradictions: there's motion in the background, but a quiet scene of two people at a table, with depth in the background but a closeness to the characters. What goes into a scene like that? I think you kind of nailed the direction I was going for there, just a nice contrast of the calmness of playing a game, them talking while there’s a bit of chaos surrounding them, which may be a hint of where the story will go eventually. It’s also a scene for some reason it stuck with me, even though I read the book more than a year ago, so it’s definitely memorable. ### Folio Books reprints the classics, and that often means that there's a history of prior covers, sometimes screen adaptations, or other art that's often cemented the image that readers have of the series: how do you see your relationship with the text and how you add to that? Do you feel like you need to purposefully separate yourself from those prior images, or do they have an influence? Good question, and I try to do something different, although for covers I was definitely influenced a bit by the previous geometric, weird shaped covers as that’s something I’m more fond off, compared to having covers like the more detailed inside illustrations which are more clear in the sense of what is going on. So overall I’m influenced a bit, but I’m aware of it and try to make my own version instead. ### As a bit of a followup, Banks was known for his illustrations: Orbit released a book of his art, [*The Culture: The Drawings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572873?ref=andrewliptak.com) last year: Did that sort of thing have any influence on you? To be honest I haven’t seen much of that book, I’ve only noticed it in a Facebook Group when someone posted about it few months ago, but I should check it out, thanks for reminding me! But other illustrator's work can inspire me, I’m always looking to learn, especially when I need to illustrate something that I haven’t done before and looking at how other artists do it helps. But like my previous answer, I like to mix it up with my own solutions and style. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0843.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### What do you have in the works at the moment that we should look forward to next? I can’t really talk about it unfortunately, but I have some posters coming up, like the more recent [*Stray*](https://www.madebymutant.com/merch/472354-dniel-taylor-stray-poster?ref=andrewliptak.com) poster for *Mutant* and we also released our own sci-fi/fantasy book almost a year ago titled [*Omnimorphs: Beyond the Veil*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CP8HHXRC?geniuslink=true&ref=andrewliptak.com). --- As always, thanks for reading: I hope you've found this interesting. Are you a fan of Banks' *Culture* novels? What draws you to them? Let me know in the comments! Andrew ### Space fashion URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/axiom-spacesuit-nasa-artemis-3/ Last updated: 2024-10-19T16:03:52.000Z I love a good space suit. One of my favorite stories involving spacesuits is Arthur C. Clarke's 1958 short story "Who's There?", about an astronaut who steps off into space only to encounter something strange inside his suit mid-mission. Over the years, books, TV shows, films, and games have all depicted suits of various types, [some good, some bad](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/19/16104004/science-fiction-space-suit-worst-best-the-martian-alien-sunshine-gravity?ref=andrewliptak.com). But they're almost always cool to look at. Ever since I was a kid learning about the space race and lunar landings, I've thought that space suits are some of the coolest pieces of equipment that we've ever devised. When you break it down to its core elements, it's a tiny fragment of Earth that you're bringing with you, and there's so much potential wrapped up in the layers of fabric and rubber and plastic. Earlier this week, the private space firm Axiom Space [unveiled the spacesuit](https://www.axiomspace.com/release/prada-axiom-suit?ref=andrewliptak.com) that NASA's Artemis astronauts will wear on the moon when we make our next landing. It's called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit, and it's really a gorgeous piece of equipment. It looks a bit like the classic A7L spacesuits that the Apollo astronauts wore on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, and a bit like the modern [Extravehicular Mobility Unit](https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/extravehicular-mobility-unit-emu/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (EMU) that astronauts now wear for spacewalks onboard the International Space Station, but it looks sleeker and a bit more versatile. (And it looks much better than [SpaceX's suit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdELVCg2Ank&ref=andrewliptak.com), which has always felt to me like it needs a belt or something.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/AxEMU_Prada_Spacesuit_Mockup_20241007_085.jpg) Image: Axiom Space Space suits are complicated pieces of equipment. Nicholas de Monchaux's phenomenal book [*Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262015202?ref=andrewliptak.com)is an excellent look into the development of the spacesuit and how deceptive and intricate they are to assemble and wear. These aren't things that you can merely throw on and jump out of an airlock and go walking around: in addition to the numerous layers of material that seamstresses hand sewed together, they're garments that have to withstand incredible variations in temperature, hold water, air, waste, and have to allow someone to actually move. Every piece of equipment that gets flown in space needs to be completely rethought and reconstructed in order to operate in those extremes. Earl Swift's 2021 book [*Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062986535?ref=andrewliptak.com)is another good window into the development and deployment of these items. Axiom's spacesuit is undoubtably building on the things that we learned from the Apollo missions and the other EVA excursions that we've conducted in the decades since. In their release, they highlighted that these suits are designed to work with both male and female astronauts across a range of body types – no small feat considering that NASA's original astronauts were men and the first American woman to conduct an EVA was astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan in 1984\. [Writing in *The New York Times* in 2019](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out that if NASA is serious about returning to the Moon and hoping to go elsewhere, it will need to fundamentally examine the hidden gender biases that crop up throughout the space program. The EMU suit was based off of the Apollo spacesuit designs, she writes, suits that were designed for men. And while NASA had planned to produce additional suits in a range of sizes, for "budget reasons, the extra-small, small and extra-large suits were cut. However, many of the male astronauts could not fit into the large suits, so the bigger size was brought back. The smaller sizes never were." [Interview with Mary Robinette KowalA couple of years ago, Mary Robinette Kowal published a pair of books that utterly blew me away \[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review\] : the first two installments of her Lady Astronaut series: The Calculating Stars \[https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385\] and The Fated Sky \[https:![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_bda06a81-0101-4019-9254-d6a71e163c37_2448x2448.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-mary-robinette-kowal/) As a result, when NASA happened to have a pair of women scheduled for a spacewalk in 2019, they had to shuffle the staffing, because they only had one suit that would fit both of the women. The first all-female spacewalk took [place months later](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/watch-nasa-s-first-all-female-spacewalk-ncna1068526?ref=andrewliptak.com), when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir went out to conduct some repairs on the ISS. Axiom touts the flexibility of this new suit in its announcement. Not only can it fit a range of bodies and withstand various conditions on the moon, one detail stood out to me: the AxEMU will use a "single, foundational architecture," meaning that they'll be able to adjust and modify it with standardized parts depending on the mission. NASA is in the [midst of a years-long crisis with its spacesuits](https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-spacesuit-crisis?ref=andrewliptak.com), and they've had to swap out or trade parts to keep the suits that they've got functioning. As parts break or malfunction, the shortage hampers NASA's ability to field astronauts for critical repairs or to conduct their work. If we're going to the moon, this can't happen, and the space agency really needs to get its infrastructure ducks in a row in order for these missions to go off smoothly. Even when it was operating routine spaceflights, NASA had a habit of swapping parts between the space shuttles, as Adam Higginbotham notes in his book *Challengers*, something that put serious strains on their operational capabilities. [Review: Challenger by Adam HigginbothamAdam Higginbotham’s Challenger is an engrossing overview of the failures that led to the 1986 space shuttle accident.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/09/IMG_0631.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/) Despite plans, NASA isn't likely to land on the moon in 2026 with Artemis III. The agency is far behind its schedule to return to the moon, and with this year's contentious election throwing no small amount of uncertainty into the mix, it will likely be a while before we see these suits deployed to the Moon's surface or used during an EVA. But it is exciting to see that these suits have come this far. They're not over the finish line yet: Axiom says that they're in the final development stretch and have to undergo a battery of tests in the next year or so before they're actually manufactured. I really dig the look of this suit: they look functional and practical, and I'm excited to see them used on the lunar surface in the (hopefully) next couple of years. What's particularly neat is that these suits will be equipped with lights and HD cameras (I think the mounts are above the helmet's visor?) which should beam back plenty of footage from the EVAs that those astronauts will eventually undertake – something that I'm sure will provide no shortage of inspiration for plenty of scientists and science fiction writers in the years that follow. ### The state of the newsletter URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/state-of-the-newsletter-2024/ Last updated: 2024-10-12T16:19:17.000Z It's been a little while since I've been able to sit down and put together what I call a roundup email, and I realized that on October 19th, this newsletter will celebrate its 6th anniversary. I did a double-take: I've been writing this for a lot longer than I thought, and it's a good opportunity to look back on those six years and muse on how this newsletter started out and how it's changed – how I've changed. Newsletters had always been *a thing,* but around 2018, they were starting to get some attention as a new delivery method for writers. Most authors that I followed had a newsletter, but they were rarely used for anything other than "I've got a book coming out" and those sorts of updates. Social media decimated the blogging community with its pithier updates and rapid-fire pace, and as places like Twitter grew more contentious and toxic, a bunch of writers and entrepreneurs latched onto the idea that this older form of communication was better. In my [announcement post](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2018/10/19/im-starting-up-a-newsletter), I cited [Eliot Peper's newsletter](https://eliotpeper.com/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a good guiding example: in our conversations, he talked about how it was a good way to connect with readers. I was looking for a better way to talk online: I'd just purged my [timeline of Tweets](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2018/8/25/the-long-trail-of-conversations-best-forgotten), and was looking for another place to place articles that didn't quite hit *The Verge*'s bar for coverage: the more wonky, in-depth stuff about science fiction and fantasy fandom that I got yelled at for writing about. When I left *The Verge* in 2019 and ended up freelancing and writing a book, the newsletter became a lifeline: I rethought how I'd be covering things, and decided to implement a roundup that would serve as a sort of catch-up to the firehose of SF/F news that was taking place day in and day out. For dedicated subscribers, I released some more news-oriented commentaries, and used it as a way to talk about more cosplay stuff. What's been interesting, looking back, at how my views on covering the news has changed the longer I've been out of a newsroom. In many cases, looking back, I was covering stuff that was interesting, but really only in a larger context; incremental stories that I was essentially writing with the expectation of having a trail of coverage that would pay off down the road with some larger piece, or I'd be commenting on a news event and... essentially just adding my voice to the others that were talking about it, sometimes without really adding anything to the story. Most of all, I've found that it's easy to set out with a plan: write X items on Y timeline. That structure can be good, but as with my attitude towards genre boundaries, I've found it useful to discard them when the time is right. Ultimately, my attitude towards posting is: write what I find interesting, and tell people why that's the case. It seems to have worked so far. Along the way, TO has undergone its own transformations. When I started it in 2018, it was on TinyLetter ([RIP](https://blog.emailoctopus.com/alternative-to-tinyletter/?ref=andrewliptak.com)) under the title Wordplay, which was pretty much just words on a page, without too much in the way of images or frills. It worked pretty well for what it did, and I ended up with a couple of hundred subscribers, some of whom are still here. From there, I jumped to Substack as that platform was making waves about being the next big thing in newsletters, and somewhere along the way retitled it to the overly bland "Reading List", in part because my reliable freelance income writing up monthly book lists had dried up when the pandemic squashed freelance budgets. I eventually bumped myself off of Substack a couple of years ago after having some concerns over their moderation and content policies, and ended up here on Ghost. I'm happy with were TO has landed: I'm able to write some in-depth things that aren't necessarily tied to the news cycle, review books that I find interesting and worth sharing, and type up the occasional news piece when I find things that I think folks will enjoy – some habits are hard to break. A lot of these changes have gotten me closer to the core of what I'm most interested in: reading and writing, and sharing things with the folks who share those interests. Most of all, I'm pleased at the community that I've been able to build up around this, either through the folks who've responded to issues, left comments, or who take part in the slack community. It's grown from a modest couple of hundred people to around 2,600\. Some of you are here for the book recommendations or reviews, and you've patiently followed along as I've gone off on tangents about Vermont history or some other thing that's caught my attention. At the very least, I hope that you've found it interesting and enriching. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/10/IMG_0796.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently Reading I was talking with a friend last night about what's on my TBR pile, and it's a hefty stack. At the top of the list (ie, what's in my work bag right now) are two books. The first is [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Karin Lowachee. Karin's one of my favorite authors, and I've been looking forward to this ever since I [interviewed her about it earlier this year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/). It's really excellent, and I've been gripped from the first couple of pages. The second is [*The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744098822?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)by Chris Kampshall, a book tailor-made for me if ever there was one. It's a really engrossing in-universe history of the *Star Wars* franchise, and it's one of those books that really provides a lot of context for how all of the various puzzle pieces fit together in a cohesive whole. I'm loving every page. A couple of books that I've finished recently: - [*American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643753560?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Dauber. I enjoyed his book [*American Comics: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324036098?ref=andrewliptak.com) and this was an another neat overview that looks at the horror genre and how it intersects and draws inspiration from the real world. - [*Agony Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826626?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Stewart Taylor. A comfortable mystery set in Vermont in 1965: a new detective has to solve a case about a farmer who died in a barn fire, and things get a little complicated. This was a fun, light read, perfect for late summer in Vermont. - [*A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643263366?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Brown. This is a phenomenal book of nature writing, exploring the boundaries of the natural world and our destructive tendencies. It’s a wonderful mix of history, observation and memoir and I can’t recommend it enough. --- ## Further Reading I mentioned that it's been a bit of a while since I've done a roundup: a linkdump of a whole bunch of prior TO articles, and other things that I've found interesting to read: - [**A brilliant light in the dark**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-bright-sword-lev-grossman-king-arthur-fantasy-book-review/)**.** My review of Lev Grossman's *The Bright Sword*. - **Ben Cooper costumes.** One of the things that I focused on for *Cosplay: A History* was the history of Halloween. Over on the *Chicago Tribune*, Christopher Borrelli [has a neat overview of the story of Ben Cooper costumes](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/10/03/the-sweaty-masks-the-weird-graphics-for-generations-of-kids-ben-cooper-costumes-meant-halloween/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - **Book lists**. August's [first](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-sci-fi-fantasy-books-corey-kingfisher-tolkien/) and [second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-books-okorafor-dinniman-feist/) lists, September's [first](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-books/) and [second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-september-2024-novik-tchaikovsky-zahn/) lists, [October](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-books-vandermeer-stephenson-solomon/) - [**Changing collections**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-collections-museum-history/). This was a piece I wrote for VHS about how the organization (and museums!) have changed how we've collected items over the years. - **Comic collection**. If you were a comics fan in Vermont, you'll likely have heard about Christine Farrell. She owned Quarterstaff Games and Earth Prime Comics in Burlington, and reportedly had one of the largest and most complete collections of DC comic books in existence. I missed the news that she died earlier this year, and now, her [collection is going up for auction](https://www.sevendaysvt.com/music/christine-farrells-rare-comics-collection-goes-to-auction-41930406?ref=andrewliptak.com). - **Electric State**. I'm a big fan of Simon Stalenhag's work, and enjoyed his book The Electric State when it came out a bunch of years ago. It's being turned into a movie, and *Vanity Fair*'s Anthony Breznican has a [first look](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-electric-state-first-look?ref=andrewliptak.com) at it. It's slated to come out in 2025\. - [**For Democracy**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/helldivers-2-cosplay-making/)! A piece I wrote about the popularity of Helldiver 2 and the cosplayers who're suiting up in armor that the game's soldiers wear. - **Green Mountain Book Festival Auction**! This is something that I'm involved in closer to home: I'm on the board of directors for the Green Mountain Book Festival! We're preparing to hold this year's festival in November, and we're kicking off now with a [silent auction](https://www.32auctions.com/greenmountainbookfestival?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a bunch of cool prizes, including a signed copy of *Cosplay: A History*! Bidding ends November 1st. - [**How Dark Matter went from graphic novel to Syfy hit**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-matter-syfy-channel-joseph-mallozzi-graphic-novel-show/). This was a reprint of an article I wrote for Barnes & Noble a bunch of years ago, re-edited, updated, and brought back in time for a recent anniversary of the show's passing. - [**Judging covers**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/)**.** A look at cover art, minimalism and why some books get new covers every couple of years. - **Last Dangerous Visions.** *Rolling Stone*'s Jason Sheehan [takes a look](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/harlan-ellison-last-dangerous-vision-1235117069/?ref=andrewliptak.com) at the story of the long-overdue anthology from the late Harlan Ellison. - [**Orbital Horror Story**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/) . My review of Adam Higginbotham's book about the Challenger disaster, *Challenger*. - [**Paper Grinder**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-biography-publishing-cover/)**.** A look into what goes into publishing a book at a historical society. Also, here's an [interview that I conducted with Kevin for VHS](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-kevin-graffagnino-interview/). - [**Survival of the Fittest**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/). My review of the new James S.A. Corey novel, *The Mercy of Gods*, which I really enjoyed earlier this summer. - [**Swinging for the fences**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/). A look back on *Star Wars: The Acolyte* and why it worked and didn't work for me. This one struck a nerve on Facebook. 🙄 - [**The Temporary Resurrection of Omni Magazine**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/omni-magazine-adidas-reboot/). This was a piece that I'd noodled with for a couple of years before finally getting the time to finish it and send it off. I need to do more of these in-depth, reported pieces, because they're fun to assemble. - [**Timothy Zahn's Conqueror's Trilogy is just as good as his Thrawn novels**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/timothy-zahn-conquerors-trilogy-sci-fi-books/). Another Barnes & Noble reprint, timed to the 30th anniversary of these books. - [**Trinity's Endgame**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/). My review of Annie Jacobsen's *Nuclear War: A Scenario*, which was a pretty terrifying read. As an aside, here's another nuclear story, one that I wrote for VHS's member magazine, *History Connections*: [Front Lines in the Cold War](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-atlas-missiles-cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis/). - [**Undoing Extinction**](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/). My review of Ray Nayler's novella *Tusks of Extinction,* which was an excellent science fiction thriller. ### Here's a first look at the Jules Verne-inspired series, Nautilus URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nautilus-prime-video-jules-verne-streaming-series/ Last updated: 2024-10-10T14:18:04.000Z Back in 2021 at the height of the streaming wars, Disney [announced that it was adapting a science fiction classic](https://www.andrewliptak.com/disney-orders-nautilus-a-captain-nemo-origin-series/): Jules Verne's *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*. This particular take, *Nautilus*, would follow the origins of Captain Nemo, an Indian Prince who invented a futuristic submarine and ruled the depths, working to fight against the British Empire. The novel follows Professor Pierre Aronnax, a scientist who was captured by Nemo and taken aboard the submarine. The series went into production in 2022, and when Disney started slashing its catalog to cut costs, [it also dumped *Nautilus*](https://deadline.com/2023/08/nautilus-canceled-disney-plus-uk-series-cost-cutting-content-removal-1235529143/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* [AMC ended up snagging it a month later](https://www.amcnetworks.com/press-releases/amc-networks-licenses-epic-drama-nautilus-a-live-action-original-series-from-disney-entertainment/?ref=andrewliptak.com), with Prime Video streaming it in the UK. Now, our first look at the show comes from Prime Video UK, which launched a trailer for the show earlier today. Shazad Latif (*Star Trek: Discovery*) plays Captain Nemo, who steals the *Nautilus* and goes on a vendetta against the East India Trading Company and British Empire. It looks like a lot of fun, with a real "adventure of the week" vibe to it. The show's slated to begin streaming in the UK on October 25th, but I haven't been able to find when it'll debut here in the US. ### 22 new SF/F books to read this October URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-books-vandermeer-stephenson-solomon/ Last updated: 2024-10-03T16:32:16.000Z One of the books that I've been enjoying lately is Chris Kampshall's [*The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744098822?ref=andrewliptak.com), an in-universe history of the story of the *Star Wars* franchise. As the title suggests, it's an overview of how the Empire rose from the Galactic Republic, plunged the galaxy into a devastating Civil War, and transformed into the First Order. It's a really interesting story, one that feels like a good overview of the franchise as an actual reference text. It's definitely a book that speaks to my background. It's made for a good read this fall: I've been enjoying reading it while on the road the last couple of weekends, and while sitting in my backyard for a short while after work while I let the chickens roam around the yard. With the turning of the month, we have a new crop of books to check out. October brings a whole bunch of horror reads, a long-anticipated science fiction anthology, stories of fantastical empires, and quite a bit more to add to your TBR. I usually do two lists a month, but this time around, I've gotten everything into a single list. 📚 As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Ghost has a new way to support newsletter writers:** you can now tip creators with a one-time payment and you can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-september-2024-novik-tchaikovsky-zahn/#/portal/support). Thanks to the folks who tried this out during the last list! Okay, here are 22 new books that you should check out this October: ### [*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781526681553?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suzanna Clarke (October 22nd) One of the greatest fantasy novels of modern history came out 20 years ago this year: Suzanna Clarke's *Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell*. If you haven't read it, it's a phenomenal read about two magicians who find themselves at odds with one another, and work to change the course of England's future through their efforts during the Napoleonic War. To mark the anniversary, Bloomsbury is issuing a new edition of the novel, which features an introduction by V.E. Schwab. ### [*Star Wars: Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723432?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Steven Barnes (October 15th) Years ago, I was an active member on a Star Wars message board, particularly their books section. It was big enough that many of the authors of the novels would swing by to chat and interact with readers, sometimes to ask questions. One of those authors was Steven Barnes, who was writing [*The Cestus Deception*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345458988?ref=andrewliptak.com), a novel set during The Clone Wars era between *Attack of the Clones* and *Revenge of the Sith.* I ended up chatting with him by phone to answer some nit-picky questions about Asajj Ventress, and ended up with a credit in the acknowledgements. After a long hiatus from the *Star Wars* universe, Barnes is back with a new story, one about Mace Windu: *The Glass Abyss*. Set after *The Phantom Menace*, Mace Windu works to come to terms with the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, whom he had some disagreements with. Mace gets a final request from the slain Jedi master: help an Outer Rim planet called Metagos, which had been transformed by a violent solar flare that transformed its surface into irradiated glass, forcing its surviving inhabitants underground. Qui-Gon had once undertaken a mission there, and promised to return if needed: a promise that Mace will now have to undertake. ### [*Metal from Heaven*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660989?ref=andrewliptak.com) by August Clarke (October 22nd) In this debut book from H. A. Clarke (author of [*The Scapegracers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660699?ref=andrewliptak.com), writing as August Clarke), introduces us to a fantastical world where those who control ichorite, a durable metal that's underpinning the growth of a nation, controls the world. Industrialist Yann Chauncey overseas production of the metal and exploits the workers who work in his forges. One such worker, Marney Honeycutt, has gone on strike with her family, only to see them die when strikebreakers fire on the crowds. A decade later, she finds the opportunity for revenge when Chauncey begins looking for a suitable heir to marry off to his ward. Marney works to disguise herself as an aristocrat to enter that gilded world carry out her mission. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645660989?ref=andrewliptak.com) and says "lyrical prose, meticulous worldbuilding, and steamy lesbian sex scenes make this a surefire hit." ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Livesuit*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/livesuit/9780316575348/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey (October 1st) Over the course of *The Expanse* series, James S.A. Corey wrote a series of shorter novellas, novelettes, and short stories that told smaller stories around the edges of the main narrative, which they eventually collected into a single volume, [*Memory's Legion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316669177?ref=andrewliptak.com). Their latest novel is *The Mercy of Gods*, and while it kicks off a longer, it seems as though they're going to be following a similar model, releasing shorter stories along with the series. The first such story is *Livesuit*, a novella in which the human forces fight in a vast war by melding their bodies into technologically advanced suits, becoming something more than human. After reading *Mercy of Gods*, I'm not entirely sure where this'll fall in the larger story, but I'm very eager to see where it takes us. [Survival of the fittestJames S.A. Corey’s Mercy of Gods is an astonishing work that looks at colonialism, power and the choices people make to survive in an impossible situation![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-6.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_9229.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/) ### [*American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643753560?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Dauber (October 1st) I picked up Jeremy Dauber's [*American Comics: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324036098?ref=andrewliptak.com)a couple of years ago and found it to be an excellent overview of the medium and was excited to see that he's got a new history coming out this fall: *American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond*. I've been listening to the audiobook and as the title suggests, it's a wide-ranging history of the horror genre here in the US. He goes beyond just the textual influence of the genre, exploring how the nation's original sin of slavery and the beliefs of the original colonists have played a big role in the genre's foundation, up through how social unrest and real-world horrors bounce into the genre. I'm finding it to be a fascinating listen so far, and I'm excited to see how he covers the rest of the story. ### [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (October 22) Earlier this year, Ace Books acquired the hardcover rights to Matt Dinniman's *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series (a self-published series that blew up in recent years), and after releasing the first installment, [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) and [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) this summer, they're moving on to the third installment in the series, *The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*. The series follows Carl, a Coast Guard veteran and his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut, who're contending with a world transformed by aliens into a video game-like dungeon for the amusement of an intergalactic audience. In this installment, Carl and Princess Donut have reached the fourth level: The Iron Tangle. It's a super-complicated subway system that forms a complicated maze, and they have to try and get out. ### [*Last Dangerous Visions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212183796?ref=andrewliptak.com)edited by Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski (October 1st) For decades, Harlan Ellison promised that he was hard at work on *Last Dangerous Visions*, a massive, final installment of an anthology series that he had begun with [*Dangerous Visions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212183710?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Again, Dangerous Visions](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212183758?ref=andrewliptak.com). It was supposed to be out in 1974, and at the time of his death in 2018, it remained unfinished. J. Michael Straczynski, known for shows like *Babylon 5* and *Sense8 (*and an author in his own right) was a good friend of Ellison and his wife, and became executor of their estate. He's been hard at work ever since, promising that he [would finish that anthology](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-j-michael-straczynski-harlan-ellison-last-dangerous-visions/), and doing some additional work to bring out Ellison's works once again, first with [*Greatest Hits*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781454953371?ref=andrewliptak.com)back in March. [At Last, Dangerous VisionsHarlan Ellison’s long-unfinished science fiction anthology might finally see the light of day![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/image-3-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/at-last-dangerous-visions-harlan-ellison/) *Last Dangerous Visions* is the culmination of years of broken promises, heartbreak, and work, and despite the drama and lore around it, it should make for an interesting read, loaded with a table of contents with unpublished stories from A.E. Van Vogt, Cory Doctorow, Robert Sheckley, Dan Simmons, Adrian Tchaikovski, James S.A. Corey, and many, many others. It *is* a bit of a far cry from the original plans for the book: Ellison acquired more than 100 short stories to include in it, only 13 from the original list are in this volume. You can see the original TOC [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FLast%5FDangerous%5FVisions?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*And the Sky Bled*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781959411680?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S. Hati (October 15th) The city of Tejomaya is powered by a magical fuel known as calor – collected after the blood rains that fall from the sky. A months-long drought has brought the city to a standstill, prompting a trio of treasure hunters to seek out a hidden stash of the stuff. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/and-the-sky-bled-1810869?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "this compelling stand-alone fantasy explores both personal and societal costs of reliance on a dwindling resource." ### [*Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964269?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nalo Hopkinson (October 29th) SF Grandmaster Nalo Hopkinson's latest is a collection of her short fiction, following cyborgs, the exploration of a giant alien lifeform, nanotechnologies, and quite a bit more. Library Journal [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/jamaica-ginger-and-other-concoctions-2237463?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Hopkinson’s stories hold deep messages at their core, yet flow with a dreamlike etherealness, even when they’re nightmares." ### [*Blood of the Old Kings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250895332?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sung-Il Kim, translated by Anton Hur (October 8th) The Empire runs on necromancy, relying on dead sorcerers that are drained of their magic to further its expansion across the world. Arienne is a magical user and has resigned herself to this inevitable fate when she hears the voice of a long-dead sorcerer, which tells her that there might be another future in store for her. At the same time, a woman seeks out a dragon that the Empire has chained up under a volcano in a distant land with a desperate plea for help, while an orphan in the Imperial city tries to avenge his slain friend. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250895332?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Kim avoids saddling his characters with the well-worn “chosen one” narrative, finding ways to make their destinies more a product of actions taken than of inheritance. Readers seeking an exciting new fantasy world to sink into will find this hits the spot." ### [*The Mad Mountains*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964245?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe R. Lansdale (October 15th) Joe R. Lansdale pulls inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft for his latest collection of short stories, skewering the late author's mythos and tropes. Stories include tales of haunted records with horrifying songs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer embarking on their own adventure to Dread Island, detectives, and more. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61696-424-5?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Lansdale fans and Lovecraft devotees alike will be impressed." ### [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karin Lowachee (October 8th) Any time a new Karin Lowachee story surfaces, you've got my attention. Karin's [*Warchild* novels](https://www.andrewliptak.com/karin-lowachee-warchild-review/) are amongst the most influential in my own personal canon, and I've been looking forward to a new story from her for ages. That new story? *The Mountain Crown*, the first novella in a trilogy that is set during a war between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor. Meka's people have been driven from their homes from the Kattakans, and after a truce a decade later, returns home to perform a necessary rite: cull a king dragon from the Crown Mountains to help keep the balance in the wild country. But when she shows mercy to an imprisoned dragon and a Kattakan soldier, she draws the ire of the authorities and leads to the addition of Raka, a traitor, to the mix. [Revealing Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain CrownA Q&A with one of my favorite writers![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-5.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/) ### [*Hell, Ink & Water: The Art of Mike Mignola*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798887242903?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Mignola (October 15th) I'm a big fan of Mike Mignola's *Hellboy* comics, and in conjunction with a [galler](https://www.philippelabaune.com/show/philippe-labaune-gallery-hell-ink-water-the-art-of-mike-mignola?ref=andrewliptak.com)y [exhibition](https://www.philippelabaune.com/show/philippe-labaune-gallery-hell-ink-water-the-art-of-mike-mignola?ref=andrewliptak.com) at the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York City (Which runs through October 26th), there's an exhibit catalog being published: *Hell, Ink, & High Water: The Art of Mike Mignola*. This book features 31 new watercolors by the artist, and a number of other illustrations from throughout the Hellboy series. ### [*Batman: Resurrection*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593871904?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Jackson Miller (October 15th) Tim Burton's Batman films, *Batman* and *Batman Returns* remain some of the more influential films about the character, and in his latest novel, John Jackson Miller's explores what happens in the aftermath of that first film. The Joker has apparently been killed, and Batman is now the symbol of hope for the beleaguered Gotham City. While The Joker has been killed, his lackeys are still out there, and have been wrecking havoc on the city, while the survivors of the villain's chemical weapon attack are crowding hospitals. To save the city, Batman is forced into action, getting help from a scientist, all while his obsession with saving the city begins to fracture his relationship with Vicki Vale. ### [*The Great When*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781635578843?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alan Moore (October 1st) Alan Moore launches a new trilogy with *The Great When*, a fantasy set in 1949 London. When 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, stumbles into a used bookstore, he discovers a book that shouldn't exist, yet he's holding it in his hands. It's an artifact from the Great When, a magical version of London where stories have come together in a reality-blurring world. He realizes that this world needs to be kept secret, and has to find a way to return the book without exposing it to the real world. [Writing on *Boing Boing*](https://boingboing.net/2024/09/08/alan-moores-new-whimsical-wonderful-and-wordy-novel.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Thom Dunn says "Once the story reaches that other world and the plot becomes clearer, *The Great When* becomes a gripping and exciting crime thriller and moves much more swiftly. But that opening stretch can be a slog. Still, I enjoyed the book overall, and I'm excited to see where he takes the Lovecraftian horrors of Long London in the next installment, whenever that might be." ### [*Strange Beasts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781959411642?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Susan J. Morris (October 15th) A woman named Samantha Harker – daughter of Jonathan Harker, Dracula's killer – has been working as a researcher for the Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena. She has a secret: nobody realizes just how different she is, and has a unique insight into the minds of the world's monsters. When she's assigned to a case with the notorious Helena Moriarty, the daughter of Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, on an investigation to try and stop a beast on a rampage in the depths of Paris. ### [*Haunt Your Heart Out*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639109487?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amber Roberts (October 8th) My good friend and former bookstore colleague Amber Roberts launches her next romance novel, *Haunt Your Heart Out*, a spooky romance set in Stowe, Vermont. Lex McCall enjoys her job at a bookstore, and has one rule: she won't date tourists, newcomers, or anyone else who might eventually leave. When the opportunity to buy the bookstore – located in a supposedly haunted building – she jumps at the chance. When a stranger named James arrives, she assumes that he's just a regular tourist. As it turns out, he's a ghost hunter working on a documentary and wants to learn more about the ghosts that haunt the town. Lex is excited to get involved, but she has a secret: most of the ghost stories from around town are ones that she's made up, and she sees this as an opportunity to mess with their results and save her reputation. But, the most time she spends with James, she realizes that she's falling for him, and learns that his mission isn't as empty as it seems. ### [*Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781538725429?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jason Schreier (October 8th) Gaming journalist Jason Schreier takes a look at the troubles that have plagued Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind *Diablo* and *World of Warcraft*. Once seemingly unstoppable, it came under scrutiny when it canceled a hotly-anticipated game, [*Titan*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan%5F%28Blizzard%5FEntertainment%5Fproject%29?ref=andrewliptak.com), prompting Activision (Blizzard's parent company) CEO Bobby Kotick to crack down on the company and tore it apart. Schreier looks at the downfall of the company, drawing on hundreds of interviews to figure out what happened and what it means for the future of gaming. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781538725429?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Animated by thorough reporting, this deep dive into the gaming industry’s dark side unsettles." ### [*Dark Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212218795?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alex Segura and Rob Hart (October 8th) I really enjoyed Alex Segura's 2022 novel [*Secret Identity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250801746?ref=andrewliptak.com)and I'm looking forward to its sequel,[*Alter Ego*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250801777?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* when it comes out in December*.* But in the meantime, he's got another book coming out, co-written with *Rob Hart: Dark Space.* I've started listening to the audiobook, and it's a fun space opera that follows a pilot named Jose Carriles, who's piloting a massive interstellar starship called the *Mosaic* on a mission outside of the solar system. His estranged friend Corin Timony works back on a lunar colony and while had been a promising spy, has been demoted to a desk job – something she blames Jose for. When the Mosaic experiences some malfunctions and Jose takes drastic measures to save the ship, he begins to wonder if the mission has some other covert reasons behind it, something that Corin also begins to suspect when the distress call she receives is wiped from the logs. *Kirkus Reviews* [called it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rob-hart/dark-space/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "gritty, bombastic space pulp" and that "the stakes steadily escalate, the action-packed plot consistently entertains, and a ping-ponging third-person narrative kindles suspense and keeps the pages turning. Explorations of humanity’s hubris and myopia lend depth." ### [*Model Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374607135?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rivers Solomon (October 1st) As children, the three Maxwell siblings, Ezri, Eve, and Emanuelle, moved to a predominantly white gated community in Texas. They were the only Black family there, and while their neighbors were pleasant, strange things began happening in their house. The family refused to leave, and years later, the siblings return after the deaths of their parents. There, they have to confront their family's past and figure out what happened in their absence. The book earned a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rivers-solomon/model-home-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Kirkus Reviews*, which said "the twists and turns are carefully drawn, with the tension mounting toward a shocking end. Readers should be aware that the novel features themes of grooming and child sex abuse, and Solomon is thoughtful in their treatment of these heavy issues." ### [*Polostan, Volume One of Bomb Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062334497?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Neal Stephenson (October 15th) Neal Stephenson kicks off a new series with *Polostan*, which follows the life of a woman named Dawn Rae Bjornberg, a woman born in the American West and raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution before moving back to Montana. She's drawn to the revolution that's brewing during the Great Depression, and before long, she gains the attention of the US government, prompting her to return to Russia and join the predecessor to the KGB to work as a spy. ### [](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/livesuit/9780316575348/?ref=andrewliptak.com) *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/neal-stephenson/polostan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and says "Dawn/Aurora’s early life is captivating on its own, but Stephenson manages to set her up with a brilliant cliffhanger that will have readers begging for the next volume." ### [*Absolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374616595?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeff VanderMeer (October 22nd) Jeff VanderMeer returns to the world of his [*Southern Reach*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374261177?ref=andrewliptak.com)[ trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374261177?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year) with a new installment, *Absolution*. The trilogy (made up of [*Annihilation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824042?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Authority*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824059?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Acceptance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824066?ref=andrewliptak.com)) introduced us to a world where a piece of coastal territory has been cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious barrier, and explored by a series of expeditions to try and figure out what's behind the phenomenon. In the first book, a team of four women enter Area X to make observations, and discover that life within the place has transformed in uncanny ways. In the second book, the Southern Reach – a secretive government agency) is trying to make sense of the situation, while in Acceptance, a new team enters Area X to find a missing team member, all while the threat to the outside world has increased. The trilogy is fantastic and strange and well worth picking up, and I've been excited to see what VanderMeer has in store for a final chapter to the story. In this new book, he follows a trio of new expeditions and their inability to comprehend the alien nature of Area X. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374616595?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that VanderMeer draws "heavily on bioresearch and scientific extrapolations, this foray into the human cost of bureaucratic paranoia and the abandonment of logic to 'hope, prayers, and blessings' provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn. VanderMeer’s horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout." --- Thanks for reading. As always, let me know in the comments what catches your eye, and what you're reading this month. ### Orbit announces deluxe edition of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-nk-jemisin-broken-earth-fifth-season-deluxe-edition/ Last updated: 2024-09-27T14:02:28.000Z One of my favorite works of fantasy is N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy: [*The Fifth Season*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316229296?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Obelisk Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316229265?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Stone Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316229241?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which I [noted in my review](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/17/16156416/n-k-jemisin-broken-earth-trilogy-the-stone-sky-fantasy-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) is "ambitious narrative in an amazingly complex and vivid world, with a story that addresses systemic problems with oppression and power." Each entry in the trilogy earned the Hugo Award – no small feat. If you're a fan of the series, [Orbit has announced](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jemisin/the-broken-earth-trilogy/9780316574440/campaign/?lens=orbit&utm%5Fsource=Twitter&utm%5Fmedium=SocialOrg&utm%5Fcampaign=MultiTitle%5F9780316574440&utm%5Fcontent=na&utm%5Fterm=na) that it'll be releasing what they're calling an "Orbit Gold" (deluxe) edition of the trilogy in November: the three installments will come in a boxed set with illustrations by [Nephelomancer](https://nephelomancer.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Each volume will come with foil-stamped covers, silver edges, a bookmark ribbon, and colored end-papers. *The Fifth Season* will come signed, and will include a bonus scene that wasn't included in the prior editions. They are a bit pricey: the boxed set [will run you $180](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jemisin/the-broken-earth-trilogy/9780316574440/campaign/?lens=orbit&utm%5Fsource=Twitter&utm%5Fmedium=SocialOrg&utm%5Fcampaign=MultiTitle%5F9780316574440&utm%5Fcontent=na&utm%5Fterm=na) ($144 if you preorder), and they're expected to ship in November. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/image-1.png) Image: Orbit All in all, it's a pretty edition, and it comes as publishers are increasingly turning out special editions with some additional bells and whistles for book collectors and fans. This isn't the first set of special editions that Orbit has turned out in recent years, either: last year, the publisher [released a special 10th anniversary edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/) of Ann Leckie's [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574266?ref=andrewliptak.com)and has given similar treatment to the [first](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316333429?ref=andrewliptak.com) [three](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) [installments](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com) of *The Expanse* series by James S.A. Corey. The publisher also announced another "Orbit Gold" edition back in June: Hannah Whitten's *The Wilderwood* duology, [which runs $120](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-whitten/the-wilderwood-duology/9780316571982/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I really appreciate this sort of treatment and attention from publishers: Orbit's special editions are nice volumes of those books, and I happily added them to my bookshelf. Interestingly, it looks like Orbit is only selling this type of special edition through their own storefront: it isn't available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, or any of the other bookstore chains that I can find. All in all? This looks like a nice edition for huge fans of the trilogy, and another example of this sort of treatment from a major publisher. Stay tuned: this is something that I'm planning on writing about at some point in the near future. ### Orbital horror story URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/challenger-adam-higginbotham-nasa-history-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-09-27T13:00:49.000Z I vividly remember when Space Shuttle *Columbia* broke up as it reentered Earth's atmosphere on February 1st, 2003\. I was headed to a work day at the summer camp where I spent my summers and heard NPR report that the shuttle was overdue for its landing. I felt a creeping sense of dread as updates began trickling in as people across the southwest began reporting streaks of light, contrails, and debris in the skies. It was quickly clear that astronauts Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon had all perished. The destruction of *Columbia* was made all the more tragic when we learned that the crew was likely doomed long before they reentered orbit: a piece of foam had come free during liftoff and smashed a hole in the protective tiles covering shuttle's left wing. Mission Control spotted the problem during launch, but determined that it wasn't something to worry about: foam breaking off from the shuttle's external fuel tank wasn't an uncommon occurrence. Their error was etched in the skies over Texas two weeks later. The accident brought with it painful memories of the explosion of Space Shuttle *Challenger*, which occurred nearly 17 years to the day on January 28th, 1986\. In his latest book, [*Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster at the Edge of Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982176617?ref=andrewliptak.com), journalist Adam Higginbotham digs into the accident to explain how decisions embedded throughout the shuttle program during its inception and mismanagement along the way likely made such accidents inevitable. Higginbotham seems poised to be the go-to person for explaining the complicated and layered stories behind some of the world's biggest historic disasters and the culpability of human decision making that led to them. His 2019 book [*Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501134630?ref=andrewliptak.com)was a breathtaking examination of the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear power plant in 1986\. In it, he dissected the design, management, and actions that led up to the accident, and the desperate efforts that helped contain it. With *Challengers,* hefollows a similar path, going back to NASA's first disaster in January 1967 when the crew members of Apollo 1 burned alive when a fire broke out in the cockpit during a hardware test and working his way up the timeline to explore how and why the space agency decided to shift away from lunar missions to instead design and deploy the shuttle – a radical advance in space travel. Growing up, the space shuttle was a marvel to watch: a space plane that delivered astronauts to Low Earth Orbit for experiments or resupply trips to Mir and later the International Space Station. It captured the imagination of the public and the showed that space travel wasn't just something out of science fiction, but something that was maybe attainable to, if not regular folks, a wide pool of specialists. That was the original dream of the space shuttle: a way to bring the costs of space travel down to the point where it would be economically feasible for companies to deploy satellites, scientists and institutions to conduct experiments, or for technicians to visit satellites for repairs or replacements. Higginbotham traces the complicated route that advocates and NASA took to turn the shuttle from a concept to reality, utilizing experimental designs and engineering, economic trickery and forecasting, playing up expectations of its capabilities while playing down the risks that came with flying such a craft. Prior to the shuttle, NASA and its counterparts reached orbit the old fashion way: rockets. The first Mercury astronauts sat atop missiles designed to deliver nuclear payloads to targets across the world, before NASA deployed the massive Saturn V rockets to deliver astronauts into orbit and to the Moon. It was reliable but expensive; you needed a new vehicle for each mission. As the space race wound down after the success of Apollo 11, expensive was a bad thing for NASA. Faced with mounting costs of the Vietnam War and various social programs, policymakers weren't willing to continue to fund NASA's work at the levels at the height of the space race. Consequently, to keep flying into space, NASA turned to the concept of the space shuttle as a means to cut costs. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/shuttle.jpg) Space Shuttle Enterprise on display at the **Intrepid* Museum in New York City. I was overcome with emotion when I saw it for the first time. Image: Andrew Liptak On paper, the shuttle was a brilliant daring concept: a reusable ship that could fly to space and back over and over again. Flown enough times, the US would save money in the long run while maintaining its presence in space. This was something that had never been tried before. The massive white and black orbiter required considerable design and engineering work to be made to work – in addition to the ship itself, it required a massive fuel tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters that would lift the spacecraft into orbit and shed as they were used up. The orbiter and boosters would be recovered, refitted, and reused for the next mission. Planners estimated that NASA could fly a fleet of shuttles as much as 60 times a year. Reality is more complicated than the plans put down on paper. The shuttle was one of the most complicated machines ever developed, and as astronaut John Glenn once famously said: "As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of rocket was supplied by lowest bidder" – a thought that ran through many astronaut's minds as they waited for liftoff. It's often said that hindsight is 20/20, and there's an impulse to make a bee-line to examine the O-Rings that were ultimately responsible for the destruction of the *Challenger*. Higginbotham does that, but goes beyond the story of the hardware. He covers the shuttle's development process in exacting detail, looking at the enormity of this problem and how complications slowed progress on the construction and design process. The shuttle's protective tiles were one such challenge: to protect the aluminum airframe, engineers had to develop a novel material that was not only lightweight, but which could withstand the intense heat of reentry *and* stay on the shuttle at the same time. The initial tests saw them flaking off the vehicle in droves. Engineers found that they couldn't just glue them to the surface, because the shuttle's frame shifted as it moved, and any gaps would undermine the protection they afforded the craft. They ended up having to cover the shuttle in a fireproof fabric and affix the tiles to that. Another challenge were the solid rocket boosters. Attached to the external fuel tank, they would run until exhausted once ignited. Derived from similar rockets used by the military, they could be adjusted to help steer the craft as it leapt into orbit, and as Higginbotham explains, engineers made a number of assumptions during the design process and didn't fully test their limits – particularly when it came to operating temperatures. That was the case with the O-Rings, which were designed to seal the segments of the solid rocket boosters together after they were assembled in Florida (the SRBs were nearly 150 feet tall, and were shipped by train in segments). Made of rubber, the rings were nearly 40 feet in diameter and designed to prevent gases from escaping: their elasticity would fully seal the boosters once ignited. But Thiokol , the manufacturer that made the boosters, didn't fully test the limits of the elasticity or how they would function in colder temperatures. Ultimately, their assumptions led to not only near-disastrous incidents prior to *Challenger*, but eventually to the accident in January 1986\. What struck me about Higginbotham's book was at how early engineers were raising the alarm about these flaws, and how NASA's managers brushed those concerns off to the side. The [STS-51-C mission](https://www.nasa.gov/mission/sts-51c/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the third flight of Space Shuttle *Discovery* (launching almost exactly a year prior to *Challenger* on January 27th, 1985*)* very nearly realized those concerns. The shuttle launched during a cold spell and the O-Rings didn't do their jobs well: when the boosters were recovered, engineers found that superheated gasses escaped and burned the first set of O-Rings before eating into the secondaries. Higginbotham explains that the shuttle likely came within milliseconds of exploding during its ascent. It should have been a warning to NASA. While engineers raised concerns, the managers at Thiokol and the space agency didn't heed them. It's not hard to understand why: NASA was under considerable pressure to heed to a crowded launch schedule. At the same time, interest in space travel was waning. To drum up interest, NASA initiated a program to send a school teacher into space and demonstrate that the shuttle could be used to open up access to space to a wider population. After a lengthy selection process, the agency selected New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, and assigned her to the STS-51-L *Challenger* mission. In the leadup to the mission, McAuliffe became a huge celebrity throughout the world, and interest in NASA and its work skyrocketed. In the leadup to the launch of *Challenger* in 1986 was heavily delayed due to mechanical and weather issues, and in the spotlight, NASA was keen to get it off the ground. Further delays threatened the timing of the schedule of launches that were to take place later that year. Despite the fact that temperatures were lower than *Discovery*'s launch the year before, and even after engineers raised concerns about the safety of the launch, NASA pressed ahead. Thiokol's engineers were staunchly opposed to launching the shuttle, but were ultimately overruled by company managers uneager to disappoint their biggest customer. The rest, as they say, is history. The nation was horrified as it watched live as the the shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight. As in *Midnight in Chernobyl*, Higginbotham explores how these types of tragedies aren't one-off incidents. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant wasn't just a mechanical failure and design flaw, and the *Challenger* Space Shuttle wasn't just an O-Ring that failed. Both are the results of a complicated and years-long system of mismanagement and flawed and dishonest decision making, which laid the groundwork for the worse case scenario to occur. Neither *Challenger* or Chernobyl would have never exploded had any number of people along the way taken the time to think through issues, listen to the people raising concerns, or put safety front and center. The results are tragedies that we can learn from, recognizing that the complexities of the systems and organizations we build can lead us to great things – or horrific, regrettable failures that will haunt us for years to come. --- Reading this book in the last couple of weeks has been a bit surreal as NASA tried to figure out what to do with the [Boeing Crew Flight Test (Boe-CFT)](https://www.nasa.gov/mission/boeing-crewflighttest/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that launched in June 2024 and brought astronauts Barry E. Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station. The mission was plagued with delays because of mechanical issues with the capsule, and upon reaching space, the crew detected helium leaks and experienced problems with some of the aft reaction control system thrusters. The crew were only supposed to stay at the station for eight days, but because of the issues, they'll remain in orbit onboard the ISS until February 25th. NASA decided to avoid the risk of the capsule failing on reentry and brought it back autonomously on September 6th. It [experienced two problems on its way down](https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/09/leaving-behind-its-crew-starliner-departs-space-station-and-returns-to-earth/?ref=andrewliptak.com) – a thruster failed to start and there was a glitch in its navigational system. While this particular mission turned out okay, I couldn't help but think about how similar this mission felt to the likes of the disastrous *Challenger* and *Columbia* missions: Boeing has already been under fire for its hardware: first after a pair of deadly crashes with its 737 Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019, while a door blew out on another plane in January 2024, raising questions about how the aerospace company is prioritizing safety and quality over its revenue. After NASA phased out its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, it's been working to find ways to get its astronauts to space in a cost-effective manner. While it's begun to rely heavily on SpaceX as a third-party contractor to deliver personnel and hardware to orbit, it's also needed its own hardware for missions into Low Earth Orbit and eventually, to reach the Moon for the ongoing [Artemis program](https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The same pressures that NASA faced in 1967 with the Apollo program and in the 1980s with the shuttle program are still present today: complicated organizations and programs with lots of moving parts and decisions that need to be made, all with mounting public and political pressure to be on time, error-free, and under budget. Space travel is hard; we'll never be able to fully eliminate the risk of traveling to space. But while NASA has worked to overhaul its culture and management, problems like the Crew Flight Test feel as though they're a product of the same factors that led to the demise of *Apollo 1, Challenger*, and *Columbia*. NASA's prudence with the recent test flight is encouraging: a hopeful sign that they've learned from their mistakes. I hope that's the case. ### Horror in the heartland URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sinners-ryan-coogler-michael-jordan-vampire-film-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-09-26T14:16:38.000Z This looks like a very cool movie: *Sinners*, directed by Ryan Coogler (*Black Panther*) and starring Michael B. Jordan. It's a vampire film that looks like it's set in the post-WWI era, following twin brothers (both played by Jordan) who return home only to find that there's an evil presence lurking there. This has been a buzzy movie ever since it was [first announced](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/michael-b-jordan-ryan-coogler-teaming-for-secret-genre-movie-1235784762/?ref=andrewliptak.com) earlier this year: THR's report was breathless, touting that it was an original idea from Coogler and that the sales process was pretty secretive. Warner Bros. ended up winning the distribution rights for it, and just released the first trailer: That's how you do a trailer: it really builds up the suspense without giving too much away. This feels like it could vibe nicely with P. Djèlí Clark’s excellent novella [*Ring Shout*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250767028?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* another Black horror story set in the post-WWI years, which I'd recommend checking out. [P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout reimagines Lovecraftian horrorReimagining Lovecraft, Robin Hobb on The Farseer Trilogy, and more Hello! I hope that you’ve been faring well in the last couple of weeks. One of the things that I’ve found myself doing the last couple of months is work around the house, activities that keep me focused![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-7.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_2ae0dc08-3c02-4c09-9d56-0734b834f7b4_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clarks-ring-shout-reimagines-lovecraftian-horror/) Without painting too broad a brush, it feels like there's something of a renaissance brewing in this space: Tananarive Due's [*The Reformatory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982188344?ref=andrewliptak.com)blew up since its release last year, as well as the Jordan Peele/John Joseph Adams-edited anthology [*Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593243800?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as a whole bunch of other books that have hit shelves in the last couple of years – not to mention films like *Get Out* and *Nope* from Peele. It's obviously too early to tell how or if this film will fit into that movement – if there actually is a movement. Either way, this looks promising, and I'll definitely be making plans to check it out when it hits theaters on March 7th, 2025\. ### Here are 18 new books to add to your TBR for the rest of September URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-september-2024-novik-tchaikovsky-zahn/ Last updated: 2024-09-25T17:55:46.000Z Fall seems to have arrived quickly here in Vermont this year. The leaves are starting to change into their vibrant shades of red, orange, and yellow, and the temperatures are starting to dwindle into comfortable levels. I haven't been reading much outside as a result, and I'm starting to switch over to reading in more comfortable places around the house, usually with a blanket and a pot of tea. One book I finished while on the road to visit family last weekend was Christopher Brown's [*A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643263366?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which came out earlier this month. I'm a big fan of his newsletter *Field Notes*, and this is an outstanding look at our relationship to the land around us and our place in it. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'll likely have a review in the nearish future. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/image.png) Image: Andrew Liptak Also on my TBR is a cozy-ish mystery novel set in Vermont, [*Agony Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826626?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Sarah Stewart Taylor, about a new detective who's investigating the death of a farmer in 1960's Vermont. It's an interesting, light read so far, and perfect reading for the fall here in Vermont. Also, if you read James S.A. Corey's *The Mercy of Gods* and you're in the Slack channel, stop by #books-print to chat about it! Here's my [review from last week](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/). 🚀 As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it: \- [Sign up as a supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. \- Purchase a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link below. \- ****Ghost has a new way to support newsletter writers:** you can now tip creators with a one-time payment and you can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-books/#/portal/support). Thanks to the folks who tried this out during the last list! Okay, here's 18 new SF/F/H books to check out over the course of the rest of the month: ### [*The Strangest Fish*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662620782?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katherine Arden and illustrated by Zahra Marwan (September 3rd) I'm a big fan of Katherine Arden's books, and [really enjoyed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/) her novel [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) when I read it earlier this year. She's doing something a little different for her next outing: a picture book called *The Strangest Fish*. This is a delightful read: it's about a young girl who wins a strange-looking goldfish at a fair, and as she cares for it, it begins to transform into something wonderful. I've really enjoyed reading it to my daughter the past couple of nights. ### [*The Rack: Stories Inspired By Vintage Horror Paperbacks*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780990632771?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Tom Deady (September 3rd) This looks like a fun anthology as we barrel toward October: *The Rack*, which features a number of stories that are inspired by the types of cheap horror paperbacks that you‘d find at a grocery store wire rack. A friend of mine, Kristin Dearborn, has a story in it, and it looks like a packed TOC of other spooky stories. ### [*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com) by by Matt Dinniman (September 24) Ace Books acquired the hardcover rights to Matt Dinniman's *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series (a self-published series that blew up in recent years), and after releasing the first installment, [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com), last month, they've moving on to the next installment this month. In *Carl's Doomsday Scenario*, Carl, a Coast Guard veteran and his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut are dealing with a world transformed into a video game-like dungeon for the amusement of an intergalactic audience. They've survived so far, but the dungeon is getting even more dangerous, and they're now faced with a new challenge: a quest. They're brought to Over City, an urban arena now in ruins with dangers all over the place. They have to figure out the mystery behind a devastating spell before time runs out. ### [*Exodus: The Archimedes Engine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357668?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter F. Hamilton (September 17th) Peter F. Hamilton is known for his sprawling space operas, and in his latest, he jumps into the world of [*Exodus*](https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US?ref=andrewliptak.com), a major AAA video game that's set to be released ... at some point in 2025? 2026? It looks like they're getting a jump on things early with this new book. In this world, humanity left Earth 40,000 years ago, traveling across the galaxy in generation ships, eventually ending up at Centauri. There, they found a cluster of stars and some habitable planets and after arriving, we thrived and evolved. When this story kicks off, humanity is ruled by five great houses, who now have to contend with the arrival of other arkships filled with Earth's original inhabitants. One of those new arrivals is Finn, who grew up in the Centauri worlds, and chafes under the oppressive rule of the Celestials. When a new arkship arrives, he finds that he has a chance to escape and become a Traveler, journeying out into the depths of unknown space to find new worlds. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*The Midnight Club*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781525809880?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Margot Harrison (September 24th) A quarter of a century ago, the Midnight Club, a group of friends from a small Vermont college's literary magazine, last assembled. They're bound not just by friendship, but from the tragic death of one of their classmates, Jennet, who died while they were students. They've now been brought back together with a mysterious invitation, and upon arriving on campus, they realize their host has a task for them: find out the story for how Jennet actually died, and offers them the opportunity to not only remember, but relive their past lives. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781525809880?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Harrison meticulously weaves flashbacks, elaborate time-travel twists, and the perspectives of each main character into a suspenseful saga about regret and missed opportunities." ### [*The Sapling Cage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781558613317?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Margaret Killjoy (September 24th) I [enjoyed](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/7/17205838/margaret-killjoy-danielle-cain-books-fantasy-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) Margaret Killjoy's novellas [*The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397362?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Barrow Will Send What It May*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397386?ref=andrewliptak.com) when I picked them up a couple of years ago, and her new trilogy, *Daughters of the Empty Throne*, looks to be just as interesting*.* It follows Lorel, who's long wanted to learn magic, fight monsters, and become a witch. There's a problem: she was born a boy, and when a local coven claims her friend, she disguises herself as a woman and takes her place, leaving her home behind. She finds a world hostile to the witches: dark magic is spreading across the kingdom, and people have blamed a tree-killing plague on them. As Lorel learns more about this world and her powers, she's worried that her new companions will force her out if they learn her secret. Over at *Ancillary Review of Books*, Roseanna Pendlebury [says](https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2024/09/16/treading-unfamiliar-ground-review-of-the-sapling-cage-by-margaret-killjoy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Killjoy has written a story that is attempting to challenge some of the givens of the fantasy genre, in its approach to worldbuilding particularly. For someone who has read a lot of fantasy, whose mind is well worn into those familiar grooves, *The Sapling Cage* is an invitation to step out onto fresh ground." ### [*Ultra 85*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982158279?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Logic (September 17th) I'm always interested in off-beat storytelling, and rapper Logic's latest project fits the bill nicely: *Ultra 85* is his second novel and is set in 2115\. Earth is uninhabitable, and most of humanity lives on a giant space station called Babel. We follow two pilots, Quentin and Kai who are tasked with heading off to a secret planet called Paradise where humanity's best and brightest are permitted to live. The pair encounter Quentin's estranged father and discover that the planet is not what they imagined it would be. The book comes after Logic released his latest album (also titled *Ultra 85*) in August, and it's something that I'll have to add to my to-listen list. It sounds like a fascinating project. ### [*Darkside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320130?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Michael Mammay (September 24th) In this latest installment of his *Planetside* series ([*Planetside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062694669?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Spaceside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062694683?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Colonyside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062980977?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Michael Mammay follows Colonel Carl Butler as he sets out to enjoy his retirement on a distant planet, only to get reluctantly brought in on another mission when a 12-year-old asks him to track down her missing father, Jorge Ramiro, an archeologist who was supposed to be working a dig on a distant moon called Taug. Even more worrisome, the moon is controlled by a pair of mining conglomerates that have tried to kill him in the past. When he arrives with a friend and a security squad, he finds that not only is the man missing, but there are plenty of other secrets on the moon's dark side. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/darkside-1807581?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Readers who can’t resist that world-weary voice, enjoy SF/mystery capers such as Suzanne Palmer’s “Finder Chronicles” and the soldier stories of John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series, or simply like their military SF with multiple twists will be thrilled by Butler’s latest misbegotten adventure." ### [*The Armageddon Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915998002?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dan Moren (September 24th) One series that I've been desperately trying to get back to is Dan Moren's excellent *Galactic Cold War* series, which kicked off a couple of years ago with [*The Caledonian Gambit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781940456843?ref=andrewliptak.com)and continued with [*The Bayern Agenda*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780857668196?ref=andrewliptak.com)([my review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-with-character-veronica-mars-djinns-and-space-spies/#:~:text=grow%20a%20bit.-,The%20Bayern%20Agenda,-One%20of%20the))*,* [*The Aleph Extraction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780857668417?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Nova Incident*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780857669452?ref=andrewliptak.com). The series follows some agents working on behalf of the Commonwealth of Independent Systemsas they operate in an interstellar cold war against the Illyrican Empire. In this new (and final) installment of the series, we rejoin agent Simon Kovalic and the Special Projects Team after a terrorist attack on the planet Nova. They're targeted by the head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Directorate and arrests him and General Adaj for treason, and the rest of the team is forced to go on the run to try and find an Illyrican mole within the intelligence community. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781915998002?ref=andrewliptak.com) that novel's "the two subplots run in parallel until the very end, when Moren ties things up in a way that feels both plausible and rewarding." ### [*Buried Deep and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593600351?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Novik (September 17th) Naomi Novik brings together 13 of her shorter stories, ranging from stories of a bride who gambles with Death, a reimagining of *Pride & Prejudice*... with dragons, and a story set in the world of a new epic fantasy series, Abandon. ### [*I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250285959?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jason Pargin (September 24th) This looks like an entertaining thriller: a woman named Ether approaches Abbott Coburn, a Lyft driver in L.A. and offers him $200,000 to transport a large black box across the country to Washington DC. The catch? He can't look inside, ask questions, tell anyone, has to leave right now, and can't take any tracking devices with him. As rumors begin to fly that it might be part of a terror plot, it turns out that the box's contents are stranger than you might think. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jason-pargin/im-starting-to-worry-about-this-black-box-of-doom/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "wacky, thoughtful, and fun." ### [*Rumor Has It*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250269393?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cat Rambo (September 24th) Cat Rambo brings out a third installment of her Disco Space Opera series ([*You Sexy Thing*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269294/yousexything?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Devil's Gun*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250269362?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which the crew of You Sexy Thing have set out for Coralind Station to regroup and figure out their next steps as they work to take down a notorious pirate, Tubal Last. While Niko works on trying to figure out some of the logistics (insurance payouts are a pain even in the future, it seems), they work on tracking down an old friend who might be able to help them find Last. But there are other threats lurking at the station, and they're going to have to face them down or risk losing everything. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250269393?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "luscious extraterrestrial foods highlight Coralind’s attractions, while the diverse alien species Rambo delineates so well provide stories-within-stories that spice up the main plot." ### [*The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262549066?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Francis Stevens (September 17th) Lisa Yaszek introduces a new installment of MIT Press's latest installment from Joshua Glenn's *Radium Age* series, a series of books from the early 20th century that helped shape the science fiction genre as we know it today. This collection is a roundup of one of the early genre's pioneering writers, Francis Stevens, who penned tales of interdimensional jumps into dystopian worlds and quite a bit more. This looks like an excellent way to rediscover an excellent writer. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon-3.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/Blank-8-Grids-Collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) ### [*Alien Clay*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316578974?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (September 17th) There's a running joke in the TO Slack channel about how Adrian Tchaikovsky is enormously prolific, and how we're all for it. His latest book is *Alien Clay,* which is set on the planet Kiln, where the tyrannical Mandate oversees a prison colony. For most prisoners, it's a death sentence, and when one political dissident, xeno-ecology professor Arton Daghdev, is sent there he discovers that humans aren't the only intelligent life on the planet: there's a long-lost civilization in ruins there. He's curious, and despite the harsh conditions, sets out to find some answers about his new home, answers which could transform Kiln and Earth. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [*starred review*](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/adrian-tchaikovsky/alien-clay/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "A savagely satirical take on the consequences of repressive doctrine and the power of collective action." ### [*Space Oddity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534454521?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Catherynne M. Valente (September 24th) A number of years ago, Catherynne M. Valente wrote a book that I [absolutely adored](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/14/17233606/space-opera-catheryenne-valente-science-fiction-humor-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com): [*Space Opera*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481497503?ref=andrewliptak.com), where Earth is dragged into an intergalactic singing competition as a means for joining the collective. If they win, they'll be invited in, but if they lose, they'll be wiped off the map. In this sequel, the Metagalactic Grand Prix is back on and Earth's fate is once again in the balance as a handful of planets that have opposed humanity have been working to take them out, and it's up to Decibel Jones – now on tour – to save Earth once again. *Publishers Weekly* [said that it's](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781534454521?ref=andrewliptak.com) "dense, elaborate, and wacky, this reads like Douglas Adams writing on a sugar high." ### [*Where I End*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661856?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sophie White (September 24th) Sophie White’s novel *Where I End* is getting a new edition after it [won the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award last year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-shirley-jackson-awards-readercon-horror/). This gothic horror follows a young mother named Aoileann who’s lived her entire life on an isolated island off the coast of Ireland. Her mother is bedridden, and she takes care of her along with her grandmother. The island she lives on is cursed, and only Aoileann hears its whispers. When a woman named Rachel and her newborn daughter arrives on the island, she awakens something in Aoileann, bringing a darkness to the island that will force her to confront the secrets behind her mother's ailment and potentially upend their lives. [Writing in *The Guardian* in 2022](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/22/where-i-end-by-sophie-white-review-intense-mother-daughter-horror?ref=andrewliptak.com), Christobel Kent says "White embraces a visceral revulsion at what lies beneath the skin and behind the eyes, in a language pulsing with slippery energy. But what the writers have in common is an uncanny ability to tune in to the frequency of madness without allowing it to drown out subtlety." ### [*Pilgrim Machines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798338880302?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (September 17th) Back in 2020, Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne published an excellent space opera novel, [*The Salvage Crew*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781949890709?ref=andrewliptak.com), about an artificial intelligence that oversees a salvage mission on a distant planet. As it turns out, the planet is inhabited by massive aliens, and the crew is confronted by another salvage team trying to scoop up their prize from under them. Wijeratne's been working on another couple of installments of the series, and is finally out with his next one: *Pilgrim Machines.* In this new adventure, the crew of the long-range freighter PCS Blue Cherry Blossom have been tasked with a voyage into the center of the galaxy to survey an unimaginably complex alien presence and to study it. This was an insta-buy for me: I'm really excited to see what's in store for us in this one. ### [*The Battle of Space Fort Jefferson and Other Stories*](https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-battle-of-space-fort-jefferson-and-other-stories/9781504096911?ref=andrewliptak.com)By Timothy Zahn (September 24th) Timothy Zahn has long been a favorite author of mine, and before he was known for his [*Star Wars* novels](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-heir-to-the-empire-thrawn-trilogy/) (and other [excellent space operas](https://www.andrewliptak.com/timothy-zahn-conquerors-trilogy-sci-fi-books/)), he was known for his short fiction. He's got a new collection of 13 short stories now out, which looks like a fun way to dip into some of his back catalog. --- If you missed it, you can read the first list for September [over here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-books/), and other past book lists [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). ### Survival of the fittest URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-gods-scifi-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T17:49:21.000Z In his 2008 novel *The Dark Forest*, Chinese author Liu Cixin introduced a frightening concept about the nature of intelligent life in the universe: > "The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound...The hunter has to be careful because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life – another hunter, an angel, or a demon, a delicate infant, or a tottering old man, a fairy, or a demigod – there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. The concept is one grim possible answer for the Fermi paradox: if there's life out in the universe, why haven't we heard anything from other civilizations like ours? Are we alone, or are we all trying to remain hidden from sight, lest we stumble upon something that threatens our existence? The idea of venturing out into the depths of the galaxy and finding scary things goes back to the heart of the genre. H.G. Wells' *The War of the Worlds* played out the horrors of an invasion from Mars, H.P. Lovecraft imagined untold horrors from outer space by way of his Cthulhu stories, while the crew of the *Llanvabon* in Murray Leinster's story "[First Contact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First%5FContact%5F%28novelette%29?ref=andrewliptak.com)" realized that even the possibility of alien contact could spell doom for humanity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/08/IMG_9233.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak Science fiction is littered with plenty of other examples, and James S.A. Corey's latest novel [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=andrewliptak.com) taps into that kernel of an idea at the center of most of them: humanity is a small speck in the universe and one that can be swept away with very little thought. And that's exactly what happens. At some point in the distant future, humanity settled on a planet called Anjiin, and developed into a robust, modern civilization numbering in the billions. They've settled into nations, squabbled over geopolitical problems, conducted scientific research, and made lives for themselves as they float along through the galaxy. Those lives are shattered when they detect some incoming objects, which turns out to be an invasion fleet from a civilization known as the Carryx. They're a sort of insectoid species that has spread throughout the galaxy as a sort of hive and empire, taking over other planets and civilizations and incorporating them into their ranks as they slowly take over the galaxy. They swiftly bring Anjiin to its knees, first by targeting an eight of the population to kill outright in a brutal demonstration that they mean business, and after deploying their ground troops, begin rounding up the planet's best and brightest, including Dafyd Alkhor, a minor researcher, and some of his fellow scientists. Those who're captured are split up into smaller groups, loaded onto ships, and transported to a distant planet. There, they find that they're one of many species, all tasked with carrying out a series of experiments. From the introductory statement from a Carryx librarian, we know this encounter with humanity will prove to be a turning point for both civilizations, and as we follow the terrified and traumatized band of humans, they sprinkle in details of the much larger conflict that the conquerors are engaged in. Amidst the humans is an alien presence, a swarm that has taken over one individual, a spy from the Carryx's adversaries working to report back on their activities, laid as a trap as they conquered Anjiin. We're later taken to another world that the Carryx attempt to take over, only to have things go disastrously wrong and this encounter shows that while powerful, they're not invulnerable. Against this backdrop, Dafyd and his fellow humans are beginning to figure out their surroundings – and the forces that threaten their very existence. As they conduct their experiments, they're attacked by other teams of aliens looking to stymie their progress and help their own standing. The humans quickly adapt, fashioning their own weapons and adjusting their mindsets to these new circumstances. As they spread out and make contact with the other scattered teams of humans, Dafyd begins to piece together what the Carryx's motives are: testing them to figure out if they'll be useful parts of their larger collective. There's an implied threat: if it turns out that they can't contribute, they'll be slaughtered, as they find out when their monkey-like alien rivals give up their attack against them. When Dafyd learns that their fellow human cells are attempting an uprising of their own, he's forced to make an excruciating decision: give the Carryx a warning about the plans that his fellow survivors are making and play the long game, or stay quiet and potentially doom them all. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Corey (the pen-name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) has played with with some similar themes in the *Expanse* novels. In [*Leviathan Wakes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316129084?ref=andrewliptak.com) and its sequels, humanity discovers an alien technology dubbed the "protomolecule," created and spread by a the Ringbuilders, a long-dead, advanced alien civilization. Humanity finds itself dealing with its first steps into the darkness with some powerful threats surrounding it, and against the backdrop of geopoltical (solarpolitical?) drama between the solar system's dominant powers, Corey ultimately highlights the value of cooperation as a survival strategy. If we can't overcome our factionalism as we expand into the cosmos, we will face a vulnerable future in a galaxy that's unforgiving to young civilizations. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) Running at the center of this novel is a question: what is the cost of survival? Where *The Expanse* explored ideas of unity as a means of survival, *Mercy of Gods* follows another strategy: adaptation. The Carryx invasion of Anjiin echoes the dangers of an imbalance of power to a younger, smaller civilization, but the route to survival isn't quite as insurmountable as in *The Expanse*. The survivors of Anjiin don't necessarily agree on a course of action after they've been captured: one faction wants to bloody the Carryx's noses on their way out, using what technology they can access to extract as much pain as they can inflict as they go down, even if it means the swift deaths of everyone that's been transported to their new planet and those who remain back on Anjiin. Dafyd, after watching and observing the Carryx – and learning about the swarm embedded in one of his companions – has another idea: play the long game, even if it means sacrificing some of his companions and friends to ensure that they can life to see the next day. By demonstrating his usefulness to their captors – and the usefulness of humanity – he's able to buy critical time to gear up for a war, rather than a battle. Historically, we think of the clash of civilizations as extinction events. Europeans arriving in the Americas brought conflict and diseases to the indigenous populations, wiping them out and repopulating the land. *Homo sapiens* encountered *Homo neanderthalensis* in Eurasia and triumphed. But that's not really what happened: despite their titanic and overwhelming losses, the descendants of the Mayans and various other Native American civilizations are still with us today. The Neanderthals' might have gone extinct, but their DNA still lives on in our own. In *The Mercy of Gods*, the civilizations that the Carryx takes over aren't destroyed: they're repurposed and utilized for their useful traits and technologies to continue the conquest. Even the alien presence that is the swarm isn't your typical hidden-in-our-midst spy: it's just as influenced by its host as it is its original programming. In each of these cases, the very act of first contact and conquest means that all parties come away transformed by the experience into something different. This means the question of survival that Dafyd finds himself at the center of is far more complicated than the continuation of humanity. If he and his fellow survivors and their descendants are to exist in this new environment, what does humanity look like? What is gained and lost in the act of surviving? The survivors of Anjiin will never go back to their old lives. Unwilling or not, by making the choice to survive despite the costs, Dafyd is about to lead a changed humanity's next step into a strange and uncertain future. I find this line of thinking to be a refreshing one. All too often, we consume stories of resistance fighters working to topple a totalitarian empire or fending off an invasion, ultimately restoring the prior, comfortable order that they once knew. That's not generally how the world functions, and both authors are more than aware that looking back at the past with nostalgia can be a fraught exercise. In a world where it seems like we're pelted with crises and problems that would have been unthinkable in years past, the familiar status quo serves as an illusion of tranquility. We can't return to that past, and so we must figure out how to adapt to the coming future with everything that we've learned and experienced. With *The Mercy of Gods,* Corey has laid out the building blocks of that evolution, and the next steps feel like they'll bring humanity to a stranger and weirder future, one that will somehow topple the Carryx, or at least leave them with serious regrets that they tangled with humanity. As humanity steps into the dark forest, they're doing so with considerable agency, recognizing that while their surroundings are perilous, they can adapt and learn how to survive against all odds. This is the start to a new epic, and I'm eager to see what Corey has in store for humanity and how their characters go from an insignificant speck in the cosmos to a presence that can't be easily wiped away. If *The Expanse* is anything to go by, it should be quite the ride. 📖 If you've read the book and are a member of the TO Slack channel, stop by #Books-print next week (9/23-9/27\. I'd like to try and see if we can do a virtual book club to discuss it live-ish as a group, because I'd love to hear your thoughts about this book! ### Seeing double URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey-17-bong-joon-ho-ed-ashton-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-09-18T16:02:59.000Z A couple of years ago, I picked up Ed Ashton's novel [*Mickey 7*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250875280?ref=andrewliptak.com) and blew through it in a couple of sittings. It was a fun thriller with a neat twist on the "[transporter paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation%5Fparadox?ref=andrewliptak.com)": what happens when you come across your exact duplicate? Which one is the "true" version? Not too long after the book came out in 2022, it was [scooped up for adaptation](https://variety.com/2022/film/news/bong-joon-ho-movie-robert-pattinson-warner-bros-1235157577/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (renamed *Mickey 17*) by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, who was just coming off of a Best Picture win at the Oscars for his film *Parasite*, and who's known for some of his outlandish genre films like *The Host*, *Snowpiercer*, and *Okja*. The film went into production later that year, with the plan of [getting released into theaters in the winter/spring of 2024](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey17-march-2024/). That obviously didn't happen: Warner Bros. has been undergoing some turmoil and restructuring (not to mention the big writer's strike), and the film was bumped to next year: January 31st. Warner Bros. finally released a full trailer for the film this week, and it looks like it'll be really interesting thing to watch: zany and somewhat serious. I've really been impressed with Robert Patterson's work in the last couple of years: he was excellent in Christopher Nolan's *Tenet* and Matt Reeves's *The Batman*, and this feels like it'll be a fun role for him. The novel follows a guy who's eager to get away from Earth, and jumps to the head of the line for a colonization project by volunteering to be the mission's expendable crew member. His consciousness is backed up on a computer and whenever there's a stupidly dangerous problem that needs to be solved, Mickey's the guy to do it. Throughout the book, he's killed in some pretty gruesome ways, from radiation poisoning or other injuries. It's not exactly a coveted job. After his body is recycled, he's decanted and his memories are uploaded into the new body. [Review: Mickey7 by Edward AshtonThe baggage that lingers under the surface![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/08/FY3_ftsWQAA8KWc.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey7-edward-ashton-scifi-book-review/) That's all fine, until he's left for dead on the icy planet where they're trying to set down a colony, but ends up surviving. When he limps his way back to base, he finds that his replacement has been activated, and he-they aren't willing to be recycled. It's a fun, quick read, and it brings up some interesting questions about consciousness and being, and some of the problems inherent in a world where you can back people up in replacement bodies. I'm looking forward to checking this out when it hits theaters in a couple of months, and I should probably read the novel's sequel, [*Antimatter Blues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250322012?ref=andrewliptak.com), which came out last year. Ashton also has another book (a standalone) coming out around the same time as the film, [*The Fourth Consort*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250286338?ref=andrewliptak.com), which looks pretty neat as well. ### RIP Redbox URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/redbox-bankruptcy-physical-media-movies-streaming/ Last updated: 2024-09-16T13:00:06.000Z July marked an unfortunate milestone in the entertainment industry: Redbox, the company behind the ubiquitous DVD vending machine shut down for good. Originally founded in 2002 an initiative from the fast food chain McDonalds, the company operated tens of thousands of bright red machines that dispensed Blu Rays, DVDs, and games to customers. They were simple to operate: insert your credit card, select the item you wanted to rent, and it would spit out the disk in a small plastic sleeve, which you could return at any of the company's kiosks. The company has been in trouble for a little while: it was sold to a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, in 2017, launched a streaming service, tried its hand at acquiring original content, and was purchased in 2022 by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, after which point a whole bunch of chains like 7-Eleven, CVS sued the company for not paying them for their locations (they received a percentage of the rentals). In 2024, the company announced some massive losses and [went into bankruptcy and liquidation](https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/media/redbox-bankruptcy/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), which included its chain of Redbox kiosks. Janko Roettgers has a [pretty good overview](https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/5/24191963/redbox-chicken-soup-for-the-soul-entertainment-bankruptcy-why?ref=andrewliptak.com) of how and why the company collapsed. There are a couple of ways to look at this story; first as a case study of business mismanagement, in which the Redbox was acquired and passed from company to company. Chicken Soup seems to have overextended itself when it acquired the company, and once the companies that hosted it began unplugging the machines after missed payments, everything seems to have snowballed. As Roettgers reports, the pandemic didn't help: the loss of new releases put several nails in the company's coffin. The other way to look at this is a much larger story of how we consume entertainment: streaming services have overtaken the home video market, with streamers like Apple TV+, Disney+, Max, Netflix, Peacock, and others shifting consumer preferences away from physical discs to options that you can select from the comfort of your home. [I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDsA newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0461.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/physical-media-dvds-blu-ray/) These sorts of upheavals are a familiar story in the entertainment industry: prior to the 1980s, movie theaters were primarily where you'd go to take in a film. Television cut into that a bit, but it was with the development of the VHS tape that opened up an entirely new market that studios resisted for years, worrying (correctly) that it would cut into their theatrical revenue. With the introduction of the DVD (and later, Blu-Ray), the market for VHS declined and vanished: the last ones were produced in 2016\. The discs are experiencing a similar decline, as companies have begun pulling back on manufacturing and releasing home releases, and as stores like Best Buy and Walmart have begun cutting back or eliminating their offerings entirely. Redbox is part of that story. It entered the picture because while rental outlets like Blockbuster offered up a huge selection of films for rent, a kiosk could easily sit outside of any number of high-traffic locations, like supermarkets or drug stores. DVDs were also easier to distribute, and by focusing on new releases, one could easily rent a handful of films while out running errands, and easily drop them off when they encountered one of the locations. The company did run into considerable issues along the way: they ran afoul of various studios worried about how Redbox's rentals impacted their own sales, often imposing retail windows (Redbox apparently would purchase films from other retailers!) or working out some sort of distribution deals with them. Looking back, Redbox appears to be one of those companies that was destined to fail, given the gains in streaming and the decline of physical media. It's so much easier to subscribe to Netflix and have a much wider selection available at your fingertips. But where Netflix correctly envisioned a future where streaming would take over, Redbox was not only late to the game with their own attempts, but they also had a large footprint of physical locations and the supporting infrastructure to contend with, something that's hard to shift around quickly. It seems like it's a case where the company just wasn't able to adapt to the changing landscape quickly enough. The result is now these empty husks that are sitting abandoned at shopping centers and strip malls across the country. The one at my local grocery store sadly sits just outside of the checkout lines, with a taped-on sign that reads "Redbox is no longer in business." It's an unfortunate turn, one that I'm slightly complicit in; I can't remember the last film I rented from a Redbox. I've rented my share over them over the years, but I've often preferred to buy my own DVDs rather than rent them, while the collection of streaming services I subscribe to has taken over the "let me check this film out rather than invest in buying it" tendencies that I have. The danger here is that Hollywood's pivot to streaming means there are fewer outlets to find home releases: as stores pull back their selections (if they have them at all) and rental outlets like Redbox vanish into the sunset, it seems that demand for physical copies is destined to decline as well. I don't think that it'll vanish entirely – look at the resurgence of vinyl, the durability of physical printed books, and the continued availability of CDs. But maybe it'll be harder to get films and shows in non-streaming ways. Disney only released *The Mandalorian* and *Andor* a couple of years after the shows debuted on Disney+, while Amazon only released a boxed set of the entire *Expanse* series back in December. As we've seen with streaming services, what's available online can be unreliable, especially as these platforms have pulled down some of their original offerings when they didn't perform as well as they'd like. Having the discs on hand is a bulwark against those stories vanishing, and while the end of a company like Redbox isn't the whole story, it's just one piece of the larger picture. Who knows? With Redbox's assets being liquidated, maybe some ambitious person will figure out a way to use those machines to restart a similar business, tapping into the convenience that they once afforded. One can hope. ### Paper grinder URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-biography-publishing-cover/ Last updated: 2024-09-10T13:00:48.000Z One of the things that I like to do is write about books, and in my day job at the [Vermont Historical Society](https://vermonthistory.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), I've found myself operating in a very small part of the publishing industry. A lot of people are surprised to learn that we publish books. We do, with a specific focus: books about Vermont's history. A friend of mine told me about the job in 2021 or early 2022: my formal title is PR & Guest Services Coordinator, which means that I do everything from managing [our social media](https://linktr.ee/vermonthistory?ref=andrewliptak.com) to running our bookstore at the [museum in Montpelier](https://vermonthistory.org/museum/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Part of that, as it turns out, has been promoting our line of books, both to the media, reading public, and bookstores, and I've found it to be an interesting process. I'm not involved in the editorial or commissioning process (don't send me manuscripts, [go here for that](https://vermonthistory.org/publishing-program/?ref=andrewliptak.com)), but once a book is in the pipeline, that's when I get to work. [The things I’ve learned running a small bookstoreIt’s been a fun, interesting year selling books![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/04/f3213bbe-5e36-4f5d-9b3b-806a2387edf6_3132x2349.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/indie-bookstore-day-2023-lessons-bookselling/) Our latest book is [*Ira Allen: A Biography*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/ira-allen-a-biography/1364?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com)by J. Kevin Graffagnino, and it's been in the works for a little while. Graffagnino, our former executive director, actually wrote this as his PhD dissertation back in the 1990s, and after bouncing around from archives and historical societies around the country, he returned to Vermont when he retired, and the ball started rolling to clean up the manuscript for publication. It came to us, and after our publishing committee looked it over, it went into the pipeline. [Complicated historiesAn interview with Ira Allen: A Biography author J. Kevin Graffagnino![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/Kevin-Graffagnino.056591b3.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-kevin-graffagnino-interview/) They didn't have to do much for this particular title: new copy edits and some updates, but for other books, we've helped guide the research and writing process, as in our 2023 book, [*"Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/-vermont-for-the-vermonters-the-history-of-eugenics-in-the-green-mountain-state/1253?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com)by Mercedes de Guardiola. Once it gets to the publishable stage, we started working on the next phase: printing and selling it, which is where I get involved. --- I think [about](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/) book [covers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cover-art/) and [book art](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/) a lot on this newsletter, and some of that thinking has percolated into my work here: in my role as PR goblin for VHS, it's a book that will sit on the bookshelves of not only our museum, but our website, bookstores around the state, libraries, and book sales. We can talk about Ira Allen's story and his importance to the state's history, but how do we get people to pick it up and investigate further? The cover plays a big role here. One of the fun parts of this project has been playing more of a role in the cover design here. The eugenics book was a challenge to put together in 2023: we didn't want to use people or specific locations. I played with a bunch of ideas, but de Guardiola had the best idea, to use a stylized family tree map, which I think worked pretty well. For this book, I wanted to do something a little different. I've found some of our prior covers a bit wanting: some are better than others, and I wanted something straightforward. Last winter, I took a quiet afternoon and started browsing through covers of other biographies of figures from this era, which essentially boiled down to a portrait of the book's subject against a plain-ish background. I then took some of the same elements and put them together in Canva for an image that we could point our designer, Jim Brisson, to. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/Untitled-collage.png) Four initial prototype covers that I put together. The one on the far left is the first one I came up with, and the others were some other ideas playing with the placement of the title. I've been following a book designer on Instagram, [Elisha Zepeda](https://www.instagram.com/ez.bookdesign?ref=andrewliptak.com), who's been posting progress images of some of the covers he's worked on, which I found helpful and enlightening. It prompted me to try a slightly different approach: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/Ira-Allen-prototype-cover-1.png) A rabbit hole that I went down while brainstorming other ideas. I didn't end up submitting that version, as we were already pretty far along in the process, but it was a useful exercise to break down a cover into smaller elements and try and convey the story that way. This one is missing a big part: Allen himself, but I'm thinking this style might make for a good starting point for another project. My original version ended up being a good model for what we ended up with. Those versions were just hacked together with some random maps that I snagged for the background, so we selected a better version, commissioned a better scan of Allen's portrait from UVM, and ended up liking the red typeface a bit better than the yellow-orange that I selected (which I think works better with black and white anyway.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/53847401287_e603cbca18_k.jpg) Image: Vermont Historical Society Once we locked the cover in, the look and tone of the cover helped to inform how we'd go about marketing the book on our website and social media. Zepeda put together a [nifty book cover template](https://new.express.adobe.com/publishedV2/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:0d72459e-57c9-486d-82c3-b9f885f09459?promoid=Y69SGM5H&mv=other&category=search&ref=andrewliptak.com) that sets book covers against a plain background, which I've borrowed and used for our other titles. (see the header image above.) And once all of that was done, we actually need the book itself. Brisson handled the interior text design and layout, our editor handled lining up things like the ISBN number, details for the Library of Congress, index, ebook files, lined up blurbs, and things like that. I wrote the marketing copy, sent copies out to reviewers around the state, lined up press coverage, social media and store assets, added the product entry on our storefront and on Amazon, and began getting the word out, first to newsletter subscribers, then to press, libraries, and bookstores. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/09/Copy-of--2024-LLHSM-Conference--Banner--2-.png) A banner that I put together for our website and Facebook page. --- For this book, I put together a marketing plan, one that covered how we'd roll out the announcement of the book, press outlets to contact, what we'd put out in newsletters, and when we'd open up preorders. The book was supposed to hit stores back in April to tie in with Ira Allen's birthday, but we had some production delays and opted to bump it to the fall, out of the way of some of our big exhibits and projects over the summer. This was something that I did for the eugenics book, and it was interesting to see how these two projects set out to accomplish the same goals, but were different in tone. Eugenics is a somewhat controversial and painful topic, one that's still relevant in Vermont's communities: there are still some survivors of the practice out there, and it's a book that has some pretty clear parallels to the mental health crisis that the state is facing and trying to work with right now. It's a timely book, and something that we could use while pitching the book and its story to news outlets and other writers. *Ira Allen: A Biography* is completely different. It's more of what I'd call a "Dad History": the sort of book that you might buy you father or father-in-law, but which isn't necessarily tied to social issues in the present day. (Our next book will go back to the pressing social story: a history of Vermont's COVID-19 response by historian and journalist Garrett Graff, part of a big oral history project we stood up in 2022.) There are lots of biographies of old white guys out there, and while it's not quite as newsworthy, Graffagnino put together a book that's compelling and interesting. Ira Allen isn't as well known as his older brother Ethan, and played a much larger role in the formation of Vermont as an independent republic and eventually, the 14th state in the Union. Even better, Ira was a pretty reviled figure in his day: he played an important role in the creation of the state, but died penniless, exiled from Vermont and was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near Philadelphia. As Graffagnino notes in the introduction of his book, Ira's passing was barely mentioned in Vermont press at the time. There's a compelling story in the rise and fall of a person, and as Graffagnino [noted in a](https://vermonthistory.org/kevin-graffagnino-interview-ira-allen-vermont-history?ref=andrewliptak.com) [couple of](https://www.colchestersun.com/news/ira-allen-biography-coming-soon-let-s-hear-from-its-author-kevin-graffagnino/article%5F3073572c-4ac0-11ef-a859-777daeadecc6.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) [interviews](https://www.rutlandherald.com/features/weekend%5Fmagazine/rethinking-ira-allen-a-new-look-at-vermonts-other-brother/article%5F20f36262-63eb-11ef-be7c-8344fda17523.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), his subject was a hard person to admire. Here in Vermont, Ethan Allen is often lionized as a founding father of Vermont, although his role was just part of the puzzle. (I highly recommend Christopher Wren's [*Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781416599562?ref=andrewliptak.com) to learn more about Ethan and his complications), Ira is less well-known to the public, so part of the marketing challenge has been to teach folks who he was, pushing his story out through some of our [partnerships](https://www.mychamplainvalley.com/at-this-place-in-history/this-place-in-history-ira-allen-a-biography-part-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and publications. This isn't exactly what I'd call "hidden history," but there's a lot of curiosity in learning about these individuals and events that haven't had quite as much time in the spotlight. Additionally, the semisesquicentennial (250 years) anniversary of the founding of the United States is coming in 2026\. You'll see a lot about this in the next couple of years as that big milestone approaches, and there'll be a lot of work done to examine and reexamine the founding of the nation and the people who helped make it happen. Ken Burns has one of his [huge documentaries coming out](https://kenburns.com/films/the-american-revolution/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to mark the occasion, and there'll be plenty of other things along the way. Ira Allen was an important figure in this corner of the country, and one of the ways that I've been thinking about this book is how it's a good, accessible window into not just his life, but the formation of Vermont during this period. It also pairs nicely with some of our other books about this time period, such as Elise Guyette's [*Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburg, 1790-1890*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/discovering-black-vermont-african-american-farmers-in-hinesburgh-1790-1890-second-edition-/959?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Harvey Amani Whitfield's [*The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/the-problem-of-slavery-in-early-vermont-1777-1810/448?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Neil Goodwin's [*We Go As Captives: The Royalton Raid and the Shadow War on the Revolutionary Frontier*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/we-go-as-captives-the-royalton-raid-and-the-shadow-war-on-the-revolutionary-frontier/472?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), Robert Mello's [*Moses Robinson and the Founding of Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/moses-robinson-and-the-founding-of-vermont/554?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com), and John J. Duffy, H. Nicholas Meuller III, and Gary Shattuck's [*The Rebel and the Tory: Ethan Allen, Philip Skene, and the Dawn of Vermont*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/the-rebel-and-the-tory-ethan-allen-philip-skene-and-the-dawn-of-vermont/956?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Hopefully, it'll be a book that folks will gravitate towards as that celebration approaches. That's a central part of how I go about doing my job: not just as someone to put together information about VHS and our programming and publications, but using social media, outreach, and the internet as ways to further our mission to educate Vermonters and "Vermonters at heart"; using everything from a social media post to talk about the history of our state, all the way up to publications. Above all, it helps that this is a good read. We're an academic organization, and some of our books are a little more on the academic side. Not impossible to read, but they might be a bit limited in appeal to a broader audience. While this has its roots in a PhD dissertation, Graffagnino wrote it as a narrative, and I found it to be an engaging story about Allen and his life. I've enjoyed reading it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what other readers think of it as they dig into it this fall. --- A big chunk of my time over the last couple of months has been selling the book. When I came into this role in 2022, we didn't seem to do much on the sales front. We had released a bunch over the years, and would fill requests as they came in, but there didn't seem to be a ton of outreach. With the eugenics book out in 2023, I put together a list of bookstores in the state, put together a catalog of our titles, and began getting in contact to let them know about what we had to offer. It's been a fun project, especially as I've worked in bookstores and libraries in the past, and it's taught me some interesting lessons in being persistent and figuring out how I need to go beyond "here's a new book that we have." This year, I was pleased when a couple of bookstores that I'd been trying to get our books into finally got back in touch and placed orders for the first time. We also sell books directly to readers, and I had to keep track of the preorders as they started rolling in. That brought its own set of additional things: did we have enough mailers and postage on hand? Where do we put these piles of books while we wait for them to sell? And with a handful of titles that are similar to this one, like *The Rebel and the Tory* and *Moses Robinson and the Founding of Vermont*, do we have enough copies on hand in case people want to learn more about our history? This week has been a blur, starting on Saturday when I had Graffagnino stop by the museum to sign preordered copies, to Tuesday and Wednesday as I packed and shipped those preorders, delivered books to bookstores or the post office, and shared the articles and reviews of the book that have been popping up online. And starting today, I've got Graffagnino stopping by the museum for an impromptu talk and signing, after which point he'll be going around the state to talk about his work and his subject. We'll be into the holiday sales season by that point, at which time we'll be doing another round of sales for bookstores and readers, we'll probably start experimenting with some ads for the book, and whatever talks and follow up articles we'll have for some of our publications and programming. Our next issue of History Connections will likely be themed around the American Revolution to tie in with the kickoff of the 250th, and I've already told Graffagnino that we'll tap him for a brief article. And then, we'll shift focus to our next book, which we're supposed to release in the spring, and the entire process will start all over again. Whew. --- All of this is to say that publishing a book is a lot of work. Publishers accomplish this on a much larger scale and with a much larger staff, but even in this slimmed down version, there's a lot hiding under the surface that just isn't visible to the readers at the end of the pipeline. As a writer, I find it useful and interesting to know about some of those smaller details, like the ISBN number, or the number of iterations and conversations that we had about the cover. Just about every book that you see on a bookstore shelf goes through something like this: not just the writing of the manuscript, but a whole constellation of decisions that comes long after the author has completed the text. ### Complicated histories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-ira-allen-kevin-graffagnino-interview/ Last updated: 2024-09-09T20:35:21.000Z This summer, the Vermont Historical Society will publish a new book: *Ira Allen: A Biography*, written by J. Kevin Graffagnino, which explores the life of one of Vermont's most influential figures during the American Revolution and its founding. While not as well known as his famous brother Ethan, Ira was no less important to Vermont's early history. Here's what the book is about: > Land speculator, revolutionary, pamphleteer, politician, and empire builder, Ira Allen was a key figure on the Green Mountain frontier. In a remarkable Vermont pioneer generation that included such noteworthy leaders as Ethan Allen, Thomas Chittenden, Moses Robinson, Isaac Tichenor, and Stephen Row Bradley, Allen stood out for his extraordinary energy, vision, and accomplishments. > > Allen helped create and sustain the independent State of Vermont; held such important state offices as treasurer, surveyor general, and member of the Governor’s Council; published hundreds of pages defending Vermont against a host of internal and external enemies; and represented Vermont in negotiations with the British Empire, other American states, and Congress. > > J. Kevin Graffagnino’s biography ably details Ira Allen’s extraordinary life. As the first published examination of Allen’s career in nearly a century, this book shines new light on Allen and his prominent role in Vermont’s formative decades. To prepare for its release on September 13th, I chatted with Kevin to learn a bit more about himself and the long journey this project took to reach print. ### First off, can you introduce yourself to our readers? I was born in New York and raised in Montpelier, Vermont, and went on to attend UVM, where I earned two degrees in history. From there, I got my PhD in History from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. When I returned to Vermont, I became the curator of Vermontiana at UVM’s Special Collections between 1978 and 1995, and along the way, became the youngest trustee in the history of the Vermont Historical Society (between 1979 and 1985), then left Vermont and became the library director at the Wisconsin Historical Society between 1995 and 1999\. From there, I became the executive director at the Kentucky Historical Society in 1999, and in 2003, I returned to Vermont and became the executive director of the Vermont Historical Society until 2008\. After that, I went on to become the director of the William L. Clements Library at the University o Michigan, and retired in 2019\. Along the way, I’ve written and edited 25 books, 15 of them about Vermont’s history, and lectured about history throughout the state. ![](https://vermonthistory.org/assets/image-cache/books/Book%20Cover.85fd7c9b.png) ### You’ve spent a good part of your career studying Vermont’s history: how did you come to write this book about Ira Allen? I began researching Ira Allen in early the 1980s, after a lot of research and publishing on Vermont in the 18th century, and I thought he deserved more attention than he'd received. I saw James B. Wilbur's biography (published in 1928) as inadequate for assessing Ira's role in Vermont's beginnings. So I began planning a biography around 1984 and wrapped that research into my PhD work at UMass-Amherst for my dissertation, which I earned in 1993\. I planned on turning that dissertation into a book, but life had other plans: my professional moves to Wisconsin and Kentucky, and Michigan diverted me to other publishing projects. It wasn’t until 2022 that I returned to the project when my mentor and friend Nick Muller urged me in his final months to put the biography into print. I contacted Steve Perkins and Alan Berolzheimer about it and VHS’s Publications Committee approved the idea. A couple of years later, this book is the result. That's more along the "how" line: on the "why" side, I see Ira as one of the most important and influential Vermonters of his time. He ranks up there with Thomas Chittenden, Ethan Allen, and a handful of others in the efforts to create, defend and sustain Vermont against a variety of opponents between 1777 and 1791\. He held a number of important offices, such as State Treasurer, Surveyor-General, member of the Council, chief advisor to Governor Chittenden, and wrote and published a remarkable amount of material making Vermont's case for its existence. He was a key figure in the Haldimand Negotiations that discussed Vermont's return to British control during and after the American Revolution, claimed more than 200,000 acres in northern Vermont, worked towards a commercial and real-estate empire in the Champlain Valley that rivaled the visions/plans of early America's most ambitious land speculators, and planned revolutions in Canada and Mexico to advance his hopes and dreams. An early Vermont history without Ira Allen is incomplete; with him we have a much more complete and accurate of our state's formative decades. ### How will this book paint a new picture of Allen and the founding of Vermont for readers? I hope this book will combine considerable new detail on Ira's life with scholarly/objective analysis of his motivations, what he hoped to accomplish, and the factors that led to his ultimate failure. Readers will learn a great deal about Ira and a good deal about Vermont between 1770 and 1810\. This book breaks with the old Vermont tradition of regarding our Founding Fathers with worshipful approval to portray Ira as a complex, talented individual who deserves our respect if not always our admiration. It incorporates the perspectives and insights of leading Vermont and American historians of the past half-century to create a better-rounded picture of Ira Allen and early Vermont alike. ### What was the most surprising thing you learned about Allen in the course of this book? I think what most surprised me about Ira was the tremendous optimism and tireless energy that he brought to his many schemes, plans, projects, and dreams. No matter how often he fell short of his goals, he always had a Plan B that was sure to produce a successful result. Reversals and failures that would have crushed any normal individual had little effect; he never ran out of ideas and determination to move ahead. When he died in poverty in Philadelphia in 1814, after a decade of exile from Vermont, Ira was awaiting word of what he was sure would be the success of a military expedition he had sent south to start a revolution in what would become the independent state of Texas (only 22 years later than Ira expected). ### What is it about Allen’s story that you feel is important to learn in 2024? What do you hope that they’ll take away from the book when they read it? More than two centuries after Ira's death, I hope his story can remind us that the men and women who created and sustained Vermont in its early years were complicated, multi-faceted human beings rather than cardboard paragons or (if on the "wrong" side) unprincipled villains. Their motivations and ideals varied, both individually and collectively, and an understanding of that historical reality can serve us well in dealing with the challenges, issues and disputes of our own time. *Ira Allen: A Biography* will be published in September by the Vermont Historical Society. You can find details about the book [here](https://vermonthistory.org/ira-allen-biograpjy-kevin-graffagnino-vermont-history-book?ref=andrewliptak.com) and order your copy [here](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/ira-allen-a-biography/1364?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com). 🏛️ This interview was originally published on the Vermont Historical Society's website and newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter for more updates about VHS, go [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Here's the September book list! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2024-09-09T16:07:45.000Z I always strive to have these book lists hit your inbox at the first of the month. I don't always hit that mark, and this last week, the reason has been wholly book-related. I work at the Vermont Historical Society as their PR and Guest Services person, which means lots of writing and editing, but also promoting our work as an independent publisher. That's been the focus of my week this month so far, because we have a book coming out this week *Ira Allen: A Biography* by J. Kevin Graffagnino! I've got an entry for it below and will have a post out tomorrow about some of the behind-the-scenes that went into getting it ready for publication. --- As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it costs time and resources to put together. There are a couple of ways to support it! - Sign up as a supporting member, which gets you additional posts and access to the TO Slack channel. - Purchase a book through an affiliate link below. - **Ghost has a new way to support newsletter writers:** you can now tip creators with a one-time payment and you can do that by clicking [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/support). --- Okay, here are 15 new books that you should check out this September. I'll have another list for you in a week or two. ### [*Expeditionary Force: Task Force Hammer*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Task-Force-Hammer-Audiobook/B0D38CR7BR?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Craig Alanson (September 10th) Craig Alanson had planned an ending for his long-running Expeditionary Force series, but ended up realizing that he had some more adventures for the Merry Band of Pirates up his sleeve. In this new installment, the crew has stopped their enemy from stealing a Sentinel, *and* destroyed its Elder starship. But in doing so, they've realized that their enemy wasn't what they thought it was, and they now have to figure out if they can take it on. [Expeditions in self-publishingHow Craig Alanson forged a new path a a self-published author![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/03/IMG_3522.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) ### [*A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781643263366?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Brown (September 17th) I've long been a fan of Christopher Brown's novels ([*Tropic of Kansas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062563811?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Rule of Capture*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062859099?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Failed State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062859105?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which I've found to be some of the most prescient and smart science fiction out there at the moment. [Failed State’s Christopher Brown on building utopias out of dystopiasHappy Friday! (or whatever day it is you’re reading this on.) One of my favorite discoveries recently has been author Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State, as well as a whole host of short stories. He’s popped up in some interesting![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_f12eb1e6-c99a-48a3-b7c6-95f8c0f755a6_722x1080.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/failed-state-christopher-brown-on-building-utopias-out-of-dystopias/) I'm also a huge fan of Brown's newsletter [*Field Notes*](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which somewhat informs this book. Brown writes extensively about the intersection of human society and nature, and in the late 2000s, purchased a lot of industrial land in Austin, Texas to build his home. Since then, he's become fascinated by those formerly inhabited spaces and how nature has crept back in. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/christopher-brown/a-natural-history-of-empty-lots/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Brown’s unusual combination of memoir and “natural history” contains many surprising images," and that it's "an appealing mixture of nature writing, memoir, and self-reflection." ### [*William*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593719602?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mason Coile (September 10th) An engineer named Henry is trapped inside his home thanks to a case of agoraphobia. He spends his time inside working on a project: a half-completed robot that he called William. He made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence while working on the robot, and when his friends and coworkers come over to see it and his smart house, things go south quickly. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mason-coile/william/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Coile maximizes his premise’s inherent tension using nightmare imagery and an uneasy third-person-present narration shot through with powerlessness, paranoia, and dread." ### [*Guillotine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803368337?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Delilah S. Dawson (September 10th) Dez Lane lines up a date with Patrick Ruskin as a way to meet his famous mother-in-law, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau Magazine, hoping that it'll help her line up an internship at the publication. When she arrives at his family's compound, she finds a wealthy estate, showing her a window into the way the 1% lives that she's never been able to experience. And once the guests arrive and the ferry to the island leave, things start going dark: the family's servants, long oppressed by horrible contracts, have decided that it's time to make a change, and Dez has to figure out where her loyalties lie. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781803368337?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Dawson’s vivid prose and snappy dialogue brings the gory, stylized action to life." ### [*Sandymancer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765379603?ref=andrewliptak.com)by David Edison (September 10th) Caralee Vinnet has grown up in a desolate world, one where water is scarce and dust is everywhere, with a small group of powerful control the few elements that still exist out in the cosmos. Caralee has some options at her fingertips: she can draw upon the magic in her bones and command the sands. When she tries it, she accidentally summons a god-king who broke the centuries ago and ha now taken over the body of her best friend, and it's now up to her to make things right. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780765379603?ref=andrewliptak.com) "After a slow start, readers will be drawn in by the well-realized characters and the weird westernesque setting. Edison makes this dystopia fun."[](javascript:void%280%29;) ### [*Ira Allen: A Biography*](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/ira-allen-a-biography/1364?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com) by J. Kevin Graffagnino (September 13th) This one isn't SF/F, but as noted above, it's a book that I've been working on for my day job at the Vermont Historical Society. This is the first biography in nearly a century of Ira Allen, who was one of the state's most important – and flawed – founding figures. It's an excellent read that explores not only Allen's life, but how Vermont went from a backwater, frontier at the edge of the colonies to its own republic and eventually, the 14th state. (I'll have a bit more about this tomorrow.) ### [*Daughter of the Wormwood Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781630231132?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Jessup (September 10th) A woman named Clara survived a brutal attack on her university, and in the aftermath, finds that she has a bond with her fellow survivors. They call themselves the "Knot", and they've discovered that some door that shouldn't have been opened have been. They find their horrors aren't over: a group of devotees are after them, and Clara and her sisters have to deal with everything from zombie cultists, a lighthouse filled with living shadows as they work to find the Jawbone Door, beyond which lies some true horrors. ### [*One Hundred Shadows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661443?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jung Yewon (August 20th) Set in an electronics slum in Seoul, Eungyo and Mujae have found a decent living working as assistants in repair shops, only to find that their home has been slated for demolition. At the same time, strange shadows of the slum's inhabitants have begun to rise, Writing in *Speculative Fiction in Translation*, Rachel Cordasco [says](https://www.sfintranslation.com/?p=981&ref=andrewliptak.com) "the book exudes a quiet sadness mixed with a glimmer of optimism- the latter, I think, stems from the sweet and tentative relationship that develops between the two friends." ### [*Somewhere Beyond the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881205?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T.J. Klune (September 10th) T.J. Klune pens a sequel to his blockbuster novel [*The House in the Cerulean Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250217318?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* following Arthur Parnasus, who's the headmaster of an orphanage on a distant island, where he hopes to guide and teach the magical children who live there. That sense of calm is shattered when he's called to speak about his dark past, and finds that he has a fight on his hand for the future of the magical children in his care. When a new child arrives on the island, one who believes that he's a monster and one that Arthur had worked to protect his children from, everything is on the verge of falling apart. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/somewhere-beyond-the-sea-1807567?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The emotional arcs are epic, taking readers from sadness to laughter, and the children sit front and center in the action." ### [*Haunt Sweet Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250330260?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Pinsker (September 3rd) A young woman named Mara gets a job working on the night shift for a reality how called *Haunt Sweet Home*, he realizes that "reality" is a stretch: she's hiding fog machines and making up scares for homeowner. When a new, creepy coworker comes on et, she has to figure out who's she's really been tricking. Library Journal [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/haunt-sweet-home-1806927?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Pinsker’s evocative prose turns an amusing reality-show backdrop into a haunting story of hiding from (and discovering) oneself." ### [*The Gods Below*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564892?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrea Stewart (September 3rd) In this new series from Andrea Stewart (who earned acclaim for [*The Boneshard Daughter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316541435?ref=andrewliptak.com) and its sequels), a war has left humanity in ruins. In their desperation, the struck a deal with the god Kluehnn, who would restore the world but at a steep price: humanity would be indebted to him. As he transformed the world, the inhabitants were as well. Hakara wasn't willing to go along with the deal, and fled with her family to a neighboring kingdom, and was forced to abandon her sister. Now, she's discovered that she can channel magic from the gems that she was forced to mine for the god, and discovers that her sister is alive. She'll have to team up with a band of rebels working to undermine the pact to save her. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316564892?ref=andrewliptak.com) "While the duplicity of Kluehnn is never in doubt, Stewart maintains a good balance between the sisters and their competing goals, creating a fascinating level of moral ambiguity so that readers will feel that each character is justified in making her choices." ### [*Vigilance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589360?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Allen Stroud (September 3rd) Allen Stroud caps off his trilogy *The Fractal* with *Vigilance* (preceded [*Fearless*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787585409?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Resilient*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787587137?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which humanity has colonized the solar system. Captain Ellisha Shann commands a search and rescue ship called the Khidr, and had responded to a distress call, leading to the discovery of some strange phenomena. In this final installment, Phobos Station has been destroyed, and there are some malevolent forces that are working to stop humanity's colonization of the solar system's other worlds, all while Shann and her crew are working to figure out the workings of an ancient alien ship. ### [*The History of Middle-earth box set #4*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390850?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Tolkien and J. R. R. Tolkien (September 10th) This is the fourth and final boxed set of Christopher and J.R.R. Tolkien's sprawling *History of Middle Earth* series, which is a deep dive into work that went into creating the larger Middle-earth legendarium. This boxed set contains *Morgoth's Ring* and *The War of the Jewels,* which detail the writing of the *Silmarillion*; *The Peoples of Middle-Earth,* a deep dive into the chronology of the fourth age, genealogies*,* and quite a bit more*;* and an Index for the entire series. This boxed set follows *The History of Middle-ear*th boxed set #1 ([*The Silmarillion / Unfinished Tales / Book of Lost Tales, Part One / Book of Lost Tales, Part Two*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063379848?ref=andrewliptak.com)), [Boxed Set #2](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390836?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*The Lays of Beleriand / The Shaping of Middle-Earth / The Lost Road*), and [Boxed Set #3](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390843?ref=andrewliptak.com) (*The Return of the Shadow / The Treason of Isengard / The War of the Ring / Sauron Defeated*) ### [*Lucy Undying*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593724408?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kiersten White (September 10th) One of Dracula's first victims was Lucy Westenra, the daughter of a wealthy family and friend of Mina Murray. Turned into an immortal vampire by Dracula's bite, she's been trying to escape from the monster's grasp for years and figure out who she really is. Eventually, in the 21st century, she meets a woman named Iris, who's also trying to escape from her past — a long-held family secret that underpins her wealthy family's empire. Lucy finds herself falling for the woman, only to face a bunch of outside forces: Iris's family, and Dracula, who's returned once again. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593724408?ref=andrewliptak.com) "White paints familiar characters in a new light, and her enchanting prose will keep readers enthralled. This is a must-read for Bram Stoker fans who believe Lucy deserved better." ### [*Out of the Drowning Deep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803369822?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A.C. Wise (September 3rd) Set in the distant future, Scribe IV is a robot that lives in a secluded monastery called Bastion. When the Pope is murdered on a visit, Scribe IV has to figure out how to uncover the culprit before the Sisters of the Drowned Deep come to exact punishment on the inhabitant of Bastion for the crime. He turns to Quin, a drug addict in recovery who's been working as a private investigator, and an angel who hears his prayers. Together, they work to try and find the culprit before it's too late. --- ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781649377104?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Changing Collections URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-collections-museum-history/ Last updated: 2024-09-06T19:40:49.000Z In October 2024, the Vermont Historical Society will formally open the Research and Exhibition Gallery in Barre’s Vermont History Center. This gallery will help to showcase a wide range of the Society’s object collections, bringing them out from the basement storage rooms and into the view of the general public. It’s a major new project that is in step with today’s museum practices: increasing accessibility of collections and objects to allow visitors and scholars to view them. With the space to display thousands of items behind glass at once, this gallery looks similar to the cabinets loaded with items that were once the centerpiece of collectors and early museums. Indeed, many of the world’s modern museums and institutions evolved from the scientific and anthropological collections of wealthy patrons. But the Research and Exhibition Gallery is a far cry from those early cases, showing just how much the role of physical objects and museums has changed over the centuries. The United States was undergoing a period of reflection when Vermont’s legislature chartered the Vermont Historical and Antiquarian Society in 1838\. The generation that fought in the American Revolution had largely died out, and many worried that as the population of young Americans moved out west, the country would become unmoored from the foundations and principles upon which it was built. State officials and scholars worked to solve that problem by establishing historical societies and educational programs to preserve the documents and objects that helped tell the country’s story. The legislature tasked VHS with “collecting and preserving materials for civil and natural history of the State of Vermont,” with its library and cabinet in Barnet, the home of one of the society’s founding members, Henry Stevens. Initially, the Society’s primary focus was on acquiring documents related to the founding of Vermont. In his book *Up & Doing: The Vermont Historical Society, 1838-1970*, former VHS director Weston A. Cate, Jr., notes that there were a few reasons for this: the concept of a museum was still young, collections of objects took up space, and there was already a “State Cabinet” located at the State House. When a fire tore through the State House on January 6th, 1857, it destroyed not only much of the State Cabinet, but also the items from Stevens’ personal collection that he had stored there and whatever items VHS had stored in the space allotted to it by the legislature. When the building was reconstructed, it included space for a new Cabinet room to house various artifacts and relics from the state’s past. In the decades that followed, space became a constant concern for the Society. In 1886, it and the Vermont State Library moved into a newly constructed annex behind the State House, and again in 1918 to the new Vermont Supreme Court Building down the hill. There, the Society consolidated the collection that had been stored all over the state. VHS remained there until 1960, when it once again outgrew its space and relocated to the National Life building across the campus, only to move back across in 1970 into the first floor of the reconstructed Pavilion Building. As VHS hopped from location to location over the 19th and early 20th century, its collection grew. “No longer was the Society interested only in relics,” Cate writes. VHS “broadened its vision to include all kinds of artifacts from buttonhooks to full-sized buildings such as the Hyde Log Cabin in Grant Isle.” These physical objects brought a new dimension to the types of history and stories that the Society was able to preserve, from items from notable battles to the ephemera of everyday Vermont life. As the collection grew, so too did the demands on VHS staff, who not only had to catalog and document the collection, but to also provide care to ensure that items would survive for future generations. Cate notes that through the middle of the 20th century, the Society’s librarians oversaw both the library and object collections, and in the years following the Second World War and into the 1960s, the Society and its staff produced numerous exhibits in the Supreme Court and National Life Buildings, writing: “they reflected the then current practice in museum presentations, which contrasts dramatically with today’s \[late 1980s\].” The move to the “Pavilion Building offered the first real opportunity to apply modern museum techniques. No longer were exhibits crammed solely into glass cases. Instead, visitors’ attention was focused on a series of modules in which representative exhibits traced the history of the state.” In addition to applying new practices to preserve the collection, Cate explains that it’s the move to the Pavilion Building that best highlighted the Society’s changing mission: “from a library for the use primarily of scholars, genealogists, and historians with scant attention to a ‘cabinet’ to a greater balance between historical library research and exhibits that help interpret the past.” In many ways, VHS’s story mirrors that of the museum itself: how disparate collections assembled by enthusiasts transformed into institutions of preservation and learning. While the focus began with books and documents, it has expanded to include photographs and objects held and used by Vermonters. This addition brings new dimensions to Vermont’s stories, bringing about a fuller picture of our past for all to learn. 🏛️ This piece originally ran in the Spring 2024 edition of **History Connections*, VHS's member magazine. To get it and support the organization, sign up as a member [here](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Here are the winners of the 2024 Dragon Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2024-dragon-awards/ Last updated: 2024-09-05T19:29:57.000Z Dragon Con took place over the weekend, and part of its programming was the reveal of this year's Dragon Awards winners. The award has been handed out annually for the last couple of years, and its winners are decided by fandom at large. [Here are the finalists for the 2024 Dragon AwardsA nice snapshot of the SF/F of 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/08/IMG_9086.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-award-finalists-sci-fi-fantasy-books-dragoncon/) Overall, it's a good list of popular titles to pick up. Here are the winners, marked in **bold**: ### **Best Science Fiction Novel** - *The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport* by Samit Basu - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Theft of Fire* by Devon Eriksen - *These Burning Stars* by Bethany Jacobs - *Beyond the Ranges* by John Ringo, James Aidee - ***Starter Villain* by John Scalzi** - *System Collapse* by Martha Wells ### **Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)** - *Three Kinds of Lucky* by Kim Harrison - *The Water Outlaws* by S.L. Huang - *He Who Drowned the World* by Shelley Parker-Chan - *My Brother’s Keeper* by Tim Powers - *House of Open Wounds* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - ***Iron Flame* by Rebecca Yarros** ### **Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel** - *Homecoming in Black* by J.M. Anjewierden - *So Let Them Burn* by Kamilah Cole - ***Midnight at the Houdini* by Delilah S. Dawson** - *Hideki Smith, Demon Queller* by A.J. Hartley, Hisako Osako, Kuma Hartley - *Death Lord Arcanist* by Shami Stovall - *The Spirit Bares Its Teeth* by Andrew Joseph White ### **Best Alternate History Novel** - *Devil’s Battle* by Taylor Anderson - *1638: The Sovereign States* by Eric Flint, Paula Goodlett, Gorg Huff - ***All the Dead Shall Weep* by Charlaine Harris** - *Dirty Water* by Tom Kratman - *Cahokia Jazz* by Francis Spufford - *The Wages of Sin* by Harry Turtledove ### **Best Horror Novel** - *The Hollow Dead* by Darcy Coates - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due - *Dead Storm Rising* by Shane Gries - *The Dead Take the A Train* by Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw - ***Black River Orchard* by Chuck Wendig** - *Double Dose* by F. Paul Wilson ### **Best Illustrative Book Cover** - *Dragonesque* by Justin Adams - *The Silverblood Promise* by Jeff Brown - *Yumi and the Nightmare Painter* by Aliya Chen - ***Of Jade and Dragons* by Kelly Chong** - *Beyond Enemies* by Sam R. Kennedy ### **Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel** - *X-Men: Forever* by Kieron Gillen, Luca Maresca - *Wonder Woman* by Tom King, Daniel Sampere - ***Monstress* by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda** - *Canary* by Scott Snyder, Dan Panosian - *Nightwing* by Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo - *Batman* by Chip Zdarsky, Jorge Jimenez ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet** - *3 Body Problem*, Netflix - *Ahsoka*, Disney+ - ***Fallout*, Amazon Prime Video** - *For All Mankind*, Apple TV+ - *Good Omens*, Amazon Prime Video - *House of the Dragon*, HBO - *Loki*, Disney+ - *Monarch: Legacy of Monsters*, Apple TV+ - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds*, Paramount+ ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie** - ***Dune: Part Two* by Denis Villeneuve** - *Barbie* by Greta Gerwig - *Godzilla Minus One* by Takashi Yamazaki - *Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga* by George Miller - *The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* by Francis Lawrence - *Wonka* by Paul King ### **Best Digital Game** - *Alan Wake 2*, Remedy Entertainment - ***Baldur’s Gate 3*, Larian Studios** - *Dragon’s Dogma 2*, Capcom - *Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree*, FromSoftware - *Starfield*, Bethesda Game Studios - *Helldivers 2*, Arrowhead Game Studios ### **Best Tabletop Game** - *Cascadia: Landmarks*, Flatout Games - ***D&D The Deck of Many Things*, Wizards of the Coast** - *Disney Lorcana*, Ravensburger - *Dune: Imperium – Uprising*, Dire Wolf - *Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs*, Cephalofair Games - *Magic: The Gathering Wilds of Eldraine*, Wizards of the Coast ### Swedish Machines: a new art book from Simon Stålenhag URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-stalenhag-swedish-machines-kickstarter/ Last updated: 2024-08-28T13:00:43.000Z For years, I've been a huge fan of Swedish artist [Simon Stålenhag](https://simonstalenhag.se/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the author of a series of narrative art books. I love his art style: minimalist images often featuring tiny people amidst giant landscapes and fantastical machines. His first two books, [*Tales from the Loop*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982150693?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Things from the Flood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982150716?ref=andrewliptak.com) told a story of some teenagers in an alternate 1980s Sweden, where a collider accident brought about some weird things. It was made into a TV series on Prime Video by the same name, which was quite good. His next, [*The Electric State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501181412?ref=andrewliptak.com), is a road trip through a dystopian US, where a VR headset has turned everyone's brains off (it's being made into a film for Netflix), and his latest, [*The Labyrinth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534320697?ref=andrewliptak.com), is a grim story about some characters trying to live in an inhospitable land. [“I wanted to paint ash”: Simon Stålenhag on his latest art book, The LabyrinthThe cold has come for Vermont. I woke up this week to darkening skies and a thin layer of wet snow clinging to the leaves, and it’s remained overcast and damp, which is the perfect environment for the week of Halloween, and for a project that I’ve been![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_6996a0e0-2045-46a9-be89-0cf3a2861fc6_1024x1024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/i-wanted-to-paint-ash-simon-stalenhag-on-his-latest-art-book-the-labyrinth/) He was one of my favorite people to [interview](https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/16/17959372/simon-stalenhag-whats-in-your-bag-sci-fi-art?ref=andrewliptak.com) when I met him back at New York Comic Con in 2018. He's now back with a new book: *Swedish Machines*, which is now [being funded via a Kickstarter campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/swedish-machines-lonely-places-new-simon-stalenhag-book?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's already well-surpassed its goal of $24,480, and for \~$44, you can get a copy of the book ($78 for a collector's edition), which should arrive in March 2025\. According to the description, this is Stålenhag's most personal story yet: > *Swedish Machines* explores masculinity, friendship, and sexuality in a queer science fiction tale about two young men stuck in the past – and in each other’s orbit. Their story spans decades, as fleeting moments become defining memories, and they set out to explore a mysterious forbidden zone together. He's been sharing some images of the book over on his [Instagram page](https://www.instagram.com/p/C%5FKpd%5FVMhtx/?hl=en&img%5Findex=1&ref=andrewliptak.com), and it looks like classic Stålenhag art: gorgeous images with fantastical machines. I've already preordered my copy, and I can't wait to tear through it. ### Art in motion URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/art-in-motion/ Last updated: 2024-08-27T14:13:54.000Z Today in drop-everything-and-watch-this news: the YouTube channel *Every Frame A Painting* has just released a new video after a seven year hiatus! Run by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, *Every Frame A Painting* was a series of video essays about the art of filmmaking; not the way films came together on a story or character level, but the techniques of shooting any sort of story on film. What is the language of filmmaking? How do you use your actors and characters to play into the story, how do you use sound, camera movement, music, and framing to tell the story itself? The channel was a huge influence on how I've watched movies and TV shows ever since, and over the years, I'll get into a mood where I'll go back and watch the entire series (28 videos in all) just to get inspired or to think about filmmaking and storytelling. Some of my favorites include "[Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag&ref=andrewliptak.com)" (if you watch any of these, watch this one), "[Michael Bay - What is Bayhem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THVvshvq0Q&ref=andrewliptak.com)?", "[A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFfq2zblGXw&ref=andrewliptak.com)", "[Robin Williams - In Motion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8lQKLjmoWI&ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[David Fincher - And the Other Way is Wrong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPAloq5MCUA&ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpXle4NqWI&ref=andrewliptak.com)," and "[Buster Keaton - The Art of the Gag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEjxkkB8Xs&ref=andrewliptak.com)." Each of those provided some enlightening takes on how these various directors have worked, and how they've made films and stories that endure. In 2017, the pair [called it quits](https://medium.com/@tonyszhou/postmortem-1b338537fabc?ref=andrewliptak.com), writing that "when we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time." I can applaud that decision: so many projects linger on long after their sell-by date has passed. Better to go out on top than dwindle into meaninglessness. The pair also noted that they had moved on to other jobs. They've done some directing: they did three episodes of Netflix's 2021 documentary series [*Voir*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voir%5F%28TV%5Fseries%29?ref=andrewliptak.com), and recently completed a short film, *The Second.* To tie in with that film, they've announced that they're [bringing the *Ever Frame a Painting* series back for a limited number of episodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSlZKdApob0&ref=andrewliptak.com), culminating in the release of that short film, which stars Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ethan Hwang. It's exciting to see that they're back, especially if they've been putting the work that they've talked about for so long online into the actual production of a film. This first episode right out of the gate is pretty interesting, looking at scenes where you have both actors in frame talking to one another. It's a style that's not used as much, because filmmakers aren't constrained by the amount of physical film they have available to them: digital cameras frees them up to move the camera around in a whole range of different angles. The reason to keep using this sort of shot? To highlight the chemistry between the actors. It's not something that I've really paid attention to, but I will from now on. I'm not sure what the tempo of the upcoming episodes in this series will be, but I'm eager to see what they've got in store. If you haven't watched the series before, it's definitely worth checking it out and subscribing. [](https://www.youtube.com/@everyframeapainting?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://www.youtube.com/@everyframeapainting?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://www.youtube.com/@everyframeapainting?ref=andrewliptak.com) [](https://www.youtube.com/@everyframeapainting?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### How Dark Matter went from graphic novel to Syfy hit URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-matter-syfy-channel-joseph-mallozzi-graphic-novel-show/ Last updated: 2024-08-25T14:00:45.000Z In 2016, the Syfy Channel's space opera series *Dark Matter* returned for its second season, bringing us back to follow the crew of the Raza as they embarked on another se of adventures. The action-heavy series about a mind-wiped crew who awakens aboard a derelict spaceship has played a key role in the resurgence of the cable channel, which returned to its science fiction roots with fervor in 2015, launching one ambitious new program after another, from *Killjoys,* [to *The Magicians*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lev-grossman-magicians-tv-fantasy/)*,* to *The Expanse.* [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) But the road that brought *Dark Matter* to television was anything but straight. As we gear up for more mysterious adventures, creator Joseph Mallozzi talks about how the series went from pitch, to the comic page, and finally, to the small screen. Mallozzi joined the *Stargate* franchise as a producer in 2000, and played a part in expanding the series into two additional spinoffs, *Stargate: Atlantis* and *Stargate: Universe*. While working on the franchise, he began to develop the hook for a new show: a crew of six wake up on a starship. Their memories have been wiped, and they don’t know who they are. From that idea, Mallozzi planned to incorporate a whole raft of influences, from *The Dirty Dozen*, to *The Seven Samurai,* to *Farscape.* Plans to bring the idea to television quickly kept getting stymied by *Stargate*‘s success. “The plan was to roll right into \[the\] series after *Stargate* wrapped,” he said, “but we kept getting picked up: for a fourth season of *Atlantis.* Then a fifth. Then a season of *Universe*. Then another.” In 2007, *Stargate SG-1* ended after a decade on television. *Stargate:* *Atlantis* continued for another two years, ending in 2009, while *Stargate: Universe* went off the air 2011\. With the franchise effectively dead, Mallozzi pulled an idea out of his back pocket: the space opera about the forgetful crew, co-written with Paul Mullie. But by 2011, the industry had begun to change. Online services like Netflix were offering their own programming, and geek-friendly channels like Syfy had drastically scaled back the space-oriented programming; the demise of *Stargate: Universe* was twofold: not only was it the final breath of the franchise, it was the last space-based television show, period. Mallozzi realized that selling his idea would be difficult, especially because it wasn’t based on an existing story. “My many years as a development executive taught me the value, and allure, of established properties,” he recalled. “Original ideas, while attractive, are long shots. \[Intellectual properties\], on the other hand, are proven commodities…at least in the eyes of most buyers.” With that in mind, he hatched an idea for another way to bring his story to life: through comic books. Mallozzi is a life-long comic reader. “I used to read a lot of Marvel as a kid, eventually shifted to DC and the *Bat* titles” he [told MTV in 2012](https://web.archive.org/web/20160710054941/http://www.mtv.com/news/2623887/stargates-joseph-mallozi-explores-dark-matter-and-more-stargate-interview/). He stuck with comics over the years, and began to think *Dark Matter* would work well as a comic. He and Mullie took their screenplay to illustrator Garry Brown and Dark Horse Comics and presented a plan to adapt it as a limited-series comic. The move would give Mallozzi would a solid, pre-existing property to later adapt to television, while also providing the future series with a built-in visual reference. While Mallozzi had been writing for television for a number of years, *Dark Matter* was his first attempt at writing for comics, and he found it more difficult than he imagined. “When I write a script for television, I envision the scene in my head, but when it comes time to produce said script, the visual story-telling falls to the director,” he said. When it came to writing a comic, however, he had to guide Brown’s visuals. “I suddenly took on the role of the director, specifying each and every ‘shot’ of each and every panel. That was, without a doubt, the biggest challenge in converting the script to comic form.” In the years Mallozzi and Mullie talked about the story, they’d fleshed out much of the story. By the time they began to create the comic, they’d detailed many of the characters’ backstories and established an ambitious five-year plan—should the show be picked up. In January 2012, Dark Horse Comics launched *Dark Matter* as a four-issue miniseries. Its first two issues drew directly from the pilot script, while the second two resolved a lingering cliffhanger and quickly answered key questions of the premise, revealing who each of the characters really were. Readers were introduced to an ensemble cast known only by numbers: One, earnest and sympathetic; Two, a tough, take charge woman; Three, a roguish male with a fondness for guns; Four, a quiet, deadly man with a fondness for *swords*; Five, a young boy; and six, a large, yet thoughtful man. As they wake from their stasis pods, they encounter another individual on the ship: a pale android with red eyes. Mallozzi was upfront about his intentions to use the comic to launch a television show. “As you well know,” he wrote in [his blog](https://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/february-10-2012-all-aboard-the-dark-matter-express-next-stop-a-t-v-near-you-sampling-crunchyroll-whats-up-with-apple-and-carl-and-alexanders-early-early-christmas-gifts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) shortly after the second issue hit comic book stores, “the plan is to use the comic book’s opening arc as a springboard to an SF television series–so if you’d like to get behind the prospect of a new SF TV series, want to get an early sneak peek at what it’s all about, or simply want to start making some early, early casting suggestions, pick up *Dark Matter*.” By May, the four issues were collected [into a trade paperback](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781595829986?ref=andrewliptak.com), and Mallozzi predicted on his blog that any developments on a television show were months away. He was right: in November 2012, he [hinted](https://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/november-16-2012-dark-matter-mystery-projects-more-j-pop-and-k-pop-videos-and-the-mailbag/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that “…after much back and forth, missed opportunities, lost causes and blown deadlines, it appears as though–maybe, just maybe–there could be a deal in the works.” On October 15th, 2013, the [Syfy Channel picked up](http://tvline.com/2014/10/15/syfy-acquires-dark-matter-graphic-novel-adaptation/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the comic for a 13-episode first season, with Mallozzi and Mullie acting as showrunners. The week after that announcement, Mallozzi departed for Toronto, where casting and production were set to begin. While Mallozzi sold the show on the strength of the comic, he didn’t want the look and feel of the show to be beholden to the visuals laid down in the original medium. “When it came time to casting the show,” he recalled, “I prepared myself for the probability that the actors we hired would not, in most cases, reflect the characters as I’d originally envisioned them. I didn’t want the production to be tied down to casting ‘types.’ I’d saw two of them as Asian, but we auditioned all ethnicities. That was the deal for all seven of our characters.” When the roles were finally cast, some did fit the original vision: One/Jace Corso, (played by Marc Bendavid), Two/Portia Lin (played by Melissa O’Neil) Three/Marcus Boone (played by Anthony Lemke), and Six/Griffin Jones (played by Roger Cross) remained much as they had appeared in illustrated form. Four/Ryo Tetsuda, played by Alex Mallari, Jr., remained Asian, but with a slightly different appearance. Five, a boy in the comics, became a girl when Jodelle Ferland was cast, while Android also became a female character, played by Zoie Palmer. “In all cases,” Mallozzi said, “it came down to who \[was\] best for the part.” With the cast assembled, the show went into production in January 2015\. In addition to some of the changes in the cast, the appearance of the world had also changed. The comic book world allowed for “considerably more opportunities to tell a bigger story,” Mallozzi said. “At the end of the day, production considerations will always dictate a TV show’s visual narrative.” Expensive set pieces such as a greenhouse were eliminated, as was a large space battle. “We could have certainly shot the big climax as envisioned in the comic book,“ Mallozzi said, “but the money would have come out of ensuing episodes. It’s all a matter of picking your \[battles\].” In June 2015, the show premiered, looking drastically different from how the story first appeared three years earlier. The two-part pilot episode follows the graphic novel—the crew awakens without memories, and eventually discovers that they were a team sent to clean up a colony on a backwater world, before turning the tables and deciding to save them instead. The rest of the season moves well beyond what was laid down in the comic book, though Mallozzi said that, had that iteration of the story continued, it would have followed roughly the same beats. The show performed well enough that Syfy announced it would be back for a second season, picking up after a twist ending. While Mallozzi is riding high on the success of the series, he said he’d love to bring the story back to the page someday, if only for “certain one-off adventures,” but cautioned that he has a beginning, middle, and end in mind for the show, and, that at the moment, TV is the priority. Unfortunately for Mallozzi and Mullie, Syfy decided to end the series after its third season in 2017, bringing the story to a close after 39 episodes. In the years since, Mallozzi has noted that there have been some efforts underway to try and finish out the story. On his website, [he outlined](https://josephmallozzi.com/2018/05/17/may-17-2018-dark-matter-episode-401-act-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com) some of the plans that would have made up the un-filmed fourth season, and in 2021, [he had completed a pitch for a continuation](https://josephmallozzi.com/2021/09/10/september-10-2021-slippery-slopes-and-news-of-note/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which he [eventually started posting online](https://josephmallozzi.com/2021/09/14/dark-matter-miniseries-pitch-the-intro/?ref=andrewliptak.com). As recently as 2022, he [explained that there had been some discussions](https://josephmallozzi.com/2022/11/24/november-24-2022-a-dark-matter-update-of-sorts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of coming back for a miniseries or wrap-up film, but those efforts don't appear to have materialized thus far. Maybe someday, we'll get to return to the Raza ... in one form or another. ### The temporary resurrection of Omni Magazine URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/omni-magazine-adidas-reboot/ Last updated: 2024-08-23T13:00:55.000Z Years ago, I met a friend in a parking lot to take possession of some stories. They filled the trunk of his car, battered cardboard boxes filled to the brim with some familiar titles — yellowed issues of *Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fact and Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,* and *Omni*. I'd spent many hours in high school reading copies copies of *Asimov*'s until their covers were smudged and crinkled, and I knew that the magazine was one of the places where I could find exciting new stories in the genre that I loved. I hadn't come across Omni before, however, and those copies stood out. Unlike the cheap digest-sized issues that I'd leafed through for years, these were something altogether different. they were chunky, loaded down not only with short stories, but stories about science and technologies, weird fashions and pop culture. They were alluring, hip, and vibrant in ways that the traditional SF magazines weren't, and I can see why they had such an influence during their heyday. *Omni* was an enormously influential publication over the course of its run in the 1980s and 1990s, and since it shut down more than a quarter-century ago, its presence has lingered. Its pages influenced the next generation of science fiction writers and journalists, and it's DNA can be seen in any number of publications and outlets that cover that weird intersection of science fiction, technology, and pop culture. In 2021, *Omni* — in its magazine form — returned. Sort of. Athletic sportswear and design multinational Adidas produced out a limited, special edition of the magazine as a publicity item, and distributed for free in November and December. --- *Omni Magazine* came at an pivotal moment in the history of science fiction literature. By the late 1970s, speculative fiction as a genre and community were well-established: there were a variety of publications regularly putting out new material, authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert were becoming mainstream figures in the literary world, and thanks to things like *Planet of the Apes, Star Trek* and *Star Wars,* science fiction was reaching new audiences. It was in this mix that *Penthouse* publisher Bob Guccione decided to launch a new publication: *Omni.* In his introductory editorial, he positioned the publication as one that would "see the future... a future of growing intellectual vitality, of expanding dreams and infinite hope." Citing Albert Einstein's musings about the power of the human mind, and his own calling as an artist, he explained that *Omni* would be a compromise: "my way of bridging both levels of interest and inquiry." It would contain science fiction, articles about astronomy and robotics, and quite a bit more. *Omni* looked nothing like the traditional, digest-sized genre magazines: it was filled with vibrant articles, photography, advertisements, and short stories on slick paper. Guccione provided the magazine with a big budget that allowed its editors to fill its pages with stories from a range of authors: from well-known figures such as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, to newcomers like Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, and others. The magazine pushed against some of the genre's long-standing traditions, giving those space to innovate and experiment with their storytelling: it was a key incubator for the cyberpunk movement. Ellen Datlow, one of the magazine's editors, ultimately published seven anthologies collecting the magazine's short fiction. *Omni*'s run didn't last: as the news industry experienced downturns, its owners eventually transformed it into an online-only publication in the 1990s, which they eventually shut down in 1998\. It left behind an impressive legacy: *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction* [writes](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/omni?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was "one of the most successful publishing ventures of its time," and that it "revolutionized the general readership's perception and understanding of science and, thanks to its fiction editors, published some of the most memorable fiction of the period." It influenced [writers and journalists](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/visionary-iomni-magazinei/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, who went on to found *io9,* a futurism blog that covered everything from science fiction to comic books to weird history to science and technology. "What drew me to the blog is the chance to talk about how our fantasies about the future affect what we do to build that future," Newitz [told *Wired* in January 2008](https://www.wired.com/2008/01/gawker-blasts-into-sci-fi-with-new-blog-io9/?ref=andrewliptak.com). "Science fiction is really mainstream right now and has truly reached a mainstream audience. It's silly to talk about it as being marginal or geeky." These are ideas that echo Guccione's intentions with his own publication, and which have since spread out to plenty of other sites around the internet. *io9* wasn't alone: sites that blend the likes of *Omni*'s science, pop culture, and technology like *Ars Technica* or *The Verge* inherited some of their DNA from the likes of *Omni* and how it covered the present day. *Omni* was a demonstration that science fiction didn't need to stay confined to an existence boxed off from the rest of culture; it had tendrils that extended into all other parts of culture, something that's more apparent now than ever. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- Fast-forward to 2021\. In the interceding years, *Omni* has endured a somewhat volatile existence. In 2013, a businessman named Jeremy Frommer accidentally acquired Guccione's personal archive. *Penthouse*'s creator and publisher died in 2010, and [according to Claire Evans at ](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppq73b/from-the-archives-to-the-stars-omni-magazine-will-rise-again?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Vice*](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppq73b/from-the-archives-to-the-stars-omni-magazine-will-rise-again?ref=andrewliptak.com), Frommer had bought the contents of a storage locker on a whim, and ended up with the production assets from the magazine: original pictures, covers, paperwork, the ultimate collection of *Omni* memorabilia. "He has but one goal," Evans wrote, "to own the most complete collection in the world of ephemera relating to this largely forgotten magazine." Frommer, through his company Jerrick Ventures, had plans to bring *Omni* back to the rest of the world: he put together a [book of the magazine's art with Powerhouse Books](https://powerhousebooks.com/books/the-mind-s-eye-the-art-of-omni/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2014, and announced a new initiative: an online site called *Omni Reboot,* which would do exactly as its title suggested: reboot the fabled magazine with a blend of science fiction, science writing, and everything in between. (I actually [contributed a piece to the site](https://vocal.media/futurism/science-fiction-needs-a-new-subgenre?ref=andrewliptak.com) six years ago). The original magazine wasn't entirely impossible to find: Archive.org had scanned and uploaded most of the issues, and Jerrick had also put together plans to [sell archival issues of the magazine on Amazon](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/2/15729620/omni-magazine-archive-amazon-jerrick-media?ref=andrewliptak.com). The company also [announced a deal with Jared Leto](https://variety.com/2017/film/news/jared-leto-omni-magazine-production-deal-1202478739/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to produce a slate of original content for the web in 2017\. It seemed as though Omni would indeed be coming back in a big way. It didn't: Penthouse, under new its new publisher Kelly Holland, [filed a lawsuit against Jerrick](https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-penthouse-caligula-omni-20170712-story.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the summer of 2017, claiming that Penthouse still retained the intellectual property that was *Omni*. Jerrick's discovery of Guccione's archive in New Jersey was "as if I went to a garage sale and bought a DC Comic for a dime and thought I can make *Wonder Woman*,” Holland said at the time, and indicated that they were planning to launch their own version of the magazine at some point. At the time, [Jerrick said that it](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jerrick-media-holdings-inc-responds-to-action-filed-by-penthouse-global-media-633176563.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) "believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend against it." Penthouse [eventually relaunched a print edition of ](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16633732/omni-magazine-penthouse-new-print-launch?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Omni*](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16633732/omni-magazine-penthouse-new-print-launch?ref=andrewliptak.com) later that year (branding it as "RealOmni" online), and brought on Pamela Weintraub as editor-in-chief and Ellen Datlow as the new version's fiction editor. Datlow [explained at the time](https://www.facebook.com/nancy.kress.9/posts/1984186404930684?comment%5Fid=1986242841391707&reply%5Fcomment%5Fid=1986761708006487&comment%5Ftracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D) that it was a "quarterly continuation of the original." That debut issue featured an interview with William Gibson, short fiction by Nancy Kress, Maureen McHugh, and Rich Larson and a handful of essays. It appeared to be a triumphant return for the magazine, while Jerrick quietly rebranded *Omni Reboot* as *Futurism*. It wasn't. That 2017 edition was the only physical edition that Penthouse produced, with a single story hitting the web (a reprint from Robert Silverberg), and a brief resurrection in April and May 2020 with [podcast called *Omnipod*](https://omnimagazine.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), which ran for only two episodes. The site still says that *Omni* will return at some point. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/02/IMG_4785-2.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak "Our agency is a little bit more traditional in the way that we handle our accounts," Sarah Bassett, the design director for the Johannes Leonardo advertising agency told me. She was in the midst of a photoshoot when our interview came up, and I could hear the wind through the phone as she stepped outside to take my call. Her company typically did projects for traditional media like television and magazine campaigns, and handles clients like Volkswagen, Instagram, GAP, Amazon, and Adidas. "What's been super cool about \[Adidas'\] Originals movies in a design perspective is we have a bit more freedom to do some creative projects \[which are\] outside of the box." Some of that out-side-the-box advertising? A [12-hour long ad](https://youtu.be/RrOGoxxoF54?ref=andrewliptak.com) released in October 2020 to promote the return of Adidas's ZX shoe. It's weird commercial, one that sees someone cut a cake shaped like the shoe, a model paint their face up like one of the shoes, someone sculpting a shoe out of clay, some segments were animated with wild colors... you get the idea. It's an ad that looks a bit like something you'd stumble on flicking through cable channels late at night. Bassett explains that she and her team opted to go with a science and technology-themed campaign to promote the shoe, because it "is very technical and has all these really interesting, quite nerdy – if you're a sneaker head — cool functions." Their marketing campaigns drifted into nostalgia: the long ad was something that they imagined they might see running on MTV late at night, and as they wanted to break away from their traditional formulas, they wanted to bring something out that was tactile and which fit with that mashup of things: weird science, technical obsession, and strange visuals. "The *OMNI* narrative came about because obviously it's a cult Sci-fi fan fiction magazine, \[and\] it very much fit with the aesthetic of the campaign," she explained. "We didn't have any idea if it would actually be possible when we pitched the idea, just that it would be hilarious and amazing if it worked, and we were very lucky to be able to get in contact with them. *OMNI* has been long out of print, which made the pitch go a little more easily, Bassett explained. Adidas licensed the brand name from Penthouse, which provided access to their archives and collaborated with them on the look and feel of the magazine. --- When is an homage just an homage, and when is it a resurrection that carries with it some of the same thinking that informed the original? That can sometimes be a hard line to define, especially when the creators involved in the resurrection are fans of what their predecessor represented. Guccione, ever the salesman, noted that his magazine was designs to be intellectual and interesting, with authors and writers pushing boundaries to explore the state of the modern world. "In terms of how we approached the design," Bassett noted," it was really important to us that it didn't become a brand trying to rip off the *OMNI* idea: we really wanted to reference — we matched the type styles, all the upfront formatting, on the stories at the beginning of the magazine, like they look exactly how the original magazine was laid out. It was important for us to honor the original aesthetic and not have it feel like a branded, gimmicky thing that doesn't have any correlation to the original. The result *is* a magazine that looks quite a bit like one of those original magazines. Its cover features the bold, iconic *OMNI* logo, a bit of surrealist art on the cover, and a whole host of articles about the types of things that the original publication likely would have featured had it been around today: there are articles about NFTs, UFOs, and digital music, as well as short fiction and plenty of pictures. We live in a media age where companies are increasingly reluctant to go out on a limb and create something new, opting instead to fall back on existing IP. Sometimes it's a winning strategy: SCI FI's reimagining of *Battlestar Galactica* proved to be an excellent project. Lucasfilm's *The Book of Boba Fett*? [Not so much](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-celebration-mandalorian-storytelling-updates/). This isn't a new phenomenon. In his recent book, [*The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827050?ref=andrewliptak.com), Chris Nashawaty makes the argument that that summer's slate of blockbusters (and duds) was the moment that Hollywood realized how to really do science fiction and it's been trying to recreate that moment ever since. "Four-plus decades ago," he writes, "we were entertained, enthralled, and enlightened. Today, we're merely cudgeled into numb submission over and over again and treated like children being spoon-fed the same sound-and-fury pap." How do you resurrect a magazine like *Omni*? You can't. You can recreate the look and feel of its covers and contents, but capturing the direction, intention, and thinking behind those early issues is an exercise in futility. Stuck in a pile of its predecessors, this new version of *Omni* (and even the 2017 attempted reboot) wouldn't stand out: Bassett and her team were able to provide that design continuity to ape the vibe that defined the originals. But while the intentions and design were drawn from the same source, they're still drawing from the same well, and the result is a publication that feels less like a throwback and more a weird transplant from another dimension. That's hardly the thing that will spark the same curiosity and intrigue decades later, as my box of magazines did. What's frustrating about this is that it's an exercise that feels empty from the beginning: effort that could have been put into something new and vibrant and interesting. You don't have to look hard to see that it isn't same magazine: it's a 100+ page ad for a shoe. ### The Folio Society is publishing Frank Herbert's Children of Dune URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-children-of-dune-frank-herbert/ Last updated: 2024-08-21T12:00:12.000Z When the Folio Society began publishing science fiction and fantasy books in earnest way back in 2015 when it [released its version of Frank Herbert's *Dune*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-folio-society-dune-frank-herbert-sam-weber/)*,* with art by Sam Weber and an introduction by Michael Dirda. It's a gorgeous book, and I was excited when the publisher opted to finally put out a [followup edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/) of the next book in the series, *Dune: Messiah*. Now, the publisher is continuing the series with a new edition of the third installment of the series, *Children of Dune*. *(h/t to Mark W. for spotting it in the TO Slack.)* In its [announcement](https://twitter.com/foliosociety/status/1825883321571713422?ref=andrewliptak.com), the publisher noted that *Children of Dune* has been highly requested, and that it'll release the edition on September 3rd. Preorders aren't up yet, but they're pointing buyers to [sign up for their mailing list](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/children-of-dune-sign-up?ref=andrewliptak.com) to get updates. This doesn't seem to be one of their special edition titles, and while pricing isn't available yet, I'm guessing it'll follow suit with *Dune* and *Dune: Messiah*, which are priced at $145 and $110, respectively. Herbert first serialized *Children of Dune* in 1976 in *Analog Science Fiction and Fact*, largely seeing the story as the culmination of the story that he began in *Dune*. In that first book, we follow Paul Atreides as his family is decimated by a rival family and forms a revolution on the planet Arrakis, harnessing the power of the indigenous Fremen to unleash a jihad across the galaxy that ultimately kills billions. In the second installment, *Dune: Messiah*, Paul is wary of the power that he's been given, aware that he's unable to control the movement that he began, and ends up walking away into the desert. In *Children of Dune*, the transformation of Arrakis has begun and Paul's children begin to fear his sister Alia, believing that she's been possessed by the their grandfather Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. At the same time, a mysterious figure has emerged from the desert, a rival house is plotting to take over the throne, and ... it gets weird. When it was published as a hardcover in April 1976, it became the first ever science fiction novel to become a bestseller. Herbert went on to write three more installments of the series before his death, *God Emperor of Dune*, *Heretics of Dune*, and *Chapterhouse: Dune*, and I wouldn't be too surprised if The Folio Society eventually releases them. Herbert's son Brian, along with co-author Kevin J. Anderson, have continued the series with a number of installments of their own. In 2003, the SCI FI Channel adapted both *Dune: Messiah* and *Children of Dune* as a miniseries (titled *Children of Dune*), and in 2021 and 2023, director Denis Villeneuve adapted the first novel as a pair of feature films, and [is currently working](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/denis-villeneuve-next-film-2026-release-warner-bros-1235935128/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on a third film that'll adapt *Dune: Messiah*. That's due out in December 2026\. There's also a TV series coming to HBO's Max [later this year](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-prophecy-frank-herbert-max-streaming-teaser-watch/), *Dune: Prophecy*. I'm excited to see how *Children of Dune* looks: Folio Society hasn't released anything beyond a look at the cover (Hilary Clarcq produced the excellent artwork for their edition of *Dune: Messiah)*, which appears to (fittingly) feature Paul's children Leto II and Ghanima. ### Swinging for the fences URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-series-review-jedi-storytelling/ Last updated: 2024-08-20T16:45:25.000Z Lucasfilm streamed the finale of its latest series, *Star Wars: The Acolyte* earlier this summer, and word broke this week that the studio has [decided not to continue the series into a second season](https://deadline.com/2024/08/the-acolyte-canceled-no-season-2-star-wars-disney-plus-1236044233/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've been thinking a lot about the series since it wrapped up, and piecing together what I felt about the show and its place in the larger *Star Wars* ecosystem and where it goes from here. --- After Lucasfilm and Disney released *Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker* into theaters in December 2019, they've been trying to figure out how to keep the franchise going beyond the nine-episode "Skywalker Saga" that formed the core of the story and world. This isn't an insurmountable problem: the [sprawling](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-books-brian-daley-west-end-games/) [Expanded](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-thrawn-trilogy-expanded-universe/) [Universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/) [provided](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-new-jedi-order-vector-prime/) [something](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-clone-wars-books-comics-games-republic-commando/) [of a roadmap](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-legacy-of-the-force-expanded-universe/) until that canon went away prior to the arrival of the sequel trilogy, while films like *Rogue One* and shows like *The Mandalorian* and [*Andor*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/)have showed that it's possible to tell good stories in this world without the Skywalker name. But it's also hit or miss: there's the desire to pull back to those familiar characters, like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Boba Fett, and others who've popped up here and there, and the most immediate films on the horizon are ones that step back into some of those familiar characters, like [Din Djarin](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/) and Rey. That's why I was intrigued by Lucasfilm's decision to step further back into the timeline with its latest series, *The Acolyte,* setting it about a century prior to the events of *The Phantom Menace*, at the tale end of a major project they've been calling The High Republic – a collection of novels and comics set during the Republic's heyday. Removing the series from the familiar settings of the Skywalker Saga would give its creator, Leslye Headland, space to operate and play out what was [billed](https://www.starwars.com/news/future-lucasfilm-projects-revealed?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a "mystery-thriller that will take the audience into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark side powers in the final days of the High Republic era." *There are significant spoilers ahead for the series.* Set a century before the rise of the Empire, *The Acolyte* starts off with a startling scene: an assailant tracks down a Jedi Master named Indara and after a brief and intense fight, slays her with a knife. In quick succession, we watch as two more Jedi, Master Torbin and Kelnacca are struck down by this mysterious figure. The Jedi Order quickly come to believe that it was enacted by a former Padawan named Osha Aniseya, who had been taken from a cult of witches living on a planet named Brendok 16 years ago by the slain Jedi. She was trained by Sol, the last Master in the group who's still alive, but ultimately left the Jedi Order and was found working as a mechanic on a spaceship. Over the course of eight episodes, Headland takes us through the connection between this group of Jedi and Osha. They quickly realize that Osha wasn't the one who perpetrated the murders: it was her twin sister Mae-ho, who they had thought perished during the Brendok mission. Mae, as it turns out, had not only survived, but was discovered and trained by a Sith agent (called The Stranger, and played by the outstanding Manny Jacinto), who appears to have a vendetta against the Jedi Order. He takes apart Sol's team of Jedi, and as they all converge on Brendok, the events that took place there begin to come to light, and showcase a much deeper conspiracy that helped kick off their current predicament. At its highest points, *The Acolyte* seemed as though it was aiming to be the *Star Wars* equivalent of HBO's *True Detective* or *Mare of Easttown,* a slow slow-burn mystery that deals with buried conspiracies that forces everyone to deal with an issue that they'd rather leave forgotten. Master Sol and his companions discovered that Osha and Mae were particularly strong in the Force and might have been the result of some powerful meddling, and decide to try and force the community to give up the girls to train them as Jedi. Things go south: Sol kills the girl's mother, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), and has to make a choice: save Osha or Mae. He ultimately leaves Mae to fall and assumes that she perished in the resulting explosions and fires. On paper, this is a really interesting mystery, but one that was ultimately stymied by a handful of factors: the show's lackluster execution, as well as a sense that the show's writers spent a lot of time overthinking what they were trying to accomplish. There's a quote from *Rogue One*'s Gareth Edwards that lives rent-free in my brain, something he noted in the film's [Celebration reel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUb%5FzpdyDpU&ref=andrewliptak.com) back in 2016 when talking about how to bring something new and different to the franchise: "if you're too respectful of it, if you didn't do anything new or different, take a risk, then what are you bringing to the table?" New and different are essential things in keeping any long-running franchise fresh and relatable to viewers, while fans are often a bit more conservative in their desires: by and large, they want more of the same, the story and character frozen in place from their last entry-point. Headland's [been talking about how](https://screenrant.com/star-wars-the-acolyte-leslye-headland-expanded-universe-influence/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [she was a huge fan of the Expanded Universe](https://www.starwars.com/news/leslye-headland-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com) and drops some [neat throwbacks to it throughout the show](https://www.starwars.com/news/the-acolyte-cortosis-the-mandalorian-beskar?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it feels like she's been trying to find the balance between telling the story and slotting it into the existing lore and canon. I've often noted that I see *Star Wars* not just as a single, sprawling story, but as a genre in and of itself that can contain all sort of stories. We've seen high political intrigue in the form of *Andor*, military science fiction from Michael Stackpole's *X-Wing* novels, romance in the form of Beth Revis's *The Princess and the Scoundrel*, and western adventures by way of *The Mandalorian*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/08/image-2.png) Image: Lucasfilm A slow-burn conspiracy mystery is well-suited for this particular world, and by and large, I really dug what *The Acolyte* was about: a story of how heroic characters are fallible and can make some awful choices, all while confronting the image that we have in our heads of what these heroic characters are actually like. This is where I think *Star Wars* is often at its strongest: the darkness of *The Empire Strikes Back*, George Lucas's vision for the Prequel trilogy, the way Rian Johnson upended our expectations in *The Last Jedi*, and how Tony Gilroy brought us a darker version of the Rebel Alliance in *Andor*. *The Acolyte* brought us a new look into how complicated the Jedi Order was, and that sometimes, they're not always the good guys. This is something that we've seen before: Karen Traviss's *Republic Commando* novels, told from the point of view of a handful of clone troopers, paints a very different picture of what the Jedi Order is, and there's elements of that vision in this show: the Jedi are an order that is tasked with maintaining peace and order throughout the galaxy, but while they're largely benevolent, they're not unaffected by the political happenings that are going on around the galaxy. We see that they're concerned (rightly!) about superpowered individuals running amok throughout the galaxy, and get a bit snippy when others (like the Galactic Senate) question their workings. In that way, the Jedi Order isn't too different from a major religion: a force for good in the eyes of a lot of people, but also unwilling to share power or market share, lest they lose their favored position in the hierarchy of the world. This take is something that I've long wanted to see in *Star Wars*, and for the most part, the show delivers. Where it doesn't falls into a couple of categories. The first thing was the execution of the series, which is pretty superficial, all things considered. Weird camera angles, CGI, acting, these aren't generally important to whether or not a story works, but when they don't hold up, they pull attention away from everything. The bigger of them is that it felt like the show's writers spent a little too much time overthinking, and ended up making the story a bit more complicated than it needed to be. One of the things that the Sequel trilogy played with was the idea of a "Force dyad," where a pair of force-sensitive individuals have a deep and unbreakable bond. Headland and the show's writers pick up that thread with Osha and Mae's story, putting their own twist on it as a soul split between two bodies. In doing so, they're able to play with some really interesting points about the duality of the Force's Light and Dark sides, with the characters ending up in some interesting places by the time the series wraps up. Master Sol is forced to make a heartbreaking choice during their initial encounter (save one girl or fail to save both), but this dyad theme doesn't really figure into the core conspiracy beyond the surface level, and it ends up feeling a little too wonky for a casual viewer who hasn't immersed themselves in a ton of the background lore – also an issue with another of this year's streaming shows, *Ashoka*. Lore isn't *bad,* but it's often distraction. --- What's frustrating about the show and its cancellation (or as Lucasfilm has [pedantically put it](https://twitter.com/GermainLussier/status/1825760491756810442?ref=andrewliptak.com), not canceled, because it wasn't greenlit for a Season 2) is how much of the studio's planning seems to be at the whims of some of the worst people in *Star Wars* fandom. There's a running joke that nobody hates *Star Wars* more than diehard *Star Wars* fans, and in the years since Disney purchased Lucasfilm and released the latest crop of sequels and spinoffs, there's been a cottage industry and network of YouTubers and news sites that have made hay out of every single rumor and development, often crowing that identity politics and Kathleen Kennedy are slowly running the franchise into the ground. [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) One of the biggest complaints that I saw about this show was how it made the Jedi look like the bad guys, complaints that go hand-in-hand with "*The Last Jedi* ruined Luke Skywalker," while films like *Rogue One* and shows like *The Mandalorian* are praised because they don't really push the needle that far: they're remixes of a lot of common elements, but don't really change the underlying meaning of those things we're fans of. *(I think* Andor *is a weird exception to this: it's been highly praised, pushes our understanding of the franchise, and didn't get a ton of pushback.)* This is a problem for storytellers for any long-running franchise: how do you push the story forward when fans don't really want to be challenged in a meaningful way? In some ways, just waiting fandom out can do the trick. The Prequel trilogy was *reviled* after the release of *The Phantom Menace* and *Attack of the Clones*. It's hard to sometimes conjure up the same feeling of vitriol on message boards at the time. *The Clone Wars* was the same way when it hit theaters, but eventually turned out to be a super popular thing. The Sequel trilogy? Wait for 10-15 years and see how the mood will turn when the kids who were introduced to the series through those films come of age, and after Lucasfilm can backfill any of the continuity issues or the "somehow, Palpatine has returned" moments with books and comics. *The Acolyte*? My 11-year-old son really enjoyed it – it's the first *Star Wars* thing that he's really sat through beginning to end. In other ways, I think Lucasfilm could stand to have more of a long-term vision for what they want to do with the franchise. Filling out the last trilogy in piecemeal fashion as they did is still perplexing to me. Change is important for the longevity of any sort of franchise like this, but I also think that abrupt changes in direction, tone, or style really don't work – for any property. (I'll forever maintain that *The Last Jedi* should have been Episode 9, with *The Force Awakens* easing us into this new era with something utterly recognizable, and with an episode 8 that should have bridged the two, but that's me.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/08/image-3.png) Image: Lucasfilm Where does *Star Wars* go from here? They'll presumably burn off whatever hanging threads left over from *Acolyte* (and oh, there were some great threads left hanging) in some books or comics down the road, and we'll at some point get *The Mandalorian & Grogu* and the Rey film in a couple of years. What I'd like to see is more of an idea from the start that Lucasfilm is putting out stories where they know the direction, and have a way to cap them off in a satisfying way, rather than throwing out a one-off and hoping that fandom won't be fickle and childish about it. *The Acolyte* actually felt like it would have been good as a one-off story, had it been a bit more streamlined: hanging story threads like the appearance of Darth Plagueis and whatever will happen with The Stranger and Mae point to a much larger story that really shouldn't be constructed while the plane is mid-flight. It's perplexing to me, because Lucasfilm has so much control over its story through the Story Group, but can't seem to figure out the end game for most of these stories. We have a growing list of unfinished stories like *Solo: A Star Wars Story*, *The Acolyte*, *Ashoka*, and *The Book of Boba Fett*, which are essentially left hanging. It's frustrating because these are cinematic stories with momentum behind them, and it often feels as though you're wasting time delving into them. There's no easy solution to this. I think fans and the studio needs to stop listening to the more toxic factions of fandom and concentrate on the telling of the stories, fans need to stop being so goddamn fickle and childish and precious about what stories are being told (ie, not treating everything like an apocalypse), and accept that the *Star Wars* (or any other franchise) that you fell in love with is a malleable thing and won't – and shouldn't! – be the same static thing moving forward. It should change and update itself and get weirder with time. Otherwise, we're just remixing the characters and stories, a self-deprecating loop that sucks whatever joy we gleaned from it in favor of commercials for the next year's toys. For all the complaining that YouTubers and commentators have made about the franchise since Disney's acquisition, I think they've done a lot to push and experiment with where the franchise can and should go. Not all of those experiments will work, but not everything has to. --- Ultimately, I thought *The Acolyte* was a decent and engaging series. It fell short for me of the high water mark that *Andor* left behind, but had quite a lot going for it: it expanded the world in some unexpected directions and introduced us to a series of new characters that I'd love to see down the road. While this particular story came to a shorter-than-expected closure this time, I'm hoping that they'll keep trying to swing for the fences and come up with something just as interesting. ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 World Fantasy Award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/world-fantasy-award-2024-finalists-peele-due-wells-books/ Last updated: 2024-08-20T13:47:26.000Z This year's World Fantasy Convention is its 50th, and last week, the con [announced](https://wfc2024.org/world-fantasy-judges-and-nominations/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the finalists for the annual World Fantasy Award. This year's convention will be held between October 17th and 20th, 2024 in Niagara Falls, NY. [Here are the winners of the 2024 Hugo AwardsAn excellent set of winners from a convention that seems to have gone off with few issues![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1516850228053-a807778c4e0f?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDMwfHxzcGFjZXxlbnwwfHx8fDE3MjM0MjEwMjF8MA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-2024-scifi-fantasy-glasgow-worldcon/) The awards have been handed out annually since 1975, and are amongst the highest honors in the fantasy and horror genres, alongside the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Here are the finalists for this year's award: ### Best Novel - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due - *The Possibilities* by Yael Goldstein-Love - *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow - *Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon* by Wole Talabi - *Looking Glass Sound* by Catriona Ward - *Witch King* by Martha Wells ### Best Novella - *The Crane Husband* by Kelly Barnhill - *Thornhedge* by T. Kingfisher - “Prince Hat Underground” by Kelly Link (*White Cat, Black Dog*) - “Half the House Is Haunted” by Josh Malerman (*Spin a Black Yarn*) - *A Season of Monstrous Conceptions* by Lina Rather - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo ### Best Short Fiction - “[How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P. Djèlí Clark (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) - “[Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont](https://www.fantasy-magazine.com/fm/fiction/once-upon-a-time-at-the-oakmont/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P. A. Cornell (*Fantasy* 10/23) - “John Hollowback and the Witch” by Amal El-Mohtar (*The Book of Witches*) - “[Waystation City](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/waystation-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by A. T. Greenblatt (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare* 10/23) - “Silk and Cotton and Linen and Blood” by Nghi Vo (*New Suns 2*) ### Best Anthology - *Christmas and Other Horrors* edited by Ellen Datlow - *Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume One* edited by Stephen Kotowych - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023* edited by R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams - *Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror* edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams - *The Book of Witches* edited by Jonathan Strahan ### Best Collection - *The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volumes 1 & 2* by Peter S. Beagle - *The Fortunate Isles* by Lisa L. Hannett - *White Cat, Black Dog* by Kelly Link - *No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories* by Premee Mohamed - *Jackal, Jackal* by Tobi Ogundiran - *Jewel Box* by E. Lily Yu ### Best Artist - Audrey Benjaminsen - Rovina Cai - Stefan Koidl - Charles Vess - Alyssa Winans ### Special Award – Professional - Bill Campbell, for Rosarium Books - E. M. Carroll, for *A Guest in the House* - M. John Harrison, for *Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir* - Stephen Jones, for *The Weird Tales Boys* - Liza Groen Trombi, for *Locus* ### Special Award – Non-Professional - Scott H. Andrews, for *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - Trevor Kennedy, for *Phantasmagoria* - Brian J. Showers, for Swan River Press - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, for *Uncanny Magazine* - Julian Yap & Fran Wilde, for *The Sunday Morning Transport* ### **Lifetime Achievement** - Ginjer Buchanan - Jo Fletcher --- What are your picks from this list? ### Here’s another pile of books for you to check out this August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-books-okorafor-dinniman-feist/ Last updated: 2024-08-17T17:19:15.000Z August is humming along: it’s weird at how fast this part of the summer goes. I’ve been spending the last couple of days sinking into James S.A. Corey’s latest, [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), which I’m really enjoying: it’s always great to find yourself transported into a new universe. It’s the first of a trilogy and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next. Expect some more detailed thoughts in the near future. In case you missed it, here's the first list for the month (find prior lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag): [17 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read in August 2024New books by James S.A. Corey, Madeline Ashby, P. Djèlí Clark, Gabino Iglesias, and more!![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/08/IMG_9013-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-sci-fi-fantasy-books-corey-kingfisher-tolkien/) As usual, I'll note that this newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce, and if you're so inclined, I'd like to invite you to support the newsletter by signing up as a supporting subscriber. You can also support TO by buying a book through out of the Bookshop.org affiliate links below. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Alrighty, here are 15 more SF/F books for you to check out this month: ### [*The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020: The History of the Science-Fiction Magazines Volume V*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781835537770?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Ashley (August 28th) Mike Ashley's series on the history of science fiction magazines has long been an essential tool for my work while writing about the history of the genre. Preceded by *The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950, Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970, Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980,* and *Science-Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990: The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine*, Ashley has traced the evolution of science fiction in incredible detail, exploring how editors, writers, artists, and fans have influenced and nudged the genre in every possible direction. I've been waiting for this one: it's the final installment that I've heard he's been working on for ages, and looks at how the internet and online publishing took over genre publishing and how it's helped to break down barriers and open up new avenues for authors all over the world. [](https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Cyberzines-Science-Fiction-Magazines-Liverpool/dp/1800856482/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.NCOhvkbIDl6d3RwK1SwaYk4ZaxRuwCU0eVsRK7-VBcK%5FlnsHcTO9NS4yTCZJRV-hTdwRu4qLItc5sTOrzrFYtpzI2BuN0oZHBJ46R7dvaP0ebf9MeUpBkpN5GSkmVGtHl-lw3w8bbyJpjirGAERc-Z4LxXOYxZ1Mq-KXdESxcK0Kx%5Fy2dcDT42s6sESfKz6JElCbykthF85FvR2H7DVniKFVeyeTVyTu4-Sctisv%5F0Q.qIX7JU1Aqt7VxJ4hSxwNOFE0Y9RFNy4l49Dtr8vwowo&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=The+History+of+the+Science-Fiction+Magazines&qid=1720791192&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Crypt of the Moon Spider*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250291738?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nathan Ballingrud (August 27th) I've long been a huge fan of Nathan Ballingrud's short fiction, and have his debut novel, [*The Strange*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534449954?ref=andrewliptak.com), on my to-read list. His next looks really interesting: a spider once lived in a cave and its silk provided its worshippers with some incredible powers. Fast forward to 1923, and a woman named Veronica Brinkley has arrived on the Moon to stay at a treatment facility called the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. Its doctor's methods are unconventional: brain surgery and spiders, but it's been successful in treating those afflicted with various conditions. But lurking under the surface, there are some problems that have begun to crop up, and Veronica might be one of the reasons. ### [*Dungeon Crawler Carl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820247?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Matt Dinniman (August 27th) I missed this when Matt Dinniman first self-published this back in 2020, but I've seen it pop up every now and again as it's blown up amongst fans. Ace Books picked up the rights to publish the first three installments in the series ([*Carl's Doomsday Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820261?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593820285?ref=andrewliptak.com), coming out in September and October, respectively.) They follow a Coast Guard veteran named Carl, who're recently gone through a breakup and inherited his ex's cat while doing so. At the same time? Earth is being invaded by aliens that have leveled civilization and transformed the place into an intergalactic game show that resembles a dungeon in a video game. To survive, he and Princess Donut will have to work their way through the fantasy dungeons, encountering goblins, potions, and drug-dealing llamas along the way. I've heard this described as being similar to Ernest Cline's [*Ready Player One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307887436?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Andy Weir's [*The Martian*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553418026?ref=andrewliptak.com), so I'm expecting it to be a light, fun romp. ### [*Loka*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662505065?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.B. Divya (August 13th) S.B. Divya follows up her novel [*Meru*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662505096?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which she introduced readers to a far-future Earth where humans have been restricted to their home planet, and where their posthuman descendants are free to explore beyond. When they discover an Earth-like planet, a Jayanthi, a human child adopted by posthuman Alloys and her Alloy pilot Vaha, it's an opportunity to explore and test relations between the two. In this next installment of the series, we follow Akshaya, the hybrid daughter of a human mother and an alloy, who's deemed the future of life on Meru. But before she decides her future, she wants to explore Earth and figure out where her path really lies. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781662505065?ref=andrewliptak.com) "informed by the author’s experiences working in science and engineering, and struggles with long-Covid-induced chronic fatigue syndrome, the narrative explores questions of belonging and friendship with a clear-eyed precision, bringing to mind the heartfelt emotion of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series and the worldbuilding and deep ethical questions of *The Terraformers* by Analee Newitz." ### [*A Darkness Returns*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062315847?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Raymond E. Feist (August 20th) Raymond E. Feist kicks off a new fantasy series with *A Darkness Returned*, one that brings together his Firemane Saga ([*King of Ashes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061468469?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Queen of Storms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062315939?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Master of Furies*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063305403?ref=andrewliptak.com)) and his [Riftwar Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FRiftwar%5FCycle?ref=andrewliptak.com), which he began in 1982 with *Magician (*eventually re-released as [*Magician: Apprentice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553564945?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Magician: Master*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553564938?ref=andrewliptak.com)). In this "conclusive" adventure, Hatushaly of the Firemane dynasty, his loved Hava, and friend Donte have been transported to the world Midkemia, where under the guidance of the magician Magnus and his reincarnated father Pug work to train them to save their home world Garn. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062315847?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "all the usual Feist elements are here: skullduggery, high seas action, military clashes, and ever-expanding types of magic. It’s a grand setup for what could be the ultimate battle between all of Feist’s heroes and their age-old nemesis." ### [*Napalm in the Heart*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374612955?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Pol Guasch and translated by Mara Faye Lethem (August 13th) In the near future, the world has been devastated by war and natural disasters, a young man and his mother try and make a living at the edge of a forest. He spends his time exchanging letters with a lover across the forest, and they have to deal with soldiers who patrol the region. When he's forced to violently defend his mother, he leaves to try and find safe haven. It's a journey that will make him confront his own morals as he tries to avoid becoming the thing that he's running from. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/pol-guasch/napalm-in-the-heart/?ref=andrewliptak.com), calling it "a bleakly brilliant novel of a near future in which humankind has descended into unspeakable brutality." ### [*Dragons of Eternity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984819420?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis (August 6th) Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis finish out their latest DragonLance trilogy (preceded by [*Dragons of Deceit*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984819390?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Dragons of Fate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984819383?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in which Destina Rosethorn and her companions traveled back in time to the Third Dragon War and found that the Graygem of Gargath changed things. Upon returning home, they discovered their present was different, with the forces of evil ruling the world. Now, they have to make one last-ditch effort to restore the River of Time and fix everything before it's too late. [Dragonlance changed how we read fantasyThe franchise’s original creators have sued Wizards of the Coast for breach of contract over a new book trilogy![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/image-11.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragonlance-changed-how-we-read-fantasy/) ### [*Blackheart Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668005101?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nalo Hopkinson (August 20th) On the magical island of Chynchin, Veycosi is training to become a griot (a sort of historian and magician), and is preparing to examine a rare book in order to join the Colloquium of Scholars. When elements of the Ymisen navy arrive to force a trade agreement with the island, Veycosi finds his plans derailed, and while he tries to help, he finds that he's out of his depth. Things soon get worse: children start vanishing and the remnants of a long-frozen invading army begin coming back to life, Veycosi has to put aside his own issues and guilt over his role in the troubles, and figure out how to save his home. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668005101?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Hopkinson’s worldbuilding astonishes: the isle of Chynchin features its own patron twin caiman goddesses who watch over a culture that freely mixes words and foods from around the world, even as its own social order clings to vestiges of class and caste distinctions.." ### [*The Wind That Sweeps the Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789095500?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Greg Keyes (August 20th) Yash of Zeltah makes a journey to the city of Honaq to be wed to Prince Chej, where she's greeted by as an outsider and barbarian. Her impending wedding is designed to bring peace, but she's well aware that the world is already being torn apart by warfare. Yash is more than just a barbarian: She's a skilled assassin, and has to defeat nine challenges in the form of masters, and she has to go up against monsters and soldiers to take out everyone in her path in order to save the world – all in a single day. ### [*Between Dragons and Their Wrath*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316417983?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Devin Madson (August 27th) Devin Madson kicks off a new series with *Between Dragons and Their Wrath*, an epic fantasy in which the Celes Basin has conquered the world, only to find that its enemies have returned and are threatening its borders. In an effort to try and save the kingdom, Lord Reacher has declared himself supreme ruler, only to bring out internal tensions that have long festered under the surface. The situation brings three unlikely characters together: an apprentice named Tesha who becomes a pawn in a political plot, Naili, a laundress to an alchemist who's given her strange powers, and Ashadi, a dragon rider who's worked to protect the basin who's been shot down and is being hunted. The three will have to fight to protect their home from enemies at home and afar. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316417983?ref=andrewliptak.com) "This first installment serves mainly to lay the groundwork—the three protagonists’ paths don’t cross until the very end—but each individual’s complicated maneuvering still excites. Replete with backstabbing, secrets, and political intrigue, this is a promising start." ### [*The Dragon in Winter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250892638?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jonathan Maberry (August 20th) Jonathan Maberry brings his *Kagen the Damned* trilogy to a close with *The Dragon in Winter*. In [*Kagen the Damned*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250783974?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Son of the Poison Rose*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250783998?ref=andrewliptak.com), we were introduced to Kagen, a former captain of the palace guard who was tasked with protecting the Emperor's family. When he's drugged and his wards killed, the empire collapses, and he goes on the run, abandoned by his gods and begins plotting out his next moves. Now, Kagen has gathered new allies and have been working on building their strength to topple the Witch-king of Hakkia. Their task is difficult: but Kagen will stop at nothing to exact revenge. ### [*Inversions*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8Q4SWJK?tag=storm058-aut-20&geniuslink=true&ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.V. Melcer (August 13th) M.V. Melcer brings out a new installment in her Guardian Cycle (following last year's [*Refractions*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGM8N6SC?tag=storm058-aut-20&geniuslink=true&ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which Earth's distant colony Bethesda has gone silent. Nathalie Hart is part of the rescue mission, dealing with the grief of her sister's death as she works to take over the mission when she's awoken early. 20 years later, word of the mission finally returns to Earth, which is on the verge of collapsing. Nathalie's nephew, Jason Nevsky, is working to figure out how to try and fix Earth's issues, but realizes that the planet's orbiting rulers, the Yun Ju, have more devious plans. ### [*She Who Knows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418953?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nnedi Okorafor (August 20th) Nnedi Okorafor broke out with her novel [*Who Fears Death*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756417109?ref=andrewliptak.com), an Africanfuturist novel about a woman struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic Africa, and who gives birth to a daughter with some frightening powers. Okorafor has returned to the same world for a new trilogy of books, the She Who Knows trilogy, which follows Najeeba, who had The Call, something that only men and boys generally experience. She's eager to set off from her village to mine salt at the Dead Lake, and she finds that as she undertakes this journey, something about her presence on the road changes everything. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nnedi-okorafor/she-who-knows/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying, "as always with Okorafor’s work, the prose is sharp and immersive, the characters provide insight into family drama and healing, and the narrative seamlessly blends elements of fantasy, folklore, and speculative fiction." ### [*The Sunforge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982187071?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sascha Stronach (August 6th) Sascha Stronach's latest book is a followup to her 2022 debut, [*The Dawnhounds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982187057?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* The city of Radovan has been engulfed in flames, and the crew of the *Kopek* are stranded in its harbor. They’ve endured considerable hardship: they survived a biological attack, their captain has gone missing, and their new weaver, Yat, is trying to regain control of her mind. To escape the harbor, they have to venture into the destroyed city and disable the technology that has them trapped, dodging enemy patrols. As They do so, Kiada has to deal with her own past and history with the city, and some of the people she encounters. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781982187071?ref=andrewliptak.com) “Stronach avoids the sophomore slump, moving her trilogy forward while still building to a satisfying payoff within this volume. This jam-packed adventure promises more good things to come.” ### [*A Spectre is Haunting Greentree*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781959790044?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carson Winter (August 15th) After she experiences a series of panic attacks, Carina takes up an offer from her friends: visit the town of Greentree, Oregon to start her a new life away from an abusive ex. When she arrives, she finds it's strange: the residents are wealthy, it still has a video store, and there are a ton of scarecrows everywhere. As she begins to discover more of the town's secrets, a violent revolution has begun brewing. --- So, what catches your eye, and what are you reading now? ### The Folio Society goes cyberpunk URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/neuromancer-william-gibson-folio-society-cyberpunk-book-sci-fi/ Last updated: 2025-04-02T14:07:10.000Z The Folio Society has just released a new edition of a classic science fiction novel: [William Gibson's *Neuromancer*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/neuromancer.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). *(*Update:* As of 8/15, it's completely sold out.) (*Another update:* as of April 2, 2025, Folio Socie*Ty *has announced that the book will be coming back later this month.)* The publisher says that this is one of their most requested books, and they're starting out with a limited edition that costs $600\. For that price, it comes with some bells and whistles: it's illustrated by Anna Mill, a designer, artist and author from London (who also designed the clamshell box), has printed endpapers and book edges, ribbon marker, and comes with a limitation label signed by William Gibson and Anna Mill. Mill's artwork looks spectacular: bold green-and-blue images that evoke a retro-futuristic look, and the entire package is very enticing. I've generally been impressed with the Folio Society's selection of artists, and I feel like they really knocked this one out of the park. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/08/image-1-1.png) Image: Folio Society This edition comes right as the novel [celebrated its 40th anniversary in July](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/30-years-william-gibsons-ineuromanceri/?ref=andrewliptak.com). While it wasn't the first work of cyberpunk out there, it was a work that certainly cemented the look and feel of the genre as we know it today. Folio's edition looks like it captures the look and feel of the genre nicely. That said, I'm not sure that it's a copy that I'll be rushing out to get: the Folio Society seems to have been headed in the direction of limited editions in recent years: it's recently put out such limited editions as Becky Chambers' [*The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-becky-chambers-van-dijk-art-interview/)*,* Walter Miller Jr.'s [*A Canticle for Lebowitz*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/a-canticle-for-leibowitz.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's [*Roadside Picnic*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/roadside-picnic-limited-edition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)([here's my look at the regular edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/roadside-picnic-strugatsky-folio-society/)), George Orwell's [*1984*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/nineteen-eighty-four-limited-edition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [Frank Herbert's *Dune*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-frank-herbert-dune-special-edition/), all well outside of my price range. I get it: book collecting can be a lucrative market, but I'm hoping that they'll go on to release some regular editions for those collectors who aren't able or interested at dropping hundreds and hundreds on an book. --- *Additional reading:* - [Cyberpunk's power came from global dystopian politics](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-power-came-from-global-dystopian-politics/) - [Read the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades for free online](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-mirrorshades-gibson-cadigan-rucker-free-science-fiction/) - [Cyberpunk aesthetics](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-the-peripheral-william-gibson/) - [Apple's next big sci-fi show? *Neuromancer*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/) ### Here are the winners of the 2024 Hugo Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-2024-scifi-fantasy-glasgow-worldcon/ Last updated: 2024-08-13T13:43:15.000Z This year's [World Science Fiction Convention](https://glasgow2024.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) was held over the weekend in Glasgow, Scotland, and from all accounts, it was a really excellent time. I've been having some serious FOMO with conventions this year: San Diego Comic Con, WorldCon, and the upcoming DragonCon are all events that I wish I had the time to head off to. WorldCon has endured some ups and downs in the last decade, part of an ongoing saga over how Fandom as a whole is working to define itself, with last year's convention [marred](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/) by corruption in the voting process for the Hugo Awards, leaving a handful of nominees out in the cold after they were deemed "ineligible" to be nominated. (George R.R. Martin [stepped in](https://locusmag.com/2024/08/2024-alfie-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to present the four, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao, *Sandman,* and Paul Weimer, with a special Alfie Award) This year's convention staff not only seem to have learned from those mistakes (each WorldCon is organized by a different group of people), but served as excellent examples in how to deal with potential issues: they set [expectations for transparency for the awards](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/01/27/glasglow-worldcon-commits-to-hugo-process-transparency/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the onset, and when issues did arise, [they put them out into the open](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/07/22/when-hugo-nonsense-is-handled-right/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in a clear way. And, as my buddy Aidan Moher [pointed out](https://bsky.app/profile/aidanmoher.com/post/3kzhxjpy6qo2g?ref=andrewliptak.com), they released the long-list of voting statistics within hours of the awards being handed out, rather than burying them with excuses to delay and hide the issues that had arisen. What a concept! The result is a positive one for Fandom at large: WorldCon attendees that can see that the process *can* be trusted, especially when you have a capable group of people running the show. And while the mechanics of the awards and conventions might seem like inside baseball to a small group of devoted fans, the Hugos have some real weight behind them: they're a long-standing award that has honored some of the best works in the genre: it rewards creativity and exemplary work, and raises the profile of said winners and nominees, and by and large, helps the rest of the genre. Here are the winners of this year's Hugo Awards: ### Best Novel - *The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi* by Shannon Chakraborty - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - ***Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh** - *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi - *Translation State* by Ann Leckie - *Witch King* by Martha Wells ### Best Novella - “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet”, He Xi / 人生不相见, 何夕, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo - *The Mimicking of Known Successes* by Malka Older - *Rose/House* by Arkady Martine - “Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - ***Thornhedge* by T. Kingfisher** ### Best Novelette - *I AM AI* by Ai Jiang - “[Introduction to *2181 Overture, Second Edition*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/gu%5F02%5F23/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)”, Gu Shi /〈2181序曲〉再版导言, 顾适 translated by Emily Jen - “[Ivy, Angelica, Bay](https://reactormag.com/ivy-angelica-bay-c-l-polk-2/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by C.L. Polk - “[On the Fox Roads](https://reactormag.com/on-the-fox-roads-nghi-vo-2/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Nghi Vo - “[One Man’s Treasure](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/one-mans-treasure/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Sarah Pinsker - **“**[**The Year Without Sunshine**](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**” by Naomi Kritzer** ### Best Short Story - “Answerless Journey”, Han Song / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - **“**[**Better Living Through Algorithms**](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer%5F05%5F23/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**” by Naomi Kritzer (*Clarkesworld* May 2023)** - “[How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by P. Djèlí Clark (*Uncanny Magazine*, January-February 2023) - “[The Mausoleum’s Children](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Aliette de Bodard (*Uncanny Magazine*, May-June 2023) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare Magazine*, October 2023) - 美食三品 (“Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times”), 宝树 / Baoshu (银河边缘013：黑域密室 / *Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain*) ### Best Series - *The Final Architecture* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - ***Imperial Radch* by Ann Leckie** - *The Last Binding* by Freya Marske - *The Laundry Files* by Charles Stross - *October Daye* by Seanan McGuire - *The Universe of Xuya* by Aliette de Bodard ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *Bea Wolf*, written by Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet - ***Saga*, Vol. 11 written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples** - *Shubeik Lubeik*, Deena Mohamed (Pantheon); as *Your Wish Is My Command* - 三体漫画：第一部 / *The Three Body Problem*, Part One, adapted from the novels by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin), written by 蔡劲 (Cai Jin),戈闻頔 (Ge Wendi), and 薄暮 (Bo Mu), art by 草祭九日东 (Caojijiuridong) - *The Witches of World War II* written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo - *Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons* written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha and Nicola Scott ### Best Related Work - *All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays* by Niall Harrison - 中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷，(*Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History*, vols 2 and 3) ed. 杨枫 / Yang Feng - ***A City on Mars* by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith** - *The Culture: The Drawings*, by Iain M. Banks - 雨果X访谈 (*Discover X*), presented by 王雅婷 - *A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller*, by Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Barbie*, screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, directed by Greta Gerwig - ***Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves*, screenplay by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Michael Gilio, directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein** - *Nimona*, screenplay by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane - *Poor Things*, screenplay by Tony McNamara, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse*, screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson - 流浪地球2 / *The Wandering Earth II*, based on the novel by 刘慈欣 Liu Cixin, screenplay by 杨治学 Yang Zhixue, 郭帆 / Frant Gwo, 龚格尔 Gong Geer, and 叶濡畅 Ye Ruchang, script consultant 王红卫 Wang Hongwei, directed by 郭帆 / Frant Gwo ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Doctor Who: “The Giggle”,* written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Chanya Button - *Loki: “Glorious Purpose”,* screenplay by Eric Martin, Michael Waldron and Katharyn Blair, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - ***The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”,* written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar** - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists”,* written by Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Jonathan Frakes - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Subspace Rhapsody”*, written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dermott Downs - *Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder”,* written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Tom Kingsley ### Best Game or Interactive Work - *Alan Wake 2,* developed by Remedy Entertainment - ***Baldur’s Gate 3,* produced by Larian Studios** - *Chants of Sennaar*, developed by Rundisc - *DREDGE*, developed by Black Salt Games - *The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom* - *Star Wars Jedi: Survivor*, developed by Respawn Entertainment ### Best Editor Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - **Neil Clarke** - 刘维佳 (Liu Weijia) - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - 杨枫 (Yang Feng) ### Best Editor Long Form - **Ruoxi Chen** - Lindsey Hall - Lee Harris - Kelly Lonesome - David Thomas Moore - 姚海军 (Yao Haijun) ### Best Professional Artist - Micaela Alcaino - **Rovina Cai** - Galen Dara - Dan Dos Santos - Tristan Elwell - Alyssa Winans ### Best Semiprozine - *Escape Pod*, editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes; assistant editors Benjamin C. Kinney, Premee Mohamed and Kevin Wabaunsee; hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart; producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht; and the entire Escape Pod team - *FIYAH Literary Magazine*, publisher and executive editor DaVaun Sanders, poetry editor B. Sharise Moore, special projects manager L. D. Lewis, art director Christian Ivey, acquiring editors Rebecca McGee, Kerine Wint, Joshua Morley, Emmalia Harrington, Genine Tyson, Tonya R. Moore, sponsor coordinator Nelson Rolon - *GigaNotoSaurus*, editor LaShawn M. Wanak, associate editors Mia Tsai and Edgard Wentz, along with the GNS Slushreaders Team - *khōréō*, produced by Aleksandra Hill, Zhui Ning Chang, Kanika Agrawal, Isabella Kestermann, Rowan Morrison, Sachiko Ragosta, Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Melissa Ren, Elaine Ho, Lilivette Domínguez, Jei D. Marcade, Jeané Ridges, Isaree Thatchaichawalit, Danai Christopoulou, M. L. Krishnan, Ysabella Maglanque, Aaron Voigt, Adil Mian, Alexandra Millatmal, E. Broderick, K. S. Walker, Katarzyna Nowacka, Katie McIvor, Kelsea Yu, Marie Croke, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Phoebe Low, S. R. Westvik, Sara S. Messenger - ***Strange Horizons*, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective** - *Uncanny Magazine*, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; nonfiction editor Meg Elison; podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky. ### Best Fanzine - *Black Nerd Problems*, editors Omar Holmon and William Evans - *The Full Lid*, written by Alasdair Stuart and edited by Marguerite Kenner - *Idea*, editor Geri Sullivan - *Journey Planet*, edited by Michael Carroll, Vincent Docherty, Sara Felix, Ann Gry, Sarah Gulde, Allison Hartman Adams, Arthur Liu, Jean Martin, Helena Nash, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Yen Ooi, Chuck Serface, Alan Stewart, Regina Kanyu Wang, James Bacon and Christopher J. Garcia - ***Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together*, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla.** - *Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog*, editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk ### Best Fancast - *The Coode Street Podcast*, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe - *Hugos There*, presented by Seth Heasley - ***Octothorpe*, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty** - *Publishing Rodeo*, presented by Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford - 科幻Fans布玛 (*Science Fiction Fans Buma*), production team 布玛（Buma)，刘路（Liu Lu)，刘倡（Liu Chang) - *Worldbuilding for Masochists*, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Rowenna Miller, Cass Morris and Natania Barron ### Best Fan Writer - Bitter Karella - James Davis Nicoll - Jason Sanford - Alasdair Stuart - **Paul Weimer** - Örjan Westin ### Best Fan Artist - ​​Iain J. Clark - Sara Felix - Dante Luiz - **Laya Rose** - Alison Scott - España Sheriff ### Lodestar Award for Best YA Book - *Abeni’s Song* by P. Djèlí Clark - *Liberty’s Daughter* by Naomi Kritzer - *Promises Stronger than Darkness* by Charlie Jane Anders - *The Sinister Booksellers of Bath* by Garth Nix - ***To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose** - *Unraveller* by Frances Hardinge ### *Astounding* Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines) - Moniquill Blackgoose (1st year of eligibility) - Sunyi Dean (2nd year of eligibility) - Ai Jiang (2nd year of eligibility) - Hannah Kaner (1st year of eligibility) - Em X. Liu (1st year of eligibility) - **Xiran Jay Zhao (eligibility extended at request of Dell Magazines)** --- So, what did you think of the recipients of the awards? ### Here's a stack of books to check out this August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-sci-fi-fantasy-books-corey-kingfisher-tolkien/ Last updated: 2024-08-17T17:20:02.000Z I've been in something of a book rut the last couple of weeks: there's one book that I've been reading that I was really looking forward to that just isn't grabbing me. The sunk cost fallacy is always something that's hovering in the back of my mind when it comes to books, especially ones that I've had high hopes for, and I'm always curious where I make the decision to give up on a book that isn't working for me – and why. Sometimes, it's the narrator of the audiobook that throws me out completely, other times, it's the amount of attention that my brain has to process the plot/writing style/pace/etc. I tend to cycle through reads: my to-read list is pretty long at the moment, and sometimes it's a matter of turning over to another one and another one and seeing what'll catch my attention at the moment. This seems to have worked: I recently picked up Chris Nashawaty's [*The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827050?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is a pretty light and breezy history of some of the most formative blockbusters to hit theaters. I think it really appeals to my interests as a fan, and if you're a TO reader, I think you'll enjoy it as well. I've got some other books that I'll be cycling through as well. --- As usual, I'll put a call for new supporting subscribers. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce. Putting this together takes time and resources, and your support would go a long way towards helping keeping it here on Ghost and beholden to you, the reader. There are a couple of ways to support *Transfer Orbit*: - Sign up as a supporting member: $4 a month or $40 a year. Supporting subscribers get access to the Transfer Orbit Slack channel and various news / commentary posts throughout the week. I really enjoy this Slack channel, and I use it to drop a ton of other news and links and things to keep you informed about the SF/F world. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) - Purchase a book that catches your eye through one of the affiliate links below. TO gets a small cut of the sales made through Bookshop.org. - Tell your friends / fellow readers / networks about what you're reading here and encourage them to sign up: word of mouth is a big thing for a small newsletter like this. Thanks in advance for considering! --- Okay, here are 17 new books to check out this August: ### [*Glass Houses*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765382924?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Madeline Ashby (August 13th) The staff and CEO of a company known for developing some impressive AI / emotion-mapping software encounter some problems when their plane crashes on a tropical island. The survivors discover that it's not quite abandoned: there's a private palace installed on it, fully tricked out with the latest technologies, but without any connection to the outside world. Kristen, the company's "Chief Emotional Manager" is working to keep her colleagues safe as they figure out their next steps, and the house seems to have some strange secrets about it – and why it's been left abandoned. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fglass-houses-1806867&ref=andrewliptak.com) "Ashby has created an eerily familiar future world and characters who are both sympathetic and horrific." ### [*The Deading*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661290?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nicholas Belardes (July 23rd) The small California fishing town of Baywood has been known for its birding and oyster farming, but there's something horrific lurking under the ocean not far away. Sea snails begin washing ashore and attacking anything they can touch, and an infection begins to spread amongst the wildlife and people, transforming them. To try and contain the problem, the government cuts off the town, leaving those stuck inside to fend for themselves. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645661290?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this patchwork of familiar horror plot motifs offers some fun scares. ### [*The Dead Cat Tail Assassins*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250767042?ref=andrewliptak.com) by P. Djèlí Clark (August 6th) I've really enjoyed P. Djèlí Clark's fantasy and horror fiction. His novella [*Ring Shout*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clarks-ring-shout-reimagines-lovecraftian-horror/) is a phenomenal read that still lives rent-free in my head, while his novel [*A Master of Djinn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250267665?ref=andrewliptak.com) showcased a phenomenal world with an outstanding plot. [P. Djèlí Clark on history, fantasy, and how racism creates monstersP. Djèlí Clark on history, fantasy, and how racism creates monsters![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/11/B89B50E0-2117-4B94-BB0D-1341BE5EC848.JPG)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/p-djeli-clark-interview/) I've been intriguing by what his next book brings: a new fantasy about Eveen the Eviscerator, a skilled assassin for hire in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. She and her guild adhere to three simple rules: the contract has to be just, they can only kill th person they've been contracted to kill, and if you take a job? You carry it out. When the Festival of the Clockwork King throws the city of Tal Abisi into chaos, Eveen finds herself face to face with her past and a vow that she's bound to. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/p-djeli-clark/the-dead-cat-tail-assassins/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "well crafted, exciting, darkly comic, and just gory enough." ### [*The Mercy of Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey (August 6th) This is probably one of the books that I'm most excited to read this year. I've long been a fan of James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* series, and now that that series has come to a close, I've been wondering what they'd turn to for their next act. That comes in the form of a brand new space opera series, *The Captive's War*, which kicks off with *The Mercy of Gods*. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) In the distant future, the Carryx–an alien civilization that's part Empire, part hive–has been fighting to conquer the galaxy, taking over or destroying any civilization that gets in their way. They're now fighting an implacable enemy, and the humans living on Anjiin might be able to help with that fight. As the Carryx arrive and begin stealing the Anjiin's best and brightest, Dafyd Alkhor is one of the scientists swept up and dropped into an unthinkable and unimaginable war alongside other captive species. In order to survive, they have to figure out a bigger game, understand their captors and try to manipulate them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-s-corey/the-mercy-of-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The sense of wonder associated with the story’s magnitude is simply breathtaking...The beginning of what could be Corey’s most epic—and entertaining—series yet. Simply mind-blowing." *I've been reading and savoring this one for a couple of weeks: it's about to get tossed onto the top of my reading list. Stay tuned for more.* ### [*Mistress of Lies*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565356?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K. M. Enright (August 13th) Shan LeClaire is the daughter of a powerful Blood Worker who's fallen from grace. She's spent her life perfecting her blood magic, and has been fighting to amass as much power as she can. To save her brother, she kills her father to take over the family. At the same time, when Samuel Hutchinson comes across the victim of a magical serial killer, he's pulled back into the magical world and the court of the Vampire King that he's tried to extract himself from. With a serial killer on the loose, the Eternal King tasks Samuel, Shaun, and a Royal Blood Worker named Isaac into the city to try and stop the bloodshed. The trio will have to figure out their loyalties and priorities, even as they find themselves growing closer to one another. ### [*The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593299920?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Evan Friss (August 6th) This one looks like it's tailored perfectly for my interests *The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore* by Evan Friss. As the title suggests, it's a walk through the story of American bookselling, going back to Benjamin Franklin's bookstore in Philadelphia and up through the timeline of history to explore how books have been sold over the centuries, from small indie bookstores to the major retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593299920?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Along the way, he chronicles the history of over a dozen notable bookstores, interspersing these chapters with ruminations on the role of the buyer, the importance of the UPS driver, and other bits of bookstore arcana that refreshingly focus on the behind-the-scenes experience of bookselling." ### [*House of Bone and Rain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316427012?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gabino Iglesias (August 6th) Growing up in a slum in Puerto Rico, Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo have endured a lot: accidents, hurricanes, violence, and deaths. When Bimbo's mother is killed, and that her death was at the hands of a gang working for a drug kingpin, they swear revenge. As they do so, a hurricane brews off the coast, bringing with it evil spirits that are waiting to come ashore. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316427012?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Iglesias blends the history and myths of Puerto Rico into a gritty coming-of-age story, whose violent excesses may be off-putting to some readers. Readers who like their horror bloody, however, will be pleased." ### [*A Sorceress Comes to Call*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250244079?ref=andrewliptak.com) by T. Kingfisher (August 6th) Cordelia has grown up knowing that her mother is strange. She's kept her from having any friends, she forces her to sit still and quiet for hours, the house she grew up in has no doors, and she's an evil sorceress. When they abruptly move to a new home of a wealthy family, Cordelia realizes that they're her mother's next victims, and that for the first time, she feels at home. As her mother's plans become apparent, she has to figure out how to save them and face the woman who raised her. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250244079?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Expertly blending humor with folkloric horror, this incredibly satisfying fantasy will delight Kingfisher’s fans and newcomers alike." ### [*In the Shadow of the Fall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250907967?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tobi Ogundiran August 6th) Ashâke grows up as an acolyte in a temple, awaiting the day that she'll be made a priest and will serve her order out in the world. But she's the only one that her gods refuse to interact with, and she's spent years watching as her peers grow up and leave the order. Desperate, she sets out to trap an orisha, and instead of snaring one, she have a powerful vision that brings her to the attention of an ancient enemy that could destroy her world. In *Locus Magazine*, Wole Talabi [says that it's](https://locusmag.com/2024/06/wole-talabi-reviews-in-the-shadow-of-the-fall-by-tobi-ogundiran/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "immersive, entertaining, and well-crafted, with an atmospheric tone and an intriguing cast of characters, *In the Shadow of the Fall* is a small African epic fantasy with big scope and big stakes, and I look forward to its conclusion." ### [*Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250287700?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tore C. Olsson (August 6th) I haven't played the *Red Dead Redemption* video games, but they've looked like fun: open world westerns that let you play out adventures on the American frontier. What's equally interesting to me is the actual violent history of the American west, and that's the topic of Dr. Tore C. Olsson's new book: a deep dive into the game and the history that inspired it. According to Olsson, the book came out of an [experimental class that he taught](https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-this-professor-made-history-class-cool-again?ref=andrewliptak.com) at University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he used the game to frame the real-world history of the region. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tore-c-olsson/red-deads-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Olsson has much to say about connecting the past to the present in ways that are novel and fun." ### [*Time's Agent*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250854315?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brenda Peynado (August 13th) When humanity discovers "Pocket Worlds," small and hidden alternate realities, researchers begin a series of missions to explore their potential and what they can learn from them. An archeologist named Raquel and her wife, Marlena believed that these worlds might hold the key to solving all of our problems, but decades after their discovery, they're controlled by corporations who've ruthlessly monetized them. Raquel has found herself in disgrace while Marlena lives in her own pocket world, refusing to speak with her spouse. When Raquel finds an opportunity to redeem herself, she jumps at the chance. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/times-agent-1807921?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "steeped in Peynado’s Dominican culture, the novel’s setting and its seemingly sudden destruction point to the evils of colonialism while demonstrating that this has all happened before and will again." ### [*Hum*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668008836?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Helen Philips (August 6th) In the near future, robots and artificial intelligence rules the world. After she loses her job to an AI system and to escape crippling debt, May volunteers for an experimental procedure to change her face. Now somewhat flush with cash, she takes her family on a three-day trip to the Botanical Garden, a lush, natural refuge from their home city. When she's separated from her children, she has to figure out how to trust one of the robots in order to bring her family back together. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/helen-phillips/hum-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds—between partners, parents and children, and siblings—can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world." ### [*The Drowning House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781728292823?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cherie Priest (July 23rd) I've really enjoyed Cherie Priest's supernatural tales, particularly her recent psychic mysteries [*Grave Reservations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982168902?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Flight Risk*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982168933?ref=andrewliptak.com). In her next book, she's turning back to some of the gothic horror that she's really known for. In *The Drowned House*, a storm washes a house back onto shore in the Pacific Northwest. A woman who encounters it knows exactly what it portends, and she dies of a heart attack next to it. Her grandchild, Simon, goes missing, and his two estranged friends, Melissa and Leo, set out to find out what happened. [Writing in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/books/review/new-horror-books.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), author **Gabino Iglesias** notes that "Priest has a knack for creating a palpable atmosphere of dread in her books, and that’s on full display in this novel," and that it's "an immersive, memorable read." ### [*New Adventures in Space Opera*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964207?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Jonathan Strahan (August 13th) Jonathan Strahan has edited a ton of anthologies over the years, and he always puts together an excellent selection of short stories. His latest is *New Adventures in Space Opera*, in which he says in the introduction is a sort of spiritual successor to 2007's [*The New Space Opera*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780060846756?ref=andrewliptak.com) and 2009's [*The New Space Opera 2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061562358?ref=andrewliptak.com), which he edited with the late Gardner Dozois, both of which came out of discussions in the early 2000s about what the nature of space opera was at that point in time. This anthology picks up the baton, and features an exciting roster of authors, including Alastair Reynolds, Charlie Jane Anders, Yoon Ha Lee, Arkady Martine, Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, and more. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964207?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's got "plentiful action, enigmatic and complex worldbuilding, sinister technology, and vast space vistas impress. It’s a gift for sci-fi lovers." ### [*Agony Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826626?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Stewart Taylor (August 6th) While I generally focus on science fiction and fantasy for these book lists, I do enjoy mysteries as well. Sarah Stewart Taylor is a fellow Vermont author, and her latest caught my eye because it's taking a step back into the state's history as a Boston detective arrives in a small town and finds himself immersed in a local crisis: a New York transplant and farmer set himself and his barn on fire, and it seems as though there's more to the story than folks are letting on. I'm a huge fan of Archer Mayor's [Joe Gunther novels](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780979812200?ref=andrewliptak.com), and this feels like it's going to hit a lot of those same vibes. *Library Journal* gave it a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/agony-hill-1806249?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*The History of Middle-Earth Box Set #3*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390843?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien (August 13th) The next boxed set in J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien's *History of Middle-earth* series arrives (following the [first](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063379848?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [second](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390836?ref=andrewliptak.com) boxed sets in February and May). This set includes the works *The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring*, and *Sauron Defeated*, exploring the creation of Tolkien's vast Middle-earth legendarium. The [final boxed set](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390850?ref=andrewliptak.com) drops in September. ### [*The Doors of Midnight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250796189?ref=andrewliptak.com) by R.R. Virdi (August 13th) R.R. Virdi follows up last year's [*The First Binding*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250796240?ref=andrewliptak.com) with the next installment in the series, *The Doors of Midnight*. In that first book, he follows a storyteller named Ari who's traveled across the Mutri Empire who encounters a mysterious woman who shares a past with him – one that's catching up to both of them. In this new adventure, Ari's is awaiting the judgement after a prince is murdered, and as Virdi jumps from the past to the present, we learn a bit more about Ari's exploits and how he ended up in his predicament. *Fantasy Book Critic* [notes](https://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-doors-of-midnight-by-rr-virdi.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "*TDOM* is *The Dark Knight* to *The First Binding* in every department." --- As always, thanks for reading. Stay tuned in a couple of weeks for another August list. Which one of these catches your eye, and what is currently on your reading list? Let me know in the comments! ### [ ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65214032-the-doors-of-midnight?ref=andrewliptak.com#CommunityReviews) ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 Dragon Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-award-finalists-sci-fi-fantasy-books-dragoncon/ Last updated: 2024-08-06T14:30:20.000Z Over the last couple of years, I've been following the rise of the Dragon Awards, a newish prize in the SF/F world from fans at Atlanta Georgia's DragonCon that was [founded in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/13/12461038/dragon-awards-shortlist-dragoncon-science-fiction-fantasy?ref=andrewliptak.com). It had something of a [complicated history](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16118054/john-scalzi-alison-littlewood-dragon-awards-controversy-sci-fi-horror?ref=andrewliptak.com): it came right at the moment that the Hugo Awards and SF Fandom were grappling with some big issues about the nature of fandom, with one side (the "Sad Puppies" making some bad-faith arguments about just wanting good stories – which came in response to more women and authors of color earning top prizes from Hugo voters). For a moment, it seemed as though the Dragon Awards would be the Sad Puppy's consolation prize: an award that they could give themselves. [The Cosplayers of Dragon ConHello! It’s been a busy couple of weeks — the highlight of which was heading down to attend DragonCon for the first time. It’s a convention that I’ve seen a lot of friends go to over the years, but haven’t had the chance to go to until![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_9f3a35ed-3deb-4d6e-af31-ad8d201bd164_640x401.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-cosplayers-of-dragon-con/) That hasn't actually been the case: voting is open to anyone, and [over the](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2021-dragon-awards/) [last couple](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-2022-dragoncon-sci-fi-fantasy/) [of years](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-con-2023-finalists-leckie-kuang-tchaikovsky-zahn/), I've been impressed with the range of books that have been making it onto the final ballots. There's a real mix of critical favorites and bestsellers and crowd-pleasers, and I think it's a good indication that most of the arguments from the Puppies were pretty dumb: people aren't generally gravitating towards ideology when they reach for their next book, and the stuff that they were complaining about? They're broadly enjoyed by more than just traditional fans! I've also come to generally think of the Dragon Awards as the type of readership that I sort of think about when I'm writing for this newsletter: a broad swath of fandom that extends beyond traditional print fandom and including fans who're also consuming things across mediums, genres, and franchises. Overall, I think this is a pretty good reading list if you're looking for something interesting to pick up. Voting is open to the public and starts today: you can sign up to vote [here](https://application.dragoncon.net/dc%5Ffan%5Fawards%5Fsignup.php?ref=andrewliptak.com). The winners will be announced on Sunday, September 1st at Dragon Con. Here's the full list of finalists: ### **Best Science Fiction Novel** - *The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport* by Samit Basu - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Theft of Fire* by Devon Eriksen - *These Burning Stars* by Bethany Jacobs - *Beyond the Ranges* by John Ringo, James Aidee - *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi - *System Collapse* by Martha Wells ### **Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)** - *Three Kinds of Lucky* by Kim Harrison - *The Water Outlaws* by S.L. Huang - *He Who Drowned the World* by Shelley Parker-Chan - *My Brother’s Keeper* by Tim Powers - *House of Open Wounds* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Iron Flame* by Rebecca Yarros ### **Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel** - *Homecoming in Black* by J.M. Anjewierden - *So Let Them Burn* by Kamilah Cole - *Midnight at the Houdini* by Delilah S. Dawson - *Hideki Smith, Demon Queller* by A.J. Hartley, Hisako Osako, Kuma Hartley - *Death Lord Arcanist* by Shami Stovall - *The Spirit Bares Its Teeth* by Andrew Joseph White ### **Best Alternate History Novel** - *Devil’s Battle* by Taylor Anderson - *1638: The Sovereign States* by Eric Flint, Paula Goodlett, Gorg Huff - *All the Dead Shall Weep* by Charlaine Harris - *Dirty Water* by Tom Kratman - *Cahokia Jazz* by Francis Spufford - *The Wages of Sin* by Harry Turtledove ### **Best Horror Novel** - *The Hollow Dead* by Darcy Coates - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due - *Dead Storm Rising* by Shane Gries - *The Dead Take the A Train* by Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw - *Black River Orchard* by Chuck Wendig - *Double Dose* by F. Paul Wilson ### **Best Illustrative Book Cover** - *Dragonesque* by Justin Adams - *The Silverblood Promise* by Jeff Brown - *Yumi and the Nightmare Painter* by Aliya Chen - *Of Jade and Dragons* by Kelly Chong - *Beyond Enemies* by Sam R. Kennedy ### **Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel** - *X-Men: Forever* by Kieron Gillen, Luca Maresca - *Wonder Woman* by Tom King, Daniel Sampere - *Monstress* by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda - *Canary* by Scott Snyder, Dan Panosian - *Nightwing* by Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo - *Batman* by Chip Zdarsky, Jorge Jimenez ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet** - *3 Body Problem*, Netflix - *Ahsoka*, Disney+ - *Fallout*, Amazon Prime Video - *For All Mankind*, Apple TV+ - *Good Omens*, Amazon Prime Video - *House of the Dragon*, HBO - *Loki*, Disney+ - *Monarch: Legacy of Monsters*, Apple TV+ - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds*, Paramount+ ### **Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie** - *Dune: Part Two* by Denis Villeneuve - *Barbie* by Greta Gerwig - *Godzilla Minus One* by Takashi Yamazaki - *Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga* by George Miller - *The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* by Francis Lawrence - *Wonka* by Paul King ### **Best Digital Game** - *Alan Wake 2*, Remedy Entertainment - *Baldur’s Gate 3*, Larian Studios - *Dragon’s Dogma 2*, Capcom - *Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree*, FromSoftware - *Starfield*, Bethesda Game Studios - *Helldivers 2*, Arrowhead Game Studios ### **Best Tabletop Game** - *Cascadia: Landmarks*, Flatout Games - *D&D The Deck of Many Things*, Wizards of the Coast - *Disney Lorcana*, Ravensburger - *Dune: Imperium – Uprising*, Dire Wolf - *Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs*, Cephalofair Games - *Magic: The Gathering Wilds of Eldraine*, Wizards of the Coast ### Another decade of Scalzi URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-starter-villain-book-deal/ Last updated: 2024-08-05T21:47:26.000Z If you're a fan of John Scalzi's books, some good news dropped last week: he has [signed a new major deal with Tor Books](https://reactormag.com/tor-publishing-group-and-tor-uk-announce-major-multi-book-deal-for-bestselling-and-award-winning-author-john-scalzi/?ref=andrewliptak.com), one that will see him publishing 10 more books with the publisher, for which they'll be paying him a seven-figure advance. If that sounds a little familiar, [it's because back in 2015](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-tor-deal-decade-science-fiction-books/), he and Tor signed a $3.4 million, 13-book deal that has seen him release [*The Collapsing Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388902?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Consuming Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388995?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Last Emperox*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389183?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Head On*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765388933?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Starter Villain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389220?ref=andrewliptak.com), with [*When the Moon Hits Your Eye*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389091?ref=andrewliptak.com) and another [installment of his *Old Man's War* series arriving in 2025](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-new-book-military-scifi/). By my count, he's still got six additional books to fill out that contract, and this new deal builds on that. Over on his blog, Scalzi [explains](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/07/29/about-that-new-deal/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he and his team and Tor began looking over the sales record of his recent novels and that "of the five books Tor had put out since the 2015 contract started, four of them had been *New York Times* bestsellers, all had been optioned for film/TV, and there had been rather a few award nominations and wins. Equally significantly, through sales and directly-related income, I had earned a multiple of the up-front financial figure attached to the 2015 contract." That's not a bad place to be in, and around the release of *Starter Villain*, "we both felt like now was the right time to figure out the details of that, so that there would be no “end of contract” anxiety on either side of the table." [Interview with John ScalziJohn Scalzi on fictional pandemics, space empires, and more.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_10276eaa-dcfc-4c6c-9981-feb0545249ba_819x1024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-john-scalzi/) I'm a bit hit or miss on Scalzi's books: I think he's done some excellent work over the years, particularly with his [*Old Man's War* series](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's touted his ability to write books quickly, and I think that's shown with books like [*The Consuming Fire*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/12/03/an-interesting-fact-about-the-consuming-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Starter Villain*](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/12/19/process-notes-on-starter-villain/?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which he wrote pretty quickly. They weren't *bad*, but I felt like they were works that could have stood to have had their release dates pushed back a bit and given a bit more time ([something I think is always worth it with any creative ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-screenwriting-film-production-storytelling/)endeavor) to write and rewrite. Mind, my criticisms with the books don't seem to have affected the books in any way: as he pointed out in the announcement and his follow up notes, the books have done exceptionally well, sales-wise: hitting various bestseller lists and getting [optioned for TV and film](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-kaiju-preservation-society-optioned-fox/). I think much of his success comes from his desire to write voicy, easily-accessible novels, and those sorts of books have broken out beyond the confines of SF Fandom and into more mainstream, genre-curious readerships. When [I interviewed Scalzi back in 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/14934064/john-scalzi-the-collapsing-empire-old-mans-war-interview?ref=andrewliptak.com), he described himself as Tor's "easily accessible, gateway science fiction author." Which is totally fine: it helps bring people into the fold who might not have otherwise picked up a book. I thought *Kaiju Preservation Society* hit the right note for that wide audience, and judging from the announcement, it's done pretty well for Tor, which should broadly help the other authors it publishes. [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/03/IMG_5405.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) So, I generally see this as good news: A rising tide lifts all boats. Scalzi [followed up this announcement with some number crunching](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/07/30/some-number-crunching-on-career-sales-2024/?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that a bulk of his income isn't from books like *Kaiju* and *Starter Villains*, but from his backlist performing steadily year after year. I have to assume that Scalzi's readers don't *just* stick with him: they'll also pick up other genre books as well along the way. For the folks that don't particularly like his books? Well, there are plenty of others out there to choose from. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/08/Untitled-collage.jpg) Updated covers for John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. In a fun bit of serendipity, there's another indication from Tor that they're planning ahead for the 20th anniversary of Scalzi's debut novel, *Old Man's War*. As I noted above, he's noted that the book's his best seller by far, and there's a new installment coming down the pipeline in 2025\. While putting this post together, I found that it looks as though Tor is re-releasing the books with new covers (I'll point to the [piece I wrote last week about minimalist covers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/)), presumably to celebrate that milestone and get readers excited for the next book. The first two, [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359735?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Ghost Brigades*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359551?ref=andrewliptak.com)will hit stores in November, while [*The Last Colony*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359537?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250359520?ref=andrewliptak.com) will hit stores in February 2025\. I don't see updated covers or listings on the various retailer sites for the other two books in the series, [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765369550?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com), but it might just be too early for those to have appeared just yet. Like any minimalist cover, your milage might vary. These are kind of neat, and they provide a fairly unified look for the series, but I do hope that Tor will bring back John Harris to do up the cover. It's hard to top his artwork. [Sci-fi John Harris on creativity and finding spiritualism in the cosmosJohn Harris talks about finding inspiration in the beauty of space and why AI can’t capture creative imagination![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/11/IMG_4554.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/) ### Peacock's Battlestar Galactica reboot is dead URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/peacock-battlestar-galactica-reboot-cancelled/ Last updated: 2024-09-23T22:12:23.000Z At the height of the streaming wars, it felt like there was something of an arms race on the part of streaming services to lock up as much original content as they could, which meant going through their archives to mine whatever content they could for their subscribers. That led to some zany experiments, like DC Universe, [a one-stop shop for all things DC Comics](https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/19/17589522/dc-universe-titans-streaming-service-san-diego-comic-con-2018?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which was [shut down](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fans-lead-the-way/) in September 2020) or Stargate Command (a [one-stop shop for all things *Stargate*](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/20/16007184/stargate-origins-sg-1-mgm-sdcc-2017?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), which [shut down in November 2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/stargate-centric-streaming-service-stargate-command-is-shutting-down/)). One of the projects that came out of that was a reboot of the SCI FI Channel's classic series *Battlestar Galactica,* to be helmed by *Mr. Robot's* Sam Esmail, and it appears that it's no longer in the works: [according to *Variety*](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/battlestar-galactica-reboot-canceled-peacock-1236091898/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Peacock isn't moving forward with the project. NBC announced that it was putting the reboot into [development back in 2019](https://deadline.com/2019/09/battlestar-galactica-reboot-drama-series-sam-esmail-nbc-streaming-service-peacock-1202736127/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for its then-upcoming streaming service, and ever since, there's been some caginess about what exactly it would be about, or how it would related (if at all) to Ron Moore's 2003 series. It was apparently a series that would have followed up the Moore version, with [word coming a year later](https://www.andrewliptak.com/battlestar-galactica-reboot-peacock/) that it wouldn't be a restart, but something set in the same world. It's quietly simmered in the background ever since, with Esmail tackling an [ambitious *Metropolis* reboot for Apple](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-sam-esmail-metropolis-series/) (which has since been [canceled due to the 2023 Writer's Strike](https://deadline.com/2023/10/sam-esmail-comment-metropolis-tv-seres-canceled-apple-ucp-strike-1235583713/?ref=andrewliptak.com)). The series was designed to be part of Peacock's lineup of original programming, but it never reached the point where it was formally greenlit to a series. Earlier this year, [word broke](https://deadline.com/2024/01/battlestar-galactica-reboot-derek-simonds-showrunner-peacock-sam-esmail-1235695526/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Peacock had brought on Derek Simonds to serve as showrunner and writer for the project. [Battlestar Galactica elevated sci-fi television 20 years agoLooking back on the influence of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/12/IMG_4886.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/battlestar-galactica-miniseries-scifi-tv-anniversary/) I've always been a little skeptical of this particular project, in no small part because Moore's reboot was an enormously transformative and consequential series when it first aired on the SCI FI Channel in 2003\. Following the survivors of a series of colonies that had been attacked by a race of robots known as the Cylons, that series was unlike anything that had aired in the genre to that point: a dark and serious series about genocide, the rule of law, and warfare that emerged in the immediate post-9/11 world. [The creeping dread of Battlestar Galactica’s miniseriesHappy Friday! This week has been pretty quiet, SF/F-wise: it seems like the news about the royal family, the anniversary of COVID-19, and the passage of the latest stimulus bill has sucked most of the oxygen out of the room. Instead, I’ve got some thoughts on a thing![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_adce806b-ea0b-4620-9c82-4da6e91856c7_1200x675-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-creeping-dread-of-battlestar-galacticas-miniseries/) I don't usually have an aversion to rebooting or continuing shows – *Battlestar Galactica* was itself a reboot! – but as I noted in the TO Slack channel, this reboot would have had to clear a very, very high bar. It wouldn't be impossible, but I had trouble seeing how a continuation would work, given that the (spoilers for a 20-year-old TV series) survivors ended up finding Earth. This was also something that the Syfy channel itself tried to do: After Moore's series came to an end in 2009, the network launched a prequel series, *Caprica*, in 2010\. Set decades before the events of *Battlestar Galactica*, it was designed to show off the events that led into it: the rise of the Cylons and some of the family dynamics that figured into the world and politics. It never quite hit with audiences, and was canceled after a season. A couple of years later, SyFy attempted another return with another prequel, *Blood & Chrome*, which was envisioned as a TV pilot, but which was eventually split up into 10 webisodes. At the same time, NBCUniversal had been working on another *Battlestar Galactica* property: a rebooted film from Bryan Singer, which wouldn't have had any relationship to Moore's series. Singer has long since left the project, but the studio hasn't given up on the idea: in 2020, Simon Kingsberg signed on as a [producer and writer for another rebooted film project](https://www.andrewliptak.com/simon-kinberg-battlestar-galactica-film-reboot/). It sounds like the folks behind the concept will be shopping it around, but that's a pretty standard line to hear when a studio halts development. Maybe someone will pick it up, but I'm not holding my breath. There are larger issues to tackling a *Battlestar Galactica* reboot that I think are likely to have thrown some roadblocks in the path here. Back in 2022, I [noted that there seemed to be quite a bit of confusion](https://www.andrewliptak.com/battlestar-galactica-nbc-sam-esmail-simon-kinberg-sci-fi-franchise-streaming/) stemming from NBCUniversal over the nature of the property and the various projects that were part of it. The most successful shared-universe projects, be it *Star Wars, Star Trek,* *Stargate* or Marvel tend to have some level of coordination between their various parts: there's an understanding that these stories are part of a much larger canvas. *Battlestar Galactica* certainly feels like it's part of a larger world, and its various spinoffs leaned neatly into that. But *Caprica* felt like it was something a little too far removed from the experience of its predecessor: were fans really looking for a show that was completely different in tone that explained some of the roots of the events of *BSG*? And while *Blood & Chrome* was more in line with the harder military SF of the show, were viewers going to go out of their way to watch something online? I feel like *Battlestar, Caprica,* and *Blood & Chrome* arrived at the party a bit too early to really blossom into the bigger story that it could have become. Where I think about this new series that Peacock was developing, is the gravity of that original show really going to pull fans back two decades later for a continuation? Maybe: it has worked in the past. *Star Trek* could be held up as a good example. But there were factors leading to *Star Trek*'s revival that are unique to it: it exploded in popularity when it hit syndication and when it was played all the time on local channels. *Battlestar* has certainly had its reruns on the Syfy and on streaming services, but I don't think it's experienced the same level of fervor that *Trek* did. It's not hard to understand why: there are lots and lots of other options out there if you're a science fiction fan. I think that NBC fumbled this one: *Battlestar Galactica* as a concept – survivors of a colony escaping to try and find their mythical homeland – is a sound one, but somewhat limited. The survivors escape and go somewhere, a story that was limited to that original show. I think the world could have supported a franchise along the lines of *Star Trek*, had NBC figured out some sort of succession plan to Moore's *BSG* when it went off the air in 2009, and figured out what the bigger world was. And of course, there are a lot of unknowns here: we don't know what Esmail's BSG would have looked like or been about. I don't think I could see this series as being something like another fleet of ships escaping (and essentially running parallel to the series), and given where the series left off, I'd have a hard time seeing them leaving Earth again. But then again, those are the types of things that can surprise you and turn into a really excellent and compelling story (sort of like HBO's *Watchmen*, which was advertised in some weird, confusing ways, but which turned out to be really excellent.) So, it's a shame that we can't see what Esmail and his partners would have come up with: to see if they'd be able to top that high bar that Moore's *BSG* left behind. If they couldn't, it would at least be interesting to watch the attempt. If they did, well, we'd really be missing out. ### Awards roundup URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/arthur-clark-ignyte-theodore-sturgeon-ursula-le-guin-awards/ Last updated: 2024-08-03T15:19:32.000Z Summertime is the big awards season for the larger SF/F community, and the last couple of weeks have seen the release of a whole bunch of finalist lists (and one award), which turn out to be some excellent reading lists. Here's the latest: ### The Arthur C. Clarke Award Back in May, the folks behind the Arthur C. Clarke award [announced the finalists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-finalists-for-the-2024-arthur-c-clarke-award/) for this year's prize. They just announced the winner from those finalists: [*In Ascension*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780802163462?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Martin MacInnes. The novel is about a microbiologist investigating the life in the ocean's depths. When she discovers a new trench in the Atlantic, she's hoping to discover new forms of life that might yield some insight into how life evolved on Earth. According to Dr Andrew M. Butler, Chair of Judges, “*In Ascension* shows us, in the words of one judge, 'vistas between the cellular and the cosmic.' It’s an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.” [Here are the finalists for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke awardSome of the best works of science fiction from 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/IMG_7566.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-finalists-for-the-2024-arthur-c-clarke-award/) ### 2024 Ignyte Award Finalists The Ignyte Award was founded alongside FIYAHCON in 2020, and were designed to honor BIPOC contributions to the SF/F genres. The awards have announced this year's shortlist, which includes an excellent range of authors. **Outstanding Novel: Adult** - *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose - *The Saint of Bright Doors by* Vajra Chandrasekera - *The Water Outlaws* by S.L. Huang - *Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon* by Wole Talabi - *We are the Crisis* by Cadwell Turnbull **Outstanding Novella** - *Sordidez* by E.G. Condé - *Off-Time Jive* by A.Z. Louise - *Green Fuse Burning* by Tiffany Morris - *The Mimicking of Known Successes* by Malka Older - *The Lies of the Ajungo* by Moses Ose Utomi You can see and vote for the rest of the finalists [here](https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/vote/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### 2024 Theodore A. Sturgeon Award Finalists [](https://locusmag.com/2024/07/2024-sturgeon-award-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com) The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas has announced its annual slate of finalists for the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award. Named for noted author [Theodore Sturgeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore%5FSturgeon?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), this award has been handed out since 1987 and honors the best short fiction published in the prior year. Here are the finalists: - “The Rainbow Ghosts”, Violet Allen (*Luminescent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention*) - “[Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe](https://strangehorizons.com/fiction/patsy-cline-sings-sweet-dreams-to-the-universe/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Beston Barnett (*Strange Horizons* 11/20/23) - “[The Unpastured Sea](https://www.asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TheUnpasturedSea%5FFeeley.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Gregory Feeley (*Asimov’s* 9-10/23) - “[Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/?ref=andrewliptak.com)″, R.S.A. Garcia (*Uncanny* 7/23) - “[The State Street Robot Factory](https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/the-state-street-robot-factory/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Claire Humphrey (*Apex* 3/23) - “[What It Means to Be a Car](https://reactormag.com/what-it-means-to-be-a-car-james-patrick-kelly/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, James Patrick Kelly (*Tor.com* 7/26/23) - “[The Year Without Sunshine](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Naomi Kritzer (*Uncanny* 11-12/23) - “[Notes From a Pyre](https://thedeadlands.com/issue-23/pyre/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Amal Singh (*The Deadlands* 3/23) - “[An Infestation of Blue](https://www.analogsf.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/InfestationBlue%5FWagner-1.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Wendy N. Wagner (*Analog* 11-12/23) This year's winner will be announced this summer. They'll win a cash prize and will be named the guest of honor at the third annual [Sturgeon Symposium](https://sfcenter.ku.edu/sturgeon-award?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will be held between October 24-25, 2024\. ### 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin **Prize** A couple of years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin's literary estate announced a new award: the [Ursula K. Le Guin Prize](https://www.ursulakleguin.com/prize-overview?ref=andrewliptak.com), which seeks to honor the late author by recognizing an author for their work of "imaginative fiction". The winner of the award receives a $25,000 cash prize. The first winner of the award in 2022 was Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for her book [*The House of Rust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781644450680?ref=andrewliptak.com), while Rebecca Campbell earned the award in 2023 for her novel [*Arboreality*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781777682323?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This year's selection panel includes Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado. The winner will be announced October 21, 2024. Here are this year's finalists: - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *The Skin and Its Girl* by Sarah Cypher - *It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over* by Anne de Marcken - *Orbital* by Samantha Harvey - *Sift* by Alissa Hattman - *Those Beyond the Wall* by Micaiah Johnson - *The Library of Broken Worlds* by Alaya Dawn Johnson - *The Siege of Burning Grass* by Premee Mohamed - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo Finally, this year's World Science Fiction Convention is being held next weekend in Glasgow, Scotland, where we'll see this year's Hugo Awards announced. Hopefully, there'll be less [fuss](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/) than last time around. [Here are this year's finalists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-hugo-award-finalists-glasgow-worldcon/). ### Timothy Zahn’s Conquerors’ trilogy is just as good as his Thrawn novels URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/timothy-zahn-conquerors-trilogy-sci-fi-books/ Last updated: 2024-08-01T13:00:19.000Z If you’re a sci-fi fan of a certain age, when you hear the name Timothy Zahn, you tend to think of one thing: *Star Wars*. Zahn played an enormous role in developing the Star Wars Expanded Universe, first with his Thrawn trilogy, and later, with the Hand of Thrawn duology and associated standalone books. They’re fine reads, and the first place to go if you want a great *Star Wars* novel, but they’ve come to eclipse the fact that Zahn’s productive, award-winning career as a science fiction author began in the early 1980s, and continued well beyond the galaxy far, far away. Nearly two decades ago, following the completion of that first Star Wars trilogy, Zahn released another saga of interstellar war that’s every bit as thrilling: the *Conqueror's* trilogy. [Building a Galaxy: Heir to the TrilogyWhile the Star Wars franchise is best known for its films, it’s also well-known for its sprawling novel series, the Star Wars Expanded Universe. While it’s no longer canon, it kept Star Wars going for decades, and still retains a loyal following.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/05/IMG_0529.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-thrawn-trilogy-expanded-universe/) The trilogy picks up in the far-future with [*Conquerors’ Pride*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553568929?ref=andrewliptak.com). Commander Pheylan Cavanagh is in charge of a Commonwealth task force, which has discovered signs of a new alien race: four ships “milky white in color, shaped like thick hexagonal slabs of random sizes attached to each other at random edges. Alien as hell.” It is the Commonwealth’s first contact with another species, and moments after they transmit an introductory radio burst, the alien ships open fire, destroying the task force in six minutes. Cavanagh escapes, and watches in horror as the escaping life pods are methodically destroyed as well. At home, Cavanagh’s father, a former member of the Commonwealth parliament, learns that his son might still be alive. As the threat of invasion nears, he defies governmental measures and convinces Copperhead pilot Adam Quinn to exit Commonwealth space, locate his son, and bring him home. All the while, Pheylan Cavanagh contends with his status of a prisoner of war, and formulates his own plan to escape. In the second novel,*Conquerors’ Heritage*, Zahn does something unconventional: he flips the viewpoint to the invading alien Zhirrzh, whose was with humanity has ground to a stand-still. Their lone prisoner, Cavanaugh, has escaped, and now, factions within their society have begun to make their own moves, with drastic consequences. Then, there’s the question of what started the war: according to the Zhirrzh, humans fired the first shot. [Review: Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called PeaceTwo novels, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace and Timothy Zahn’s Conqueror’s Pride deal with first contact in some interesting ways![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/07/IMG_2064.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-first-contact-desolation-conquerors-martine-zahn/) Finally, in *Conquerors’ Legacy*, Zahn alternates viewpoints, as humans and Zhirrzh barrel toward one another and the war escalates. Factions on each side race to understand how the war started, and are stunned at the tragic revelations they uncover. To prevent all-out annihilation, a small alliance of members from both species will go to great lengths to bring conspiracies to light and end the war. Zahn has long been one of my favorite hard SF writers, and the Conquerors’ trilogy is a series I’ve read and reread. With these novels, and many of his other works, Zahn assembled a fantastic space opera with a rich background and interesting set of characters. What stands out the most, however, isn’t the physics, or how the Commonwealth is composed, or the warfare, but the way an entire intergalactic war can be traced back to a terrible mistake. Throughout science fiction history, there have been many tales of first contact, with good and bad outcomes. This is one of the first I encountered that thoroughly examines the fallout. First contact is a trope that’s often underestimated: imagine being dropped into a foreign culture with no way to communicate—not even a shared genetic heritage. It’s hard! Zahn points to another factor: the assumptions that we believe we can rely on—surely a space-faring alien race would be able to utilize radio, mathematics, and other “basic” technology—may be gross errors. His switch from the human side to the alien helps immensely to get his point across, avoid heavy-handed plot twists that paint alien invaders as an unknowable menace, and reveal the entire situation as deeply complicated. The action occurs due to mistaken assumptions, but Zahn goes a step further: he recognizes that in any highly complex situation, there are individuals more than willing to take advantage of the confusion for their own gain. Both humans and Zhirrzh retreat to their respective corners, pushed along by internal agents who are pointedly trying to engage in a war to their own ultimate benefit. It’s what makes the *Conquerors’* trilogy work so well: Zahn presents warfare as a complicated, shifting event, rather than as a place for characters to prove their worth and show off their bravery. In doing so, he’s constructed a fantastic, under-appreciated space opera that balances action and politics in a captivating narrative that has stuck with me for years. --- ### Judging the covers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-book-covers-design-art/ Last updated: 2024-07-31T13:00:52.000Z I like cover art quite a bit. I often think about books not just as bricks of paper and glue containing a story, but as a whole package, of which the cover is an integral part. Covers have the ability to make or break a book for audiences, and I'm always intrigued to see when a publisher decides to go through the additional effort to give a book a new look. Sometimes, it's down to the length of time between books and tastes / preferences have changed. Other times, a publisher has opted to update a popular series with a new look, taking advantage of those changes, looking to introduce them to new readers. [A new look for Iain M. BanksOrbit will release all of the late author’s works with new, minimalist covers![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/10/BANKS-reissies.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/) Those big, popular books? Just look at the progression that series like *Harry Potter*, *The Lord of the Rings* (so many changes over the years), or Iain M. Banks's *Culture* series. The latest to get a change in covers? George R.R. Martin's *A Song of Ice and Fire*, [which will come out in October](https://www.ign.com/articles/george-rr-martin-reveals-new-covers-for-a-game-of-thrones-and-whole-song-of-ice-and-fire-series?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a series of new linocut covers designed by Mark Seekins with jacket design by Tim Green of [Faceout Studio](http://faceoutstudio.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), with art direction by David G. Stevenson. I really dig this look, especially at a point in time when covers are moving increasingly to minimalist, text-driven designs. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/07/Untitled-collage.jpg) Some recent examples of covers being redone in a modern, minimalist style. Images: Orbit, Tor, and Penguin Random House As I noted when I wrote about the changes to Banks's *Culture* series, these sorts of changes can be hit-or-miss, something that I've found especially true when you start off with a really high point, like Ann Leckie's *Ancillary Justice* or Lev Grossman's *Magicians* books. I don't think that this new crop of covers really captures the magic of the books that the originals do, and I'd point to the two *Magicians* styles as opposing examples of how minimalism can work or not work for the books. I utterly adored the [stark cover of the original book](https://aidanmoher.com/blog/2009/08/art/cover-art/cover-art-synopsis-the-magicians-by-lev-grossman/?ref=andrewliptak.com). While it didn't really say much of anything about what the book was about–it fit neatly into the "this is a fantasy novel for people who like *real* books" design trend of the 2000s–it conveyed a sort of otherworldliness and seriousness that worked really well for this particular story. I don't think the new covers quite capture that. On the other side of things, Martin's books have always had a sort of minimal presence, starting in 1996 with the release of *A Game of Thrones*, before leaning a bit of the 1990s-style epic fantasy art before going back to the stark designs for *A Feast of Crows* (2005) and *A Dance with Dragons* (2011). Whenever Martin completes *Winds of Winter*, the cover design has long since moved on to a different style of minimalism. ![](https://i0.wp.com/www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/51020/game-of-thrones-a-clash-of-kings-a-storm-of-swords-george-rr-martin-first-edition-signed-1996-2011-2.jpg?fit=1000%2C553&ssl=1) Image: [Raptis Rare Books](https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/game-of-thrones-a-clash-of-kings-a-storm-of-swords-george-rr-martin-first-edition-signed-1996-2011-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com) I've always found the ASOIF covers pretty bland. When I first came to the series, I picked up the chunky 2005-era mass market editions that came out with *A Feast for Crows* that focused on distinctive colors for each edition, with a simple and elegant typeface and a central house sigil*.* The last batch of redesigns followed a similar pattern in the style of *A Dance with Dragons.* None of these covers are particularly inspiring, but they also don't really need to be: the series is already exceptionally well-known, so the need to entice a reader is diminished. Still, if you look through the [various iterations of the series covers](https://georgerrmartin.com/all-books/cover-gallery/a-song-of-ice-and-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com), they're all pretty boring! [Writing on his blog](https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/07/10/a-bold-new-look-for-the-a-song-of-ice-and-fire-boxed-set/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Martin explained that they wanted to "capture the vastness of Westeros and the dangerous journey readers will encounter. There is a raw and gritty quality to linocut and woodcut art. A certain starkness that seemed to fit the stories, and a long history to the art form that felt right for this world." I think that these new covers accomplish that: they spell out something about the tone and nature of the series. If Faceout Studio sounds familiar, you might have come across one of their designers on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ez.bookdesign/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Elisha Zepeda](https://www.elishazepeda.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who's been using the platform to sketch out his work on designing covers. He didn't work on the ASOIF books, but he's part of a studio that's [produced some outstanding covers over the last couple of years](https://www.faceoutstudio.com/work?ref=andrewliptak.com). In a recent interview with *Publishers Weekly*, [he made a good observation](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/95545-booktok-s-favorite-book-designer.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how and why so many books end up looking the same: > "I also think that seeing a handful of designs proposed—which start out as artistic and inspired, then often are reduced to looking like a knockoff of a bestseller—just gets under people’s skin. The industry corners itself into saying, “This is how big text should be,” and, “We have to be mindful of the tiny thumbnail.” But why shouldn’t book covers look like art? Seeing the visceral response in the comments section makes me feel like I’m not crazy. I’m only spending $30 on a hardcover if it looks like art that I can display. It’s the whole reason vinyl is back today—people want a tangible way to show off their interests. Why not lean into that in publishing? Giving a cover a dime-a-dozen look that will be lost in the oblivion of similar covers feels like a waste. Most of my viewers share that sentiment." "Why shouldn't this look like art?" is an excellent question to ask, especially when hardcover books are hitting the $30 or $35 mark. Publishers face incredible competition not only from their rival publishers, but from other entertainments like streaming services, video games, and social media. Producing something that stands out and helps capture someone's attention from those distractions has never been more important. The rise of visual influencing through movements like [BookTok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookTok?ref=andrewliptak.com) does seem to be pushing for greater demand from readers for good design and cover art: as Zepeda notes, readers want to display books on their shelves. *(Obviously, there are limits to how far you can take this; I can't help but roll my eyes at a emptiness of a perfectly-curated bookshelf that only exists to serve as a backdrop for a reel on Instagram. I like my personal bookshelves to be a busy riot of colors and styles.)* Publishers should take heed and ensure that if they're going through the effort and expense to produce a book, they should be making sure that the thing readers and buyers see first makes a good first impression. [Sci-fi John Harris on creativity and finding spiritualism in the cosmosJohn Harris talks about finding inspiration in the beauty of space and why AI can’t capture creative imagination![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/11/IMG_4554.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/) I think that's a positive direction for publishers to go, especially as we're in the early days of an age where generative AI platforms can cook up artwork in seconds, or where designers and publishers [chasing trends](https://www.printmag.com/book-covers/the-book-cover-behold-the-book-blob/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and come up with something that's indistinguishable from their neighbors on the shelves. Good cover art and design shows intent and a creative spirit from the entire team behind the book, and an outstanding image can help define a story long into the future (look no further than the [impact that artist John Schoenherr had](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the%5Fartist%5Fwho%5Fvisited%5Fdune?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Frank Herbert's *Dune* series). Readers recognize when there is creative effort put into a project. ![May be an image of text](https://scontent-lga3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/451698783_18446270731011499_5849479644781375384_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=J66J3K29q7gQ7kNvgGSwkg6&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-2.xx&oh=00_AYCTZ84xtudcpn3-aQZDCsHhhZaL6Jl7fSLA_7CtP6LyUg&oe=66AAC055) Image: Faceout Studio That's what really draws me to these new covers for AOIAF. Martin recounts some of the process that went into the design on his blog: "\[linocut artist Mark Seekins and designer Tim Green\] worked together to develop sketches and carve the designs into blocks of linoleum, where the raised areas were inked and pressed onto paper. The covers feature several colors, which required separate blocks for each color layer. The finished prints were then photographed and incorporated into the covers." That's a lot of physical and artistic work, but the results really speak for themselves. You can watch a [reel on their Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/reel/1147241133173450) where they show how those layers come together. It's pretty cool to watch. I'm not willing to give up the [Folio Society editions that I have of Martin's series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/game-of-throne-clash-of-kings-folio-society-jonathan-burton-interview-george-rr-martin/) (even if it would save me precious inches on the bookshelf), but these are distinctive, interesting covers, and you can't help but take them in, which is what these are supposed to do. ### For Democracy! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/helldivers-2-cosplay-making/ Last updated: 2024-07-30T21:59:13.000Z Cosplay is an interesting hobby, and over the last two decades that I've been involved in it, it's undergone some fascinating changes. One thing that I've noted (and wrote about in my book, *Cosplay: A History*) is how cosplayers are often operating on a cycle, where you'll see a handful of popular costumes pop up on the convention scene, because that's the big story of the year. Some of those costumes have included things like Harley Quinn from various DC movies, Eddie Munson from *Stranger Things*, Spartans from *300*, and so forth. One of this year's big stories? The video game *Helldivers 2*, which has taken over my Instagram and Facebook feeds in recent months, and which seems poised to be a huge costume this year. The game is a sequel to the 2015 game *Helldivers*, which is set in the distant future as humanity fights to protect Super Earth from alien enemies. It draws plenty of inspiration from Robert Heinlein's *Starship Troopers* (and the 1997 film adaptation by Paul Verhoeven), with players fighting as soldiers working to uphold humanity's existence under a "managed democracy." As an MMO shooter, *Helldivers 2* leans heavily into the satirical propaganda that defined the film, and players are tasked with working together on missions fending off giant alien bugs and robots. Shortly after its release (Playstation and PC) in February, *Helldivers 2* [exploded in popularity](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/helldivers-2-blowing-through-sales-estimates-as-servers-struggle-to-meet-demand/1100-6520994/?ref=andrewliptak.com), with players sharing clips of the action as they blow up aliens and often, each other. [John Rodriguez](https://www.instagram.com/alphaignition/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) is a cosplayer and prop maker in California (who I recently spoke with [about his involvement in Apple's Mandalorian commercial](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-star-wars-commercial-cosplay-fandom/)) who's been chronicling his work to put together a squad of Helldivers for this year's convention season. Rodriguez became interested in cosplay around 2016 when he attended his first convention. He enjoyed the experience and began building costumes of his own. He ended up joining the 501st Legion and Mandalorian Mercs and has found work making props and costumes for a variety of projects. He noted that he's recently gotten into Helldivers, and that the game's main appeal has been its cooperative nature: "you're playing WITH other players and not against them," he told me. "It's US vs them (them being bots, etc...) The amount of camaraderie that is built off that type of interaction is contagious." Shortly after the game's release, he began working on building a costume of the B-01 Tactical Armor from the games, printing off parts from [Yosh Studios](https://www.etsy.com/shop/yoshstudios/?etsrc=sdt&ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Dungeons & Starships](https://thangs.com/designer/dungeonsandstarships?ref=andrewliptak.com). Hoping to get a squad together for this year's San Diego Comic Con, [he announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/C4qJ9viL6r3/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'd be opening up a kit run for costumers looking to make their own. After getting the various armor components printed, he explained that he then moved on to make molds to cast the armor in a semi-rigid urethane resin. The components are pretty straightforward for someone to assemble: a helmet, armor that covers one's chest, shoulders, arms, thighs, knees, and shins, along with a black uniform and cape. He isn't alone in making the armor: plenty of other cosplayers, like [3D Printing studio/shop Galactic Armory](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c67dm5/finished%5Fmy%5Fhelldiver%5Fcosplay/?ref=andrewliptak.com), have completed their own builds and produced tutorials for making armor for one's self. Rodriguez noted that part of the appeal of this costume was that "you get to live out the game in person with three other friends," and that there was just enough variation between characters that cosplayers can "make them unique while still being uniform with your team." He turned out a team of troopers this year at San Diego Comic Con, along with a number of others. We’ll have to see if the game’s popularity will endure and if we’ll see them deploying to more cons in the future. ### Superpowered corrosion URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/austin-grossman-fight-me-superheroes-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-07-27T18:41:03.000Z Stan Lee's oft-repeated line from *Amazing Fantasy* #15, "with great power comes great responsibility" is one of the superhero genre's most iconic phrases, one that's helped to define and direct not only Spider-man, but tons of other vibrant superheroes and creators who've followed. It's a line that draws a line in the sand for heroes: you can use your powers for good, or for ill. Those stark contrasts work well in the pages of a comic book, but the real world doesn't break down as easily into black and white moral sides. Life is complicated, and there are few people who fall into straightforward categories. Good people do bad things all the time, and bad people are sometimes virtuous. That dynamic is at the core of Austin Grossman's latest novel, [*Fight Me*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446205/fight-me-by-grossman-austin/9780241555941?ref=andrewliptak.com), a time-jumping story of four superheroes who're trying to figure out their place and their powers as they get along with one another as they work to solve a mysterious death. It's a book that I've been waiting for: years ago, Grossman's debut novel [*Soon I Will Be Invincible*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307279866?ref=andrewliptak.com) blew me away with its serious take on superheroes, years before the tidal wave of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or DC Expanded Universe films that took over movie theaters. Rereading it before digging into *Fight Me*, I found that it held up exceptionally well, 17 years and untold numbers of CGI superhero fights later. In that story, Grossman introduces us to two intriguing characters: Doctor Impossible, a scheming, genius criminal who's tried to take over the world many times, only to get foiled over and over, and Fatale, a woman who was turned into a cyborg after a horrific accident and who's been moonlighting as a gun for hire for the US. Government. When Doctor Impossible escapes from prison, and a superhero named CoreFire goes missing, she's invited to join a superhero team called The Champions. ![May be an image of vulture and text](https://scontent-lga3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/449147792_999067828886550_1043155025877865971_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=833d8c&_nc_ohc=ue94uS3_WEwQ7kNvgF_GI2V&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-2.xx&oh=00_AYB_QzVxhiixEDzgjBSvMd2SIimR3MXqwrENQHjMIFdgRg&oe=66AADFE8) Image: Andrew Liptak Through their two stories, Grossman explored the tropes and themes of comic book superheroes in a grounded way, while never losing sight of what really makes these stories so much fun to read. Doctor Impossible is focused on world domination, while the Champions are a colorful array costumes and powers. While comics arcs like Marvel's [*Demon in a Bottle*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon%5Fin%5Fa%5FBottle?ref=andrewliptak.com)or [*Civil War*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil%5FWar%5F%28comics%29?ref=andrewliptak.com)played with serious, grounded issues like alcoholism or the role of government oversight, it's not always the first thing that comes to mind. Grossman plays his superheroes as real, complicated people: Fatale tries to find her place in this new team and her various members have their own complicated pasts and relationships that form an uncomfortable set of personalities and dynamics that they have to navigate as they work to find both Doctor Impossible and CoreFire. It's an excellent read that explored how superheroes were just as prone to the issues that most folks deal with. More than a decade later, Grossman has returned to the superhero genre with a new book, [*Fight Me*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446205/fight-me-by-grossman-austin/9780241555941?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he takes another look at how people with incredible abilities cope with the power that they have at their disposal. It's not exactly a sequel to *Soon I Will Be Invincible*, but it's set in the same world, and there are some neat references here and there. In the mid-1990s, Alex Beekman's teacher leads him to a cave and gives him a magical amulet that allows him to transform into Prodigy, a superhero who's nearly indestructible, before vanishing, leaving him without guidance beyond doing good with his powers. After a fight at a school social goes terribly wrong, Andrew is scooped up by a government agency placed in a group with a couple of other teenage misfits: the super-intelligent Jack, a supersoldier named Cat, and an exiled fae princess named Stefanie. Thrown together into a team called the Newcomers, they work to figure out their powers as they're tasked with trying to track down a time-traveling supervillain named Sinistro. Along the way, things go wrong, and Prodigy goes into retirement. Alex becomes Dr. Rick Tower, a bland English professor teaching at a college in New England, watched by the government to make sure that he's staying out of trouble. When a communicator blinks to life and he discovers that the teacher who gave him the amulet has been murdered, he's pulled back into the superhero life and into contact with his former teammates to try and figure out what was behind the killing. If *Soon I Will Be Invincible* is Grossman's take on a superhero origin story, *Fight Me* is his take on the superhero team, and along the way, explores how a person deals with superpowers and how their personal moralities aren't quite as straightforward as we've seen in comics over the years. Teenager Alex goes through the usual motions of a superhero origin story: an ordinary kid who's suddenly imbued with powers. He does what most kids do: goes out into the woods and explores the limits of his abilities, and when he's confronted by a group of his fellow students at a school dance, he does what any immature person would do: he ends up transforming into Prodigy and fights back, putting his assailants in the hospital and leveling the school. In a film or comic, this might have been played off as a learning opportunity, a moment where a trusted mentor tells him that he has a moral obligation to use those powers for good. Here, Alex is detained by a government agency that's used to scooping up superhumans, and told that he's got several strikes against him. His companions are also similarly under scrutiny, and they're given an opportunity to redeem themselves: specialized training where they can learn to use their powers in a somewhat responsible way, under the guidance of an agent/mentor who turns out to be more complicated than they thought. Grossman jumps between the early to mid 1990s and 2015, watching as the characters come into their powers and later deal with the death that pulls them back in. That time jump is essential (and made all the more fun when it becomes clear that time travel is an important part of the plot), because we get to see how these characters come to terms with their powers. There's an important moment early in the book when Alex is questioned about the incident that landed him in the hands of the government: what did he *really* feel when he beat those kids to a pulp? Some gratification and pleasure at them getting what they deserved? Later, as the crew gets together to try and figure out who's behind the murder, we learn more about what's driving each of these characters, and how their respective powers and connections to one another figure into how they're moving forward to attain their goals. That sounds a big vague, because I don't want to spoil how this unravels. But I will say that when push comes to shove, they're willing to do what it takes to get what they want. This is the sort of moment where superheroes are often forced to confront this temptation to take the higher, moral road, but in Grossman's hands, it's a dilemma that barely registers. These sort of power dynamics is something that I've thought about quite a bit over the years. Vermont has a [weird reputation](https://www.vermontpublic.org/vpr-news/2015-01-13/why-is-vermont-such-a-hotbed-for-embezzlement?ref=andrewliptak.com) for having some high rates of embezzlement from town officials, often people with positions of access to money and little oversight who just slip into theft because they can. At the same time, we've seen a wave of politicians go from being super critical of Donald Trump to becoming some of his more fervent supporters: it's easy to abandon one's principled stances when it becomes clear that they're an impediment to staying in power. Superhero stories are the modern day morality plays, portraying clear-cut ideas of right and wrong. Absolute good and bad do exist in the world, but it's sometimes easier to recognize that when you're watching from afar. Those ideas are percolating throughout this story: the rigid moral stances of the X-Men or the Avengers, but once Grossman's superheroes fly into action, they're often confronted by the fact that they're people who haven't necessarily sworn an oath or who're fighting on behalf of a morally-driven higher power. They're people, making decisions as they come up against each issue and antagonist. Superhero stories have exploded into even greater popularity since Grossman released *Soon I Will Be Invincible* and across film, television, comic books, and novels, creators have explored the nature of superpowers from every angle, from the mythic, epic and earnest depictions, to grim, cynical, and depraved takes. If there's a thread that ties these stories together, it's in how their respective creators are exploring how their characters come to and use their powers. Are superpowers corrosive, or do they clarify one's purpose and inner morality? Finding that dividing line between good and evil and all the shades between has been the fodder of plenty of creators over the years, and in *Fight Me*, Grossman paints a picture of what a world with superheroes might plausibly look like: one where one's conduct isn't necessarily something that's informed by one's internal moral compass, but by the external forces that buffer them. It's a world that isn't too unlike the one we're living in now. Indeed, there are powerful people operating around the world every day: politicians, tech barons, billionaires, world-famous fantasy authors, often acting with impunity *because they can*. It's not a good thing for the world. In many ways, that is what makes *Fight Me* is so compelling: it highlights the importance of that inner sense of morality that guides superheroes, why it's important for Ben Parker to whisper that famous line, and why believing that there are good and bad sides to the world is a healthy way to exist as we move through the world. We should do well to learn from our fictional heroes and live up to their examples, as Alex often tries to do throughout his journey. Grossman's book, like *Soon I Will Be Invincible,* is a compelling and enlightening look at the decisions we make with the power we have, while also serving as an antidote for superhero fatigue if you've grown tired of the latest round of Marvel films in theaters. ### Even more SF/F books to check out this July URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-to-read-july-2024-keanu-reeves-china-mieville/ Last updated: 2024-07-26T17:19:30.000Z July is drawing to a close: it's always astounding to me at how quickly the month has passed by, especially as each one of these book roundups means that I'm adding another couple of inches to my teetering to read pile. July has been packed with some excellent books, and the later half brings even more to shelves. In case you missed it, here's the [first list for July](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2024-scifi-book-list-grossman-bacigalupi-shepherd/) (you can always find other roundups via the [Book Lists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag). [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) If you've found these lists useful, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. This newsletter is free to read, but isn't free to produce: it takes time and resources to put it together. You can find more details [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). You can also support Transfer Orbit by purchasing a book through one of these list's affiliate links, the proceeds of which go into hosting on Ghost. Without further ado, here are 14 new SF/F books to check out before the end of July. Stay tuned next week for a roundup of August books. ### [*Navigational Entanglements*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250324887?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Aliette de Bodard (July 30th) In this new space opera from Aliette de Bodard, various clans of navigators take spaceships through a region of space known as the Hollows, a place inhabited by dangerous creatures known as Tanglers. When one escapes, the clans are forced to send representatives to track it down and contain it, including Việt Nhi, who's not thrilled to be heading out on this mission. She hates dealing with people. Another is Hạc Cúc, who'd rather be out assassinating people, but she's drawn to Nhi’s presence. When their leader is poisoned, the assembled crew have to figure out how to work together before the escaped Tangler can disrupt everything. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250324887?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this magnificent space opera from Nebula Award winner de Bodard is simultaneously electric and heartwarming, full of breathless queer romance, shifting clan politics, and many cups of tea." ### [*The Fan Who Knew Too Much*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803365527?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nev Fountain (July 24th) Nev Fountain kicks off a new series of mysteries with *The Fan Who Knew Too Much*, in which Kit Pelham, a professional podcaster who hosts fandom-related podcast, The First Cult. When her friend and fellow podcaster Wolf Tyler is murdered during a broadcast just before he's about to drop a bombshell, she realizes that he discovered something about a long-simmering mystery that's plagued a classic TV series, *Vixens from the Void*. An extra had gone missing back in the 1980s, and apparently there was some foul play involved. Kit and her friends decide to investigate themselves under the guise of a documentary about the series, and work to figure out who was behind the killing. And maybe learn a bit more about their favorite TV series. ### [*Castle of the Cursed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250863898?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Romina Garber (July 30th) After her parents are killed and dealing with survivor's guilt, Estela accepts an invitation to her family's ancestral home in Spain, la Sombra. There, she begins to realize that her parent's deaths might have something to do with some long-buried family secrets. When she meets a young man that only she can see, the two team up to try and figure out what is going on with the manor castle and town, before those secrets catch up to them. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/romina-garber/castle-of-the-cursed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Elements of *Dracula* meet “Beauty and the Beast” to create a dark, engaging atmosphere. While the romantic moments with Sebastián often interrupt the story’s genuine tension, and some of the family revelations veer into melodrama, the intriguing setting with its well-wrought details will keep readers engaged." ### [*I Was a Teenage Slasher*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668022245?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen Graham Jones (July 16th) Stephen Graham Jones has written some of the more compelling horror that I've read recently, such as [*The Only Good Indians*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982136468?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*My Heart is a Chainsaw*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982137649?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which was followed by [*Don't Fear the Reaper*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982186609?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Angel of Indian Lake*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668011669?ref=andrewliptak.com)). His latest takes readers to Lamesa, Texas in 1989\. There, 17-year-old Tolly Driver and his friends crash a party, only to discover that the victim of a violent prank has returned as a zombie, and as it works to get revenge from its killers, Tolly's infected with its blood, transforming him into a violent killer who begins to cut through the town. Christopher Bollen [reviewed the book for *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/i-was-a-teenage-slasher-stephen-graham-jones.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "what makes us not only follow Tolly but care about him as he bashes one teenager’s head into a camper and impales another with a twirling baton, is his spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades." [Three horror novels to keep you up at night in 2020Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, and Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_a6eb18c9-9b1b-4fa2-9ddd-39d2e3af8cd4_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-horror-novels-mexican-gothic-only-good-indians-survivor-song/) ### [*Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780744098822?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Kempshall (July 9th) If there were ever a book that felt tailor-made for me, it's this one: *The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire*, an in-universe history text that explores the story of how the Galactic Empire came into being and then collapsed over the course of the *Star Wars* movies. I've been reading this one for the last couple of days, and it's really quite a bit of fun. ### [*Descent*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542036153?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marko Kloos (July 16th) Marko Kloos has been busy in recent years. He [wrapped up his *Frontlines* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-marko-kloos/) and kicked off a new spinoff with [*Scorpio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542035491?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and this month, added a new entry in his Palladium series ([*Aftershocks*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542043533?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Ballistic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542090070?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Citadel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542027243?ref=andrewliptak.com)) in the form of *Descent*. Set in a system reeling from a devastating war, Aden Jansen was a soldier and POW who's been recruited by the Alliance, tasked with heading back to the planet Gretia to serve as an undercover operative to try and take down a brutal insurgency. [Sci-fi author Marko Kloos on what it takes to build a brand new solar systemHis new sci-fi series, the Palladium Wars, starts on July 1st![](https://www.theverge.com/icons/apple_touch_icon.png)The VergeAndrew Liptak![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/h7bE6hOhv2C7l9UgIEvH_JAnN_4=/0x0:2040x1360/1200x628/filters:focal(1009x1030:1010x1031)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13708511/mdoying_190117_3153_0001.jpg)](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/26/18194369/marko-kloos-palladium-wars-aftershocks-frontlines-science-fiction-book?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Force of Creativity*](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-force-of-creativity-5008878?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lego (July 20th) I have a distinct memory of when I got my first Star Wars Lego sets: the [7110 Landspeeder](https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/7110%5FLandspeeder?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [7128 Speeder Bikes](https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/7128%5FSpeeder%5FBikes?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the [7130 Snowspeeder](https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/7130%5FSnowspeeder?ref=andrewliptak.com). They were waiting for me when I came home from a session at summer camp, and I remember just how excited I was to get them: I'd grown up building Lego kits, and was head-over-heels in love with all things Star Wars. It was a perfect match. And it's a brand that's continued for a quarter century: to date, the company has produced nearly a thousand kits with [ever-increasing sophistication](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17215268/lego-star-wars-solo-tie-fighters-toys?ref=andrewliptak.com) in that time. I'm endlessly fascinated by how this company has changed and evolved with time, which is why *The Force of Creativity* looks like an excellent read. It's a 312-page book that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of the line. ### [*The Book of Elsewhere*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593446591?ref=andrewliptak.com) by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves (July 23rd) Here's a pair of names that I never expected I'd see together: China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. In 2021, Reeves made headlines when he teamed up with writer Matt Kindt artist Ron Garney to produce a comic called [*BRZRKR*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781684156856?ref=andrewliptak.com), about an immortal man named B who has been wandering the world for centuries, eventually ending up working for the U.S. government, with the promise that they'll tell him about the nature of his existence. [Netflix has since picked up the rights](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-develop-live-action-film-based-on-keanu-reevess-comic-book-brzrkr?ref=andrewliptak.com) to adapt the comics for a series (with Reeves tapped to star). He's now bringing the story to book form with the help of Miéville, fleshing out the story and adding new depth and nuance to it. *The L.A. Times* [says](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-17/keanu-reeves-book-of-elsewhere-china-mieville-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "where *“The Book of Elsewhere”* really shines, though, is when it departs from its contemporary setting. Alternating chapters give voice to the stories of other characters throughout history encountering Unute....Both sets of chapters add depth to Unute, bringing his predicament — he is an immortal who wishes he weren’t — to emotionally satisfying and morally complex places." ### [*The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827050?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chris Nashawaty (July 30th) The 1980s were quite the boon for classic science fiction films, particularly 1982, which saw the release of *E.T.: The Extraterrestrial*, *Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing*, and *Mad Max: The Road Warrior*. That's an impressive roster, and in this book, Chris Nashawaty takes a look at how these films came to be, and the impact they had on Hollywood. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chris-nashawaty/the-future-was-now/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "An exemplary film history that will appeal to sci-fi buffs and students of the film biz." ### [*The West Passage*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250884831?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jared Pechaček (July 16th) The Guardian of the West Passage died in her bed, and her companions at the Grey Tower fed her body to the crows. Her death meant that there was no one to take up the fallen blade and as a result, the West Passage was left unguarded. When snow arrives in the middle of the summer, it heralds the coming of the Beast, prompting the Mother of Grey House and the guardian's squire to work to save their people. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-west-passage-1806163?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Pechaček (a host of the Tolkien podcast *By-the-Bywater*) is unafraid to mix sweet whimsy with horror, which keeps readers’ tension high as they’re immersed in this fearsomely lovely realm." ### [*Gravity Lost*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250871282?ref=andrewliptak.com) by L. M. Sagas (July 23rd) Earlier this year, L.M. Sagas published [*Cascade Failure*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250871251?ref=andrewliptak.com), a fun-looking space opera about the crew of a ship that heads off to an abandoned planet to investigate a distress call, only to discover that the Trust, a massive corporate entity in the galaxy, has some plans for the place. In the next installment of this series, we're back with the crew of the Ambit, who thought that their troubles were over when they turned Isaiah Drestyn over to the Union. As it turns out, he knows a *lot* of secrets, and he's now a target from the major players in the galaxy, and now the crew of the Ambit has to break him out of jail to try and expose some of those secrets. ### [*The Spice Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063266834?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Prashanth Srivatsa (July 16th) Prashanth Srivatsa's debut novel is *The Spice Gate*, a new fantasy in which eight kingdoms are connected via a network of gates, left behind by a mysterious god. Only those born with a special mark are able to traverse them, and those select few are subjugated by cruel masters and must endure the pain of passing through the gates. One such person is Amir, who dreams of escaping his way of life serving the rich. As he's plotting his escape, a conspiracy has begun to emerge that'll upend the kingdoms and his plans for the future. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063266834?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Srivatsa’s worldbuilding is complex, captivating, and original. The result is a masterful fantasy epic bursting with flavor." ### [*Earthlight*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670342/earthlight-by-j-michael-straczynski/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by J. Michael Straczynski (July 9th) *Babylon 5*'s J. Michael Straczynski's latest project is an audio drama about a world primed for war. Russia forms the Eastern Alliance to try and further its influence around the world, prompting NATO to create Project Earthlight. This program has selected some of the best fighter pilots in the world to fly a new generation of space-borne fighter craft in order to try and avert a new world war. Given *Babylon 5*'s excellent use of starfighters, this sounds like it'll be a really fascinating listen. ### *Area X Trilogy* by Jeff VanderMeer (July 30th) Ten years ago, Jeff VanderMeer released his epic, horrifying Area X trilogy and in October, he'll release a fourth installment of the series, [*Absolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374616595?ref=andrewliptak.com). In advance of that release, his publisher is re-releasing the trilogy ([*Annihilation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824042?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Authority*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824059?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and* [*Acceptance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250824066?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with new covers and each with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler, N.K. Jemisin, and Helen McDonald (respectively). --- That's all for now: thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments: what catches your eye and what have you been reading lately? ### Undoing extinction URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ray-nayler-tusks-of-extinction-science-fiction-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-07-22T12:00:47.000Z For years, scientists and environmentalists have talked about ways to resurrect animals that have vanished from the world's ecosystems. Humanity's impact has been devastating for the natural world, bringing about the end of animals like the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon, and countless others. As science has advanced, it's opened the door to new possibilities, such as cloning or gene editing as techniques that could them back to life. In fiction, de-extinction has been popularized by works like Michael Crichton's *Jurassic Park*, which imagined the return of the dinosaurs for a theme park, only to have devasting consequences. In his latest book, [*The Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855527?ref=andrewliptak.com), Ray Nayler lays out a story in which the woolly mammoth is brought back to life and muses on not only the complicated relationship that humanity has on the natural world, but on some of the complications and compromises that we undertake to preserve endangered species. Sometime in the near future, a company in Moscow figures out how to resurrect the woolly mammoth and begins a breeding program to try and repopulate its northern regions. The program runs into problems: the mammoths they do manage to breed are aimless and seem to lack some "natural" instincts, so they turn to an unconventional tactic: they upload the mind of an elephant scientist named Dr. Damira Khismatullina, in the hopes that she might be able to teach the new creatures how to act like elephants. That work is vital to the survival of the program: with their return, so too does the black market demand for hunting the elephants, and poachers have already been assembling to try and take the beasts. Nayler's impressed me with his debut [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com)in which he balanced big ideas such as the nature of intelligence and consciousness, environmentalism, and the destructive nature of a society built on hyper-capitalism. With *The Tusks of Extinction*, he slims down most of those ideas, but holds back none of the punch: it's a powerful novella that explores our relationship with the natural world, and how we need to solve some serious underlying conditions before we go about trying to undo the damage we've wrought – otherwise, we'll be trapped in repeating loop. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) This story plays out from a couple of angles. There's Damira's perspective, in which she's abruptly "awoken" from her digital stasis, and informed that she's the last hope of this herd of resurrected mammoths. Then there's Svyatoslav, a Russian poacher who experiences a disaster when the hunting party he's part of encounters a herd of mammoths, and Vladimir and his husband Anthony, who've arrived at the preserve to legally hunt the mammoths as part of a special program that keeps their upkeep funded. Poaching is a vocation that relies on scarcity. As animal populations decline, the demand for their parts or bodies increases, fueling an ever-present black market that pits poachers and conservationists against one another. Countries have resorted to a range of measures to counter the practice, such as banning ivory or the sale of various parts from endangered creatures, [to injecting rhinos with a radioactive isotope to detect poached parts](https://www.barrons.com/news/first-radioactive-rhino-horns-to-curb-poaching-in-s-africa-ac6221e5?ref=andrewliptak.com), to [issuing permits to hunt endangered animals to raise funds for local communities](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/26/south-africa-grants-permits-to-hunt-10-critically-endangered-black-rhino?ref=andrewliptak.com). With the reintroduction of mammoths to the world, Nayler anticipates that they too would become targets for those big-game hunters who're drawn to being one of the few to take down a rare animal. Reintroduced to Siberia, he details the various methods steps taken to keep the animals safe from poachers: they're reintroduced to a remote steppe, where the vast Russian wilderness acts as a natural buffer. Misinformation about advanced drones and counter-poacher teams, horse-bound rangers, and human intelligence provide additional layers of protection, all while they let in small numbers of authorized hunters who're willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to take down one of the animals. That money is put back into their care and protection, and those who embark on hunts aren't permitted to ever talk about their experiences, let alone keep the animals they take. In detailing these three interlocking stories, Nayler deftly critiques our place in the natural world and the problems that we face when it comes to conservation. These natural populations do not exist just for the pleasure of humans, be it hunting or appreciation from afar; they're part of the natural world and ecosystem, and our desire to hunt these animals for sport is a destructive one. We're living through a period of unprecedented destruction of the natural world, an [extinction event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene%5Fextinction?ref=andrewliptak.com) that will ultimately be on par with the ones that took place during the [Late Ordovician](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late%5FOrdovician%5Fmass%5Fextinction?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Late Devonian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late%5FDevonian%5Fextinction?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [Permian/Triassic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic%5Fextinction%5Fevent?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [Triassic/Jurassic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic%E2%80%93Jurassic%5Fextinction%5Fevent?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the [Cretaceous/Paleogene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene%5Fextinction%5Fevent?ref=andrewliptak.com) periods. These were world-altering events, largely driven by everything from natural geologic processes to asteroid impacts. While these events are the result of a complicated knot of factors, humanity's footprint has disrupted ecosystems and left a lasting mark on the natural world, one that will likely have consequences for millennia to come. One thing that I'll note about this particular book: it's pretty pricy. At $26, it's the cost of a regular hardcover novel, and a little unusual, given that some of Tordotcom's longer hardcovers are significantly cheaper. Whatever the reasons, it feels a bit steep for a 100-page book, and it's an instance where it's worth reading, but if you're budget conscious, it might be worth waiting for the paperback. Through this book, it seems as though Nayler is realistic about the way forward: we're facing a massive problem, and it's difficult to adjust our innate tendencies. There's no one solution to this issue, but we can work to anticipate and build systems that can deflect some of our habits and proclivities. Even if we can't undo all of the damage, maybe we can learn to adapt in a changing world. ### Trinity’s endgame URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen-apocalyptic-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-07-16T16:03:56.000Z 79 years ago today, a massive fireball erupted in an isolated stretch of land in New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, the first detonation of a nuclear warhead. The explosion unlocked a new era for humanity: the Cold War. A new book examines the frightening possibilities that the moment could lead to. Known for heavily-reported books about topics like [Operation Paperclip](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316221030?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [black ops strike teams](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316441421?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [places like Area 51](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316202305?ref=andrewliptak.com), Annie Jacobsen has built a career writing about some of the modern world's more frightening geopolitical issues. The latest focus of her attention is probably the most horrifying: what would a nuclear war look like if one started today? Her answer comes in the form of a speculative book: [*Nuclear War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476093?ref=andrewliptak.com), which looks, minute by minute, at what would happen if a country decides to launch a nuclear weapon against the United States. For decades, a nuclear war was not too far from an abstract idea. Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, the US and Soviet Union engaged in a high-stakes game of nuclear escalation, adding nuclear warheads to their respective arsenals in an effort to deter one another from an outright attack as both worked to influence and control broad swaths of the globe. Children hid under desks, families built underground bunkers and stocked up on non-perishables, all while elements of the US government plotted out ways to launch overwhelming attacks against anyone who dared launch a nuke our way. [Mushroom Clouds on the Future HorizonScience fiction was born in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_30decfbc-ca0e-46ac-b83e-4c320e2565a6_956x577.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mushroom-clouds-on-the-future-horizon-science-fiction-was-born-in-the-fires-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/) The conflict between the two superpowers grew heated at points, with tensions flaring off the shores of Cuba in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but tapered off and petered out through the 1980s and with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991\. While the prospects of nuclear war slipped out of the limelight in the 1990s and 2000s, the ongoing war in Ukraine serves as a vivid reminder that not only do many of those warheads still exist, but that the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons still poses a very real threat to humanity's existence. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. In that environment, popular culture has stepped in to show what those dangers might look like. Movies like *The Terminator* and *Terminator 2, Wargames*, and *Threads*, and shows like [*Battlestar Galactica*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-creeping-dread-of-battlestar-galacticas-miniseries/)and *Chernobyl* have painted a picture for the destruction and fallout that nuclear war brings with it. But entertainment can be a poor framework for warning about these sorts of horrors: a story of characters encountering nuclear war has to be more than just their deaths, and most delve into narratives of post-apocalyptic survival that tries to convey some sort of message that there's a slim chance that there will be people who'll survive to carry on humanity's legacy. [How the US military uses sci-fi to imagine the future of warHow the military is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/10/9BAC815C-2EA7-45F5-9DAE-13C400808157.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) Jacobsen's book paints a bleak picture of what we could face in such a situation. In doing so, she joins a crop of books that blend in-depth reporting with a fictional narrative (FICINT), such as Jeffrey Lewis's [*The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328573919?ref=andrewliptak.com), James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman's [*2034: A Novel of the Next World War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984881274?ref=andrewliptak.com) and P.W. Singer and August Cole's [*Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544705050?ref=andrewliptak.com)to piece together a plausible narrative from real-world events. These types of books aren't exactly predictive (although there have been moments where it feels like they are coming to life), but they're designed to spark some conversation and consideration about the state of the world. The book opens with a dramatic scene: a "bolt from the blue" attack in which a 1 megaton nuclear bomb destroys Washington DC. The bomb obliterates the city, and Jacobsen takes us through the gory details of the ensuing firestorm, and radioactive fallout to show just how horrifying such an attack would be. The rest of the book plays out like a grim version of the TV show *24*. After an overview of the Cold War and the strategic planning that the US put into place over decades, we covers the end of the world in three 24-minute intervals. In the first, she takes us through the scramble of actions that would ensue the second the US detects the launch of a potential ICBM threat – in this case, from North Korea. We follow the steps as various satellites, radar stations, and intelligence analysts go on high alert to identify and track the incoming missile. We follow alert goes up the chain to the president, and the chaos that ensues as every person along the way has to make world-altering decisions in mere seconds. We learn that that once a nuke is on its way, that there's very little that we can do to stop it, and the pressures that surround the President as he comes to the decision to launch a counter-attack. From there, we enter the next 24 minutes as Jacobsen takes us through what happens as the bombs start flying, and adds in even more trouble: a submarine-launched attack missile attack against a nuclear power plant in California, laying waste to the West Coast, followed closely by the destruction of Washington DC. We learn about the US's capabilities and the efforts to evacuate the President and policymakers from the nation's capitol in a desperate attempt to preserve the chain of command. As mushroom clouds sprout over the US and missiles head toward North Korea, Russia quickly follows, following its protocols and procedures, prompting another volley of nuclear bombs in both directions. In the final 24 minutes, nothing is held back, and what policymakers who've survived launch the next salvo, unleashing a nuclear Armageddon that will reduce the human population to miniscule levels. In the last section, those who survive will have to endure a hellish world, recognizing that those who perished were probably the lucky ones. From beginning to end, the world comes apart in a mere 72 minutes. Jacobsen has attracted some criticism from policy wonks for some of her research in this book: citing outdated statistics or theories and the general dramatic, cinematic way that she plays this story out. (One element involves an EMP strike against the US, [which seems to be something of fringe theory](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-overrated-threat-from-electromagnetic-pulses-46e92c3efeb9?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Read as a novel, it's scary, but it's ultimately unsatisfying because it's a book with no narrative, just cause and effect. There's no explanation for the sudden attack, there are no characters to follow other than individuals with titles. Other works of FICINT, like Singer and Cole's *Ghost Fleet*, which tackles some of the same ideas and themes, works much better as a device for examining and considering these systemic issues. But that doesn't really seem to be the point of the book. While there might be some factual issues and weak assumptions at play, the core issue that Jacobsen highlights isn't the pedantic sequence of events that takes place, but a criticism of the system that we've found ourselves unwittingly part of: the greased rails that brings us from a normal day to the end of the world in 72 minutes. This isn't a new argument, but it's retold in vivid, excruciating detail. It's an echo of films like Stanley Kubrick's *Dr. Strangelove*, Christopher Nolan's *Oppenheimer*, and plenty of science fiction authors who've warned that we live in a world with our fingers poised over a big, red launch button, and that it wouldn't take much to press it. As the battlefield becomes encumbered with technology, the amount of time available to leaders and decisionmakers drops. Where generals and strategists might have had weeks to consider their next moves hundreds of years ago, the amount of time that the advent of nuclear allots comes down to seconds. Drones and automated systems – as detailed in books like P.W. Singer's excellent [*Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143116844?ref=andrewliptak.com)or Paul Sharre's [*Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393356588?ref=andrewliptak.com)– bring about the potential for decisions that need to be made faster than the human mind can operate. [Front lines in the Cold WarThe Green Mountain State was once home to a pair of missile silos armed with ICBMs![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/07/370184708_10223385802729371_607590677793796548_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-atlas-missiles-cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis/) Jacobsen touches on the role that automation plays in these situations, and how frighteningly close we've come to all-out nuclear war, such as when training scenarios were accidentally loaded into the systems to when machines have misidentified everything from flocks of birds to the moon as likely ICBM launches, averted only at the last minute by the people inserted into the systems who took the time to question what they were seeing and hesitated. In a war where decisions need to be made in mere minutes, those crucial seconds are all the more important, and show that there is reason to hope that we won't suddenly find ourselves irradiated. Reading this book coincided with a project that I was recently involved with: Horizon 2045's digital anthology, [**Far Futures*](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a project designed to imagine what the world might look like if humanity is able to pull back from the nuclear precipice, imagining stories that were not apocalyptic (we were actually forbidden from using nuclear detonations in our stories), but optimistic. My contribution to the project was "Embers", which you can read and listen to [here](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/embers/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). The rise of nuclear conflict came alongside the use of statistics and mass information on the part of policymakers, splitting apart the human condition and decision-making from cold automation. Modern conflict has increasingly become a numbers game, with strategists relying on probability and raw data to make their decisions, setting aside the horrific cost that it exacts from the people in and around the battlefield. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), was one of those numbers games, an ever-increasing count of how many more nuclear weapons each country held, and how many times each could destroy the world if it came to it. At the end of the day, Jacobsen points out with this book, those numbers are meaningless: when the world is covered in radioactive ash, will it matter who pulled the trigger first? This is what *Nuclear War: A Scenario* is warning against: it's a narrative that cuts through the numbers, the rationale, the theories, strategies, think pieces, and bullshit to hit the reader over the head with a hammer: a nuclear war might not play out exactly like it does in this book, but all of the infrastructure is in place for the same exact outcome: a planet that's rendered uninhabitable because of our own folly. What's scary is how quickly and easily that 72 minutes could come and go. ### Front lines in the Cold War URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-atlas-missiles-cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis/ Last updated: 2024-07-16T14:03:49.000Z In the fall of 1962, the world reached the closest point to the start of a nuclear war that it has ever experienced: the Cuban Missile Crisis. The confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union was the product of an escalating strategy of deterrence and for many was a confirmation of the dangers that nuclear weapons posed to the world at large. While the incident took place in the middle of the Caribbean, Vermont and upstate New York had their own roles to play. When the U.S. dropped a pair of nuclear bombs on Japan in August1945, it brought the Second World War to a close but ushered in a new era of warfare at the same time. In the years that followed, the U.S. and U.S.S.R established networks of intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites in a tit-for-tat game of deterrence. If one launched a missile, the other could respond in kind. This strategy of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) was theoretically designed to hold the other in check, because the consequences of such a conflict would be too destructive. **This article was originally published in the Vermont Historical Society's member magazine, History Connections. To see it and other past issues,* [**visit our Newsletter page*](newsletter)**. You can get* History Connections *by* [**becoming a member of the Vermont Historical Society*](membership/)**.* Vermont and upstate New York were part of that strategic network. Once the site of British invasion during the War of 1812, Plattsburg, New York became the home to a sprawling military base that quartered and trained soldiers through the wars that followed. As tensions rose in the aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. Air Force took over the base and repurposed for use as a hub for a number of strategic bombing units. With the introduction of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) to the country’s arsenal, the Air Force designated Plattsburgh as one of four installations to house the new SM-65 Atlas missile, which could deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/07/missile-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/07/missile-1.jpg) The base was the focal point in a ring of twelve missile silos dug into the ground in New York (Ellenburg, Mooers, Champlain, Brainardville, Dannemora, Redford, Riverview, Au Sable, Lewis, and Willsboro) and Vermont (Alburg and Swanton). Each silo extended deep into the Earth and included a control room from which a crew would oversee the missile and its operations. When ordered, the crew would fuel the missile and run through checklists to confirm its readiness, then raise it to the surface, where they’d wait for confirmation to launch the vehicle into the sky. That moment almost came in 1962\. To undercut the US’s arsenal, USSR Premiere Nikita Khrushchev ordered the secret deployment of dozens of short-range missiles to Cuba, where they could strike at much of North America. When an American spy plane discovered the arrival of the missiles in Cuba on October 14th, it prompted President John F. Kennedy to order a naval blockade of the island nation and to raise the US readiness level to DEFCON 3 on October 22nd. Construction on Plattsburgh’s missile silos had largely been wrapped up by the spring of 1962: members of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron had been assigned to the base and begun training and drilling. In April, the base took delivery of the first Atlas F missile followed by more in July. According to John Stone and Jeff Stephens in their book History of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron, the Swanton silo was the first to undergo a Propellant Loading Exercise on September 13th, 1962, which “would have been the earliest of ANY missile from the 556th SMS that would have been capable and ready to launch,” they write. “By the end of the month 10 missiles had been received by the squadron.” With Kennedy’s quarantine and alert order on October 22nd, the Swanton and Ellenburg silos were the first to be ready and go onto alert status. On the 24th, the military moved to DEFCON 2 status, and two more sites, Alburg and Willsboro went into alert status. “There was an unusual bee hive of activity on the top side of \[Alburgh\],” recounted Master Sergeant (retired) Harold “Don” Wamsley in History of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron, “The crew commander was very busy on one of the phones. He reached into a large bag he always carried, and handed me a pistol with holster and belt. I was told to put them on, and then go into the silo and ‘guard’ the guidance control console until I was relieved.” He remained there until he was relieved when a targeting team arrived at the silo and a warhead was installed. The tension caused by the geopolitical crisis was palpable elsewhere in Vermont. On the 23rd, the St. Albans Daily Messenger reported that the area was a “flurry of activity” following Kennedy’s announcement of the quarantine, with a number of jets landing at the Burlington, explained by one unnamed member of the Vermont National Guard that they were part of a Strategic Air Command maneuver. Meanwhile in Montpelier, two members from the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron helped explain the tense situation to Vermonters. According to the *Times-Argus of Montpelier and Barre* on the same day, Captain William Bernstein and Master Sergeant James Marshbourne flew by helicopter to meet with members of the Montpelier Rotary. In their presentation, they explained that the Plattsburgh base was “the only missile base in the east,” and reassured them that “none of these missiles could be fired accidentally.” Bernstein touted the abilities of the missile crews, showed off a model of the Atlas missile, and explained its launch procedures to the crowd. The Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end on October 29th, when the USSR announced it would pull back its missiles, and the US removed batteries of shorter-range missiles from Turkey. The missiles in the north country would remain for another three years: the Atlas class of missiles were eventually surpassed by more efficient ICBMs, and with their departure, the missile silos of New York and Vermont were shut down. The missiles they once carried did end up serving a useful purpose: brought to California, they were eventually used to test equipment for the space program. Their presence demonstrated the reach of the Cold War and the US’s nuclear strategy and served as a vivid reminder that nuclear warfare was not a far-off concept. ### A brilliant light in the dark: Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-bright-sword-lev-grossman-king-arthur-fantasy-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-07-15T20:11:26.000Z More than a decade ago, I had dinner with a man who claimed to be the rightful King of France, and spent a couple of hours parsing just what that meant. As the story went, Marie Antoinette wasn't executed during the French Revolution, but instead was smuggled away to Quebec, where she bore the son of King Louis XVI, and his bloodline persisted to this kitchen in northern Vermont. It was an entertaining story, but it's one of those evenings that has stuck in my head ever since. It was a lesson in how stories persist, and one that helped me understand why royal power structures: the belief that their members could trace their lineages back to divine origins, and that their rule over their subjects was not just because of military or political power, from God. I was reminded of that night while reading Lev Grossman's new novel [*The Bright Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780735224049?ref=andrewliptak.com), his take on Arthurian legend, in which he dissects the nature of royalty and power, and how King Arthur sits at a moment of profound transition in the story of England's identity. It's a novel about an ever-changing world and how we use stories to contend as the world grows up around us. Grossman opens the novel with a start. Collum, an aspiring knight hoping to join King Arthur's Round Table at Camelot, is challenged by another knight on the road, and the two engage in a heated duel. With his [*Magicians* novels](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780452296299?ref=andrewliptak.com), Grossman explored and subverted a number of classic fantasy tropes, and this fight isn't a throwback to the romantic, chivalric clashes between armored knights; it's a brutal, exhausting, and dangerous engagement, one in which Collum is ultimately the victor, but confused and somewhat dismayed at what he just endured. From there, he continues along the road, eventually making his way to the fabled castle, only to discover that he's too late: Arthur has apparently been slain and whisked off to Avalon, leaving England with an absence on the throne. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The knights who remain now have a monumental task ahead of them: figure out who can succeed Arthur, and with Collum coming along for the ride, they work figure out how to go about identifying such a person. In the hands of another novelist, this is a story that could easily fall into the pattern of any one of the major fantasy tomes: a problem confronts the world, the heroes assemble, set off and encounter troubles, and ultimately vanquish their foes when they accomplish what they set out to do. There's a quest in *The Bright Sword*, but it feels like Grossman isn't interested in solving the problem of locating Arthur's successor and he's penned a book that's after something deeper: an examination of the people who make up the legends and their motivations, delving into questions of the nature of heroics, of leadership, of bravery, and of knowing when to hold onto the stories and when to move on from them. It's a complicated, meandering, and fascinating story. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/07/8c59ffb8-3fd8-4525-a811-70e8c30975b5.png) Image: Andrew Liptak The best stories lie at a moment of transition in their fictional worlds: a before and after. Grossman's England lies at the intersection of many such transitions: England as a folkloric, Celtic land and the arrival of the Romans. King Arthur's rise to power as a wise and fair leader and the collapse of civilization after his demise. Plenty of aspiring knights who come into their own and work and fight and change to become members of the legendary Round Table. Grossman follows the story of Collum as he and his companions make their way through England on their journey, encountering not only fellow knights and dangers along the way, but creatures and beings from other parts of England (real and faerie) who are desperately trying to hold onto their way of lives. Along the way, we're pulled off the path to explore the stories of Collum's companions, like Sir Bedivere (who is besotted with Arthur), Sir Palomides (who arrived from Turkey), Sir Dinadin (a trans knight who's story is probably the most fascinating of the lot), Sir Dagonet and Sir Constantine (who are on the hunt for the Holy Grail), with other familiar figures like Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Bedivere, Mordred popping up along the way. These side stories are more than just indulgences, designed to provide window dressing for Grossman's England. They provide context and and motivation for the strange group that's assembled. It's a complicated mix of people, but their individual journeys spell out not only how they arrived at Camelot, but what's driven them to reach that point and what drives them to continue forward, even when all hope feels lost. At the heart of their quest is the search for some sign from God of a successor: trying to find someone as worthy as Arthur while maintaining the divine stamp of approval. But again, Grossman complicates the story as the knights head off to search for the Holy Grail and the Lance – the last remnants of a divine world that seems to be passing into legend and mythos. As the knights eventually discover, the quest to restore the throne with a True King isn't as straight-forward as they initially thought. What was it about Arthur that made him a good ruler? He was chosen by God through the act of pulling a sword from a stone and later by claiming Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake and eventually united England, but it's through his actions – not God's – that he accomplishes this. Indeed, there's a point where Arthur is frustrated by the act of ruling England, complaining about important duties like currency reform, land surveys, naval construction, judicial corruption, and so forth. He's restless and would much rather be out questing. Grossman uses this to illustrate some interesting points along the way: Arthur sets out on a quest and encounters a decaying kingdom not under his rule. The dying ruler was punished for daring to touch the Holy Lance: nothing grows in his land, and he's in incredible pain, but cannot die. Arthur's solution is to slay the king, telling his surviving children that sometimes, a king needs to know when to step aside for the good of his people. It's a vivid lesson, but Grossman complicates it when he revisits it later in the novel: Arthur recognizes that his decision was brash and impulsive, and while it seemed to work, it wasn't an action that he had any right to take. In a later moment, Arthur rages at the emptiness of his existence when a knight is horrifically wounded during a joust. "Arthur felt is mood darkening. That a man should lose an eye, and for what? A game, played for nothing." All of these threads play with the notion of power and how it flows from a central point, be it divine favor, military power, or of the accumulation of knowledge. Grossman's characters are all trying to figure out how to maneuver in the midst of vacuum of power, drawing on their own pasts and the legends that they grew up with to guide them, all while forces greater than them, such as agents from the fae who're worried about the barriers between their worlds breaking down, geopolitical forces like the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and pagans enacting ancient and long-sighted plans, have assembled to try and figure out who will inherit control over the land at this fragile and transitional moment. With all of that humming along in the background, Grossman adds on another layer: the power that comes from the stories of these various characters, histories, and lore. Collum is consumed with the idea of becoming a knight: it helps him drag himself from the moldering castle where he was dumped off at as a child, and gives him the path forward towards greatness. Grossman uses each of the side stories from the various knights to dissect the nature of heroics, trying to come to an understanding that it's these narratives that underpin the morals that drive each of these strange knights. Heroics aren't just the brave actions that these characters take: it's the lessons that they learn from their actions: the strength they discover within themselves that then allows them to apply themselves as they seek to control England and adjust to the changes happening around them. That's a powerful story in and of itself, told against the backdrop of a tumultuous time in the world as countries around the world (especially England) try and figure out their identities and resolve to govern their subjects and build a safe and fair world for all. In many ways, Arthur has long been something of a blank slate that storytellers have used to further their visions of the world: in his absence in this book, Grossman proves to be an excellent guide for trying to tackle these massive themes of identity and heroism and character as we muddle our way forward in a grim and dark world. The idea that power isn't granted by divine hands is a transitional idea itself. The story of wise and just men and women who learn from their stories and lives and lead us into a brighter world is far more compelling way forward than those who only lament the loss of what they feel should be theirs, but do nothing to earn it. *The Bright Sword* is a powerful tale about power and rule, but also the heavy responsibility and burden that accompanies it. *The Bright Sword* is out on July 16th. ### Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword is being developed for TV URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-tv-adaptation/ Last updated: 2024-07-09T16:20:41.000Z Lev Grossman's novel *The Magicians* was a breakout hit when it came out in bookstores in 2009, and in 2016, the Syfy channel picked it up for an adaptation, which ended up running for five seasons through 2020\. Now, it looks like we'll get another adaptation of Grossman's novels: his forthcoming novel *The Bright Sword*. Grossman has been working on the book for years: he [first announced it back in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13090002/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-announced-magicians-author-books?ref=andrewliptak.com), describing it as a take on "what a King Arthur story might look like now, in this millennium," and he finally announced that he was done [announced that he was done last year](https://www.today.com/popculture/books/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-preview-rcna123972?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've been looking forward to the novel for years, and as I noted [in my July book list](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2024-scifi-book-list-grossman-bacigalupi-shepherd/), it's a phenomenal read, an amazing take on the legend of King Arthur, his knights, and his legacy. It's also earned a considerable amount of critical praise from just about every outlet under the sun: it's going to be big when it lands next week. [According to *Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2024/07/the-bright-sword-tv-series-lev-grossman-lionsgate-3-arts-1236004183/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Lionsgate Television and 3 Arts Entertainment have scooped up the rights to adapt the book as a series, and they're currently hunting for a showrunner to develop the project to a series. Erwin Stoff (*Edge of Tomorrow, Kings, Julia*) has been tapped as an executive producer. He and Grossman apparently worked together on an adaptation of Grossman's YA novel *The Silver Arrow*, which was ultimately not picked up. (Shame, [it and its sequel *The Golden Swift* are excellent books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lev-grossman-the-golden-swift-silver-arrow-book-review/).) A studio snapping up the rights for a hot book aren't anything new in Hollywood, and it's not a surefire indication that this particular project will see the light of day, especially with all of the turmoil that we're seeing in streaming services and the financial health of some of the bigger studios. Indeed, Grossman [had been attached to a really cool-sounding space opera project](https://deadline.com/2019/07/agbo-sets-author-lev-grossmans-original-sci-fi-series-idea-the-heavens-at-amazon-1202647389/?ref=andrewliptak.com) called *The Heavens* at Amazon, but that seems to have stalled, and [it's going to become a graphic novel at some point](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/92671-penguin-random-house-launches-pop-comics-imprint.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). [What makes for an adaptation good?Fidelity to the source material isn’t always a sure sign of a quality adaptation![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/01/Untitled-design.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adaptations-sci-fi-halo-3-body-movies-books/) Hopefully, it'll work out: the book does have an episodic feel to it, and if they can pull it off, it's a rich, interesting story that delves into a whole cast of fascinating characters and landscapes to explore. It felt like a story that would be ripe for a streaming series. ### Funding short fiction URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-science-fiction-fantasy-kickstarter/ Last updated: 2024-07-09T17:23:18.000Z For its entire history, short stories have been a huge part of the modern science fiction genre. With magazines such as *Amazing Stories* and *Astounding Science Fiction* arriving in the 1920s and 1930s, the genre's been sustained by the likes of print magazines such as *Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni*, and *Asimov's Science Fiction,* and given new life with their online counterparts like *Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons*, and *Uncanny Magazine*. I'd argue that these publications have helped to keep the genre alive by providing a path for new authors and plenty of new ideas and stories over the decades, even as we've seen the rise of blockbuster movies, streaming shows, and franchises that have taken over popular culture. The history of science fiction and fantasy is one of transitions, and these publications have long been subjected to the whims of market forces. The collapse of the magazine distribution infrastructure in the late 1950s forced tons of genre magazines out of business on the eve of the New Wave movement, and the rise of the internet brought about new opportunities for enterprising editors to try and figure out how to distribute short fiction in new ways. It's also been a tough environment. Alex Shvartsman [shut down *Future Science Fiction*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-magazine-challenges/)last year because of burnout, while Brian White [closed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fireside-magazine-shutting-down/) *Fireside Fiction* in 2022 after controversies and time commitments. It's not all doom and gloom, however: in 2021, [Julian Yap and Fran Wilde launched](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fran-wilde-julian-yap-sunday-morning-transport-sci-fi-fantasy-substack/) *Sunday Morning Transport*, which is still running on Substack. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. But there are still challenges to running these publications. Authors and artists need to be paid for their work. One of the bigger challenges recently was [Amazon's decision to stop selling magazine subscriptions](https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?ref=andrewliptak.com) via its Kindle newsstand. The move was a huge blow to publications like *Clarkesworld*, which editor Neil Clarke [noted](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F09%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com) had been their biggest source of revenue: "for the first time in *Clarkesworld*’s history, we moved from stability to growth." Compounding the problem was that Clarke had no way to contact his 1800 subscribers, and said that "closing \[the subscriptions\] will be felt by more than just those directly affected. I’ve called this a “call your parents” moment for short fiction readers. If you love short fiction and the magazines that publish them–whether or not they were in Amazon–make sure you support them by subscribing if you want to see them find stability and the ability to become all they are meant to be." They've been clawing back those subscribers little by little: [as of this week](https://bsky.app/profile/clarkesworldmagazine.com/post/3kwrro37p5k2m?ref=andrewliptak.com), they're 232 away from their original subscriber numbers. It's great to see, but it's also a year's blow, and it's a good reminder for readers to remain engaged with the publications from which they get their stories: to subscribe and support them, because in the long run, that helps to keep those outlets alive to continue to tell stories. ([Here's where you can subscribe to *Clarkesworld*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com).) I've been thinking about this this week because it seems like it's pledge drive season for the SF/F short fiction industry as a whole: three major publishers are running Kickstarter campaigns to fund their upcoming years, and I figured it was worth highlighting them: ### Apex Magazine 2025 *Apex Magazine*, part of Apex Book Company (which published my anthology *War Stories* years ago) is [currently running a Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/apexpublications/apex-magazine-2025?ref=andrewliptak.com) for its 2025 season, aiming to raise $15,000\. The outlet ran a campaign back in 2022, to build up its reserves and become sustainable on subscriptions and Patreon supporters. "unfortunately, the reality is we’re falling short. Between the heat death of social media, various fires in publishing, and the fact that crowdsourcing through platforms such as Kickstarter garner much more attention than calls to subscribe, we have to move back to a system that has worked for us in the past." Hitting that $15,000 mark will fund three issues of the magazine in 2025, with additional stretch goals unlocking additional issues. A pledge of $27 will get you a year's subscription. As of right now, it's raised just over $2k, with 29 days to go. ### Strange Horizons 2025 *Strange Horizons* is one of the older online genre magazines, and has been using Kickstarter as an annual subscription drive platform for the past couple of years. They're [aiming to raise $13,500 for 2025](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strangehorizons2019/strange-horizons-2025?ref=andrewliptak.com), and fortunately, have crossed the finish line with just shy of $15,000 currently raised. They've got five days to go in their campaign. If they hit their stretch goals, they'll be producing a special issue on Afro-Surrealist SF, guest-edited by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, a special issue on Ageing and SFF, and additional pay raises for artists and additional stories. ### Uncanny Magazine Year 11: This One Goes to ELEVEN! Originally funded via Kickstarter back in 2014, *Uncanny* has used the platform as its annual fundraising source ever since. This [year's campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lynnemthomas/uncanny-magazine-year-11-this-one-goes-to-eleven?ref=andrewliptak.com) just launched, and they're looking to raise $30,000 for 2025 (they're currently just shy of $22,000 raised), which will fund six issues with 5-6 stories each, and provide funding for their staff and hosting. $35 will make you a subscriber. I've also donated a copy of *Cosplay: A History* as one of the perks for $100-level sustainer tier. --- ![May be an image of text that says 'මාම SISTERS Asimovs MIP TADER-+SOLTICEN JULY AUGUST 2024 SCIENCE THE PUICEIAD FICTION Stephen THEFLARE Cose FLARE 58:99 www.aainovs.comi 民光 Leah Cypess Genevieve onertson Robertson arciayRobertsen raMcK .Garciay Susan Susan SussAletrvine Alexirv Alex Palwick Palwich irvine lames Van Pelt alentine'](https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/449717577_1004350821691584_7382544373781572516_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=110&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=833d8c&_nc_ohc=0W4emF7vp1EQ7kNvgHBbozf&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=00_AYCeD0w-H2qsAI7An_N2vk_iSkztXKmaz9yK1kVAPOZfUQ&oe=66932083) Image: Andrew Liptak It's a story that every genre magazine has had to contend with: reaching subscribers and being able to pay their creators and staff a good wage. These types of magazines have long been an entry point for the creators of tomorrow: curious kids and teenagers who pick up a brightly colored magazine and get drawn into the stories and worlds they published that issue. Some of those readers have gone on to become the next generation of storytellers. I make it a point to pick up the latest issue of *Asimov's* whenever I stop by my local Barnes & Noble, and I've always thought that these magazines are outstanding collections of some of the most interesting stories you'll find, and I'll challenge you to head out to any of the online publications and pick out a story or two to read over your lunch break today. (Tell me what you find in the comments!) ### Here's a pile of new SF/F books to enjoy this July URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-2024-scifi-book-list-grossman-bacigalupi-shepherd/ Last updated: 2024-07-05T20:16:33.000Z I hope that you had a safe and exciting fourth of July. (If you're in the US. If you're elsewhere, I hope it was a good Thursday.) With summer now upon us, we're hitting some prime reading time: I've been steadily working on whittling down my TBR pile. It's been nice to take some time to read in the sun lately, and this month brings out a whole bunch of books that I've been really looking forward to this year.As always, you can find past recommendation lists via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). I've noted before that this newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: if you've found these lists (and newsletter!) to be an interesting read, please consider forwarding (or sharing on social media) this newsletter to your friends who also like science fiction, fantasy, writing, and reading, and tell them why you enjoy it! Additionally, all links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit. (Which helps support the newsletter!) Okay, here are 15 new SF/F books to check out in the first half of July. I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another list with even more coming out later this month. --- ### [*This Great Hemisphere*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593472347?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mateo Askaripour (July 9th) In the distant future, the world is divided along strict class lines between the invisibles and Dominant Population. Sweetmint is one of the invisibles, and she's worked hard to build a life after her brother disappeared: She's excelled in school and is now an apprentice to an eccentric, noted inventor. When the authorities arrive and explain that not only is her brother not missing, he's a suspect in the murder of the Northwestern Hemisphere's Chief Executive. As a global manhunt gets underway, Sweetmint sets out to find him before the authorities do in the midst of a heated election for the position. *Publishers Weekly* [notes that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593472347?ref=andrewliptak.com) "at it's best, this energetic, speculative deconstruction of colonialism feels like watching an expert put together a 1000-piece jigsaw." ### [*Navola*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593535059?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Paolo Bacigalupi (July 9th) I've long been a fan of Paolo Bacigapuli's novels [*The Windup Girl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597808217?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Water Knife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780804171533?ref=andrewliptak.com), and over the last couple of years, I've been wondering when he'd be coming out with another adult novel. That book has finally arrived, *Navola*. It's set in the city state of Navola, which is ruled by a small handful of powerful families, including the di Regulai family, who've built up a world-wide empire as merchant bankers. Son Davico di Regulai will soon take over the family, its dealings, and treasures, including a fossilized dragon's eye with some particular powers. When he's betrayed, he'll have to take drastic actions in order to survive. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593535059?ref=andrewliptak.com), comparing it to *Game of Thrones*. ### [*Midnight Rooms*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063228092?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Donyae Coles (July 2nd) In 1840, Orabella Mumthrope discovers a stranger in her uncle's home: Elias Blakersby, who claims to be member of an aristrocratic family and that he's intent on marrying her. She's surprised, as she's an orphan from a mixed race couple, and agrees, hoping to help her uncle come out from under his debts. She's soon brought out to the Blakersby estate, Korringhill Manor, and discovers that it's far from the wealthy household that she expecting. It's rundown and moldering, and that it's home to some deep secrets, including a cationic sister-in-law, locked doors, and a darkness that seems to be infecting her. As the nightmares pile up, she begins to lose her grip on reality. *Publishers Weekly* [gave the book a starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063228092?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Coles’s prose is evocative and strange and pairs brilliantly with the gothic tropes she expertly deploys. This is a fever dream of a novel that readers won’t want to wake up from." ### [*The Spellshop*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250333971?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Beth Durst (July 9th) Kiela would rather avoid people, and fortunately, she's been able to avoid them in her role as librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, where she's worked for years alongside her assistant Caz (a magically sentient spider plant.) There, they've been preserving spellbooks and magic for the city's elite. Trouble strikes when a revolution erupts and the library burns to the ground, prompting Kiela and Caz to try and save as many books as they can as they flee to her childhood home on a distant island, where she sets up shop in her late parents' cottage, trying to lay low from the revolutionaries. Along the way, she catches the eye of a handsome neighbor and finds that she can put her magical knowledge to work improving the lives her her new neighbors. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sarah-beth-durst/the-spellshop/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "kindness is king in this soft and breezy low-stakes cottagecore fantasy." ### [*The Bright Sword*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780735224049?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lev Grossman (July 16th) I've long been a fan of Grossman's [*The Magicians*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780147517388?ref=andrewliptak.com) trilogy for his subversive approach to a handful of the fantasy genre's dominant tropes, and for years, I've been excited to see what he'd do with another big fantasy story: the legend of King Arthur. The result is *The Bright Sword,* which I read and finished last month. It's a phenomenal read that's remained on my mind ever since, taking the story of King Arthur and re-examining it in some interesting ways, looking at everything from the various, lesser-known members of the Round Table, the role of power and transitions from antiquity to modernity. I'll have a proper, longer review of this later this month, but in the meantime, it's one not to be missed. ### [*The Eyes Are the Best Part*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661238?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Monika Kim (June 25th) In this horror novel, Ji-won finds her life upended when her father engages in an affair and leaves her and her family on their own. Her mother picks up a new boyfriend, George, who's quickly wearing out his welcome with his boorish behavior, and the trauma from all of this has brought out some horrifying dreams: she's walking through bloody rooms full of eyes, and she's beginning to take our her anger and rage on those around her, starting with their eyes. [Writing in *Lightspeed Magazine*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-the-eyes-are-the-best-part-by-monika-kim/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Ainger Loren Wilson says it's not "a comfort read. It is unsettling, raw, and unapologetic. A sharp read for fans of dark tales about rough family dynamics and so much anger." ### [*Unraveling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593598467?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Karen Lord (July 9th) Penguin Random House has been re-releasing Karen Lord's novels with some excellent new covers this year: the next in line is Unraveling, her 2019 novel about a woman who helps witnesses recover memories from traumatic events. When she's seized and brought to a fantastical world by an Undying spirit named Chance, she's presented with an unusual mission: help an Angel track down a rogue Undying spirit who was the mastermind behind the crimes of a horrifying serial killer that she once helped put away in the real world. [](javascript:void%280%29) ### [*The Sky On Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250342003?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenn Lyons (July 9th) Jenn Lyons launches a new standalone fantasy about a woman named Anahrod, who was booted from her training as a dragonrider and into a wild jungle known as The Deep. Since then, she's wanted to avoid people, prefering the company of her titan drake. After she's saved from being captured by a local warlord, she's reluctant to rejoin the civilized world. But her past is catching up to her, and she's enticed into joining a party to take part in a heist on a dragon's horde. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jenn-lyons/the-sky-on-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying the book "grabs a bunch of now-classic fantasy tropes and gives them a good shake; meanwhile, the heist story sticks fairly close to *its* classic tropes—clever ruses, last-minute setbacks, inevitable betrayals, and so on—but injects enjoyable suspense." ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063278974?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Allies and Enemies: Endgame*](https://www.amazon.com/Allies-Enemies-Endgame-Book-ebook/dp/B0D4R865P8/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.odhOihcSEwByk1pg5mgQ9-lfv48FLS0Y6mZt-yr9oXfGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.UDolYICNZsXQhH4QLVPKVqX-g71w8bOrDypVlt8BfzM&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=Allies+and+Enemies%3A+Endgame+by+Amy+Murphy&qid=1720198429&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amy Murphy ( July 1st) Fellow Vermont author Amy Murphy brings her *Allies and Enemies* military SF series to a close with its sixth installment, *Endgame*. Soldiers Sela Tyron and Jon Veradin have gone rogue and are stranded far from civilization, where they have to figure out how to survive by teaming up with a fellow human survivor, Essie Hoffs, and her Sceeloid companion Deke. At the same time, Erelah Veradin works to rescue her daughter from her prison onboard a sentient starship called Vo, and in doing so, she's pulled into a power struggle between the Ironvale and Spitdawn Guilds. ### [*Icehenge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250325662?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kim Stanley Robinson (June 11th) Kim Stanley Robinson has produced some of the more insightful and thought-provoking science fiction novels about humanity's future on Earth in the last couple of decades, like [*Aurora*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316526999?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*New York 2140*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316262316?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Ministry for the Future*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316300148?ref=andrewliptak.com). Tor Books recently reissued his novel *Icehenge* (published in 1984), which someone on my [Facebook page noted](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316300148?ref=andrewliptak.com) was playing with ideas that he'd later use in his novels [*Red Mars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593358825?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*2312*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316526982?ref=andrewliptak.com). Set in the distant future, explorers discover a series of giant blocks of ice on Pluto, laid out like Stonehenge, and across three different time periods, Robinson explores the story of an engineer on Mars caught up in a revolution, an archeologist 300 years later who discovers the engineer's notebook, and the archeologist's great-grandson, who's visiting the Icehenge monument. This sounds like a really fascinating read, and I'm tossing it onto the to-read list. ### [*All This and More*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063278974?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peng Sheperd (July 9th) I loved Peng Shepherd's last novel [*The Cartographers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062910707?ref=andrewliptak.com) when I picked it up a couple of years ago: a fast, exciting book about the power of maps and places. Her next looks just as exciting: Marsh is hitting a mid-life crisis. Her marriage has blown up, her daughter is becoming distant, and she's struggling to advance in her career. When she's selected to join a global reality series *All This and More*, she has the chance to revise her past and present, and resets herself to everything she wanted. But soon, she begins to realize that the show's promises might be too good to be true, and there might be more to everything than she thought. Fittingly, Shepherd takes a cue from the Choose Your Own Adventure books and readers can play with Marsh's story in a whole bunch of variations. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063278974?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Shepherd playfully mines nostalgia for Choose Your Own Adventure series. Whichever path readers take, they’ll find a tantalizing and well-knit story. Reality TV fans especially ought to take note. " [Mapping realityPeng Shepherd’s novel The Cartographers is a brilliant work of fantasy![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/08/A58A81E3-F5A0-44B4-A01C-0C935D3B7676.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-cartographers-peng-shepherd-review-fantasy-book/) ### [*The Night Ends with Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593815724?ref=andrewliptak.com) by K.X. Song (July 2nd) K.X. Song draws inspiration from the legend of Mulan for her latest novel, *The Night Ends With Fire.* Meilin's father is addicted to opium and had planned to sell her for her dowery. When she discovers that her would-be husband is a violent man, she decides to enlist in the Imperial army in her father's place, where she grows close to Sky, a prince who's also serving in the ranks. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-night-ends-with-fire-1806165?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Song’s poetic prose brings together cardinal spirits, a flawed protagonist, and a plot inspired by the legend of Mulan." ### [*Bury Your Gays*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250874658?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Tingle (July 9th) Chuck Tingle's latest novel explores the common Hollywood trope, "[bury your gays](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays?ref=andrewliptak.com)," where gay characters are often killed off or made expendable. In it, we follow Misha, a writer who's been working for years to break through in the film industry. When he's told by studio executives to kill off his show's gay characters, "for the algorithm," he refuses, and that decision has put him in the crosshairs of some nasty individuals, including some monsters from his past working on horror movies. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250874658?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Tingle’s vivid, visceral storytelling combines with prescient insight into the corporate dynamics that rule mainstream media. The result is smart, subtle, and a bloody good time." ### [*Pink Slime*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668049778?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Fernanda Trías, trans. by Heather Cleary (July 2nd) A coastal city is ravaged by a toxic algae bloom that's choking the air and killing anyone who dares to enter the water. Those who remain in the city have to contend with shortages of power and food, and a secretive corporation has begun producing Meatrite, a gross pink slime that turns out to be the only food anyone can afford to eat. The story's unnamed narrator is trying to hold onto her few remaining connections to her past: her mother, ex-husband, and a boy in her care, and she's forced to deal with the realization that nothing is going to improve. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fernanda-trias/pink-slime/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one; Trías’ prose and Cleary’s translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic ... This is a knockout of a story." ### [*The Icarus Changling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193485?ref=andrewliptak.com) *by Timothy Zahn (July 2nd)* Timothy Zahn's [*The Icarus Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553573916?ref=andrewliptak.com) has long been a favorite book of mine, and in the last couple of years, he's returned to the world for three new sequels, [*The Icarus Job*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193256?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which I've been picking away at in recent months), [*The Icarus Twin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193058?ref=andrewliptak.com), and now, *The Icarus Changling*. This new series has been following agent Gregory Roarke, who works for the Icarus Group. He's been exploring worlds trying to find new ways to break the Patth's stranglehold on interstellar travel, and in this latest adventure, he's off to a backwater world called Alainn to locate a potential teleportation portal that might be located there. The Patth are also on the hunt, and the two of them have to find it before they do, all while avoiding getting mixed up in a murder that occurs while they're on-planet. ### Chasing views URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/roundup-writing-content-passion/ Last updated: 2024-06-30T14:14:34.000Z I recently came across an [intriguing article](https://www.theverge.com/24181763/game-of-thrones-journalism-media-recaps?ref=andrewliptak.com) by a former colleague, Kevin Nguyen, about the impact that *Game of Thrones* had on the journalism industry while I was working full/part time as a journalist for places like *io9* and *The Verge*. It’s hard to understate just how good the series was at driving traffic towards the pantheon of nerd-adjacent news sites, something that’s revealed in the sheer number of places that dutifully wrote out episode recaps over the show’s run. It’s had me thinking a lot about the work that I did over the years, and how it’s evolved over time. I’ve written my fair share of recaps for a bunch of shows — *The Expanse*, *Dark Matter*, *Killjoys*, [*Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/), and a bunch of others — and looking back, I’m marveling at just how empty some of that effort and coverage feels now. I shared the article with another former colleague and we spoke a bit about that moment in journalism looks like in retrospect: a lot of throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked well with readers, but how very little had any real, lasting impact. Most of it was just reacting to stuff. There’s one piece that sticks out in my mind as a good example of this: a senior editor demanded late in the day, long after my shift had ended, that I write about how Patriots coach Bill Belichick threw a Microsoft Surface after a play, and how we quibbled over whether or not he was “angry” when he did so. I’m still not entirely sure what the purpose was for writing that. Over my time writing for those places, my approach toward writing these sorts of culture stories was always to try and add context. If I was hitting a story about a new adaptation, I’d write about the background of the book or the author, taking a prompt I’d picked up from a professor at my grad school by asking “why”: why is it important that readers know about this or that? My rule of thumb was that I should be able to add at least 2-3 grafs of that supplemental material, otherwise, why was I bothering? But it still feels now a bit empty: either written because there was a traffic incentive, or because I needed to write 3-4 articles a day to earn a decent enough paycheck to keep a roof over my head. Nowadays, I’ve settled into less of a news pattern, preferring to drop links into this newsletter’s Slack channel to discuss the various adaptations or news of the day, while still writing out the stories about things that I’m genuinely interested in, and of which I think TO readers will also want to know about. Thinking back to some of those more consequential stories that I wrote for my various sites, I think back to a piece I wrote [about Vermont’s Front Porch Forum](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-forum-vermont-social-network-listserv-local-online-community?ref=andrewliptak.com), or a look at the cranberry industry and [how it’s farmers were were utilizing new technologies to keep in business](https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/12640282/farming-technology-cranberry-industry-dji-phantom-drone-data?ref=andrewliptak.com). Those pieces were pretty few and far between, whenever I could find time between writing and editing those shorter pieces. It’s taken me a long time to unlearn some of those habits, where I’d aggressively chase after stories to be the first to get it up on to the site before our competitors. I’m realizing how destructive it was on my mental health: an endless rush that left me burned out and exhausted for years afterwards. I still sometimes miss that work: I like putting those sorts of stories together and being the first to tell it, but I don’t miss the stress. I much prefer writing this newsletter, where I can ignore press deadlines and take the time to really let a story take shape and breathe, where I can find the right angle and approach and tell it properly. I have a couple of those in the works, and the time that I’ve taken to think the stories through will help them, I think. Still, I get a twinge of irritation when I see a competing story beat me to it. I still have some things to unlearn. I don’t regret that work in any real sense; that flood of work helped me learn how to write with discipline, how to tease out a story and figure out what’s working in the background (and what the bigger story is), all of which I’ve found to be really useful. But the stories that I think back about and which stand out for me? They’re fewer and farther between, especially when I look at what I’ve written for this newsletter. I think it’s a good lesson and reminder that it’s important to not forget passion and interest and curiosity when it comes to putting pen to paper. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/IMG_8143.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Currently reading For once, I don’t think I brought enough books with me on a trip. I finished Fonda Lee’s *Untethered Sky*, an intriguing novella about a woman who is part of a royal military using giant birds to hunt manticores, and then moved on to start Robin Sloan’s sublime *Moonbound*. I’m reading and listening to it now, and I’m really loving it, but I’m going to finish it soon. It’s been a little while since I’ve done a roundup, and I’ve finished a handful of books in the weeks since. I read Martha Wells’s *System Collapse*, Jeffrey Toobin’s *Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism* (A happy read, if ever there was one), Michael Crichton’s posthumous novel *Eruption* (finished by James Patterson), Austin Grossman’s *Soon I Will Be Invincible* and *Fight Me (*stay tuned for more about those soon), *Veronica Roth’s When Among Crows*, Katherine Arden’s *The Warm Hands of Ghosts*, and Lev Grossman’s *The Bright Sword* (also excellent, and stay tuned for more about that.) On the to-read list? In addition to *Moonbound*, I brought *Challengers* by Adam Higgenbotham with me, which I’m excited to continue. It’s excellent so far. I’ve also got *Nuclear War* by Annie Jacobsen, *Blood, Sweat and Chrome* by Kyle Buchanan, *Stories are Weapons* by Annalee Newitz, *Those Beyond the Wall* by Micaiah Johnson, *The Icarus Plot* by Timothy Zahn, and *The Spear Cuts Through Water* by Simon Jimenez that I’ve started. Paul Tremblay’s *Horror Movie* is also on the short list to start. I’m also planning on starting Paolo Bacicalupi’s upcoming book *Navola*, which I’m very excited to read. --- ### Further reading It's been a little while since I've done a roundup, so here are some things that I've written: **Adaptations**. Here's a long-brewing piece that I've been picking away at about the nature of adaptations and why I don't think strict fidelity to the original story is necessarily the best thing. [What makes for an adaptation good?Fidelity to the source material isn’t always a sure sign of a quality adaptation![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/01/Untitled-design.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/adaptations-sci-fi-halo-3-body-movies-books/) **A new *Harry Potter* adaptation**. Pottermore and Audible have announced a new audiobook adaptation of the *Harry Potter* novels. It looks like a big production: all seven novels will get a full-cast adaptation, sometime in 2025\. [Harry Potter is getting a new audiobook adaptationAll seven books will get a full-cast dramatization![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/04/IMG_7349.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/harry-potter-audible-audio-drama/) **Afrofuturist anthology**. This looks like it'll be an excellent read. [Library of America is publishing an Afrofuturist anthologyIt’ll be released February 4th, 2025![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/81KmEtsZPHL._SL1500_.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/library-of-america-afrofuturist-black-fantastic-andre-carrington/) **Awards**! Here are the finalists for this year's [Arthur C. Clarke Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-finalists-for-the-2024-arthur-c-clarke-award/), [Locus Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-finalists-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-books/) [Shirley Jackson](https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-awards-2023-horror-books-fiction/), and the winners of the 2024 [Bram Stoker](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-bram-stoker-award-horror-books/), [Nebula](https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/) and [Locus Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2024-martha-wells-kingfisher-chandrasekera/). **Dune: Prophecy**. *Dune: Part 2* hit theaters earlier this year, but we'll be returning to the world this fall with a prequel series, Dune: Prophecy. Here's the teaser trailer: [Here’s a first look at Dune: ProphecyThe six-episode prequel to Dune will arrive on Max later this fall![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/Dune-Prophecy-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-prophecy-frank-herbert-max-streaming-teaser-watch/) **Emily St. John Mandel talk**. Super brief post, because I couldn't find my notes and the video for the event has been taken down, but I saw Emily St. John Mandel a couple of months ago and she had some neat things to say about writing. [Emily St. John Mandel talkThe Station Eleven author on genre and community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/IMG_5868.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/emily-st-john-mandel-middlebury-talk/) **Fake books**. Paul Tremblay discovered on the eve of his latest book's release that someone was selling fake versions of it. [Fakes and blanksPaul Tremblay discovered that someone was selling fake copies of his new novel, Horror Movie. It’s a window into a much bigger problem with scams on Amazon.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/06/IMG_7899.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-horror-movie-amazon-fake-books-scams/) **Find your friends**. This was a super cool thing to see: Apple released an ad for the iPhone 15 that featured Mandalorian cosplayers. [Find your friendsAnother example of cosplay’s growing mainstream appeal![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/05/3D3F22E2-83BC-4895-9D33-198268D9F410.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-star-wars-commercial-cosplay-fandom/) **Green Wing returns**! This was a favorite comedy of mine when I studied abroad in London: it's returned as an audio drama, which was a delightful surprise. [Code BlueThe hilarious Channel 4 sitcom Green Wing just got an audio drama reunion![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/IMG_7515.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-wing-resuscitated-audio-drama/) **Lady Astronaut: the Collection!** Mary Robinette Kowal is Kickstarting a new collection of stories from her Lady Astronaut series. [New tales from the Lady AstronautMary Robinette Kowal is Kickstarting a short collection of stories set in her Lady Astronaut universe![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/06/Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-White-Black-Minimalist-Bottle-Label.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mary-robinette-kowal-lady-astronaut-silent-spaces-kickstarter/) **More Middle-earth is on the way**. In the [form of a couple of new films](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gollum-gollum/), to be produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, with the first tentatively titled *The Hunt for Gollum*. It'll star and be directed by Andy Serkis. There's also a new season of Amazon's *Rings of Power* debuting later this fall: [here's the teaser trailer](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-of-power-tolkien-season-two-trailer-watch/). **Netflix has renewed *3 Body Problem***. For an indeterminate number of seasons to finish out the story, which is a good bit of news for fans of the show. [Netflix has renewed 3 Body Problem to finish the storyFor an indeterminate number of episodes and seasons![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/05/AAAAQUv07qr91qxFhxXiDc_RDATkRYpXjhmQEUNg97zbVJ7UaYfOI-bxFD0U0-8lO-vlw2RU-n3wnhPjnC6KTITEWKD1OXOaLI1Mohp_kXFtCRA4GcmuD5XsETCf4BJ549AGekqNIV-KqQmKm2AVP3XUTcaxHKc.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/netflix-3-body-problem-renewed/) **New Books**. Lots of books hit bookstores in May and June. Here are my lists: [May 1](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-book-list/), [May 2](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-new-books/), [June 1](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-book-list/), and [June 2](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list/). [Here’s the May 2024 book list!19 new SF/F books to check out this month![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/IMG_7377.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-book-list/) ### New short story! I wrote a short story! The first one that I've published in a decade, and you can read it here: [Read my new short story, EmbersPart of Horizon 2045’s digital anthology, Far Futures![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/image-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-science-fiction-horizon-2045-far-futures/) **Own part of SF History**. One of the very first Hugo Awards recently came up for sale. [Want to own a piece of SF history?One of the first-ever Hugo Awards is up for auction. It comes with a complicated legacy.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/Copy-of-Copy-of-Winter-histories-card.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-award-forrest-ackerman-philcon-2-science-fiction-fandom/) **Review**: **Katherine Arden's *The Warm Hands of Ghosts***. This is an excellent read. [The memories that haunt the battlefieldsKatherine Arden’s novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of wartime trauma and memories, and of finding hope in darkness![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/06/IMG_7838.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/) **TED Talk**. Here's a TED Talk by Annalee Newitz about how fantasy and speculative fiction can inspire people in the real world. [Watch Annalee Newitz’s TED Talk about the power of fantasyHarnessing the power of fandom for good![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/3542706810_e896bc04ef_3k.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-ted-talk-fiction-watch/) ### Here are the winners of the 2024 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2024-martha-wells-kingfisher-chandrasekera/ Last updated: 2024-06-26T14:56:54.000Z Locus Magazine held its annual conference over the weekend and announce the [winners](https://locusmag.com/2024/06/2024-locus-awards-winners/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of this year’s Locus Awards. This year’s slate of winners are not the ones that I would’ve picked, but it’s a good group of books overall, and part of an excellent crop of stories that came out last year. There's always something that crops up during awards season, and this year is no exception. Librarian and writer Alex Brown [pointed out](https://bsky.app/profile/bookjockeyalex.bsky.social/post/3kvm3runqxk2y?ref=andrewliptak.com) that with Neil Clarke's win in the editor category, he's only the fourth author to have earned the award, with Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois [each tallied 17 wins apiece](https://www.sfadb.com/Locus%5FAwards%5FWinners%5FBy%5FCategory?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the category since it began in 1989\. David Hartwell earned the award in 2016, posthumously. Hilariously, Tor has earned the award continuously since 1988. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking of these sorts of fan-driven awards as being anything more than a barometer for the tastes that SF fandom holds. At the end of the day, these are club awards: recognition from a group of people largely to the same group of people, and any minor thing that crops up bubbles up into a frenzy on social media before the next issue comes along. That's not to say that the criticism isn't valid: those are some pretty eye-opening streaks, and I think it says more about the folks voting than the ones on the ballots. It's another anecdote that fandom has some ingrained habits and preferences, and if you want to move the needle, you need to expand the pool of people who typically vote in the awards. You need to champion worthy authors and editors, encourage your followings, subscribers, or readership to take an active role in voting in the awards, and generally make it known that this sort of peer recognition is important. The challenge, as I see it, is apathy: do most readers care enough to take the time out of their day to vote for what publisher they feel did the goodest job in the past year? Probably not. Here are this year’s winners (marked in **bold**): ### Science Fiction Novel - *The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport* by Samit Basu - *A Fire Born of Exile* by Aliette de Bodard - *Red Team Blues* by Cory Doctorow - *Furious Heaven* by Kate Elliott - *Translation State* by Ann Leckie - *The Terraformers* by Annalee Newitz - *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi - *Lords of Uncreation* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - ***System Collapse* by Martha Wells** - *The Road to Roswell* by Connie Willis ### Fantasy Novel - *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose - *The Keeper’s Six* by Kate Elliott - *Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries* by Heather Fawcett - *Dead Country* by Max Gladstone - *The Water Outlaws* by S.L. Huang - *Paladin’s Faith* by T. Kingfisher - *He Who Drowned the World* by Shelley Parker-Chan - *My Brother’s Keeper* by Tim Powers - *City of Last Chances* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - ***Witch King* by Martha Wells** ### Horror Novel - *Vampires of El Norte* by Isabel Cañas - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due - *A Haunting on the Hill* by Elizabeth Hand - *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow - *How to Sell a Haunted House* by Grady Hendrix - *Don’t Fear the Reaper* by Stephen Graham Jones - ***A House with Good Bones* by T. Kingfisher** - *Lone Women* by Victor LaValle - *Silver Nitrate* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *Black River Orchard* by Chuck Wendig ### Young Adult Novel - ***Promises Stronger Than Darkness* by Charlie Jane Anders** - *The Making of Yolanda la Bruja* by Lorraine Avila - *Damned If You Do* by Alex Brown - *A Song of Salvation* by Alechia Dow - *The Library of Broken Worlds* by Alaya Dawn Johnson - *The Sinister Booksellers of Bath* by Garth Nix - *Into the Light* by Mark Oshiro - *Divine Rivals* by Rebecca Ross - *The Siren, the Song, and the Spy* by Maggie Tokuda-Hall - *The Spirit Bares Its Teeth* by Andrew Joseph White ### First Novel - *Chain-Gang All-Stars* by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - *The Strange* by Nathan Ballingrud - ***The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera** - *Threads That Bind* by Kika Hatzopoulou - *These Burning Stars* by Bethany Jacobs - *Godkiller* by Hannah Kaner - *The Marigold* by Andrew F. Sullivan - *Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon* by Wole Talabi - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh - *Ink Blood Sister Scribe* by Emma Törzs ### Novella - *The Crane Husband* by Kelly Barnhill - *The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar* by Indra Das - “Linghun” by Ai Jiang - *The Salt Grows Heavy* by Cassandra Khaw - ***Thornhedge* by T. Kingfisher** - *Rose/House* by Arkady Martine - *Lost in the Moment and Found* by Seanan McGuire - *The Mimicking of Known Successes* by Malka Older - *The Lies of the Ajungo* by Moses Ose Utomi - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo **NOVELETTE** - “What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata”, P. Djèlí Clark (*The Book of Witches*) - “John Hollowback and the Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar (*The Book of Witches*) - I AM AI, Ai Jiang (*Shortwave)* - “The Year Without Sunshine“, Naomi Kritzer (*Uncanny* 11-12/23) - “Prince Hat Underground”, Kelly Link (*White Cat, Black Dog*) - “At Every Door a Ghost”, Premee Mohamed (*Communications Breakdown*) - **“The Rainbow Bank“, Uchechukwu Nwaka (*GigaNotoSaurus* 8/23)** - “One Man’s Treasure“, Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) - “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under a Bridge“, Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny* 9-10/23) - “On the Fox Roads“, Nghi Vo (*Tor.com* 10/31/23) ### Short Story - “[A Soul in the World](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-soul-in-the-world/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Charlie Jane Anders (*Uncanny* 3-4/23) - **“**[**How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub**](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**“, P. Djèlí Clark (*Uncanny* 1-2/23)** - “[The Mausoleum’s Children](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Aliette de Bodard (*Uncanny* 5-6/23) - “Suppertime”, Tananarive Due (*New Suns 2*) - “[Window Boy](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F08%5F23/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld* 8/23) - “Reckless Eyeballing”, N.K. Jemisin (*Out There Screaming*) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare* 10/23) - “[Those Hitchhiking Kids](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/those-hitchhiking-kids?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Darcie Little Badger (*The Sunday Morning Transport* 4/2/23) - “[Stones](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor%5F09%5F23/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Nnedi Okorafor (*Clarkesworld* 9/23) - “[There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead](https://thedeadlands.com/issue-26/door/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)“, Sarah Pinsker (*The Deadlands* 6/23) **ANTHOLOGY** - *The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 7* edited by Neil Clarke - *Christmas and Other Horrors* edited by Ellen Datlow - *The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction* (2022) edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Eugen Bacon & Milton Davis - *Never Whistle at Night* edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023* edited by R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams - ***Out There Screaming* edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams** - *New Suns 2* edited by Nisi Shawl - *The Book of Witches* edited by Jonathan Strahan - *Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology* edited by Wole Talabi - *The Best of World SF: Volume 3* edited by Lavie Tidhar ### Collection - *The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volumes 1 & 2* by Peter S. Beagle - *Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories* by Tobias S. Buckell - *The Wishing Pool and Other Stories* by Tananarive Due - ***White Cat, Black Dog* by Kelly Link** - *No One Will Come Back For Us* by Premee Mohamed - *Jackal, Jackal* by Tobi Ogundiran - *Skin Thief* by Suzan Palumbo - *Lost Places* by Sarah Pinsker - *The Best of Michael Swanwick, Volume Two* by Michael Swanwick - *The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One* by Catherynne M. Valente ### Magazine - *Analog* - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - *Clarkesworld* - *F&SF* - *FIYAH* - *khōréō* - *Strange Horizons* - *Tor.com* - ***Uncanny*** ### Publisher - Angry Robot - DAW - Gollancz - Neon Hemlock - Orbit - Small Beer - Subterranean - Tachyon - **Tor** - Tordotcom ### Editor - **Neil Clarke** - Ellen Datlow - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - Arley Sorg & Christie Yant - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - Sheree Renée Thomas - E. Catherine Tobler - Ann & Jeff VanderMeer - Sheila Williams ### Artist - Brom - Rovina Cai - Kinuko Y. Craft - Julie Dillon - Bob Eggleton - Abigail Larson - **John Picacio** - Charles Vess - Michael Whelan - Alyssa Winans ### Nonfiction - *The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History* by Jack Dann - *42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams* edited by Kevin Jon Davies - *Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir* by M. John Harrison - *All These Worlds* by Niall Harrison - *101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered* by Sadie Hartmann - ***Space Crone* by Ursula K. Le Guin** - *Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color* edited by Chinelo Onwualu - *A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller* by Maureen Kincaid Speller - *Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God* by Robert Charles Wilson - *Being Michael Swanwick* by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro ### Illustrated and Art Book - ***The Culture: The Drawings* by Iain M. Banks** - *Home to Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories* by Ray Bradbury, adapted by Al Feldstein, art by Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Wallace Wood, et al. - *The Pen & Ink Drawings of Tony DiTerlizzi* by Tony DiTerlizzi - *Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly, Volume Three* edited by Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner - *The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta* edited by Dian Hanson, art by Frank Frazetta - *The Last Count of Monte Cristo* by Ayize Jama-Everett, art by Tristan Roach - *Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star* by George R.R. Martin, art and adaptation by Raya Golden - *Thalamus, Volumes 1 & 2: The Art of Dave McKean* by Dave McKean - *Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s* by Adam Rowe - *Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures* edited by Kevin M. Strait & Kinshasha Holman Conwill ### New tales from the Lady Astronaut URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mary-robinette-kowal-lady-astronaut-silent-spaces-kickstarter/ Last updated: 2024-06-26T14:14:22.000Z One of my favorite series of books in recent years has been Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut novels: [*The Calculating Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Fated Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765398949?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Restless Moon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250236968?ref=andrewliptak.com). A fourth novel is coming in 2025, [*The Martian Contingency*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250237040?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I'm very excited about, but Robinette Kowal just announced another book in the works: *Silent Spaces: Short Stories from the Lady Astronaut Universe*, which [she's now funding on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mary-robinette/silent-spaces?ref=ake62a). You can read my reviews for the books [here](https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-novels-about-unbalanced-worlds/).) Kowal's Kickstarter is aiming for a $30,000 goal, and as of right now, ~~it's just shy of the halfway point~~ it's fully funded, with a month to go. According her website, the book will contain nine stories: - "We Interrupt This Broadcast" (*The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius*, 2013) - "In the Moon’s House" - "Articulated Restraint" (*Tor.com*, February 6, 2019) - "Still as Bright", (*Life Beyond Us*, 2023) - "The Phobos Experience" (*The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction*, July-August 2018) - "Amara’s Giraffe" (Self-published, 2018) - "Rocket’s Red" (*Word Puppets*, 2015) - "Silent Spaces" - "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" (*Rip-Off!*, 2012) [Interview with Mary Robinette KowalA couple of years ago, Mary Robinette Kowal published a pair of books that utterly blew me away \[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review\] : the first two installments of her Lady Astronaut series: The Calculating Stars \[https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385\] and The Fated Sky \[https:![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_bda06a81-0101-4019-9254-d6a71e163c37_2448x2448.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-with-mary-robinette-kowal/) The Kickstarter has a variety of tiers: $10 will get you a digital copy of the collection, $30 will include the paperback and digital copy, $55 will include a hardcover edition plus patches and notecards, and other tiers (up to $3,000) will include a bunch of other goodies, including a hardcover edition of *The Martian Contingency*. With the Kickstarter now funded, Kowal is starting to add some stretch goals: there's a new piece of interior art coming, and now that it's passed the $40k mark, she'll be recording an audiobook edition. At the $45k mark, there'll be some additional patches. It's a good lineup and collection for fans of the series, who'd otherwise have to track down a bunch of different books and websites to find all of these. They really help to flesh out the world that surrounds these novels, and the ones that I've read are all excellent. ![](https://mpd-biblio-covers.imgix.net/9781250237057.jpg?w=900dpr=2) On top of all that, we finally have a cover and details about *The Martian Contingency:* > Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, D.C.—triggering an extinction-level global warming event—Earth’s survivors have started an international effort to establish homes on space stations and the Moon. > > The next step – Mars. > > Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, lands on the Red Planet, optimistic about preparing for the first true wave of inhabitants. The mission objective is more than just building the infrastructure of a habitat – they are trying to preserve the many cultures and nuances of life on Earth without importing the hate. > > But from the moment she arrives, something is off. > > Disturbing signs hint at a hidden disaster during the First Mars Expedition that never made it into the official transcript. As Elma and her crew try to investigate, they face a wall of silence and obfuscation. Their attempts to build a thriving Martian community grind to a halt. > > What you don’t know CAN harm you. And if the truth doesn’t come to light, the ripple effects could leave humanity stranded on a dying Earth… The book will hit stores on March 18th, 2025, and I already can't wait to dig into it. --- ### Library of America is publishing an Afrofuturist anthology URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/library-of-america-afrofuturist-black-fantastic-andre-carrington/ Last updated: 2024-06-22T15:49:38.000Z Here's an intriguing-looking book that I came across that should make for an excellent read when it's released next year: [*The Black Fantastic: Twenty Afrofuturist Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598538113?ref=andrewliptak.com), which will be edited by andré m. carrington and published by Library of America. . The book is slated to be published on February 4th, 2025, and will contain 20 stories that "celebrate Black identity, community, and imagination," featuring "Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners alongside emerging and experimental voices." carrington is an Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, and he's the author of [*Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780816678969?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which he examines the history of Black science fiction and fandom. Here's the back cover blurb for the anthology: > Black speculative fiction has never been better than it is here and now. On the shoulders of Afrofuturist masters like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany and pioneering visionaries before them, a new, abundant, and brilliant generation of contemporary Black authors, some of them just beginning their careers, is conjuring up a very real renaissance. > > Including Afrofuturist science fiction, weird and fantastic tales, horror and the paranormal, apocalyptic lyricism, time travel, superheroes, and more, here are twenty mindblowing, horror-strewn, weird, woke, nerdy, terrifying, liberating, fantastic, utopian, surreal, genre-defying and empowering short stories, all of them worth reading and rereading now and far into futurity. > > Reclaiming histories of racism and oppression and seizing the day, these writers are forging kaleidoscopic new senses of Black identity, community, and imaginative freedom. This sounds excellent, and it'll be joining a lineup of other recent anthologies that celebrate Black speculative fiction, such as [*Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250848192?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, and [*Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593243794?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams. [Library of America to publish the works of Octavia ButlerNonprofit publisher Library of America is expanding its speculative fiction offerings: it’ll release a volume containing the works of Octavia Butler in 2021, co-edited by Nisi Shawl and Gerry Canavan. Shawl revealed the news on Twitter, noting that they’ll be writing an introduction for the book, which will![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/OctaviaButler-headshot-740x425.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/octavia-butler-library-of-america-nisi-shawl-gerry-canavan-kindred-fledging/) Library of America has been increasingly including speculative fiction authors in recent years, collecting the works of authors such as [Kurt Vonnegut](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598530988?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [Ursula K. Le Guin](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598537734?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), [Madeline L’Engle](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535785?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and collections of novels from the [1950s](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598531589?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) and [1960s](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535013?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) from Gary K. Wolfe, and anthologies like Lisa Yaszek’s [*The Future is Female*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598535808?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*!* ### The memories that haunt the battlefields URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/warm-hands-of-ghosts-katherine-arden-fantasy-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-06-21T19:57:39.000Z What is the cost of war? Writers and artists have been exploring that question for millennia, weighing the goals of conflict against the toll they inflict on those who wage it. In her latest novel, [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com), Katherine Arden takes readers back to the First World War for a gripping and heart-wrenching tale of a woman desperately searching for her brother and the forces that they each have to face in order to escape. A short disclaimer: Katherine's a fellow Vermonter and good friend, and I read some early parts of this novel while it was in draft form. There are also some ****spoilers ahead** in this review, so read carefully. The First World War casts a dark shadow in the world's collective memory: over the four years that it raged on, tens of millions of people were killed in pointless engagements or by illnesses. It's seen as one of the first major modern conflict, with armies utilizing new forms of kinetic and chemical weapons while strategists and theorists directed the action from afar. It's in this environment that the world saw a clash between longstanding traditions and norms of warfare and the brutal hard numbers of an industrial environment. Arden opens this story in the aftermath of one of the war's most horrific moments: the [explosion of the *Mont-Blanc*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax%5FExplosion?ref=andrewliptak.com)in Halifax, Nova Scotia on December 6th, 1917\. The cargo ship, loaded with TNT, exploded when it collided with another freighter, leveling the city and killing more than a thousand people. The resulting explosion is one of the largest non-nuclear accidental explosions ever recorded. It's in the immediate reconstruction in which we meet Laura Iven, a nurse who had recently returned home after a stint on the front lines in France. To compound the tragedy of her parent's deaths in the incident, a box containing her brother Freddie's personal effects reached her from his unit on the front lines. Laura is convinced that there's a chance that Freddie is still alive; while she received his belongings, she didn't get an official notification, and the women she's caring for insist on communing with spirits to try and get an answer: they relay that he's dead but alive, and that she must find him. Freddie, meanwhile, is alive: trapped in the remains of a pillbox with a German soldier named Hans Winter. Together, they work to escape from their hellish prison, but escaping from a potential grave is only the beginning of their problems. If found, either could be considered prisoners or deserters and would be dealt with accordingly. As they attempt to escape the battlefield together, they encounter a fiddler named Faland, who leads them to the hotel that he runs. The establishment is a cozy, warm place with wine and music for the patrons, a far cry from the horrors of the battlefield. It's there that the pair encounter a new terror; Faland himself, a supernatural entity that subsists on the memories of those he ensnares with his music and wine, leaving his victims a husk of their former selves. Winter recognizes Faland for the danger he represents, and is able to escape, but Freddie is left behind and has to resist the fiddler's demands for his stories. Through a delicate chain of actions, Laura learns that her brother survived, and has to navigate her way through the broken landscape to find him before his will dwindles to nothing. --- Throughout the book, Arden deftly paints a picture of the hellish, battle-torn environment, from the descriptions of Freddie's initial experiences in the bombed out trenches and the destroyed, apocalyptic landscapes, to Laura's encounters with hospitalized soldiers who beg to be put out of their misery. Those moments spell out a horrific setting, but it's Faland who really pushes the horror over the top as a nice bit of allegory for why the First World War really stands out in our collective imagination. While reading the book, I was reminded of [an image](https://www.military-history.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Shell-shocked-Tommy-1916.jpg?ref=andrewliptak.com) that I'd come across years ago of a British soldier crouched in a trench, staring wildly into the camera during the Battle of the Somme. He was suffering from shell shock (a type of disorder what we now call PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a series of symptoms that soldiers began reporting while on the front lines, the result of brain trauma from the fighting and explosions that they were experiencing. These were soldiers who might not have been touched by the advanced chemical and kinetic weapons, but who came away from the war damaged all the same, changed by their experiences during the war. Faland's introduction gripped me because he embodies what makes war so terrifying: a Faustian presence that shakes and changes a person to their inner core. He seems to haunt the battlefield, luring in the unwary to not only ensnare them, but to tempt away what is most precious to them: their stories, their desires, the elements that make them who they are. It's a terrifying prospect, and Freddie, once trapped at the hotel, is first wooed and then threatened by the spirit, which chips away at his soul little by little. Faland is hungry for the connection that Freddie shares with Winter, and is desperate to consume him. There's some element of horror in the idea of one being corrupted or *changed* by some external force, especially when someone's unaware of the full extend of what's being asked by them, leaving them helpless when the bill comes due. In many ways, it feels like Arden has laid out a story that gets to the heart of warfare and to the experiences of the First World War: a Faustian bargain that saw an entire generation of young men crippled and damaged after being enticed into it by the claims of honor and glory that their superiors made. It's not a story that's limited to the experiences of just that terrible war a century ago either: every modern conflict since has left its mark on the people who fought them, their wounds lingering long after the guns have fallen silent. Despite the novel's bleak and horrifying trappings, Arden imbues the book with some optimistic flavors. Laura, despite every indication to the contrary, finds a way to believe that her brother is still alive, and Freddie, even in his darkest and loneliest moments, finds comfort in the love that he's discovered for Winter, two strands that help push both forward, even when the path forward seems hopeless. It's a point that elevates this novel into greatness: a recognition that we aren't fated by our circumstances; that we have the agency and ability to push against our surroundings in the dimmest of circumstances to forge a new path forward. In a period of time where we're battered from all sides by news of war and violence, that's a lesson that I find heartening to be reminded of. --- ### The rise of Chinese SF URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/chinese-sci-fi-on-the-media/ Last updated: 2024-06-18T18:23:17.000Z One of the podcasts that I listen to frequently is *On The Media* from WNYC Studios. If you haven't listened to it, it's a great weekly program that dissects the state of the media and journalism, covering everything from the plight of imprisoned journalists to presidential memoirs to the story of alt-weeklies. They do a short, mid-week podcast and a longer episode on Fridays. It's one of the podcasts that I turn to first when it comes up on my feed. A couple of weeks ago, the show broadcast an excellent segment about the rise of Chinese science fiction, which you can listen to here: [‘The Three Body Problem’ And the Rise of Chinese Science Fiction | On the Media | WNYC StudiosThe evolution of science fiction in China, from accusations of “spiritual pollution” to the spotlight.![](https://media.wnyc.org/i/180/180/l/80/2018/09/wnycstudios_app_icon_500.png)WNYC Studios![](https://media.wnyc.org/i/1860/1232/l/80/2024/05/AP24050292109340.jpg)](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/the-three-body-problem-and-the-rise-of-chinese-science-fiction?ref=andrewliptak.com) This is something that I've been keenly interested in for a number of years. I wrote [a piece for Barnes & Noble that covers a lot of the same ground](https://www.andrewliptak.com/narratives-of-modernization/) a number of years ago, and one of the stories that eluded me was a deep dive into Chinese SF and its role as a sort of political soft power tool. I appreciated the angle that this segment covers: a look at how China is using science fiction as not only an entertainment industry, but how it figures into the much larger story of where China's at these days, and how the genre has fallen in and out of favor over the years. ### Even more SF/F books to check out this June URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-book-list/ Last updated: 2024-06-15T16:55:04.000Z June has been a packed month for new books, and now that we've reached the second half of the month, it's a good moment to take a look at some of the rest that caught my eye that are coming out in the next couple of weeks. In case you missed the first list for June, you can see it here: [21 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out June 2024New books from Michael Crichton, Paul Tremblay, Robin Sloan, Tessa Gratton, and more to pick up this month.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/06/IMG_7768.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-book-list/) (You can find other recommendations from past months via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/).) As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost, as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it. If you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider supporting the newsletter, either by signing up as a supporting subscriber, or by purchasing a book via the links to Bookshop.org). Those links are affiliates, and any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Another thing that I'll note: Audible is holding a massive, site-wide sale this week (it ends tomorrow, June 16th), with deals up to 85% off. I ended up snagging a whole bunch of books that have been lingering on my to-read list (including Cadwell Turnbull's *We Are the Crisis*, Malka Older's *Mimicking of Known Successes*, Arthur C. Clarke's *The Fountains of Paradise*, and a couple more.) My own book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Cosplay-A-History-Audiobook/B09MDM493W?ref=andrewliptak.com), is marked down to $7.92, which is the best price that I've seen for it yet! If it's something you've been thinking about picking up, it's a good opportunity to do so. I also just got a big stack of copies delivered this week, so if it's something you'd also like to read, get in touch! I'd be happy to sign and personalize one for you. Okay: here are 15 more books hitting stores this month to check out: ### [*Children of Anguish and Anarchy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250171016?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tomi Adeyemi (June 25th) Tomi Adeyemi's debut novel [*Children of Blood and Bone*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250170972?ref=andrewliptak.com)and followup[*Children of Virtue and Vengeance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250233691?ref=andrewliptak.com)were enormous hits when they first came out back in 2018 and 2019, and fans have been waiting for the next, final installment. The books follow Zélie Adebola as she works to restore magic to her homeland, and in this final adventure, she and her allies thought that the battles would be over when they seized the royal palace and overthrew the monarchy, restoring the maji to their rightful place. But things take a turn when she and her people are captured and trafficked across the ocean. She eventually meets King Baldyr, the leader of her kidnappers, and he's intent on harnessing their powers to his own ends, setting up one final fight before her people are annihilated. ### [*The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878618?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sarah Brooks (June 18th) The Trans-Siberian Express is an infamous train that crosses the wastelands, giving passengers an awe-inspiring journey to see the fantastical creatures that live there. But something went wrong on its last trip, and none of the passengers can exactly remember what happened, including Zhang Weiwei, who's spent his life on the vehicle. As it embarks on a new journey, a new set of passengers with mysterious pasts and intentions come onboard, and as Weiwei forms his own bonds with some of them, he can't ignore the warning signs that there's danger ahead: they'll have to figure out how to trust one another in order to survive the next trip. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-cautious-travellers-guide-to-the-wastelands-1804311?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Brooks skillfully doles out clues at a steady, satisfying pace—but always alongside new questions, ensuring that tension remains high." ### [*The Runes of Engagement*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964160?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tobias S. Buckell and Dave Klecha (June 18th) Military fantasy is always a fun genre to play with, and I absolutely love the title for this new book from Tobias S. Buckell and Dave Klecha. One day, various fantastical creatures like dragons, orcs, and trolls arrived on Earth through portals, and a platoon of US Marines find themselves trapped on the other side, and end up embarking on a fantasy quest of their own: escorting a princess who might be able to make peace for both worlds. [](javascript:void%280%29)*Library Journal* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-runes-of-engagement-2226200?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that it's "tons of fun and full of geeky references and in-jokes. Will be catnip to readers who love this combination of military SF, alternate history, and fantasy." ### [*The Daughter's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250887672?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Buehlman (June 25th) I've heard nothing but good things about Christopher Buehlman's novel [*The Blacktongue Thief*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799975?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it's been sitting on my to-read list since it came out in 2022\. It looks like it's time to finally get to it, because his next novel is a prequel, *The Daughter's War.* It follows a younger Galva who's gone against her family's desires to join a new military unit, the Raven Knights, which is now marching on the goblin horde, accompanied by giant war crows. These war birds were created with dark magic and might be the only way they can turn the tide of the war. But they're dangerous creations, and the members of the Raven Knights will have to rely on one another to make it through the war alive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250887672?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The result is an introspective look into how Galva came to be a fierce warrior. Series fans looking for insight into Buehlman’s badass heroine’s psyche will want to check this out." ### [*Echo of Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316504690?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M.R. Carey (June 25th) M.R. Carey follows up his novel [*Infinity Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316504386?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a concluding volume to the *Pandominion* duology, *Echo of Worlds*. In that first book, Pandominion is the nexus of millions of alternate Earths, and it's now threatened by an artificial intelligence known as Rupshe that could destroy the alliance. Now, the two empires are at war, with extinction the likely outcome. There's one thing that can stop the war, known as the Mother Mass, which exists somewhere in the multiverse, and Rupshe has been working to find it, bringing together a grieving soldier, a cat woman, a killer, the digital mind of a physicist, a child, and a robotic spy to try and find it and avoid annihilation before it's too late. ### [*Rakesfall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250847683?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Vajra Chandrasekera (June 18th) During the Sri Lankan civil war, Annelid and Leveret meet against all odds, and after a violent meeting in a demon-haunted forest, they're entwined in a journey that will take their souls from life to life into the distant future, meeting over and over again. *Publishers Weekly* [notes](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250847683?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the book is in a somewhat unconventional format, but that patient readers "will sink into Chandrasekera’s lyrical and evocative style: “I chew the leaf and spit out my red days. They splatter. You chew the leaf and spit out your hours of mad redder.” Readers who put in the effort will be rewarded by this rich and sweeping epic." ### [*How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316569316?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Craig DiLouie (June 18th) Horror director Max Maurey has reached incredible heights in Hollywood: his films are successes and his actors love him, but he feels stuck in the world of cheap slashers. He wants to make something really horrifying, but his producers haven't been willing to get him the budget that he really wants. When he meets actress Sally Priest at a wrap party, he finds someone as ambitious as him. He casts her in his next film, and when he comes across a camera that once filmed a real horror, he knows that he has to use it for the film, even if there are some cryptic warnings that accompany it. As the production begins, it's clear that there are some real horrors lurking, ready to come out and ready to turn Sally Priest into a real Final Girl. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316569316?ref=andrewliptak.com) "readers will be pulled in by the morally twisted characters and serpentine plot. Film buffs will especially enjoy this paean to ’80s slasher films and the people who love them." ### [*Unexploded Remnants*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250325211?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elaine Gallagher (June 25th) In Elaine Gallagher's debut novella, we're introduced to a woman named Alice who discovers an AI stored on an old data core, setting her off on a quest to return it to its home, somewhere way out in the stargate network. The AI is part of an ancient weapons system, and she has to find a way to convince it that the war it was once part of is long over, and keep it out of the wrong hands. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250325211?ref=andrewliptak.com) " The impressive worldbuilding, replete with myriad references to *Alice in Wonderland*, could easily sustain a much longer adventure." [](https://www.amazon.com/Unexploded-Remnants-Elaine-Gallagher/dp/1250325218?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Beyond the Light Horizon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645060666?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ken MacLeod (June 25th) Ken MacLeod brings his Lightspeed trilogy to a close with *Beyond the Light Horizon* (preceded by [*Beyond the Hallowed Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645060642?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Beyond the Reach of Earth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645060659?ref=andrewliptak.com)). In the first, a mathematician received a message from the future spelling out the secrets to faster-than-light travel, and discovers a secret plan for interstellar travel has been in the works for decades. In the second, humanity has begun exploring the stars, only to discover that there are some things that are better left untouched. In this new installment, the alien Fermi have left the rocky worlds but are still hanging around the solar system's gas giants. Shipbuilder John Grant and his AI have been tossed into the past through a time slip and discover a human settlement that shouldn't exist near an ancient alien civilization, while agent Marcus Owen has been waging a fight on the planet Apis against encroaching human settlers, who've been warned to halt their settlement – or else. ### [*Incidents Around the House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723128?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Malerman (June 25th) Eight-year-old Bela is surrounded by a loving family: her mother, father and grandmother. But there's also "Other Mommy" an entity that asks daily if it can go in her heart. Other Mommy is also growing tired of asking the same question over and over again, and is beginning to escalate, putting strain on the family and threatening to unravel everything Bela has known. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593723128?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Bela’s naive narrative voice is the book’s best feature, freshening up the familiar story beats and enhancing the creeping sense of dread." ### [*We Speak Through the Mountain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770417335?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Premee Mohamed (June 18th) Premee Mohamed follows up her intriguing, post-apocalyptic novel [*The Annual Migration of Clouds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770415935?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a followup: *We Speak Through the Mountain*. In it, we follow Reid Graham, who escaped from her settlement and has made her way to reach Howse University, one of the last remnants of civilization after the collapse. Life there isn't what she expected, and finds herself growing more and more uncomfortable living in a place of wealth and resources when those outside the domes are barely scraping by. When horrible news reaches her from home, she's forced to make some difficult choices. ### [*The Bound Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316291576?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Megan E. O'Keefe (June 25th) Megan E. O'Keefe closes out her *Devoured Worlds* trilogy with *The Bound Worlds* (preceded by [*The Blighted Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290791?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Fractured Dark*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316291132?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which revolutionary Naira Sharp has been working to undermine the powerful Mercator family, which controls the exploration of the galaxy. When she's stuck on a dead world with a member of the family, Tarquin, they discover some dangerous secrets about the family and their wealth. In this final installment, the pair have escaped and made a home on Seventh Cradle, only to find their peaceful existence crushed when they're attached. When Naira sees a vision of the future and Tarquin discovers a plot that could spell the end of the universe, they have to race against time to try and save humanity. ### [*The Knife and the Serpent*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915202802?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Pratt (June 11th) After her grandmother is killed during a home invasion, a tech worker named Tamsin Culver is left to pick up the pieces. When she returns home to the Midwest to start settling her estate she makes a startling discovery: her grandmother isn't from this Earth: she's from another, more technologically-advanced reality where she was a noted oligarch. Tamsin is not only the heir to incredible wealth, but now a target from her grandmother's enemies. At the same time, a grad student named Glenn discovers that his girlfriend Vivy is also from another dimension, and is part of an interdimensional enforcement body that works to protect lesser-developed worlds. When she finds herself in trouble, Glenn is accidentally along for the ride to save her, and ends up running into Tamsin and discovers that their destinies are intertwined. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781915202802?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Trust, betrayal, jealousy, and kinky sex all mix into scenes of wounded intimacy and cinematic battles between killbots and clone armies." ### [*Captain Future: Lost Apollo*](https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Future-Apollo-Allen-Steele/dp/B0D6V6G4HN/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&dib%5Ftag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Ptg8rJqJJrMEDmiwAthCvCi0dnIRpeZrnmNHSY5V3Do.cA4ZAX-A64bpT2XuzRKXF%5F3HR7--bg9FTaHSTEzorbE&qid=1718379582&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Allen M. Steele (June 11th) Over the last couple of years, Allen M. Steele has been writing some new adventures of a classic pulp hero, [Captain Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain%5FFuture?ref=andrewliptak.com), who had first appeared in 1940 (you can pick up a [facsimile edition of his first appearance here](https://bookshop.org/p/books/captain-future-and-the-space-emperor-edmond-hamilton/10508644?ean=9781978107694&ref=andrewliptak.com)). Since 2019, Steele's authored [*Captain Future in Love*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081DBH5SY?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F0&storeType=ebooks&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Guns of Pluto*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08819JD5G?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F1&storeType=ebooks&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*1,500 Light Years from Home*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08ZJXV6GK?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F2&storeType=ebooks&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Horror at Jupiter*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09FQGDN3Z?ref%5F=dbs%5Fm%5Fmng%5Frwt%5Fcalw%5Ftkin%5F3&storeType=ebooks&ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* *In this latest adventure,* an ancient spaceship has appeared from a cosmic rifts between the Earth and the Moon: Apollo 20 and its crew. There's no record of the mission existing, so it's up to Curt Newton to to intercept the spacecraft, figure out how it got here, and how they can get it home. --- That's it for now: thanks for reading. Let me know what catches your eye, and what you've got on your TBR. ### Fakes and blanks URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-horror-movie-amazon-fake-books-scams/ Last updated: 2024-06-11T18:41:39.000Z The eve of a book launch is a day where you don't want to encounter any unwanted surprises. That's what happened to Paul Tremblay this week: his latest novel [*Horror Movie*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063070011?ref=andrewliptak.com) hits stores, but if you went to Amazon and searched for it, you might have found an additional listing for it. This book had the right title, cover art, release date, and description, but the title was a little wonky, it was in the wrong format, and it says it was authored by a James Keith. It was a fake, and Tremblay posted a [PSA to his followers](https://x.com/paulGtremblay/status/1800324321124266043?ref=andrewliptak.com): "Please don’t buy the counterfeit paperback, likely AI generated." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/IMG_7891-1.png) A screenshot of the fake **Horror Movie* product page The product doesn't appear to have actually been generated by a generative AI platform like ChatGPT: Tremblay noted in an email that it was likely a blank book with his cover on it. While the listing for the fake book has since vanished, it's an example of a much larger issue that's cropped up in recent years: the ease to which scam products can wind up on platforms such as Amazon, and to which they can cause confusion amongst book buyers. Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT use use large language models (scraped from text on the web and from books) to respond to prompts in a realistic way, allowing people to ask it to generate all sorts of things. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, people have used it to generate all sorts of things, such as [school papers](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2024/03/27/the-tell-tale-signs-students-are-using-chatgpt-to-help-write-their-essays/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [legal briefs](https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/?ref=andrewliptak.com), [articles](https://gizmodo.com/cnet-chatgpt-ai-articles-publish-for-months-1849976921?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [lists](https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/io9-ai-generated-star-wars-article-errors-1235662194/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on tech sites, [short stories](https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence?ref=andrewliptak.com) and plenty of books. In August 2023, [Amazon removed five books](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/09/amazon-removes-books-generated-by-ai-for-sale-under-authors-name?ref=andrewliptak.com) sold through the site that were falsely attributed to Jane Friedman, and a month later, the company announced [that it would limit authors to three uploads per day](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concerns?ref=andrewliptak.com) to prevent a wave of faked books, and now requires authors to disclose that they've used AI for their products. In January 2024, [*Wired* published](https://www.wired.com/story/scammy-ai-generated-books-flooding-amazon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) a report that outlined the issues that generative AI systems are creating for authors, pointing to a wave of faked products where people have turned to these types of platforms to sell generated summaries of books. In March, the [Author's Guild posted](https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-driving-new-surge-of-sham-books-on-amazon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) a blistering condemnation of the practice, noting that "we have seen hundreds of examples of how bad actors are using generative AI to produce “books” that deceive customers and drive sales away from legitimate books," and that while Amazon has been responsive to take-down requests "the fact that they are able to get through Amazon’s content filters in the first place suggests that detecting AI-aided scams is presenting a challenge." Scams and fake products listed on Amazon aren't a new thing: this Redditor found [they'd been duped back in 2021](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/l3chv2/what%5Fto%5Fdo%5Fwith%5Fthe%5Fcounterfeit%5Fbooks%5Fsold%5Fby/?ref=andrewliptak.com) when they purchased a copy of David Gemmell's *Legend*, and enterprising sellers have been able to take advantage of the ease to which someone can upload a product to Amazon to [sell copies of unpublished *Star Wars* novels](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-heart-of-the-jedi-kenneth-c-flint-expanded-universe-fandom/) or [commission an audiobook of *Dune*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune/). The Authors Guild notes that where scammers once relied on networks of poorly-paid writers to generate their fake products, they can now turn to generative AI to accomplish much the same thing. These products are designed to fool customers by appearing to be a legitimate product by scammers taking advantage of long-standing norms within the publishing industry. Increasingly, authors and publishers are discovering that scammers are able to snag a book's cover, description, and details (things that are released well in advance of the book's publication) and can either package a file full of AI-generated content with the cover slapped on it, or something as simple as a print-on-demand notebook with the stolen cover image. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/06/IMG_7892-1.png) These types of products are designed to look like the real thing to fool customers. That appears to be the case with Tremblay's book. He told me in an email that writer Jason Rekulak alerted him to the fake book, and that " my editor/publisher alerted their Amazon reps, and at the same time, I shared the image online and a bunch of folks reported the notebook thing as fraudulent." Tremblay's not the only person to be subjected to this: in February, tech writer Kara Swisher released [*Burn Book*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982163891?ref=andrewliptak.com), [only to have scammers produce a flood of similar books](https://mashable.com/article/kara-swisher-book-amazon-ai-generated-knockoff?ref=andrewliptak.com) seemingly generated by AI. And [earlier this month](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/amazons-fake-book-problem-with-upcoming-ufo-tome-imminent/475121?ref=andrewliptak.com), Luis Elizondo, who's set to publish [*Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063235564?ref=andrewliptak.com) in August, discovered that some of the readers who thought that they'd preordered the book had really purchased a fake copy – a blank notebook with his book's cover image on it. "It's maddening," Tremblay explained to me, "and one would think Amazon might want to, I don't know, figure out a way to vet that kind of stuff, prevent it from happening. But that's probably not a cost effective act, so I doubt anything will be done to prevent these notebooks or AI ripoffs of other books from flooding the site." Amazon does appear to be responsive to takedown requests: the fake version of *Horror Movie* no longer appears on the site. But it's a removal that only happens once it's spotted: if a scammer uploads and is able to sell a handful of these faked products, it likely isn't until someone receives a fake product before the scam is identified and removed, and the customer has already spent (and potentially lost) their money. There are likely some workarounds that Amazon and publishers could put into place: a verification system (think blue checkmarks) for books being sold on the platform that would signal to buyers that it's a legitimate thing. Publishers should hold Amazon's feet to the fire. Regulators should find ways to hold Amazon and scammers accountable for these scams. And Consumers play a role here as well: paying more attention to what they're buying to make sure that the copy of *Horror Movie* they purchased isn't *Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay Notebook.* But these types of scams work precisely because consumers and the platforms they shop on don't pay close attention, and scammers have all the tools they need to make a product look legitimate to a consumer who might be blissfully unaware that these types of scams even exist. Ultimately, this is a problem that Amazon needs to recognize and own – for its own good. If customers can't trust that the products on a platform are legitimate, they'll move onto other places to buy their books, or could stop altogether and spend their money elsewhere, which means publishers and authors will suffer the consequences. Amazon should spend more time and energy proactively combating these sorts of scams, either by developing new systems to flag and review suspicious titles, or by implementing better reviews to catch these issues before they reach buyers on the site. Hopefully, they're working on it: the existence of platforms like ChatGPT and others means that this is a problem that isn't going away. --- ### Here are the winners of the 2024 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/nebula-award-sfwa-science-fiction-fantasy/ Last updated: 2024-06-10T16:14:25.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association held its annual Nebula Awards Conference over the weekend, and during the festivities, announced the winners of this year's Nebula Awards! Here are the winners (marked in bold): - **Best Novel:** *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - **Best Novella**: “Linghun” by Ai Jiang - **Best Novelette** “[The Year Without Sunshine](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by Naomi Kritzer (*Uncanny* 11-12/23) - **Best Short Story**: “[Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)” by R.S.A Garcia (*Uncanny* 7-8/23) - **Best Game Writing*:* *Baldur’s Gate 3*** by Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke - **Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction:** *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose - **Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation:** *Barbie*, Greta Gerwig by Noah Baumbach - **Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award:** Jennell Jaquays - **Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award:** James Hosek - **Infinity Award:** Tanith Lee - **Damon Knight Grand Master Award:** Susan Cooper Here's the [full list of finalists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-nebula-awards-2023-scifi-fantasy-books/). I've seen a lot of praise for *The Saint of Bright Doors*, but I haven't read it yet. This was an excellent group of books, and there are a bunch that I still need to check out. ### Here are the finalists for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-awards-2023-horror-books-fiction/ Last updated: 2024-06-10T16:00:10.000Z Each year, the [Shirley Jackson Awards](https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) names the best works of literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense, honoring the legacy of author Shirley Jackson. I've always found the nominees to be an excellent mix of novels and stories, and there are some excellent nominees on the list this year. This year's awards will be presented on Saturday, July 13 at 8pm at Readercon 33 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Here are the finalists: ### Novel - *Brainwyrms* by Alison Rumfitt - *The Daughters of Block Island* by Christa Carmen - *Don’t Fear the Reaper* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Every Version Ends in Death* by Aliya Chaudhry - *The Militia House* by John Milas - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due ### Novella - *Broken Paradise* by Eugen Bacon - *Getting by in Tligolian* by Roppotucha Greenberg - *Green Fuse Burning* by Tiffany Morris - *The Salt Grows Heavy* by Cassandra Khaw - *Sleep Alone* by J.A.W. McCarthy - *To the Woman in the Pink Hat* by LaToya Jordan ### Novelette - *The Lover* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *People Like Them* by Minka Kent - *The Pram* by Joe Hill - “[Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-versions-of-my-brother-found-under-the-bridge/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Eugenia Triantafyllou - “The Swan” by Lynn C. Pitts (*Infinite Constellations*) - “Vampire Fiction” by Michael Wehunt (*The Inconsolables*) - “What’s He Building in There” by Cat Powell (*Fairy Tale Review: The Rainbow Issue*) ### Short Fiction - “[The Dizzy Room](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-dizzy-room/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Kristina Ten (Adamant Press / *Nightmare Magazine*) - “The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word” by Laura Blackwell (*Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic*) - “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers” by Lesley Nneka Arimah (*Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror*) - *Kazti Girls* by Sciascia DeKay (*The Fabulist*) - “Something is Rotten” by Jo Kaplan (*Shakespeare Unleashed*) ### Single-Author Collection - *Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories* by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu - *Her Body Among Animals* by Paola Ferrante - *Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic* by Tobi Ogundiran - *They Will Dream in the Garden* by Gabriela Damián Miravete, translated by Adrian Demopulos - *White Trash & Recycled Nightmares* by Rebecca Rowland ### Edited Anthology - *Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic* edited by Jolie Toomajan - *Mooncalves* edited by John WM Thompson - *Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology* edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. - *Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror* edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams - *Shakespeare Unleashed* edited by James Aquilone (Monstrous Books) ### Want to own a piece of SF history? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-award-forrest-ackerman-philcon-2-science-fiction-fandom/ Last updated: 2024-06-06T18:30:37.000Z For a number of years, I wrote a column on *Kirkus Reviews* about the history of science fiction, and over the course of that run, I wrote about a ton of authors and the community's institutions, like birth of the [World Science Fiction Convention](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/futurians-and-1939-world-science-fiction-conventio/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and notable incidents, [like the 1987 Hugo Awards](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/gaming-system-1987-hugo-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Science Fiction history is something I'm still deeply interested in ([ahem](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and that's why word of an auction caught my eye: amongst the items up for grabs? [One of the first-ever Hugo Award statues](https://hindmanauctions.com/items/10961634-hugo-awards-award-given-to-forrest-j-ackerman-by-isaac-asimov-at-the-11th-worldcon-1953?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a notable and significant item within the genre community's history, but it also comes with some notable complications. --- SF fandom established itself alongside the rise of pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, and in 1939, fans gathered in the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York City. The tradition continued, jumping from city to city around the United States, and in 1953 settled in Philadelphia for PhilCon II. In the months ahead of the event, the convention's organizers [announced](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Philcon%20II/1953%20-%20Philcon%20II%20-%20PR%203.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) that they would host the first ever "Science Fiction Achievement Awards," which members would be awarded to "those writers, editors, artists and fans whom the members of Convention feel have distinguished themselves during the past year." In a followup convention report, George J. Viksnins revealed that the awards were suggested by Harold Lynch, a member of the publicity committee, and who went on to serve as the award's chairman. [Why are they called the Hugo Awards?A history of science fiction’s biggest award![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/12/721EFD5A-F03F-4AE7-ABC9-FD9008F56BD1.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-history-science-fiction/) The categories that year included prizes for the best novel, short story or novelette, "fan personality," professional magazine, cover painting, interior illustrations, fan magazine, fact article, and "new discovery." The convention progress report included a ballot for members to fill out and mail in prior to the convention. The convention's [next progress report](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Philcon%20II/1953%20-%20Philcon%20II%20-%20PR%204.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) arrived in August, and organizers trumpeted some of the early results: Alfred Bester's novel *Demolished Man* was a leading favorite, while "old-timer" Forrest Ackerman and "new-timer" Harlan Ellison were tied for favorite fan. ![Forry Ackerman, Isaac Asimov, Ben Jason, Andrew I. Porter](https://fanac.org/worldcon/Philcon/w53h001.jpeg) Image: Ben Jason via [Fanac.org](https://fanac.org/photohtm.php?worldcon/Philcon/w53h001&ref=andrewliptak.com) The awards were formally announced on September 6th, with Isaac Asimov serving as toastmaster and Willy Ley as guest of honor. Ackerman [ultimately took home the award](https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/1953-hugo-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for #1 Fan Personality. (Interestingly, it looks as though the con dropped two categories: Best Short Story or Novelette and Fan Magazine, because [none of the submissions garnered a majority](https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Philcon%20II/Philcon%20Reporter%20Kyle,%20Ellison%20et%20al%201953-09-07%20Mon.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com#view=Fit)). The organizers of the following year's convention, SF Con, opted not to hold the awards (the progress reports don't provide a reason), but the 1955 WorldCon, Clevention, [brought them back](https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/1955-hugo-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com). The prize has been awarded annually ever since, and would eventually adopt its informal nickname, the "Hugo" years later. --- The novelty of a "first" is what makes this particular award statue such a cool find: the Hugo Awards are a pillar within the SF community, and despite some of the [recent drama](https://www.andrewliptak.com/last-nights-hugo-awards-ceremony-was-a-mess/) and [controversies that have arisen](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/) in recent years, those who've won the award are in rarified air. What makes this particular item notable is that it was awarded to Ackerman, who'd remained an enormous presence within the SF community since its beginning, and it serves as a good indicator of how intertwined the fan and professional communities were. Ackerman was also [notably one of the early figures in fandom to begin wearing costumes to conventions](https://lithub.com/how-costumes-and-conventions-brought-sci-fi-fans-together-in-the-early-20th-century/?ref=andrewliptak.com), helping to kick off what we now know as cosplay. [6 essential conventions to understand the history of cosplayCosplay and gatherings are inseparable![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/04/Star-Trek.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-a-history-conventions-star-trek-ackerman-501st-legion/) There are some serious complications to Ackerman's story: he [amassed a number of accounts within fandom](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/02/06/forry-too/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of [some pretty toxic behavior towards women](https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/monsterkidclassichorrorforum/forrest-j-ackerman-s-metoo-moment-t68925.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a significant asterisk that shouldn't be overlooked and should be folded into the larger story of this era of fandom and the people in it. This particular statue is a small representative example of that history: one that celebrates both the fans and professionals who created and incubated some incredible stories, but also complicated and toxic elements that existed within fandom. We can't choose our predecessors, but we can learn from their examples and try and do better. Hopefully, this statue will go to good home. I'm a bit biased because I work at a historical society, but this is the ideal item for such an organization: one that can preserve it for posterity, but also interpret its place in the larger story of science fiction culture. The auction site estimates that this item will go for somewhere between $5000 and $7000, and the auction closes on Friday, June 7th at 9:00AM CT. It seems to be [part of a much larger body of Ackerman's collection](https://hindmanauctions.com/auctions/1336-Fine-Books-and-Manuscripts-including-Worlds-of-Tomorrow-and-Americana?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [includes another Hugo Award](https://hindmanauctions.com/items/10961635-hugo-awards-hugo-award-presented-to-hugo-gernsback-at-the-18th-annual-worldcon-1960?ref=andrewliptak.com), one given to the award's namesake, Hugo Gernsback, in 1960\. --- ### Transfer Orbit URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/transfer-orbit-2/ Last updated: 2024-06-05T14:43:10.000Z For the latest updates, head over to my newsletter [*Transfer Orbit*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/)! Science fiction is everywhere in our lives. Whether it’s the latest blockbuster movie in theaters or streaming, hit novel, technological advancement, or space launch, the world around us could easily come out of the pages of a classic novel. *Transfer Orbit* helps make sense of science fiction and how it helps us understand the future. This newsletter is a regular look at the latest news within the science fiction community, featuring analysis and commentary and updates about fiction, writing, and the future of reading. ### Here are the winners of the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-bram-stoker-award-horror-books/ Last updated: 2024-06-04T17:21:25.000Z The Horror Writers Association held its annual conference over the weekend in San Diego, and as part of its programming, it [announced](https://www.thebramstokerawards.com/front-page/the-2023-bram-stoker-awards-final-ballot/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) the winners for this year's Bram Stoker Awards! The recipients are selected by members of the Horror Writers Association, and recognize "Superior Achievement" in their respective categories. Here are the winners: ### Superior Achievement in a Novel - ***The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due** - *How to Sell a Haunted House* by Grady Hendrix - *Don’t Fear the Reaper* by Stephen Graham Jones - *Lone Women* by Victor LaValle - *Camp Damascus* by Chuck Tingle - *Black River Orchard* by Chuck Wendig ### Superior Achievement in a First Novel - ***The Daughters of Block Island* by Christa Carmen** - *The Spite House* by Johnny Compton - *Everything the Darkness Eats* by Eric LaRocca - *Maeve Fly* by CJ Leede - *Edenville* by Sam Rebelein ### Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel - Monster Camp by Sarah Henning - Los Monstruos: Felice and the Wailing Woman by Diana López - **The Nighthouse Keeper by Lora Senf** - Frances and the Werewolves of the Black Forest by Refe Tuma - What Stays Buried by Suzanne Young ### Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel - ***She Is a Haunting* by Trang Thanh Tran** - *You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight* by Kalynn Bayron - *Funeral Songs for Dying Girls* by Cherie Dimaline - *Find Him Where You Left Him Dead* by Kristen Simmons - *Harvest House* by Cynthia Leitich Smith ### Superior Achievement in Long Fiction - “Rumpus Room” by Tananarive Due - ***Linghun* by Ai Jiang** - *The Salt Grows Heavy* by Cassandra Khaw - *Sleep Alone* by J.A.W. McCarthy - *Despatches* by Lee Murray ### Superior Achievement in Short Fiction - “Silk” by L.E. Daniels (*Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster: Stories Inspired by Stephen King*) - “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare* 10/23) - “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak” by Sam J. Miller (*The Dark* 7/23) - **“Quondam”, Cindy O’Quinn (*The Nightmare Never Ends*)** - “An Inherited Taste” by Nadine Aurora Tabing (*No Trouble at All*) ### Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection - *Blood from the Air* by Gemma Files - *Cold, Black, & Infinite* by Todd Keisling - *Spin a Black Yarn* by Josh Malerman - *The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future* by Christi Nogle - *Root Rot & Other Grim Tales* by Sarah Read ### Superior Achievement in an Anthology - *Shakespeare Unleashed* edited by James Aquilone - *The Drive-In: Multiplex* edited by Christopher Golden & Brian Keene - *Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology* edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. - ***Out There Screaming* edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams** - *American Cannibal* edited by Rebecca Rowland ### Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction - *The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar* by Robin R. Means Coleman & Mark H. Harris - ***101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered* by Sadie Hartmann** - *A Vindication of Monsters: Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley* edited by Claire Fitzpatrick - *The Art of the Zombie Movie* by Lisa Morton - *Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror* edited by Lee Murray & Angela Yuriko Smith ### Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction - “Words Wielded by Women” by Carina Bissett *(Apex* 5/23) - **“Becoming Ungovernable: Latah, Amok, and Disorder in Indonesia” by Nadia Bulkin (*Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror*)** - “100 Livers” by K.P. Kulski (*Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror*) - “Displaced Spirits” by Lee Murray (*Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror*) - “A Theatre of Ghosts, a Haunted Cinema: The Japanese Gothic as Theatrical Tradition in Gurozuka” by Kevin Wetmore, Jr.(*Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture: Special Issue on Asian Gothic* 6/23) ### Superior Achievement in Poetry - *Bleeding Rainbows and Other Broken Spectrums* by Maxwell Ian Gold - *The Quiet Ways I Destroy You* by Jessica McHugh - *Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair* by Marisca Pichette - *Numinous Stones* by Holly Lyn Walrath - ***On the Subject of Blackberries* by Stephanie M. Wytovich** ### Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel - *Ghostlore, Vol. 1* by Cullen Bunn, art by Leomacs - *Dead Mall* by Adam Cesare, art by David Stoll - **Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu, art by Soo Lee** - *Tombs* by Junji Ito - *H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth* by Gou Tanabe ### Superior Achievement in a Screenplay - *Black Mirror:* “Beyond the Sea” - ***Godzilla Minus One*** - *Huesera: The Bone Woman* - *No One Will Save You* - *When Evil Lurks* ### Check out all the SF/F books hitting stores this June URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2024-scifi-fantasy-horror-book-list/ Last updated: 2024-06-01T19:37:56.000Z Somehow, the year is half over. I've been enjoying the summer weather and I've been working on catching up with my reading outside in our yard. It's been delightful, and a nice change of pace from the couch while I fight for space with my kids and the TV. June also brings a ton of new books to bookstore shelves, and I've rounded up 21 books that caught my eye. In case you missed them, you can find other recommendations from past months via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). This is just the first list of the month: I've got another one coming in a couple of weeks. As always, this newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost, as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it. If you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider supporting the newsletter, either by signing up as a supporting subscriber, or by purchasing a book via the links to Bookshop.org). Those links are affiliates, and any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/account/plans) If that's not in the cards now, please consider forwarding this newsletter to your friends and fellow readers, or by sharing it on your social media of choice. It's greatly appreciated! Okay, here are 21 new books that you should check out this month: ### [*Star Wars Legends: Iron Fist*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726082?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Aaron Allston (June 4th) I was in middle school when I first got into *Star Wars*, thanks to the re-release of the special editions. After watching the films, I began seeking out the expanded universe novels, and one of the very first that I picked up was Aaron Allston's *Iron Fist,* the second installment of his *Wraith Squadron* series. I bounced off it hard. It was the middle of the series and I didn't know any of the characters, so I set it aside. Later, [when I began reading Michael A. Stackpole's *X-Wing* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-a-stackpoles-rogue-squadron-novels-unlocked-star-wars-vast-potential/), I went back and gave the books another shot and fell in love with them. Allston had a fun challenge here: making some connections between his books and the events surrounding Dave Wolverton's [*The Courtship of Princess Leia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722190?ref=andrewliptak.com) \[[interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/david-farland-wolverton-courtship-of-princess-leia/)!\], all while playing out an entertaining heist and attack against Warlord Zsinj. As a bonus, there's also a new audiobook as part of the release. ### [*The Singularity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781681378008?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dino Buzzati, translated by Anne Milano Appel (June 4th) Originally published in 1960, Dino Buzzati's novella *The Singularity* is considered one of the first major Italian works of science fiction. Now, the New York Review of Books has reissued it with a new translation by Anne Milano Appel. It follows a professor named Ermanno Ismani, who has been tasked with his country's minister of defense for a top-secret mission to Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, located in the middle of nowhere. What he's supposed to do and when isn't clear. Upon his arrival, he discovers a mysterious white wall that his new colleagues assure him isn't part of a nuclear program: it's far more powerful than that, and as he spends more time there, he discovers that it might have something to do with the nature of intelligence and consciousness itself. [Writing for *Speculative Fiction in Translation*](https://www.sfintranslation.com/?p=14118&ref=andrewliptak.com), Rachel Cordasco says "Beautifully translated by Anne Milano Appel and a fascinating exploration of hubris and obsession, *The Singularity* is a must-read as we continue, in the 21st century, to strive for ever-more aware artificial intelligence and learn, at the same time, that we must tread carefully." ### [*The Fireborne Blade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250290311?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charlotte Bond (May 28th) Maddileh is a rare female knight, and has put her efforts into slaying dragons, even if it's almost as difficult as putting up with the crap that her male counterparts have sent her way over the course of her life. When she's forced to redeem her honor, she's tasked with retrieving the Fireborne Blade from a legendary dragon known as the White Lady, or die trying. Reviewing the book for *Locus Magazine*, Liz Bourke [notes that it](https://locusmag.com/2024/05/liz-bourke-reviews-the-fireborne-blade-by-charlotte-bond/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "harks back to the adventure style of sword-and-sorcery fantasy that had its most recent great flowering (to the best of my knowledge) in the 1980s," and that while it's not terribly deep, "it’s fun. A breath blowing straight in from the D&D-esque sword-and-sorcery of yesteryear." ### [*Rebel Moon Part Two - The Scargiver*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803367330?ref=andrewliptak.com) by V. Castro (June 4th) Zack Snyder's big space opera epic for Netflix stretched across two bloated installments, the first of which dropped late last year, and the second earlier this spring. Following its release is a novelization of *Part 2: The Scargiver* (which follows [*Part One: A Child of Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803367316?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which we return to the world of Veldt as we follow Kora and her band of rebels as they work to fight against the forces of the Realm. [Snyder’s Star WarsZack Snyder’s failed Star Wars pitch is now headed to Netflix. It could prove to be the start of something interesting, or at the very least, somewhat entertaining![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-07-at-9.16.43-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/zack-snyder-netflix-rebel-moon-star-wars-science-fiction-movies/) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726105?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Eruption*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565073?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Michael Crichton and James Patterson (June 3rd) The author of such hits as [*Jurassic Park*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345538987?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Sphere*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061990557?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345539014?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Andromeda Strain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101974490?ref=andrewliptak.com), Michael Crichton was a huge and influential figure in the bookselling world, and after his death in 2008, it seemed like his name would vanish from bookstores. That didn't happen: after his death, his wife began looking through his papers and began discovering a number of unfinished manuscripts. Some books, like [*Pirate Latitudes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062428875?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Dragon Teeth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062473387?ref=andrewliptak.com) were released without too much extra work, while others, like [*Micro*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780060873172?ref=andrewliptak.com)and now *Eruption* were completed by another author selected by the estate. [Expanding the CrichtonverseIn November 2019, a familiar name appeared in bookstores: Michael Crichton. Crichton had died at the age of 66 in 2008 after a brief battle against lymphoma, but there his name was emblazoned in red on the cover of a new novel called The Andromeda Evolution \[https://bookshop.org/a/![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_c5cfc14b-f33b-466b-a40a-fbf654d10bac_3833x2875.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanding-the-crichtonverse/) *Eruption* [was completed by bestselling author James Patterson](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-crichton-james-patterson/), and it's about a volcanic eruption that threatens Hawai'i, and because of some of the US Army's long-held secrets (some nuclear waste and some nasty chemical weapons), the consequences of that eruption will be devastating on a planetary level. I've already finished this one (I listened to the audiobook on a recent trip) and it's a bombastic, dumb, and mostly entertaining book. ### [*Apostles of Mercy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250274564?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lindsay Ellis (June 4th) Lindsay Ellis rounds out her *Noumena* series (which began with [*Axiom's End*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250798138?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Truth of the Divine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250830227?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *Apostles of Mercy*. In this trilogy, we follow Cora Sabino as she discovers that the US has made contact with extraterrestrial life, and becomes an emissary to the alien civilization via an entity known as Ampersand. In this latest installment of the series, first contact hasn't gone well for humanity. Governments around the world are preparing for the arrival of the Superorganism, which threatens to take us out before we can threaten it. While Cora's ready to throw humanity under the bus, she begins to realize that her blind faith in Ampersand might be misplaced, and that humanity faces some other threats that could devastate the world. *Publishers Weekly* says "Ellis ratchets up the political intrigue, fear of alien invasion, and family drama as Cora reconnects with Nils, all while posing a moral question of whether humanity deserves saving at all." ### [*Star Wars: Temptation of the Force*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723098?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tessa Gratton (June 11th) The latest installment of *The High Republic* series arrives just in time for the new Disney series *Star Wars: Acolyte*. In this latest adventure (Set after the events of George Mann's [*The Eye of Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597934?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Jedi Masters Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann have been separated by the Nihil's Stormwall, but have since reunited after Avar's daring escape. Now, accompanied by Jedi Knights Bell Zettifar, Burryaga, and Vernestra Rwoh, they're off to lead a mission to liberate the planet of Naboo and show the planets trapped behind the Stormwall that they haven't been forgotten and abandoned by the Jedi. ### [*The Stars Too Fondly*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063320819?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Emily Hamilton (June 11th) It's always cool to see a Vermont author on this list: Emily Hamilton's debut novel is *The Stars Too Fondly*, a space opera that follows Cleo and her friends after they steal a spaceship while trying to get to the bottom of a mystery: the disappearance of a crew twenty years ago. When they went aboard, the ship's engines activated on their own and now they're off to Proxima Centauri, unable to stop the ship. In some ways, it's a dream come true: Cleo had long wanted to become an astronaut. But as their journey stretches out, the mysteries and her relationships with her friends become far more complicated as the ship's dark matter engines begin to transform them. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063320819?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This Star Trek-inspired space adventure has something for everyone—heartwarming romantic comedy, cosmic superpowers, and humanity’s future at stake. It should win plenty of fans." ### [*The Stardust Grail*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250875372?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Yume Kitasei (June 11th) Maya Hoshimoto was once known as one of the best art thieves in the galaxy, repatriating stolen objects to their home civilizations, only to go into hiding after one job went wrong. She's been enjoying life ever since as a graduate student, but she's been haunted by visions of the future. When a friend from her former life reappears with a new job, she can't refuse: find an ancient artifact that could save an alien civilization from extinction. It's been lost for centuries, and there are other treasure hunters after it. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/yume-kitasei/the-stardust-grail/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Broad in scope, covering everything from the rise and fall of alien civilizations to what it means to be a person, this is a luminous work, vacillating between the highs and lows of human experience and how they might translate across alien worlds. Sympathetic, flawed characters demonstrate how individual actions can reverberate through the past and future." ### [*Redemption in Indigo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593724385?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karen Lord (June 11th) Originally published by Small Beer Press back in 2010, Karen Lord's acclaimed debut novel is set in the Caribbean about a woman named Paama whose gluttonous husband has followed her to her parent's home and caused problems by killing livestock and stealing. She's left him, and in doing so attracted the attention of the djombi – spirit creatures – who present her with a gift: a Chaos Stick. It allows her to manipulate the world. The stick's original owner wants it back, and will stop at nothing to retrieve it. ### [*Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393881516?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annalee Newitz (June 4th) Annalee Newitz is one of my favorite writers: their novels, like [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228024?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Autonomous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392084?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Future of Another Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392114?ref=andrewliptak.com) have been excellent, and I've also really learned a lot from their nonfiction books [*Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307949424?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393882452?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_1166.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) Their next book is all about the power of storytelling through channels like disinformation and propaganda, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War and coming up to the modern day era of online information campaigns. It looks like an absolutely essential book if you want to spend any amount of time online in the present day. ### [*Daughter of the Merciful Deep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316378222?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leslye Penelope (June 4th) Jane Edwards, her family, and her neighbors were forcibly expelled from their community when she was eleven, and she hasn't said a word since. A little over a decade later, she found a safe haven in the all-Black town of Awenasa, but the construction of a new dam threatens her new home. She's willing to do anything to save Aawenasa, and when a man with strange abilities arrives, she suspects that he might be the key aiding her in her quest. She's shocked to learn that she knows him, and he was supposed to be dead, his bodied laid to rest in a river. To find answers to this mystery, she ventures into a sunken world full of unpredictable gods and myths, and will have to find her voice in order to save her community. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316378222?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Jane’s character leaps off the page, buoyed by a supporting cast who breathe life into the narrative. Meanwhile, the romance that develops between Jane and Daniel adds sweetness. This potent work packs a punch." ### [*Cinderwich* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781955765206?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Cherie Priest (June 11th) Years ago, some children discovered a body wedged into a tree in Cinderwich, Tennessee, but the identity of the body has long remained a mystery. Decades later, Kate Thrush and her former college professor Dr. Judith Kane travel to Cinderwich in hopes that it might be a woman they knew, Ellen, Kate's lost aunt and Judith's former partner. When they arrive, they find a desiccated town that's resistant to answering their questions, and as the two women dig for clues, they find more questions and rot underneath the town. ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726105?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Inland*](https://12willowspress.com/home/books/inland/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kate Risse (June 15th) In this debut novel, Kate Risse jumps a couple of years into 2026, as climate change has gripped the planet, following Julia and her friend Martin as they flee their coastal home on Florida's Panhandle to the northeast to try and find her son Billy, who's found Martin's daughters Lana and Agnes, who are also escaping as the seas overtook their homes. As they all escape the flooded coast and head for higher ground, they have to contend with a world that's changed. [](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-risse-7b6294264/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://www.instagram.com/katherine.risse/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](http://12willowspress.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Kate%5FRisse%5FInland?id=b%5FD8EAAAQBAJ&hl=en%5FUS&gl=US&ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Mirrored Heavens*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534437708?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebecca Roanhorse (June 4th) Rebecca Roanhorse's acclaimed *Between Heaven and Earth* trilogy (preceded by [*Black Sun*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534437685?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Fevered Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534437746?ref=andrewliptak.com)) comes to an end with *Mirrored Heavens*. Set in a civilization inspired by ancient central America, the story has followed a delicate balance of power that's been undermined by prophecy and revenge. Serapio is the avatar of the Crow God Reborn and now rules all of Tova, only to face a new prophecy and new enemies that could destroy him. Meanwhile, ship captain Xiala has returned home to the island of Teek, their only hope as their way of life and magical powers come under threat. However, she faces new challenges of her own and will be forced to make sacrifices to unleash her powers and become queen. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rebecca-roanhorse/mirrored-heavens/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Roanhorse’s fans won’t be surprised to hear that she’s crafted a complex, suspenseful, and ultimately satisfying ending to her masterful trilogy." ### [*Moonbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374610609?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robin Sloan (June 11th) One of the books that I've been looking forward to the most this year is *Moonbound*, by author (and friend of *Transfer Orbit*) Robin Sloan. Set eleven thousand years from now, a boy named Ariel lives in a village under the rule of a wizard. He's called to a life of adventure and while on a quest, encounters an strange artifact: an artificial intelligence that has been tasked with recording the entirety of human history. When Ariel accidentally angers the wizard Malory, he concocts a plan to defeat him, aided by some unlikely allies. Another TO friend, Eliot Peper, wrote a [glowing review](https://eliotpeper.substack.com/p/moonbound) in his newsletter: "There’s nothing quite like a good story well told. *Moonbound* is one of those. I wish I could read it again for the first time." ### [*The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781541605640?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Smyth (May 28th) I'm a big fan of books about books, and this one recently caught my eye at the local bookstore: Smyth explores the evolution of the book by looking at the lives of the people who helped influence its creation, from printer Wynkyn de Worde to John Baskerville to Benjamin Franklin, and more. Blake Morrison [writes in *The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/04/bookmaker-blake-morrison?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Smyth’s tone is jaunty, but there’s no doubting the breadth of his knowledge and love of the business." ### [*Service Model*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250290281?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 4th) There's a running joke in the Transfer Orbit slack channel about how Adrian Tchaikovsky finds the time to write all of the books he has coming out at any given time. His latest is called *Service Model*, set in a future when humanity is reliant on robots. When one robot gets an idea downloaded into its programming, it murders its owner and runs away, and finds a much wider world: a crumbling human empire where robots are forced to find a new purpose for their existence. Library Journal gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/service-model-1804835?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "A surprisingly thoughtful and compelling story from Tchaikovsky about one robot’s journey through their own version of Dante’s circles of hell, complete with all the other hells they’d rather never have imagined." ### [*Rogue Sequence*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250322432?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Zac Topping (June 11th) Decades from now, militaries around the world use genetically-engineered soldiers to carry out their deadly work. Ander Rade is one such soldier who volunteered for Xyphos Industries' Gene-Mod Program years ago. He's faithfully served, but when a mission goes catastrophically wrong, he's captured and imprisoned, and is forced into fighting pits for the next decade until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces turn up. Since his capture, genetic engineering has been banned by the World Unity Council and people like Ander are deemed a threat to society. The agents have a deal for him: track down a former teammate, and they'll grant him his freedom. He can't refuse the opportunity, but it comes with some significant strings attached. ### [*Star Wars Legends: 501st: Imperial Commando*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726105?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karen Traviss (June 4th) Another re-release in the Star Wars Legends series is the final Commando novel written by Karen Traviss (preceded by [*Hard Contact*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599495?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Triple Zero*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722169?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*True Colors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722206?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Order 66*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726068?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which finds the members of Delta and Omega Squads dealing with the aftermath of Order 66 and their new role in the Empire. ### [*Horror Movie*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063070011?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Tremblay (June 11th) I'm a big fan of Paul Tremblay's horror novels: he has an excellent light touch on the supernatural, which makes you wonder if, say, [ghosts are real](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-disappearance-at-devils-rock-horror-review/) or [what a zombie outbreak might look like](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-horror-novels-mexican-gothic-only-good-indians-survivor-song/). His next is called *Horror Movie*, and as the title suggests, it's about a horror film. [Pushing against nostalgiaPaul Tremblay on his next horror novel, The Pallbearer’s Club![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-07-at-3.06.01-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-pallbearers-club-horror/) Back in 1993, a group of filmmakers set out to make a horror film. While the film was never released, it garnered a massive fanbase, and decades later, a Hollywood studio is looking to remake it. Only one of the film's original cast members is still alive, and he witnessed firsthand the troubling elements in the script and the disturbing things that happened during the shoot, and this remake is threatening to bring back some horrifying memories. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/horror-movie-2216150?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Unease and terror rapidly build in the book as readers learn details of what happened on the original set and how it threatens the present. The novel is as unsettling and gripping as a slasher while also managing to be funny and thoughtful." --- That's all for now: thanks as always for reading. Let me know what caught your eye and what you're currently reading! ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726105?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Read my new short story, Embers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-science-fiction-horizon-2045-far-futures/ Last updated: 2024-05-30T16:33:10.000Z This week, [Horizon 2045](https://horizon2045.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) launched its digital anthology, [*Far Futures*](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I've got a story in it! It's called "Embers," and you can read and listen to it [here](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/embers/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I'm pretty excited that this collection of stories is now online. Writing this was an interesting challenge and it's been (literally) a decade since I published my first short story, "[Fragmented](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fragmented-military-science-fiction-2/)." I love the cover art by João Queiroz and I'm glad they also produced an audio version to accompany the story. (I don't know if there'll be a downloadable version of the anthology or audiobook, although that would be neat). [Announcing Horizon 2045’s Far Futures project!I’ve got a story in this, and it’s launching on Wednesday, May 29th!![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/IMG_1355.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/horizon-2045-far-futures-science-fiction-nuclear-weapons/) Something that I've been fascinated by is how fiction can be used as a foresight or scenario tool, whether it's the [military trying to imagine how technology will impact the battlefield](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) or [trying to find some hope in a future dominated by climate change](https://www.andrewliptak.com/arizona-state-university-solarpunk-cities-of-light-bacigalupi-divya-olukotun-free/). That's what attracted me to Horizon 2045's project: it's an organization trying to solve some insurmountable issues when it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons, and they wanted to put together some stories that imagine the *best* case scenario for the world: one where nuclear weapons are taken out of the equation. Once I put together the rough idea that had been kicking around in my head, I began to backtrack on what a nuclear-free world might look like, and how we might go about doing that. That's where my initial story idea fell into place: an enforcement agency, Orbital Atomic Assessment and Retrieval Division (OAARD) tasked with making sure that everyone is playing by the rule and disposing of nukes. The story takes place long after they'd gotten rid of the bombs from various countries: they're now working on all the edge cases and issues that pop up. I'm pretty happy with the resulting story: I was able to do some stylistic things that was something of an experiment for me, and it got me thinking about some things in some interesting and different ways. Hopefully, it won't be as long before I finish the next story: I have one that I've been picking away at, and I just need to sit down and finish it. While you're at the site, you should check out the [other stories that are part of the package](https://farfutures.horizon2045.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from Madeline Ashby, Vincent Ialenti, PAGES Matam, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, Tochi Onyebuchi, João Queiroz, Sheree Renėe Thomas, and Peter Waring. (And fill out the survey at the bottom!) I hope that you enjoy them all. ### High fidelity URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/adaptations-sci-fi-halo-3-body-movies-books/ Last updated: 2024-05-24T17:28:09.000Z I had high hopes for Paramount+'s *Halo* series ahead of its release in March 2022\. The trailers *looked* promising, with some good-looking scenery and a good-looking suit of Spartan armor. While there was some [behind-the-scenes industry drama](https://www.andrewliptak.com/halo-paramount-showtime-move/) that accompanied this project, it felt like we'd finally get a solid adaptation of the video game franchise despite those problems. However, the show's first season fell pretty far short of what I'd hoped for when it debuted: the story felt directionless, the details that helped define the game's world were off, and overall, it felt like a far cry from the story that I was a huge fan of. Paramount recently released the show's second season, and while it was an improvement, there's still a significant gap between the source material (and what I'd like to see in a *Halo* project) and what we've got on screen. It's a good lesson in the value of tempering one's expectations, but also a good example of where you can have all (or most of) the right elements, only to have the final product just not gel. And, it provides an excellent opening to explore a bigger topic: just what do we expect when a work is adapted? ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. It's long been clear that there would be differences between the games and the show. Prior to the show's release, 343 Industries released a [blog post](https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/silver-debrief-a-new-beginning?ref=andrewliptak.com) that outlined that the show would be set in its own canon, the Silver Timeline. Canon should be an old hat for *Transfer Orbit* readers: [it's something I](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dc-universe-james-gunn-dceu/) [think](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-canon-literature-books-history/) [about quite a bit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dc-canon-superheroes-marvel-star-wars-continuity/), because it's a useful tool for approaching and framing stories, and I think it's worth treating canon as a tool, but not something that's sacrosanct. A couple of years ago, [I interviewed fantasy author Brian Staveley](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brian-staveley-empires-ruin-fantasy-interview/), who made a point that really stuck with me: > "The irony of writing is that, before you write anything, you can do anything! You have total freedom. And for every word, every sentence you write, it's like you're building your own cage. You hope that the cage turns out to be a beautiful structure, but you're limiting your freedom with every choice you make." In a lot of ways, canon is a cage. It's a decision to keep things consistent across multiple stories and creators in order to create some sort of narrative stability. Some franchises adhere to it religiously: Lucasfilm has an entire story group that's tasked with tracking canon and making sure that everything that it's producing is congruent. That didn't stop them from [splitting off the Expanded Universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-legacy-of-the-force-expanded-universe/) to give director J.J. Abrams freedom of movement for what eventually became *The Force Awakens*. This seems to be the same approach that Paramount is taking with *Halo*. While that approach gives creators some additional freedom, it's worth remembering that there's a reason why a work is being adapted: fans are attached to particular characters, story, or other elements of the world, and they're going to come to any adaptation with some expectation that they'll be seeing some recognizable elements. --- ![May be an image of text that says 'An S SF novel by the the dean of American science fiction writers MOC ROBERT A. BETER HEINLEIN STARSHIP TROOPERS'](https://scontent-atl3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/441881874_965312965595370_1603867031965869823_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=dFvXe_z2038Q7kNvgH-DL_g&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.xx&oh=00_AYCAbigeMnVLkw3JhClJeq9uL1kswjnh5lMFqNDJUBhlEg&oe=665698E3) Image: Andrew Liptak I'm usually thrilled when I hear that someone is working to adapt a book or story. Theoretically, it should help boost the visibility of said story to a greater audience, and within the SF/F industry, the conventional wisdom is that those successes eventually make their way over to other works and bring in new fans: adaptations of *Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, The Expanse*, and others have brought in new readers and helped make the case to publishers that they should publish other books in the same vein. This era of peak TV has been a boon to new adaptations of existing works. But before this, an adaptation was a dirty word for most fans. Word of an adaptation always came with a feeling of dread: *how are they going to ruin this story?* There is no shortage of films that have only lightly adapted their source books, sometimes only taking the name and vague concepts, like Alex Proyas's adaptation of *I, Robot* by Isaac Asimov. *Halo* isn't the first franchise to dredge up issues of fidelity to its source material. [Apple's adaption of *Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/)had long-time [Asimov fans howling](https://file770.com/whose-foundation-is-this-anyway/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the series was *Foundation* in name only, while Denis Villeneuve's recently-released *Dune: Part 2* has divided some fans over some of the departures from the novel. These complaints aren't new: [When I recently posted](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/posts/pfbid0tTRGr3mDVjGXHh99dzgHGVow38Mf1APcEy6XYuADcwshUDxFv3C2VpxRXxDK7KTal) on the anniversary of Robert Heinlein's death on Facebook, the comments section lit up with people who were still angry about Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of *Starship Troopers*. All of this begs the question: what what makes a good adaptation in the first place? --- ![No photo description available.](https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/98370636_2498747030439413_802089454675165184_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=ehP5rbmxB-4Q7kNvgEgJcvA&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-1.xx&oh=00_AYDNYOkrVN954Hr8576pRspLZ4ejIs1uyywsHm7XgOBXxg&oe=66782B7B) Image: Andrew Liptak The type of story you can tell with words on the page is structurally different than what you can put on screen. The author of a novel can utilize pages of description to sketch out their world, while a filmmaker can accomplish something similar with the right location and camera setup. But an author can also go deep into a character's head to explore their motivations and decisions, while a filmmaker has to find a way to show the results of those internal monologues. And sometimes, the scale and size of a story is so much bigger than what a filmmaker's budget allows. I'm endlessly fascinated by the way films turn out because physical and financial constraints: everything that you see on the screen has to be created and positioned just right in order to work. George R.R. Martin [famously noted](https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/his-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-george-r-r-martin-talks-game-of-thrones/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he'd write things for television that would have to be cut because of television budgets, and that in part turned him to write his *A Song of Ice and Fire* series: "I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there." There's an interesting anecdote that came out of James Hibberd's *Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series,* in which the show's directors were stymied by weather and logistics while producing a complicated battle scene, and rather than filming a planned combat scene, they ended up with a shot of Jon Snow getting buried in bodies. It was a shot that worked well, and it's a good example of how the physical work that goes into a projection can impact the way a story is told – often in ways that aren't predictable when a production begins. Another major constraint on filmmakers is time: big books contain a lot of narrative, and the vast majority of audiences are only willing to sit so long in a theater to enjoy a film. While plotting out his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings,* Peter Jackson famously planned only two films. As recounted in Ian Nathan's *Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth*, when he went to New Line Cinemas to pitch the two films, the studio's founder Robert Shaye asked "why would you make two films when there are three books?" The rest is history, and even then, Jackson was pushing the limits with films that ran up into the three-hour mark. There's a reason why the Extended Editions were a home release. The streaming world has helped alleviate time as an issue for a narrative. Audiences have become accustomed to seeing a book or game get the streaming series treatment that can take that longer story spread out across eight to ten segments, thus allowing writers and producers to capture more of the narrative in their adaptation. The result, by and large, has been that they're able to produce projects that helm far closer to their source material, allowing them to keep more important scenes and dialogue in the story, rather than abridging them in favor of crowd-pleasing action scenes. There are also some mundane, boring things that feed into this: as they've worked to build up their subscriber numbers, streaming services have benefited from low interest rates, meaning they can borrow lots of money, and kick the can of profitability down the road a bit while they try and lock in as many paying subscribers as they can. The result is an environment where executives have greenlit lots of expensive productions, which in turn, helps those filmmakers and writers better realize the worlds they're adapting. When I visited *The Expanse*'s sets in 2015 and 2018 in Toronto, I was amazed at how big the production was, and how much detail they were able to pour into it. When I visited the sets for the Syfy Channel's *Dark Matter* and *Killjoys* in 2016, it was clear these were running with far fewer resources. The result of these factors means that filmmakers and studios generally have the space and resources to play out a story without having to make huge abridgements to fit it into a production, and in many cases, can helm closer and closer to the original source material. But I don't think that "close to source" automatically makes an adaptation *better*. It can, but I don't think that it's an essential element for making a great movie or show. On a whim, I took a look through my [closet of DVDs](https://www.andrewliptak.com/physical-media-dvds-blu-ray/), came up with a list of adaptations, and began plotting them on a chart to see where how well they fared as a *good* movie. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/01/Add-a-subheading--1-.png)](https://i.imgur.com/0ydeEVD.png?ref=andrewliptak.com) Graphic: Andrew Liptak, with thanks to TO's Slackers. Green = book, red = game = orange = comics. Don't yell at me: this is all subjective. Stepping back to take it in, here's what I saw: some films/shows *are* great because they're close to that source material: HBO's *Band of Brothers,* Syfy/Amazon's *The Expanse,* Ridley Scott's *The Martian*, and Steven Spielberg's *Jurassic Park* are good examples of the filmmakers and studios understanding what made a story succeed and either not having to compromise too much, recognizing that the stories translated well to their respective mediums, or seeing that changing things too much wouldn't work as well. But that's not universally the case. One good example that stuck out to me is Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 film *Children of Men,* which departs mightily from P.D. James' novel to tell an incredibly touching and frightening post-apocalyptic story. Spielberg's 2002 film *Minority Report* is another that's easy to point to: borrowing some of the central ideas from from Philip K. Dick's novella and using them to examine themes around surveillance and predestiny in a technological world. It's one that I like even more than the original story. On the other side, you have adaptations that are close to their sources but which don't really feel like they came together in the same way, like Gavin Hood's 2013 adaptation of *Ender's Game* or Duncan Jones' 2016 take on *Warcraft*: they had all the right elements, but didn't click. Zack Snyder's *Watchman* slavishly adhered to the visuals of the original graphic novel, but missed some of the meaning behind the art and story and was something of a dud. An adaptation is essentially a translation of a story, and by extension, it's a glimpse into another person's mindset and vision for what a story is. Here's an experiment: ask some of your friends to read a passage of a book or a story, and have them draw the scene or character based on the descriptions. None of them will draw exactly the same thing, because everyone will come to that story with different eyes and experiences. Even if you have a super popular story like Harry Potter, where you have a general acceptance of what the characters and world look like (aided by lots of cover art and film adaptations), you will still have noticeable differences from person to person. The same goes with a book: the author sets out to tell their story, while a filmmaker might draw anything from a similar-but-different narrative to something that's very different as they construct their picture. How well that adaptation plays out often comes down to well the story lends itself visually to film and how well a filmmaker can realize those elements in a way that the film can stand on its own. Where *Minority Report* and *The Martian* worked well and *Watchman* and *Warcraft* didn't feels like it comes down to "we're setting out to make a good movie" and not "we're setting out to make a good adaptation of this story." A good adaptation can have all the right elements, but not work well as a film or show, while a good film can have all the right components from the source material that also makes it a good adaptation. If fidelity to the source isn't the key indication of quality, what is? Certainly, the quality rests somewhat on the state of the physical elements that go into a film: having the right cast and crew, conceptualization of a world, a studio that trusts a director's vision, and so forth. And if you're drawing from a world that folks are familiar with, bringing over the building blocks, whether it's in the design of the characters/props/surroundings/world itself and an understanding of the big concepts that underpin the story are useful to have. Years ago, director Gareth Edwards made an [insightful comment about his approach to *Rogue One*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUb%5FzpdyDpU&ref=andrewliptak.com) that has stuck with me: "it's touching my favorite movie of all time, but if you're too respectful of it, that you didn't do anything new or different, take a risk, then what are you bringing to the table?" That's something that's been on my mind because anyone who's adapting an existing work has to balance some competing priorities: what do you bring that existing fans (because if you're adapting an existing work, you're operating on the idea that you'll have lots of them coming to check your thing out) want to see, verses your strengths as a writer/director/artist that might diverge a bit? One example that comes to mind here is Pete Travis's 2012 film *Dredd*. The film adapts the comic character Judge Dredd from the comic *2000AD*, and it had a mixed history of adaptations: Danny Cannon's 1995 adaptation made some critical errors, like star Sylvester Stallone not keeping his helmet on the entire time (as in the comics). In this new film, the film keeps star Karl Urban helmeted up the entire time – it's one of those details that is important to the spirit of the character, and the rest of the film seems to have captured tone of the world and story. It's not a slavish adaptation of any particular comic, but a handful of storylines. ![May be a graphic of 1 person and text](https://scontent-atl3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/434643415_937865301673470_549295558980548987_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=GDJb1_XiaDsQ7kNvgE-trgk&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.xx&oh=00_AYA5813QznfZKCfZZ64XUW--Pf19rHhbMcFz0xORPCB4Iw&oe=665687DB) Image: Andrew Liptak In April, Netflix released its adaptation of Cixin Liu's *The Three-Body Problem*, and while I watched, I went back and re-read / re-listened to the novel. It's been an interesting experience, because it made it easier to see the changes and compare them in the moment. The show retains the story's broadest strokes: it begins in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, involves first contact with an alien civilization, and they're now bent on coming to Earth to find a more stable home. But there are differences. The showrunners changed some of the characters around and took a more international view of the story, while some of the sequences and events have been moved around a bit. Where the book had long stretches of technical exposition, the show largely accomplished visually. The result is that *3 Body Problem* feels like a well-edited version of the novel, one that moves quickly through the important story beats. When I [posted about the book on my Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/posts/pfbid021r9f2Cdks5KNzzugkWR2Mk8TRYNVbrFp8969QBNQirndriV9phHBHWygBqDqMSrml), a number of commenters noted that they prefer the [recently-released Chinese version of the show](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-chinese-sf-watch/), because it's a more faithful adaptation, told across 30 hour-long episodes. I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but by all accounts, it's a pretty faithful adaptation because it helms closely to Cixin's novel, which again begs the question: what are we looking for in an adaptation? Are we looking for a movie or show that is an exact copy of the source novel? Or are we looking for reassurance that others see the book in the same way we do? I think it's the latter: people will accept a less-than-faithful adaptation if it's a good film (like *Children of Men*), but will bounce off of it if the adaptation isn't recognizable to them (like *Starship Troopers*). Adaptations work the best when the right elements line up: a good story, good design, and an understanding of what themes are important to the character of the story. But a carbon copy isn't and shouldn't be what we set out to make or watch. When it comes to *Halo*, I think it's pretty easy to see why it doesn't quite work. Its showrunners inherited a tough situation: not only has the project been in the works for a long time and has accumulated some narrative debt from the succession of creators and writers involved in it, the entire franchise has a lot of lore and canon surrounding it. I don't think that a series that faithfully reproduces *Halo: Combat Evolved* would work well: taken beat to beat, you'd just follow a guy as he runs around the Halo ring as he kills scores of Covenant soldiers. That makes for a *great* game, but the stuff that makes for a great film or show go beyond that: touching on the various things that the games and books have fleshed out, the side conversations that happen between cut scenes, Master Chief's introspection at how he got to that place; all moments that build the character in the story. The potential is all there. At its core, the original game about a soldier running around in power armor plowing through lines of enemy aliens amongst some ruins on an ancient ringworld. But the rest of the *Halo* franchise doesn't always have a good grasp on what it's about: sometimes it's about saving the galaxy from a civilization of religious fundamentalists (*Halo*s *2* and *3*) and other times, it's about the overreach of a military industrial complex (*ODST* and *Reach*). Throw in some AI malfeasance here and there (*Halo 4* and *5*), and you've got a bit of a mixed bag. (That's not to say the games are individually bad.) [Halo Infinite delivers on a long-standing promiseExploring the Zeta Halo ring![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/01/67CB45E7-D80A-4A0B-9D51-DFE232D274F6.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/halo-infinite-gameplay-open-world-review/) As a result, the show really doesn't know what it wants to be about, because there's not really an agreement from the creators on makes a good *Halo* story. The resulting show felt like it was trying to do everything *Halo* was known for and ended up splitting its focus between the "mystical ancient civilization" stuff, the "*Aliens*\-style military SF" stuff, and the "introspective commentary about military industrial complexes run rampant" stuff, it never gets to a place where it does any of them *well*. I think that's the key problem with this series, and all of the other problems–the budgetary constraints that limit the show's action and a weird reluctance to draw on some of the existing world's basic elements like sound effects or weapon effects– result in a series that *looks* like *Halo*, but which largely feels like they lost sight of the franchise's core appeal, and why it's attracted legions of fans in the first place. I'm an optimist, or maybe just hopeful that it'll improve. The show's latest season was run by a new showrunner and that came with some noticeable improvements, so maybe it's headed in the right direction (especially now that we've actually arrived at the titular Ringworld), and hopefully there it'll hit its stride if we get another season. --- So, just what is it that makes a good adaptation? A sense of recognition of what makes the original text special, and a genuine effort to take those ideas and reinterpret them for a new medium. Ideally, it's a film or show that can sit on its own, without having to read the book or played the game to fully understand the ideas, themes, and character motivations that make up the story. Sometimes, it's a take that is pretty close to the book. Other times? It's a filmmaker using the film as a jumping-off point to tell a new story that draws from the source. There will be plenty of adaptations in the future near future; the rest of this year and next will see adaptations of *Harold and the Purple Crayon*, *The Wild Robot,* *Joker: Folie à Deux*, *Wicked*, *The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim*, *Mickey 17*, *How to Train Your Dragon*, and shows like *Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The House of the Dragon, Dark Matter,* and plenty of others. Undoubtably, we'll put them under some scrutiny to see how they stack up, and how well they stand on their own. And if this latest adaptation doesn't quite work out? Maybe someone will get a second chance at it down the road for another crack at it. ### Watch Annalee Newitz's TED Talk about the power of fantasy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-ted-talk-fiction-watch/ Last updated: 2024-05-23T13:17:33.000Z Way back when I was getting my start as a writer and journalist, I ended up as a research fellow for *io9*, where I worked under one of the site's founders and editors, Annalee Newitz, writing a bunch of articles and a research project. I've since become a huge fan of both Annalee's books: they've written a handful of excellent novels (here's my [review of their latest](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/), *The Terraformers*) and nonfiction books (their next is [*Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393881516?ref=andrewliptak.com), which I'm very excited to read.) Annalee recently (November 2023, but it just went online this week) gave a TED Talk called "[How fantasy worlds can spark real change](https://www.ted.com/talks/annalee%5Fnewitz%5Fhow%5Ffantasy%5Fworlds%5Fcan%5Fspark%5Freal%5Fchange?rss=172BB350-0206&ref=andrewliptak.com)," in which they talk about how fantasy or escapist literature can be a powerful force for inspiring real-world changes or initiatives. They open with an example near and dear to my heart: the 501st Legion and how our members not only make costumes of fictional characters, but go out into the real world with them to make some tangible differences in our communities. I'm pretty tickled by this: they reached out to me ahead of time with some questions and asked for some pictures, and name-checked my book, *Cosplay: A History* during the talk's opening minutes. The main focus of Annalee's talk is how someone can use fantasy literature for enacting some positive changes in the world, and that's something that's readily apparent in their books, especially *The Terraformers*, and cite a couple of other examples of where people have used speculative fiction to inspire them in their lines of work. [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_1166.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) When it comes to the history of cosplay and the 501st Legion, this is obviously close to home. I often like to say that our charitable work with the 501st "makes our self-indulgent hobby a little less self-indulgent." I don't think that we're only doing charitable work to make what we do socially acceptable, but I do see it as a way to channel our interests and fandom into some really positive directions. Wearing our armor out in public is a pretty dramatic thing: we certainly turn heads. And if we're turning those heads, we can take advantage of that and *also* have them look towards groups like Make-A-Wish and others. We might start off building armor because we love the franchise or characters, but this? This is why we stay. ### Announcing Horizon 2045’s Far Futures project! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/horizon-2045-far-futures-science-fiction-nuclear-weapons/ Last updated: 2026-04-03T17:26:18.000Z A couple of years ago, I was invited to a round table discussion hosted by the folks at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and an organization called N Square about nuclear weapons and denuclearization policy. I’ve written about the school’s efforts to tie science fiction and science and policy together, and have an academic background in military warfare, so it was a neat opportunity. The goal of the meeting was do devise some boundaries for a potential project about what a world without nuclear weapons would look like: how would their elimination impact international relations, domestic policy, and so forth. A while after the event, the folks behind the initiative got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in writing a story for the project’s next phase: a series of stories that imagined that nuclear weapons-free world, with an idea of imagining what that optimistic future might look like. I keep a notebook that I’ve been jotting down story/character/world ideas in, and I had an idea that might work: a historian who was brought into the site of a space battle with the idea of backtracking the sequence of events to find and assign responsibility in the event that someone might run into a warhead down the line. The idea came a bit from my work with military history, but also the anti-landmine work that Senator Patrick Leahy (who represented Vermont) had done over the years. In chatting with the project leaders, I realized that this idea would work with some modifications, and I ended up writing a version that incorporated some of the ideas. (Maybe I’ll go back to the original idea at some point…) They accepted it a while ago, and after some back and forth with edits, it’s ready for publication when the project launches on May 29th! The project will officially launch on the 29th at 12PM eastern time on Zoom (you can register [here](https://bit.ly/farfutures-launch?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with a panel discussion from some of the contributors, and there’ll be an in-person talk with Horizon 2045’s Editorial Director Jenny Johnson at 10PM at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. It’ll be live-streamed, and you can get tickets [here](https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-ignite-talks-02024/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I’m particularly excited to see what the other contributors have written: the project will feature stories by Madeline Ashby, Vincent Ialenti, PAGES Matam, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, Tochi Onyebuchi, João Queiroz, Sheree Renėe Thomas, and Peter Waring. It’s a really fantastic group of people, and I feel privileged to be part of the group. I hope that you'll read it, and the other stories in the project when it comes out. I'll send out an update when that happens! ### Here's another stack of books to check out this May URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-new-books/ Last updated: 2024-05-17T19:38:28.000Z We're finally hitting some summer-like weather here in Vermont. The leaves are coming out and the temperatures are warming up. I've been spending some time on the sidelines of the kiddo's lacrosse practices, which has been giving me plenty of time to read. I'm currently working my way through [*Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668013571?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeffrey Toobin, which is engrossing, but grim. I'm going to need something lighter to pick up next, I think. Fortunately, there are plenty of options to choose from. In case you missed it, here's the first book list for the month of May. You can also find other recommendations via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). [Here’s the May 2024 book list!19 new SF/F books to check out this month![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/IMG_7377.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-book-list/) As always, any links to Bookshop.org are affiliates. Any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit, which helps support it. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost, as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it. If you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) If that's not in the cards now, please consider forwarding this newsletter to your friends and fellow readers, or by sharing it on your social media of choice. It's greatly appreciated. Here are 14 more SF/F books to check out for the rest of the month: ### [*In Our Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593640630?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jack Campbell (May 21st) Jack Campbell kicks off a new series, *The Doomed Earth* with *In Our Stars*, in which a genetically-engineered officer, Lieutenant Selene Genji, is trying to navigate her way in the United Fleet despite some pretty intense prejudices, all while society on Earth is imploding. When Earth is destroyed, the force of the blast pushes her decades into the past, giving her a chance to save humanity from the future from which she's arrived. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593640630?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Campbell juggles a lot here, with military cover-ups, alien first encounters, and ruminations on what it means to be human studding the sprawling plot...This series is off to a good start." ### [*Fight Me!*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446205/fight-me-by-grossman-austin/9780241555941?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Austin Grossman (May 23rd) I distinctly remember when I came across Austin Grossman's debut novel [*Soon I Will Be Invincible*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307279866?ref=andrewliptak.com). I was working at Walden Books and came across a review in *The Wall Street Journal*. It had a captivating cover and promised to be a slightly different take on superheroes, and I really fell head over heels for it, and I've read (and loved) just about everything Grossman's written ever since. (Run, don't walk to buy [*You*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316198547?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Crooked*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316198523?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.*) I've been waiting for a while for a new book from him, and it's finally time: *Fight Me!* follows a group of four kids who had special powers and who were tasked by a secret government program with saving the world. They did it, and then had to figure out what to do after. Rick Tower was one member of the quartet and a tragedy forced him and his companions into hiding. Tower became a mild-mannered English professor in New England, and two decades later, he has to reunite with his former companions after a mysterious disappearance threatens to upend everything. ### [*Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982176617?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Higginbotham (May 14th) I was captivated by Adam Higginbotham's history of the Chernobyl disaster when I picked it up a couple of years ago. I found it to be a well-researched and engaging portrait of the incident, and I dropped everything and grabbed this one from my local bookstore when I saw it yesterday. The Challenger disaster was possibly one of the biggest setbacks to human spaceflight in history, as people from around the world watched as the space shuttle exploded just over a minute after launching. In this book, Higginbotham follows the mission in the years before and after the accident in order to understand how it happened. [Writing in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/books/review/adam-higginbotham-challenger.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Rachel Slade says "In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element — sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster — shines through the many technical aspects of this story, a constant reminder that every decision was made by people weighing risks versus expediency, their minds distorted by power, money, politics and yes-men." ### [*Road to Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668035610?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hana Lee (May 14th) A courier named Jin-Lu has a dangerous job amidst the wastelands: she travels between domed cities on a magic-powered motorcycle, contending with dangerous monsters, raiders, and weather to deliver her goods. On her latest mission, she's delivering a series of love letters from Prince Kadrin to Princess Yi-Nereen, who's trying to escape from her abusive family and an arranged marriage. Jin harbors her own infatuation with both of them, and when asked, she agrees to help her escape across the wastelands, pursued by her family and a bounty hunter. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668035610?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The twisty plot, complex emotional entanglements, and perilous landscapes keep the pages flying." ### [*Escape Velocity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660842?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Victor Manibo (May 21st) Space Habitat Altaire is a destination for the rich and famous in low Earth orbit, and it's the chosen location for members of the Rochford Institute to hold their reunions. During their 25th reunion, finance magnate Ava is trying to figure out the truth behind her brother's murder during their senior year, and while their former classmates are working out their own issues, they find that there are some other agendas at play, possibly causing other, bigger problems for everyone. [](javascript:void%280%29)*Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645660842?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that "the whodunit plot is enhanced by careful and plausible worldbuilding that digs into the intricacies of an era when the UN’s Mars Settlement Agency is mere months away from accepting applications for civilian settlers. As in the best mysteries, Manibo never allows his plot twists to come at the expense of character development." ### [*NecroTek*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200688401?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jonathan Maberry (May 28th) Jonathan Maberry plays with Lovecraft in his latest. The crew of a station discover that they're not where they should be: an experiment has gone wrong and they're no longer orbiting Jupiter. Worse, they're surrounded by armies of ancient Shoggoths that now know about Earth and are headed their way. It's up to the crew to head down to an alien world called Shadderal, where they might be able to protect humanity from an incoming invasion. There's a catch: the advanced starship that might prove to be their salvation can only be piloted by the dead. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798200688401?ref=andrewliptak.com) "While the dialogue and plot beats are often predictable, fans of dramatic action sequences and charged emotional scenes will enjoy the short military vignettes, and Lovecraft devotees will find the lore intriguing." ### [*Lost Ark Dreaming*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250890757?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (May 21st) In a near future West Africa, people live in cities of partially-submerged towers that had once been the home to the wealthy. The towers have become stratified, with the rich living at the top and the poor in the lower levels. Three residents come together, an analyst named Yekini, a mechanic named Tuoyo, and a bureaucrat named Ngozi, after an invasion from beings known as The Children, the descendants of people left for dead in the ocean and now awakened by supernatural powers. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/lost-ark-dreaming-1803431?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The novel’s multiple points of view, along with interspersed news articles leading to the present, showcase the themes of class and disparity through tense action." ### [*Goddess of the River*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780759557345?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Vaishnavi Patel (May 21st) Vaishnavi Patel reimagines the story of the river goddess Ganga, who serves as a caretaker to the various demigods who exist along her riverbanks. When they displease a sage, Ganga is bumped down to mortal status thanks to a curse, and will remain such until she finds her way out from under it. After marrying King Shantanu to become his queen, she works to find her way back to freedom, only to discover that the curse is lifted, she has to leave her infant son, Devavrata, behind. In the years that follow the two intersect over and over again as they follow a path that's been foretold for both of them. ### [*Little Fuzzy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781680576467?ref=andrewliptak.com)by H. Beam Piper (May 7th) One of the books that gets held up as a hidden gem of the SF/F world is H. Beam Piper's *Little Fuzzy*, a fun story about a prospector on a distant planet who comes into contact with the planet's native lifeforms and discovers that they're actually sentient – something that will void the planetary mining company's charter. Wordfire Press is reissuing the book with a foreword from John Scalzi, who wrote his own take on the story, [*Fuzzy Nation*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250174642?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*When Among Crows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855480?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Veronica Roth (May 14th) Dymitr comes from a family that sacrifices their souls to become monster hunters. He's been tasked to track down the witch Baba Jaga, and in order to complete that mission, he has to team up with some monsters that he's been sworn to kill. Ala is a demon that eats fear and who has nothing to lose, waiting for a curse to bring her to death's door. But Dymitr might be able to cure her and she reluctantly agrees to help him. The two will have to find a way to work together, despite their misgivings and hidden motives. Writing for the AP, Donna Edwards [says](https://apnews.com/article/among-crows-veronica-roth-book-review-f0a07316d4705722b8fc41e9df910752?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Gruesome yet cavalier, “When Among Crows” has action, romance, family drama, fantasy, and a healthy helping of mythology. Best devoured in one or two sittings, the story is tight, the lore inviting and the characters fun." ### [*Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262547604?ref=andrewliptak.com)edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal (May 14th) 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the roleplaying game *Dungeons & Dragons,* and MIT Press has released a new book that looks over that long history. It's loaded with chapters from a variety of scholars that aims to understand how and why the game has become so popular, how it's been used by a wide range of groups and players, and where it might be headed in the next fifty years. ### [*The History of Middle-Earth Box Set #2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063390836?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christopher Tolkien and J. R. R. Tolkien (May 14th) Harper Collins has been steadily re-releasing the *History of Middle-earth* series in boxed sets. The [first set](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063379848?ref=andrewliptak.com) arrived back in February and contained *The Silmarillion,* *Unfinished Tales, and Book of Lost Tales Parts One* and *Two.* This set features *The Lays of Beleriand*, *The Shaping of Middle-earth*, and *The Lost Road.* The next two boxed sets are slated to be released later this summer and fall. ### [*How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316392204?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Django Wexler (May 21st) For years, Davi has fought to try and protect humanity from an all-powerful Dark Lord, rallying armies and fighters over and over again for a final stand. She's been stuck in a time loop, and each time, she faces defeat. She's finally done, and has decided that it's time to switch sides to win for once. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316392204?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Wexler balances the snarky asides with the angst of Davi’s repeating existence and evolving awareness that her actions have consequences. Under the flippancy, a truly touching grimdark story lurks, complete with hilarious footnotes." ### [*Heavenbreaker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781649377104?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sara Wolf (May 21st) In the distant future, a woman named Synali von Hauteclare lives on a station orbiting a distant planet. She's the illegitimate daughter of the head of House Hauteclare and a commoner, and when her mother is assassinated, she's bent on exacting revenge against the house that cast her out. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sara-wolf/heavenbreaker-deluxe-limited-edition/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "While the SF elements (including intricate worldbuilding and mind-blowing revelations regarding the aliens that humankind defeated in that distant war) are brilliantly done, it’s the insightful characterization and emotional vulnerability of Synali that power this story." --- As always, let me know what catches your eye and what's on your TBR! ### Here's a first look at Dune: Prophecy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-prophecy-frank-herbert-max-streaming-teaser-watch/ Last updated: 2024-05-17T12:23:50.000Z Earlier this year, Denis Villeneuve released the second part of his adaptation of Frank Herbert's *Dune*, and later this year, we'll be headed back to the same universe with a new story, *Dune: Prophecy,* a six-episode streaming series on Max. Based off of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's novel [*Sisterhood of Dune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765362612?ref=andrewliptak.com), it'll follow two sisters as they work to set up a sisterhood to help preserve humanity against a variety of different threats. That sisterhood will eventually become known as the Bene Gesserit, a powerful order of women who, by the time the events in *Dune* roll around, have been directing the course of humanity through various political machinations and alliances. Here's the first trailer for the show: It's been apparent for a short while that Warner Bros. has some high hopes for what it can do with the *Dune* franchise, and I've often thought that it's likely something that the studio can claim as its own counter to Disney's *Star Wars* and Paramount's *Star Trek.* Back in 2019, the studio [announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dunes-growing-cinematic-universe-and-chernobyl-roadside-picnic/) that it had greenlit a series called *Dune: The Sisterhood* with Villeneuve set to direct. The project has morphed and changed a bit since then: it [lost its main writer John Spaihts](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-the-sisterhood-showrunner-jon-spaihts/) and [picked up a new showrunner](https://deadline.com/2021/07/dune-the-sisterhood-diane-ademu-john-as-new-showrunner-1234798280/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) in the form of Diane Ademu-John, who [then left](https://deadline.com/2022/11/dune-the-sisterhood-diane-ademu-john-exits-co-showrunner-hbo-max-series-1235181229/?ref=andrewliptak.com), leaving co-showrunner Alison Schapker to oversee the project. In 2022, Warner Bros. [tapped Johan Reneck (*Chernobyl*) to direct](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-the-sisterhood-gets-a-new-director/), and a year later, [he left](https://deadline.com/2023/02/dune-the-sisterhood-director-johan-renck-shirley-henderson-exit-hbo-max-series-1235273486/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (along with one of the lead actresses, Shirley Henderson) as the series underwent a creative retooling. Somewhere along the way, it was retitled to *Dune: Prophecy*. After watching *Dune: Part 2,* I can see why Warner Bros. would be interested in this particular story to build on the films: the Bene Gesserit play a huge role in the momentum of *Dune* (and in *Dune: Messiah*.) While Herbert wrote six novels, his son Brian and co-author Kevin J. Anderson have vastly expanded the world with dozens of additional books that fill in various gaps in the story, exploring the worlds of the great houses, finishing Herbert's unfinished "final" novel, and generally keeping the universe going for those that want to keep up with the story. In 2002, the pair kicked off the *Legends of Dune* trilogy ([*The Butlerian Jihad*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250208545?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Machine Crusade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250212801?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Battle of Corrin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250212818?ref=andrewliptak.com)) that explored the events of the Butlerian Jihad, a massive revolution against artificial intelligence that took place 10,000 years before *Dune,* and followed it up a decade later with their *Great Schools of Dune* trilogy (*Sisterhood of Dune,* [*Mentats of Dune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765362636?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Navigators of Dune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765381262?ref=andrewliptak.com)), again set centuries prior to the events of the original novel. It looks as though this show is based off of *Sisterhood of Dune*, and even if it isn't a direct adaptation, it seems likely that it's covering some of the same ground. Herbert and Anderson's books have a mixed reputation: there's a legion of superfans out there who keep buying them in enough numbers to generally get them up onto bestseller lists, but other fans point to the quality of their writing and the general question of whether or not the books are warranted. Whether or not those are valid arguments (I read *Butlerian Jihad* years and years ago, but don't remember much from it), I think it's reasonable to argue that their efforts have kept *Dune* in the minds of readers and on bookstore shelves, rather than resting and coasting on the sales and reputation of a sixty-year-old novel. If anything, they show that the world of *Dune* is vast and that there are plenty of stories that they can tell around the film franchise. Should this be a success, I can imagine that we'll see them continue the show and explore other possibilities up and down the timeline. In a lot of ways, this show will supplement the film franchise by keeping fans engaged with the world by providing them with new content and lore to dig into, while also to enticing viewers to sign up for the various streaming services that are out there. This is a familiar playbook at this point, especially at Warner Bros. Following the ending of its hit series *Game of Thrones,* it launched a prequel called *The House of the Dragon* in 2022 (its second season arrives in June) while also putting into development a range of additional adaptations from the same world. This also isn't limited to Warner Bros.: AMC has released countless installments of *The Walking Dead* franchise, while Disney has released a number of *Star Wars* shows, and so forth. Will this series be any good? Time will tell. Villeneuve did some impressive work adapting the novel, helped in no small part by the film's design and art departments, who fleshed out the world in a significant way, and hopefully, this series will follow some of that underlying design to keep things congruent. There are some risks, however. Despite being tapped to direct part of the series, Villeneuve doesn't appear to be involved in this project at any level, and so it'll be interesting to see how well these two adaptations will work together. Without a single person overseeing the larger franchise (think Kevin Feige at Marvel, James Gunn/Peter Safran at DC, [Dave Filoni at Lucasfilm](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-dave-filoni-storytelling/), or Alex Kurtzman at Paramount), Warner Bros. runs the risk of putting out a disjointed or scattered franchise. It'll likely be a while before we see *Dune: Messiah* materialize. In addition to that, Villeneuve has an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's [*Rendezvous with Rama*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rendezvous-with-rama-dispatcher-black-sun-adaptations/), Annie Jacobson's *Nuclear War: A Scenario*, and *Cleopatra* on his plate. This series will fill some of that time while we wait to return to Arakis and its characters. We won't have long to wait: the series is slated to drop on Max sometime this fall. ### Netflix has renewed 3 Body Problem to finish the story URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/netflix-3-body-problem-renewed/ Last updated: 2024-05-16T14:36:17.000Z Netflix [has announced](https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/3-body-problem-renewed?ref=andrewliptak.com) (h/t to [Max Covill](https://itsthepictures.substack.com/) in the TO Slack channel) that it's renewed its science fiction series *3 Body Problem* for at least another season in order to bring the story to an end. Created by *Game of Thrones*' David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and *The Terror*'s Alexander Woo, the series adapts Cixin Liu's novel *The Three-Body Problem*, in which humanity makes contact with an alien civilization, an encounter that will leave both reeling with devastating consequences. First published in 2008 in China [*The Three-Body Problem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765382030?ref=andrewliptak.com)became a worldwide hit when they were translated by Ken Liu into English starting in 2013\. The first novel begins during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when an astronomer exiled to a remote military base makes contact with an alien civilization and angry over the state of her life, invites them to our planet, despite a warning that it would bring about humanity's downfall. The first novel contends with a string of suicides by prominent physicists around the world, and the efforts of a small team of people to try and figure out how a virtual reality game figures into it, ultimately discovering a plot to invade humanity. The following books, [*The Dark Forest*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765386694?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Death's End*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765386632?ref=andrewliptak.com) follow up and ultimately bring the story up to the end of the universe in a spectacular fashion. Netflix's eight-episode adaptation debuted in March and became a huge hit (I'm a little surprised that it's taken this long to get a renewal announcement), and covers the events of the first book and a bit of the second. By contrast, the Chinese-produced version ran for 30 episodes and covered only the first book. Where the first book was a pretty concise thriller, the next two books are *big.* They cover immense spans of time and lots of territory, some of which we've seen teased in the first season. The team behind the series will have their work cut out for them, and that's what makes this announcement interesting: it's pretty vague! Benioff, Weiss, and Woo note that they're "thrilled that we get to tell this story through to its epic conclusion," but and the rest of the announcement goes on to say that "all other details are under wraps including the number of seasons and episodes which will be revealed at a later date." So, it looks like at the very least, we're getting another season, but presumably, they've hammered out a commitment to carry the adaptation through the final two ([ish](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/19/17990984/redemption-of-time-baoshu-cixin-liu-three-body-problem-science-fiction-book-cover-reveal?ref=andrewliptak.com)) books. [Narratives of modernizationA history of Chinese science fiction Image: Andrew LiptakIn 2015, author Ken Liu stepped up to the podium at Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, to accept the Hugo Award for Best Novel on behalf of Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem. It was a historic moment: Liu![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_6232f0a5-8633-45b3-8aba-df7d74cd3636_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/narratives-of-modernization/) Given that the first season isn't a 1:1 adaptation of the first book, but something that's mixing in elements from the other two novels, I don't know that we can expect a Season 2 = *The Dark Forest* and Season 3 = *Death's End*. Indeed, the final seasons of *Game of Thrones* were playing fast and loose with the events of the books (or at least the books that have been published). That's not necessarily a bad thing: we've seen this model work pretty well with shows like *The Expanse*, which I've come to see as an adaptation of the entire story, rather than discrete adaptations of each installment. Regardless, I'm happy with this news: I really dug the first season, even if they made some big changes and departures from the book. ([There was a mixed consensus on my Facebook page about it](https://www.facebook.com/andrewjliptak/posts/937865328340134).) I read the book while watching the season and felt that you could describe the series as a well-edited version of the book, one that captured all of the high points and eliminated some of the exposition. I'll certainly be watching the show when it comes back, whenever that is. There's some *wild* concepts and events coming up in the *The Dark Forest*, and if they can capture half of them, it's going to be quite a ride. ### Code Blue URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/green-wing-resuscitated-audio-drama/ Last updated: 2024-05-15T14:32:34.000Z In the spring of 2006, I took a study abroad program in London. It was a fantastic experience. I learned a lot, traveled to Scotland, Germany, and Greece, explored the city, and watched a lot of British television, instilling me with a love of their weird sense of humor and timing. One of the shows was a sitcom called *Green Wing*: a bizarre, surreal, and hilarious series set in a hospital that followed the lives of a team of surgeons and administrative staff. It starts with the arrival of a new doctor to the East Hampton Hospital, Caroline Todd (played Tamsin Greig), who becomes the focus of the attentions of two of the doctors on staff: the smooth and chill "Mac" Macartney (played by Julian Rhind-Tutt) and the pompous Guy Secretan (played by Stephen Mangan). Along the way, there's a web of other characters: an anxious student named Martin Dear (Karl Theobald), the bizarre staff liaison Sue White (Michelle Gomez), desperate HR head Joanna Clore (Pippa Haywood), vain and stuttering Alan Statham (Mark Heap), Boyce (Oliver Chris), and HR staff Kim Alabaster (Sally Bretton), Naughty Rachel (Katie Lyons), and Harriet Schulenburg (Olivia Colman–of the entire cast, her career has taken off the most, and it's really funny to see her now and think of the character she played here.) They're all obnoxious and horny for one another, and their interactions leads to plenty of hijinks and hilarious moments. I fall into watching both seasons every couple of years because it's a series that really showcases some clever writing and quick-fire delivery from its cast. You can find it streaming for free on a bunch of platforms these days, and if you haven't watched it before, it's well worth a watch. Last week, [some unexpected news popped up](https://deadline.com/2024/04/green-wing-audible-series-stephen-mangan-tamsin-greig-julian-rhind-tutt-olivia-colman-1235898266/?ref=andrewliptak.com): the entire cast has reunited for a new series on Audible, [*Green Wing: Resuscitated*](https://www.audible.com/pd/Green-Wing-Audiobook/B0D1VTM1R5?ref=andrewliptak.com), which you can now listen to. The series is set around 12 years after the end of the show, and runs for six episodes. It picks up with most everyone still at the hospital. Mac, who had been given a terminal diagnosis at the end of the show, was miraculously cured, married Caroline, and then dumped her. Guy is a TV personality, Joanna is in jail for murder (there was a bit of a spree at the end of season 2), Harriet is now the head of HR, Martin is still struggling with everything, and Alan is still pining for Joanna. When Caroline returns as the head of surgery, it brings everyone back for another round of hijinks. Certainly, there's an appetite from fans for revivals and reunions: just look at the success of Paramount's *Picard* (or any of the *Star Trek* shows on the streaming service), or any of the other big franchises that have mad something of a comeback with their original casts. Mounting a proper TV revival is a costly affair that requires a solid commitment from the cast to revive those characters they might have left behind. On the other hand, audio seems to be a much cheaper and easier way to return to these stories: you don't need to build the sets, wardrobe, and bring the actors back: you just need to stick them in a recording booth. [Audible's *Buffy The Vampire Slayer* revival *Slayers* from last year](https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/audibles-slayers-a-buffyverse-story-set-to-premiere-on-october-12?ref=andrewliptak.com) comes to mind as another example of this type of thing working pretty well. One of the questions that I had going into this was "can this actually work for *Green Wing*?" The show relies heavily on quick, witty dialogue, often paired with a visual gag. The cast is amazing at delivering their lines (especially Julian Rhind-Tutt and Mark Heap), but they also bring a considerable physical presence to the comedy, and that's something that doesn't translate into a purely-audio setting. Fortunately, *Resuscitated* has the advantage of bringing back its original cast and writers, and the resulting dialogue and acting feels as though we've never left. The six-episode show is funny and updated enough (there's a subplot around someone using cryptocurrency) that it feels like an honest continuation of the series without feeling like a revival that's been forced because of some artificial need for content. As a fan, it was a welcome surprise: it was nice to catch up with the characters and all of their quirks once again, and hopefully, it'll open the door for more such projects, either following these characters, or for some other series that would benefit from a follow up of some sort. (One show in particular I'd love to see? A continuation of the brilliant UK detective series *Life on Mars*, [which had a third, final "chapter" in the works](https://www.andrewliptak.com/bbc-life-on-mars-ashes-to-ashes-final-chapter-matthew-graham/), [until it was axed last year](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/lazarus-life-mars-plot-cancelled-show-104917529.html?guccounter=1&ref=andrewliptak.com).) ### Here's the first teaser for The Rings of Power season 2 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-of-power-tolkien-season-two-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-05-14T15:02:13.000Z Amazon's Prime Video has released our first look at the upcoming second season of its Middle-earth series *The Rings of Power* and provided us with a release date: August 29th, 2024. The teaser brings us back to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth thousands of years prior to *The Hobbit* and *The Lord of the Rings* during the world's Second Age, following the rise of the dark lord Sauron, who forged the titular ring to control the world. *Some spoilers ahead for the show's first season* The series is derived from some of the deeper lore from Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, pulling in the story from the novel's appendices. In the show's first season, we followed a handful of characters as they contend with the rise of a dark power long after an epic battle between the Elves and the Dark Lord Morgoth. Galadriel (played by Morfydd Clark) has been on a mission to track down and defeat Morgoth's servant Sauron, and over the course of the season, he's well on his way to reclaiming power, with the season finale ending as Mount Doom erupts for the first time. In this teaser for the show's second season, it looks like we're going to see quite a bit happen: the forging of the rings of power ([one ring to rule them all](https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Ring%5FVerse?ref=andrewliptak.com), etc etc.), and something of what looks like a party being stood up to try and contend with the fallout that's coming. [Tolkien and the Horrors of the Great WarThe First World War left a lasting impression on Tolkien![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/09/BD329FBA-4493-470C-A2E9-63C78DEA2B42.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tolkien-and-the-horrors-of-the-great-war-2/) [I rather liked Season one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rings-of-power-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-amazon/): I thought that it was a decent return to the world and presented an interesting story for the one of the bigger parts of the legendarium, and while there are some changes, there wasn't anything that bothered me too much. I'll be looking forward to catching up with the series when it returns in August. The trailer comes just a week after [word broke](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gollum-gollum/) that Warner Bros. announced a pair of new Middle-earth set films, produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens. The first will be directed by Andy Serkis and is tentatively titled *The Hunt for Gollum*, and will presumably be set alongside Jackson's original adaptations of Lord the Rings and *The Hobbit*. (Whereas Prime Video's show is a little looser.) And later this year, the studio will release an [animated film LOTR-set film called *The War of Rohirrim*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-april-2024/)*.* ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-finalists-for-the-2024-arthur-c-clarke-award/ Last updated: 2024-05-14T14:03:11.000Z The Arthur C. Clarke Awards [has announced](https://clarkeaward.substack.com/p/announcing-the-shortlist-for-the) its list of finalists for this year's awards. The prize is handed out annually (since 1987) to honor the best works of science fiction published in the past year, which are selected by a panel of jurors. Here's the [full list of submissions](https://clarkeaward.medium.com/the-complete-judges-reading-list-for-the-arthur-c-clarke-award-2024-3ab9733bdb7e?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here are this year's finalists: - *Chain-Gang All-Stars* by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - *The Ten Percent Thief* by Lavanya Lakshminarayan - *In Ascension* by Martin MacInnes - *The Mountain in the Sea* by Ray Nayler - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh - *Corey Fah Does Social Mobility* by Isabel Waidner Award Director Tom Hunter said in a statement that “in addition to six new writers joining the Clarke Award’s shortlist ranks, we were delighted to receive submissions from a record-breaking 50 eligible publishing imprints this year. We hope this speaks to the future health and depth of the genre across the UK’s publishing industry even as the task of defining science fiction becomes ever more challenging for our judges!” This year's judges were Dolly Garland and Stark Holborn from the British Science Fiction Association, Nic Clarke and Tom Dillon from the Science Fiction Foundation, Glyn Morgan from the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival, and Dr. Andrew M. Butler serving in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges. Last year's winner was *Venomous Lumpsucker* by Ned Beauman, while *Deep Wheel Orcadia* by Harry Josephine Giles won in 2022 and *The Animals in That Country* by Laura Jean McKay [won in 2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/com-laura-jean-mckay-animals-in-that-country-arthur-c-clarke-award-winner-2021/). Other past winners include Tade Thompson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emily St. John Mandel, Ann Leckie, China Miéville, and more. This year's award will be announced on July 24th, 2024\. This year's winner will receive a trophy and a cash prize of £2024\. ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-finalists-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-books/ Last updated: 2024-05-10T17:54:45.000Z Each year, *Locus Magazine*, the premiere industry magazine for the SF/F world, polls fans for its annual awards, the Locus Awards. I’ve often found it to be an excellent survey of the prior year’s field (in addition to the magazine’s annual recommended reading list), and the publication has released [its list of finalists for this year’s award](https://locusmag.com/2024/05/2024-locus-awards-top-ten-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com). It’s an excellent roundup: there are a whole bunch of books that I’ve read that I really enjoyed that made the cut, and I think it speaks well of the health and variety of the genre. The winners of the award will be announced on June 22nd during this year’s Locus Awards Ceremony, which will take place at Nile Hall at Preservation Park in downtown Oakland, California. You can [buy tickets to the event here](https://locusmag.com/2023-locus-awards-weekend/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here are this year’s finalists: ### Science Fiction Novel - *The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport* by Samit Basu - *A Fire Born of Exile* by Aliette de Bodard - *Red Team Blues* by Cory Doctorow - *Furious Heaven* by Kate Elliott - *Translation State* by Ann Leckie - *The Terraformers* by Annalee Newitz - *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi - *Lords of Uncreation* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *System Collapse* by Martha Wells - *The Road to Roswell* by Connie Willis ### Fantasy Novel - *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose - *The Keeper’s Six* by Kate Elliott - *Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries* by Heather Fawcett - *Dead Country* by Max Gladstone - *The Water Outlaws* by S.L. Huang - *Paladin’s Faith* by T. Kingfisher - *He Who Drowned the World* by Shelley Parker-Chan - *My Brother’s Keeper* by Tim Powers - *City of Last Chances* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Witch King* by Martha Wells ### Horror Novel - *Vampires of El Norte* by Isabel Cañas - *The Reformatory* by Tananarive Due - *A Haunting on the Hill* by Elizabeth Hand - *Starling House* by Alix E. Harrow - *How to Sell a Haunted House* by Grady Hendrix - *Don’t Fear the Reaper* by Stephen Graham Jones - *A House with Good Bones* by T. Kingfisher - *Lone Women* by Victor LaValle - *Silver Nitrate* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *Black River Orchard* by Chuck Wendig ### Young Adult Novel - *Promises Stronger Than Darkness* by Charlie Jane Anders - *The Making of Yolanda la Bruja* by Lorraine Avila - *Damned If You Do* by Alex Brown - *A Song of Salvation* by Alechia Dow - *The Library of Broken Worlds* by Alaya Dawn Johnson - *The Sinister Booksellers of Bath* by Garth Nix - *Into the Light* by Mark Oshiro - *Divine Rivals* by Rebecca Ross - *The Siren, the Song, and the Spy* by Maggie Tokuda-Hall - *The Spirit Bares Its Teeth* by Andrew Joseph White ### First Novel - *Chain-Gang All-Stars* by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - *The Strange* by Nathan Ballingrud - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Threads That Bind* by Kika Hatzopoulou - *These Burning Stars* by Bethany Jacobs - *Godkiller* by Hannah Kaner - *The Marigold* by Andrew F. Sullivan - *Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon* by Wole Talabi - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh - *Ink Blood Sister Scribe* by Emma Törzs ### Novella - *The Crane Husband* by Kelly Barnhill - *The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar* by Indra Das - “Linghun” by Ai Jiang - *The Salt Grows Heavy* by Cassandra Khaw - *Thornhedge* by T. Kingfisher - *Rose/House* by Arkady Martine - *Lost in the Moment and Found* by Seanan McGuire - *The Mimicking of Known Successes* by Malka Older - *The Lies of the Ajungo* by Moses Ose Utomi - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo **NOVELETTE** - “What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata”, P. Djèlí Clark (*The Book of Witches*) - “John Hollowback and the Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar (*The Book of Witches*) - I AM AI, Ai Jiang (*Shortwave)* - “The Year Without Sunshine“, Naomi Kritzer (*Uncanny* 11-12/23) - “Prince Hat Underground”, Kelly Link (*White Cat, Black Dog*) - “At Every Door a Ghost”, Premee Mohamed (*Communications Breakdown*) - “The Rainbow Bank“, Uchechukwu Nwaka (*GigaNotoSaurus* 8/23) - “One Man’s Treasure“, Sarah Pinsker (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) - “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under a Bridge“, Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny* 9-10/23) - “On the Fox Roads“, Nghi Vo (*Tor.com* 10/31/23) ### Short Story - “[A Soul in the World](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-soul-in-the-world/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Charlie Jane Anders (*Uncanny* 3-4/23) - “[How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, P. Djèlí Clark (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) - “[The Mausoleum’s Children](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Aliette de Bodard (*Uncanny* 5-6/23) - “Suppertime”, Tananarive Due (*New Suns 2*) - “[Window Boy](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F08%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld* 8/23) - “Reckless Eyeballing”, N.K. Jemisin (*Out There Screaming*) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare* 10/23) - “[Those Hitchhiking Kids](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/those-hitchhiking-kids?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Darcie Little Badger (*The Sunday Morning Transport* 4/2/23) - “[Stones](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor%5F09%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Nnedi Okorafor (*Clarkesworld* 9/23) - “[There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead](https://thedeadlands.com/issue-26/door/?ref=andrewliptak.com)“, Sarah Pinsker (*The Deadlands* 6/23) **ANTHOLOGY** - *The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 7* edited by Neil Clarke - *Christmas and Other Horrors* edited by Ellen Datlow - *The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction* (2022) edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Eugen Bacon & Milton Davis - *Never Whistle at Night* edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023* edited by R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams - *Out There Screaming* edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams - *New Suns 2* edited by Nisi Shawl - *The Book of Witches* edited by Jonathan Strahan - *Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology* edited by Wole Talabi - *The Best of World SF: Volume 3* edited by Lavie Tidhar ### Collection - *The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volumes 1 & 2* by Peter S. Beagle - *Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories* by Tobias S. Buckell - *The Wishing Pool and Other Stories* by Tananarive Due - *White Cat, Black Dog* by Kelly Link - *No One Will Come Back For Us* by Premee Mohamed - *Jackal, Jackal* by Tobi Ogundiran - *Skin Thief* by Suzan Palumbo - *Lost Places* by Sarah Pinsker - *The Best of Michael Swanwick, Volume Two* by Michael Swanwick - *The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One* by Catherynne M. Valente ### Magazine - *Analog* - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - *Clarkesworld* - *F&SF* - *FIYAH* - *khōréō* - *Strange Horizons* - *Tor.com* - *Uncanny* ### Publisher - Angry Robot - DAW - Gollancz - Neon Hemlock - Orbit - Small Beer - Subterranean - Tachyon - Tor - Tordotcom ### Editor - Neil Clarke - Ellen Datlow - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - Arley Sorg & Christie Yant - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - Sheree Renée Thomas - E. Catherine Tobler - Ann & Jeff VanderMeer - Sheila Williams ### Artist - Brom - Rovina Cai - Kinuko Y. Craft - Julie Dillon - Bob Eggleton - Abigail Larson - John Picacio - Charles Vess - Michael Whelan - Alyssa Winans ### Nonfiction - *The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History* by Jack Dann - *42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams* edited by Kevin Jon Davies - *Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir* by M. John Harrison - *All These Worlds* by Niall Harrison - *101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered* by Sadie Hartmann - *Space Crone* by Ursula K. Le Guin - *Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color* edited by Chinelo Onwualu - *A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller* by Maureen Kincaid Speller - *Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God* by Robert Charles Wilson - *Being Michael Swanwick* by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro ### Illustrated and Art Book - *The Culture: The Drawings* by Iain M. Banks - *Home to Stay! The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories* by Ray Bradbury, adapted by Al Feldstein, art by Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Wallace Wood, et al. - *The Pen & Ink Drawings of Tony DiTerlizzi* by Tony DiTerlizzi - *Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly, Volume Three* edited by Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner - *The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta* edited by Dian Hanson, art by Frank Frazetta - *The Last Count of Monte Cristo* by Ayize Jama-Everett, art by Tristan Roach - *Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star* by George R.R. Martin, art and adaptation by Raya Golden - *Thalamus, Volumes 1 & 2: The Art of Dave McKean* by Dave McKean - *Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s* by Adam Rowe - *Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures* edited by Kevin M. Strait & Kinshasha Holman Conwill --- That’s the list! What catches your eye and what will you vote for? ### Gollum, Gollum! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/gollum-gollum/ Last updated: 2026-03-25T20:12:09.000Z Warner Bros. has announced that more *Lord of the Rings* film are on the way. Per [*TheOneRing,*](https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2024/05/09/117942-andy-serkis-to-make-hunt-for-gollum-movie/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the studio is bringing back the team behind the iconic film trilogy–Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens–who will produce a pair of new films. The first is tentatively titled *The Hunt for Gollum*, and will be star and be directed by Andy Serkis. There's no word on what the second film will be just yet. This announcement isn't entirely unexpected: a year ago, [Warner Bros. struck a deal](https://www.andrewliptak.com/warner-bros-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-films/) with the Embracer Group AB ([which holds a number of media rights](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-middle-earth-embracer-group-rights/) to J.R.R. Tolkien's world) to produce some new films. It's also in addition to an upcoming [animated film called *The War of Rohirrim*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-april-2024/) (which is slated for a December 2024 release) and the upcoming second season of [Prime Video's streaming series *The Rings of Power*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rings-of-power-middle-earth-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-amazon/)(which isn't under the Warner Bros. umbrella, but seems to at least be someone congruent with Jackson's films.) [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Since its merging with Discovery and its entry into the streaming world, Warner Bros. has been busy mining its back catalog for IP for new projects. It brought out *The Matrix Resurrections* in 2021 and recently put a [fifth film in the franchise into development](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/matrix-5-lana-wachowski-executive-producing-1235959174/?ref=andrewliptak.com), all while it's rebooted its DC comics film franchise under the helm of James Gunn and Peter Safran, [begun work on a *Harry Potter* streaming series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/harry-potter-series-warner-bros/), brought back its Weird mystery series *True Detective* for a fourth (quite good) season, and a bunch of others. Middle-earth is part of that strategy, and with the wealth of backstory and appendices that Tolkien included in *The Lord of the Rings* and other works, there's a lot that Warner Bros. can play with. *The War of Rohirrim* is a good example of that, I think: it's based on the stories in LOTR's Appendix A, which explores the origins of the Riders of Rohan, centuries before they played a pivotal role in *The Two Towers* and *The Return of the King.* When [word of the new films](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-middle-earth-embracer-group-rights/) broke back in 2022, the Embracer Group noted that they'd be interested in exploring the stories of characters like "Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other\[s\]." Today's announcement falls right in line with that, and my thoughts about strip-mining classic stories for parts aside, I think there are some things to be optimistic about. Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens' involvement is potentially good, as they helped launch the original adaptations in the first place, and certainly have an in-depth knowledge of the world and its mechanics, as well as how to adapt Tolkien's words for the screen. Second, Andy Serkis *is* Gollum. The character was–and remains–an astonishing figure in the films, fueled by Serkis's incredible performance (his return as the audiobook narrator for [*The Hobbit*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-will-record-a-new-audiobook-edition-of-the-hobbit/), [*The Lord of the Rings*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-is-recording-the-lord-of-the-rings-audiobooks/), and [*The Silmarillion*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-audiobook-the-silmarillion-jrr-tolkien/) are [also not to be missed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/lord-of-the-rings-audiobook-tolkien-alexa-andy-serkis/)). Serkis has since made a name for himself as a filmmaker in addition to everything else, so having him helm the project also seems like a no-brainer. The popularity and technical elements of the character aside, there's certainly space for a really good film about Gollum to be made. He's an enormously tragic figure in Tolkien's world, a Hobbit who discovers and is corrupted by the One Ring long before he encounters Bilbo and Frodo on their respective journeys. There's a lot of ways this could go wrong (like say, if they lean into the slapstick and goofiness of the character), but I think there's a path to something with potential here. [Speaking with *Deadline*](https://deadline.com/2024/05/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-hunt-for-gollum-peter-jackson-andy-serkis-philippa-boyens-explain-23-years-after-cannes-saved-original-trilogy-1235917510/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Jackson explained some of their thinking: "We really want to explore his backstory and delve into those parts of his journey we didn’t have time to cover in the earlier films. It’s too soon to know who will cross his path, but suffice to say we will take our lead from Professor Tolkien." There's always the argument to be made that there's no shortage of *other* stories to adapt and that Warner Bros. is beating a dead horse. I don't think this is wrong, but it's an argument that's already long since been lost: Hollywood is risk-adverse, Tolkien is a well-known name amongst audiences, Jackson still has lots of goodwill left over from *The Lord of the Rings* trilogy, and so forth. *The Hobbit* trilogy is a good counter-argument here for filmmaker excess, and hopefully, everyone involved will take some of the lessons they learned and avoid repeating the mistakes they made for those films. If they want to keep Middle-earth around as a viable franchise, they'll have to do more than just coast on the name: they need to make *good* films. We'll see if they're up for the task when the first film comes out in 2026\. ***Update, 5/15: added quote from Jackson via* Deadline*.*** ### Emily St. John Mandel talk URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/emily-st-john-mandel-middlebury-talk/ Last updated: 2024-05-07T19:01:43.000Z Way back in February, I made the trip down to Middlebury College during a snow storm with my friend Nate. A handful of the college's departments and local organizations had invited *Station Eleven* and *Sea of Tranquility* author Emily St. John Mandel for a discussion with assistant professor Megan Mayhew-Bergman, in which they talked about the natural world, the pandemic, and writing. It was a refreshing talk: [I was a big fan of *Station Eleven*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-review-station-eleven-emily-st-john-mandel/)when I read it a decade ago, and I enjoyed *Sea of Tranquility* when that came out last year. Both generally fall under the science fiction category, and genre was something that Mandel touched on. She explained that she didn't like the idea of being constrained into a single genre, and noted that we tend to like to put things into neat boxes to categorize them. Indeed, both *Station Eleven* and *Sea of Tranquility* are hard to really pin down: they're stories that don't necessarily fit into one such box, but sprawl out amongst many. Her next book, she noted, will be a speculative fiction story set in the near future. [Technology in the ApocalypseA review of Emily St. John’s Station Eleven![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/04/IMG_7360.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/book-review-station-eleven-emily-st-john-mandel/) A big part of the discussion centered on the role that communities played in her books. A central part of *Station Eleven* is how storytelling is an important thing for humans to practice, and [she noted that the book pushes back against the conventional tropes of a postapocalyptic story and world](https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/2024/02/author-emily-st-john-mandel-stirs-discussion-of-art-and-humanity-at-middlebury?ref=andrewliptak.com). "There will still be some beauty, and there will be humanity, and there will be joy. I think that our basic interests as a species won’t change in the sense that we will still want stories that will still be important.” Unfortunately, the video from the event was only up for a limited amount of time, so I can't share it, but it was a good talk. If you get the opportunity to see her at some point down the road, it would be worth making the time to do so. ### Find your friends URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-star-wars-commercial-cosplay-fandom/ Last updated: 2025-05-04T10:21:20.000Z Way back in 2005, I attended my first Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis. It was a life-changing event for me because I'd never encountered other fans outside of a couple of friends from high school. This was a whole new thing, and a glimpse into a much bigger world. While there, I met a filmmaker, Jay Thompson, who was working on a documentary about the 501st Legion called *Heart of an Empire*, which would look at the rise of the group and its place in the world. One of the things that's always stuck out for me about that film is a segment where a [couple of news anchors and bystanders were pretty dismissive of the troopers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhgoJgz8Tis&ref=andrewliptak.com): "they're trying to escape from reality!" one woman says. I've encountered my share of these attitudes over the years while in armor: people who pointedly avoid us, or who say things to us. Fast-forward twenty years, and cosplay is a far more mainstream thing, and one of the things that I wanted to write about in my book, [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com), was why and how that changed. ([It’s on sale at Amazon for 47% off, if you want a good deal](https://www.amazon.com/Cosplay-History-Builders-Favorite-Stories/dp/1534455825/ref=mp%5Fs%5Fa%5F1%5F1?crid=2B564XI8IB2GZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.RiiU9gjHE3JkYqMiiBvm8b8WNpyW08dqN6kaj6A57U1Jl3aSf-mIJ9MS6gt02J5I3204ghwmrcx6qEtnFJeldSI8OBlZBkpAfW66vQvFLJOwGE2xh5OAJbkvOTOWZ3UD3Yc4ZA3FiIa0MIZ1MWRdDG51tynkVNGqFbsrDUc5Hq2T-91XHdPxNC44lZmkzC6jumIDMhmx9hXqWGuJzFz3ag.3ygmbjj1q1PD2IdZ%5FtUkVTH8XBONoNyS1wGDh5E7vFo&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=cosplay+a+history&qid=1714845588&sprefix=cospla%2Caps%2C2880&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com)!) The short answer? Nerd stuff has only gotten more popular, and the activity of cosplay has been featured in some high-profile productions like *The Big Bang Theory* (although I maintain that those characters wouldn't have been buying their costumes – they'd absolutely go down the rabbit hole of screen accuracy), as a plot point in the *Ms. Marvel* series on Disney+, and it's showed up in movies and TV shows like *Ted 2, Fanboys, Supernatural, Castle, The Rookie,* and plenty of others in recent years. We can add a new one to that list: a spectacular commercial from Apple for its iPhone 15\. This commercial, "Find Your Friends," highlights one of the phone's new features, and follows a Mandalorian cosplayer as he goes from his house to a convention, and meets up with his fellow Mandos – obviously having trouble finding the exact ones in the crowd of other helmeted characters. [\- YouTubeBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/icon/favicon_144x144-1.png)YouTube](https://youtu.be/Z30T30GwEOA?feature=shared&ref=andrewliptak.com) It's a fun, well-shot commercial, with some great scenes of our hero as he makes his way across the city. Clearly, Apple's angling for the flood of Star Wars Day attention that May the 4th always gets, as well as the sky-high popularity that *The Mandalorian* has brought to the franchise. What I find neat about this is that it's a good indicator that cosplay as an activity is recognizable enough for a major tech company like Apple to use it as the central focus in one of their ads. Thinking a little more deeply about it, they're tapping into a fan scene that's dominated characters that up until a couple of years ago, were [pretty obscure](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-mandalorian-mandalorians-explainer/). Boba Fett has always been popular, but the Mandalorians were sort of deep-cut lore until they started popping up a bit more in *The Clone Wars* and *Rebels* before getting top billing in *The Mandalorian.* Part of this recognition also comes with the growth of the larger convention industry. San Diego Comic-Con is a household name for featuring movie announcements and trailer reveals, with other conventions populating every corner of the country year-round. Today's con scene is a far cry from the first conventions that were held in the 1930s and 1940s by small networks of fans. Taken together, you have an environment where deep-cut lore and dedicated fans come together in a way that's far more recognizable to the general public than ever before. Someone watching will likely understand what all of the elements in the commercial are, and rather than dismissing the cosplayers as sad, lonely adults or people trying to escape from reality, see them as people having fun with their friends and fellow fans. Above all of that, this isn't a commercial that features an pale imitation of cosplay that's been slapped together by Apple's marketing department. The costumes here look and feel authentic, because they brought in cosplayers and prop makers to make them. After I saw the commercial, I noticed that a fellow 501st member, prop-maker, and acquaintance John Rodriguez [had been brought on to help with the production](https://www.instagram.com/p/C6gpfVmrYBF/?hl=en&img%5Findex=1&ref=andrewliptak.com). He told me that he and a fellow maker, Ramsey Chandadet "built the 10 principal character's armors: five main Mandos and five backup dancers who were featured in the end of the commercial." This is another way that cosplay has gone big: the community at large has the infrastructure to do more than just build things for our own amusement. Members of the cosplay world have years of experience making and building props, costumes, and sets for themselves, and at a level of quality and professionalism that we've been hired as extras for productions like *The Mandalorian* and *Obi-Wan Kenobi*, [for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-macys-day-parade-501st-legion/), and commercials such as this. Rodriguez noted that this type of visibility helps to showcase the increasing sophistication of the cosplay field. The commercial, he says “definitely puts the level of costuming into perspective for people that think it's just cardboard and foam and hot glue. Some people put their hearts and souls into these kits and it shows. also it being Apple, there will be more eyes on it that might not usually see these types of things.” [Star Wars inspired Mandalorian fans, then Mandalorian fans inspired Star WarsHow cosplay cleared the way for Clone Wars and The Mandalorian![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/hub/sbnu_logo_minimal/405/touch_icon_ipad_retina_1000x1000.7014.png)PolygonAndrew Liptak![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8909M8fABY3DSRnyVhqYYkGw3mg=/0x0:2945x1542/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19912561/mandalorian_cosplay_purple.jpg)](https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/4/23/21227476/star-wars-the-mandalorian-clone-wars-cosplay-timeline-boba-fett-mask-signet-costume?ref=andrewliptak.com) When you zoom out and look at this from a 10,000 foot view, you see a revolution in the way that we relate to storytelling and in how we find ways to amuse ourselves and play. Those topics have long been somewhat taboo in American culture. The genre fiction that fuels that fandom has long been dismissed as juvenile or trash and fans have certainly derided for their enthusiasm for the minutia of franchise lore or for dressing up to go to a con on the weekend. That's no longer entirely accurate and it's yet another indicator that these shows are cool, that showing one's appreciation for the stories and characters isn't something to be ashamed of or to hide. That, I think, is the biggest takeaway from all of this. Cosplay has always been a fantastic and creative vocation, but the rest of the public are beginning to recognize it. --- Have a good rest of the day. I’ve been in armor for the morning and will be again later today. Andrew ### Here's the May 2024 book list! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2024-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-book-list/ Last updated: 2024-05-03T20:13:47.000Z I've been a little behind on book lists recently, so this list packs up the latter half of April and the first half of May. (In case you missed it, here's the first list for April, and you can also find other recommendations via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/).) [11 sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this AprilA belated list of books to check out this month![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/04/IMG_6583.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2023-book-list-star-wars-cixin-liu-gladstone/) As usual, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make will yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost, as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it. If you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/#/portal/signup) If that's not in the cards now, please consider forwarding this newsletter to your friends and fellow readers, or by sharing it on your social media of choice. It's greatly appreciated. Also, as a reminder, I'm running a giveaway for two copies of The Folio Society's edition of *Dune Messiah*. You can find details [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/giveaway-dune-messiah-folio-society/). Okay, here are 19 new SF/F books that you should check out for the rest of the month: ### [*I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668025277?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter S. Beagle (May 14th) Peter S. Beagle, author of the classic novel [*The Last Unicorn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451450524?ref=andrewliptak.com), embarks on a new fantasy adventure *I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons.* The kingdom of Bellemontagne is home dragons of all types, from tiny to giant. When his father dies,Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax(who goes by Robert) is reluctant to pick up his job as a dragon exterminator. He's always loved dragons but would rather be the Prince's valet. But the new job steers him along a new course, which brings new problems and challenges. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668025277?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "theresulting adventure offers surprises and humor aplenty alongside a hefty dose of classic dragon lore." [Peter S. Beagle has finally regained the rights to his body of workAfter years of a protracted legal battle, fantasy author Peter S. Beagle has finally regained the rightsto much of the literary work that he produced over the course of his life. The announcement comes nearly three years after he won a court case against his former manager, who he accused![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/11/DADC9F34-DB48-4FA3-91B8-8E56168A14E2.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/peter-s-beagle-last-unicorn-lawsuit-resolved-ip/) ### [*The Ministry of Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668045145?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kaliane Bradley (May 7th) Set in the near future, an unnamed bureaucrat is tasked with an exciting job: she's to work assisting "expats", people from the past who've been swept into the present. She'll be a "bridge" for Commander Graham Gore, a polar explorer who was presumed dead during an expedition to the arctic in 1845, and as she helps to explain the modern world, they forge a deeper relationship, one that could be upended when the nature of the governmental program they're part of becomes clear. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kaliane-bradley/the-ministry-of-time/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today." ### [*A Letter to the Luminous Deep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565530?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sylvie Cathrall (April 23rd) When a woman who goes by E. makes an interesting discovery outside of her underwater home, she begins exchanging letters with a noted scholar named Henerey Clel, and together, they begin working on unraveling a mystery about the depths. When disaster strikes and the pair go missing, E.’s sister Sophy and Henerey’s brother Vyerin work to pick up their work and figure out what they were looking for. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316565530?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying “The conceit is well used and never feels overly clever or gets in the way of the luscious worldbuilding and slow-burning plot. This poetic and emotional tale announces the arrival of a skilled storyteller.” ### [*Fall of the Iron Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660279?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Olivia Chadha (April 23rd) In this sequel to Olivia Chadha’s [*Rise of the Red Hand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660101?ref=andrewliptak.com), we follow Ashiva, Synch, and their allies after they’ve launched a major attack against their oppressive government. Now, they have to infiltrate the Planetary Alliance Commission before it can eliminate their revolutionary force, the Red Hand. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/olivia-chadha/fall-iron-gods/?ref=andrewliptak.com) “Chadha explores the necessity for human oversight of machines in a well-developed way. The story is grounded in parallels to other real-life concerns, such as worldwide environmental destruction, political truth-spinning, and a space colony that’s “a big escape pod for the rich.” ### [*To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722244?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Molly X. Chang (April 16th) Long before she was born, Ruying’s world was invited by a technologically-superior civilization from another reality, overcoming her people’s native magics and taking over. She despises the invaders and harbors a secret: she’s been blessed by Death and has the ability to suck the life force out of people, but has been careful to keep her powers under wraps to protect her family. When an enemy prince discovers her powers, he offered her an opportunity to keep her family safe, even if it means aiding him and his cause. ### [*Ocean’s Godori*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781638930594?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elaine U. Cho (April 23rd) Ocean Yoon is something of an outcast: she feels out of place in Korea, and has been kicked out of the Alliance, the country’s space agency after a mission went bad. When her friend Teo is framed for murdering his family, Ocean and her fellow crew mates find themselves at the forefront of a political crisis, and they have to figure out how to navigate the firestorm and save their friend. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781638930594?ref=andrewliptak.com) “Every scene builds suspense and illuminates fascinating themes of exploitation, privilege, and identity, all held together by a sweet found family narrative. Ambitious and heartwarming, this is a treat.” ### [*Relics of Ruin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316441049?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Erin M. Evans (April 30th) In this sequel to [*Empire of Exiles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316440875?ref=andrewliptak.com), picks up the story of a group of Archivists who uncovered a murder at the heart of the empire and has left it shaking at its foundations. Just as things are starting to get back to normal, the discovery of an ancient, stolen artifact further complicates things, prompting Quill and Amadea to try and uncover who stole and replaced the item without anyone knowing. ### [*Archangels of Funk*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250807281?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrea Hairston (May 7th) In the near future, the world has been rocked by a series of wars over water resources, prompting a huge refugee crisis and bringing about the rise of a violent militia movement. While online trolls are taking over the internet, Cinnamon, a trio of her Circus Bots, and pair of dogs team up with a community of farmers to help the refugees. Their work attracts the attention of those Darknet Lords and militia members, and it'll take everything they have to rebuild a future that's safe for everyone. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/archangels-of-funk-1803423?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The music of Hairston’s prose and her characters’ approach to conflict set the novel apart" and "This cross between *Parable of the Sower* by Octavia E. Butler and *Kiki’s Delivery Service* by Eiko Kadono deserves a place in every library." ### [*The Sword Unbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316537438?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth Hanrahan (May 7th) In this sequel to Gareth Hanrahan's [*The Sword Defiant*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316537155?ref=andrewliptak.com), Sir Aelfric and his friends saved the world decades ago by defeating a dark lord, and recently had to reunite his former companions to rise to a new challenge. Alf has now been labeled a traitor and is on the run, all while a revolution begins to take root in the lands, and in order to survive his pursuers and a web of conspiracies, he wields an evil sword known as Spellbreaker, which could ruin his reputation and standing for good. ### [*The House that Horror Built*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593638217?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christina Henry (May 14th) When Harry Adams gets the job of a lifetime – cleaning the home of famed horror director movie Javier Castillo – she's delighted. It's full of props and costumes and other relics from his career. Castillo left the film industry under scandalous circumstances, and he's kept a low profile ever since. But when Harry begins hearing someone calling for help from behind a locked door, she has to bend some rules to figure out what secrets the house harbors. *Publishers Weekly* [writes](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593638217?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Henry captures the epic scale of the best horror movies and her passion for monstrosity comes through clearly. The results are familiar but fun." ### [*First Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250835703?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Liz Kerin (April 23rd) Liz Kerin puts out a sequel to her novel [*Night's Edge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250835673?ref=andrewliptak.com), set in a world where vampires exist and who have been pushed to the edges of society. Here, nine months have passed since Mia fled a disaster in Tucson. She's hot on the tail of a vampire who bit her mother and destroyed their lives. But when she catches up with her quarry and infiltrates a group of fugitives, she finds that she might be in more danger than she thought. *Publishers Weekly* [notes](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250835703?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "this duology stands as an exciting take on the vampire mythos for the modern era, exploring the difficulties of emotional intimacy in a world designed to make it a fatal liability." ### [*Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive: Celebrating the Original Trilogy's Iconic Conclusion and Its Indelible Influence on a Galaxy Far, Far Away*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886633177?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Knox, Clayton Sandell, and S. T. Bende (April 23rd) There's no shortage of books about the making of the Star Wars universe, and here's another to add to the pile: *Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive: Celebrating the Original Trilogy's Iconic Conclusion and Its Indelible Influence on a Galaxy Far, Far Away* (there are way too many colons in that title.) This one takes a look at the behind-the-scenes work on *Return of the Jedi* and particularly looks at how it influenced everything that followed, from the books to *The Clone Wars* to *The Mandalorian*. ### [*Dry Lands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787589056?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Elizabeth Anne Martins (May 14th) In the near future, a massive flood destroys half of the world, bringing about a major refugee crisis and problems on what dry land remains. Liv and her three-year-old son Milo survived, and they're working to try and find a safe home, away from the cannibalistic gangs and problems in the encampments. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781787589056?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Liv’s daily battle against starvation and predators, human and otherwise, is visceral, and—thanks to Martin’s gift for characterization—her evolution feels earned as she gradually adapts her ethics to keep Milo alive at all costs. " ### [*Indian Burial Ground*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593546888?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nick Medina (April 16th) Noemi Broussard is trying to get a fresh start: she's planning to move off of the reservation that's been her home, only to have everything crumble when her new boyfriend apparently commits suicide. But his death doesn't really make sense, and Noemi begins to believe that something else is at play behind the tragedy. Meanwhile, her uncle Louie has returned, and he might hold the key to the secrets that the reservation holds. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/indian-burial-ground-2206751?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Medina skillfully brings to life a rich and complex cast of characters that are grappling not only with real-life horrors such as alcoholism, poverty, and suicide but also an unnatural horror inextricably linked to the Takoda people’s history, culture, and identity—and threatens to devour their community." ### [*The Wings Upon Her Back*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964146?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Samantha Mills (April 23rd) This book is one of my most anticipated of the year, the debut novel of Samantha Mills, in which a teenager named Zenya ran away from her home to join a warrior sect that augments their soldiers with mechanical wings, and begins learning their ways to protect her city. Years later, she becomes tired of warfare and the rulers whose will she upholds. When she's cast out, she has to rethink everything that brought her to that place in order to survive. [My most anticipated books of 202420 new books that I’m excited to dig into this year![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Beige-Brown-Grey-Minimalist-Aesthetic--Inspiration-Moodboard-Photo-Collage--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/) ### [*The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook: Recipes from King's Landing to the Dothraki Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599457?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel (May 7th) A number of years ago, Chelsea Monrose-Cassel and her friend Sariann Lehrer launched [*Inn at the Crossroads*](https://www.innatthecrossroads.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a blog devoted to recreating the foods of George R.R. Martin's Westeros series, which led to a cookbook [*A Feast of Ice and Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345534491?ref=andrewliptak.com), and arguably, the rise of an entire publishing niche: the nerdy cookbook. She's now back with a follow up, an official GOT cookbook with a ton of new recipes and a foreword from Martin that should provide fans with plenty of inspiration in the kitchen. ### [*The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881809?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sofia Samatar (April 16th) Sofia Samatar is back with a new book about a boy who was raised as one of the "Chained", someone raised to live and work in the depths of an interstellar mining ship. When he's abruptly brought "upstairs" and is given the opportunity to get an education and new life, his life is turned upside down. He bonds with "the professor," a descendant of a fellow worker who's struggled to build her career, and together, the two of them set off to break free of their pasts. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250881809?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Samatar unfurls worldbuilding details with masterful subtlety, making each shocking reveal all the more potent." ### [*The Maps of Middle-Earth: The Essential Maps of J.R.R. Tolkien's Fantasy Realm from Númenor and Beleriand to Wilderland and Middle-Earth*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063387317?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian Sibley (April 9th) Harper Collins has been steadily re-releasing J.R.R. Tolkien's works in some handsome editions, and has begun working on some suppliemental works in a similar format. The latest is The Maps of Middle-earth by Brian Sibley, which explores four of Tolkien's iconic maps of his legendarium: Middle-earth, Wilderland, Beleriand, and Númenor. The book comes with some great pull-out maps, and should make for an excellent read for the Tolkien afficianados out there. ### [*Can't Spell Treason Without Tea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250333292?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Rebecca Thorne (May 7th) In this cozy fantasy, Reyna and Kianthe plan on opening a bookshop where they can relax, read, and drink tea. But Reyna is one of the Queen's guards and Kianthe is a powerful mage. When Reyna is captured by an assassin, she decides that she's done with her work as a bodyguard and the pair decide to escape to a small isolated town where they can open up the bookshop they've dreamed of. But the queen they've escaped has other things planned, and it could make their cozy existence troublesome. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/cant-spell-treason-without-tea-1803439?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Like the tea they serve and the company they keep, this is a read to soothe and comfort, with sprayed book edges adding to the delight." --- That's it for me today. I'll have another post for you tomorrow morning! Andrew [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881809?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597958?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437940?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982195748?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881809?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597958?ref=andrewliptak.com)[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437940?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982195748?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250286314?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### Giveaway? Giveaway! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/giveaway-dune-messiah-folio-society/ Last updated: 2024-05-02T14:00:07.000Z If you've read this newsletter for any amount of time, you'll know that I'm a big fan of The Folio Society's books. [I recently interviewed Michael Didra about his anthology *Weird Tales*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/weird-tales-horror-folio-society-michael-dirda-interview/)and [took a look at their edition of Stephen Ambrose's *Band of Brothers*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/band-of-brothers-stephen-ambrose-folio-society-wwii-military-history/). Somehow, I ended up with a couple of copies of their recent, very pretty edition of Frank Herbert's *Dune: Messiah*, so I figure it's time for another giveaway. If you'd like to get a copy of *Dune: Messiah* (value: $110), do the following: subscribe to *Transfer Orbit,* and send me an email (either as a reply to this message or to liptakaa \[at\] gmail \[dot\] com: tell me that you'd like to be entered, and tell me what your favorite space opera novel is. I'll toss your name into a random number generator and I'll do a drawing on May 16th. If you're a supporting member of *Transfer Orbit*, I'll give you a second chance to win this: check in on the Slack Channel in #books-print: I'll open up a thread to enter. Rules: [click here for the contest's rules](https://www.andrewliptak.com/transferorbit-giveaway-rules?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). *Give them a read over before you email me to enter.* Aaaaaaand.... go. ###### ### Accessible histories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-jessamyn-west-wikipedia-interview/ Last updated: 2025-06-14T17:06:13.000Z When we upload a new video to YouTube, we try and make sure viewers who wish to find additional information can do so, often linking to our own resources, notable articles or explainers, or a Wikipedia page. Sometimes, as is the case with a recent video for Elizabeth Hubbell Fisk, we found that despite her interesting story, she didn't have a page of her own, although her husband (one of Vermont's Lieutenant Governors) did. So, we gave librarian and technologist Jessamyn West a heads up. She been an advocate for making information accessible online, and has documented her efforts to create pages for underserved peoples who should have one. Within a couple of days, [she put together an excellent page for Fisk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth%5FHubbell%5FFisk?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it prompted us to have a chat with her about this type of work and how it can be useful for those wishing to use the website as a tool to inform their members or the public at large. This post was originally published to the [Vermont Historical Society blog](https://vermonthistory.org/blog/?ref=andrewliptak.com). To support our work, [sign up as a member](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). **You’re a librarian who’s written a lot about technology and accessibility, and one project that you’ve been working on over the last couple of years has been to try and close the gap between Wikipedia pages dedicated to men and women. What got you started down this path?** I'm not sure I remember. I've been editing Wikipedia for 20 years. I know I originally got involved with it to add information about Vermont's towns. If the town had a website, I'd make sure it was in the "external links" section of the Wikipedia page for the town. There are tools you can use to help with that nowadays but I was just going through by hand. Looking at my own editing history, I mostly did that and made small edits to pages about library topics until I started editing Wikipedia in earnest over the past six or seven years. During that time, [the Wikipedia page about me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jessamyn%5FWest%5F%28librarian%29?ref=andrewliptak.com) was nominated for deletion four times. This is a normal part of how Wikipedia works, sort of, but often new Wikipedia articles about women or non-binary people will get nominated for deletion significantly more than articles about men or about many other topics. Since I was working on library topics this would include working on articles about library workers who were often women and seeing the odd sort of attention as well as reading up on Wikipedia's gender bias made me want to help in that direction. There is a terrific project, [Women in Red](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject%5FWomen%5Fin%5FRed?ref=andrewliptak.com), which gives newer editors a lot of support, advice and community to work on Wikipedia pages about women. This can include helping save them from deletion, adding photographs, or writing newer biographical articles. I find that having a larger project to be involved with helps keep me on task though I've done other articles like making sure every Wikipedia article about a librarian of color had a photo if at all possible. It's nitpicky, fiddly work but I really enjoy it. **Wikipedia is a vast online encyclopedia that anyone can update: how do you view it as an educational resource, and how can you get the most out of it, or ensure that the information that’s included on a page is correct and accurate?** Well I think those are two questions that are slightly separate. I think the thing that makes Wikipedia useful are its currency (not always but often, especially about breaking news) and its references. So if I am reading an article about a current news story I'll often drop right down to the citations to see who is reporting in authoritative ways about a thing. Or if it's a controversial topic I'll check the "Talk" page (the tab that is sort of "behind" the main article page) which is where people ideally hash out disputes about the article topic. That can give you a much richer idea of many ways of looking at a particular topic. And as far as correctness and accuracy, if I am dubious about a thing personally I'll drop down to the source and see if I can figure out where that information came from. As I'm sure you know, misinformation can propagate in a lot of ways but one of them is that Wikipedia may incorrectly report a fact and then many other web sites will report that fact FROM Wikipedia and then it gets reinforced because there are then a lot of non-Wikipedia sources reporting that same inaccurate fact which they got from Wikipedia. I sound very librarian-y here, but paying attention to what sources are being cited-some are just not good, or not good at certain topics-is part of ferreting out accuracy in any reporting, Wikipedia especially. There's a neat page buried deep in Wikipedia which is a chart about "[Perennial sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable%5Fsources/Perennial%5Fsources?ref=andrewliptak.com)," ones that are cited a lot on Wikipedia but may not be accurate or may have a very specific slant. For example, in the UK the Daily Mail is known as a tabloid, not authoritative, but maybe you don't know that if you're someone in the US. This list helps you figure out which sources are generally thought of as good and which ones are generally not. If you're someone who works in libraries or archives this is likely an idea you may be familiar with, but for people without that kind of training this may be news. I try to share this sort of thing as widely as possible. I should also mention that if you see a simple typo or something that is obviously wrong on Wikipedia, you should feel free to fix it! I see a lot of people complaining about various issues with Wikipedia but fewer who do something about it. And I get it, not everyone wants to make "fixing Wikipedia" one of their hobbies and there are legitimate criticisms about the project, but I do like to encourage people to try if they think it's something they might enjoy. There are many projects like Women in Red which are dedicated to a topic or to a task that can be a good way to get started. [LGBT Studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject%5FLGBT%5Fstudies?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a good entry to looking at Wikipedia work in that subject area or the [Wikipedia Typo Team](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Typo%5FTeam?ref=andrewliptak.com) is just dedicated to just fixing typos. **We recently got in touch because we came across one of these examples: while processing a recent collections video about Elizabeth Hubbell Fisk, we noted that her husband, Lt. Governor** [**Nelson Wilbur Fisk**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson%5FW.%5FFisk?ref=andrewliptak.com) **had a page, but she didn’t. How common is this, and how do you go about building a page?** It's fairly common, especially with famous men. In this case there was an article about Nelson Fisk because he had an important statused position as Lieutenant Governor. People writing biographies often just write the one, they don't branch out and say "OK, was anyone else in his family famous?" Writing an article takes some work, so you might have a famous person with a somewhat famous partner or, as in the case of Elizabeth Hubbell Fisk, a spouse who was fairly well known at the time but has a less well-known legacy than a former elected official. Elizabeth Fisk's life is fascinating because she was doing a few things that were really not being done at the time, designing and hand-weaving home goods as well as running a business doing that along with her friend Anna Bailey Smith (the wife of Vermont Governor Edward Curtis Smith). But Elizabeth Fisk's legacy is more well-known locally, though it got the sort of "reliable source" attention at the time as well as some contemporary attention which meant writing an article which would "stick" and not get put up for deletion was a good bet. Wikipedia does have a threshold for "[notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability?ref=andrewliptak.com)" but mainstream media mentions and an enduring historical legacy all help. For me building a page is a pretty routinized process. I get together at least 2-3 links from reliable sources. The one you sent me from Vermont Public didn't have a ton of information but it gave me a name, a date range, a location and some details which was a great starting place. I have a simple template for building short Wikipedia biographies which gives me a skeleton and then I start filling in details. Many people go through the "Articles for Creation" process to write articles which is what the Wikipedia community prefers. I've been around long enough on Wikipedia that I have "auto-patrolled" status meaning that new pages created by me don't have to get checked by anyone else. I can just start an article by searching for the person's name and clicking on the red link (where the Women in Red project gets its name from, see attached) and starting to write. Most biographies on Wikipedia follow a standard format where you include their basic information in a pretty standard way--the lede, early life and education, career, what they might be specifically known for, later years, death and legacy--so in most cases you can follow that format and just fill in the blanks. It's important to remember that Wikipedia is trying to be an encyclopedia, so you want to write more like a reference work and less like a feature piece where you might write with more superlatives, anecdotes, or slice of life stories. Also Wikipedia really values cross-linking so there's the metadata aspect where you also add links to related articles, both inline and possibly at the end. And then I always finish up making sure there are some good inbound links; there are some good tools you can use for this. In this case, I linked Elizabeth from her husband's page. I also add a link to the new article from the Women in Red page as well as adding the person to a page of people with the Fisk surname. Finally I add Wikiprojects on the Talk page, this will notify people who follow those projects that there's a new article in that area. I added Fisk's article to the Textile Arts Wikiproject as well as Wikiproject Vermont.. **How can local historians and historical societies take advantage of this as a resource or tool?** Well there are ways to start small and ways to go big. Starting small would just be making use of Wikipedia as a tool and possibly looking into uploading images of materials to Wikimedia Commons (a related project full of digital content which is all free to use) which can support content already on Wikipedia. Checking out your own local history on Wikipedia and making small edits or adding citations. There is a project called [1Lib1Ref](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The%5FWikipedia%5FLibrary/1Lib1Ref?ref=andrewliptak.com) which is all about helping people add good citations to Wikipedia. Also at a basic level sharing information you have about local people or places that contributed to history on your own website can help Wikipedia by providing reliable sources for information. If you have photographs, adding them to Wikimedia Commons or putting them on your own website with a free license can really help. I will often poke around the Vermont Historical society's website if I'm looking for inspiration. This can be tough lately because many organizations share information on social media. Which is great, but can also be harder to cite for Wikipedia. One of the best sources I found about Fisk, for example, were various links pointing to a website by a researcher that was all about her, with many photographs and citations, but it was no longer online. The Internet Archive helped me find an [archived version](http://web.archive.org/web/20181107022234/http://fisklooms.org/) of what the website about her used to look like. They have many scans of out-of-print history books too, and a keyword-searchable complete run of [*Vermont Life*](https://archive.org/details/vermontlifemagazine) thanks to Middlebury College Special Collections. In a slightly larger way, places that own content or just want to encourage community content can hold scan-a-thons or edit-a-thons where people get together and learn to edit Wikipedia as a group. You don't need to have fancy equipment to do this, just a way to get a decent scan (or even a photograph) of a famous person from your local history can be a great way to contribute. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons is mostly built as a resource, so you could put a set of images up there without having to have the usual Wikipedia notability hurdles. I often encourage people to start there. You can often get someone from Wikipedia, maybe a local editor or outreach person to maybe come talk to your group, give you a better understanding of the Wikipedia/Wikimedia ecosystem. There are also larger focused edit-a-thons that you see institutions sometimes putting on like this one which [just happened in Antarctica](https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/04/24/the-first-wikipedia-editathon-from-antarctica-in-history/?ref=andrewliptak.com), or this long running [Art+Feminism project](https://artandfeminism.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) which people can join in with. And then in the "really big deal" direction you can have a Wikimedian in Residence. This is a project that can sometimes help institutions focus on Wikipedia/Wikimedia coverage of their historical area. It's probably not a Vermont-scale thing but always a thing I admire when I see people doing it. I did an interview with the Gerald Ford Library's Wikimedian in residence over ten years ago and [it was really an interesting chat](https://www.librarian.net/stax/4008/michaelbarerainterview/?ref=andrewliptak.com). **As you’ve built pages for long-forgotten women, are there any names of Vermonters that stand out for you?** Part of what makes me good at some of this is that I don't hold on to the names super long so i can keep moving forward. I'll often look at my "watchlist," the Wikipedia tool so that you can see what edits are made on pages you have edited, and I'll struggle to remember a person's name even if it's an article I wrote. I recently created the page for [Johnson Woolen Mills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%5FWoolen%5FMills?ref=andrewliptak.com) which is one of those legendary Vermont names. I created [Jane Lindholm's page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%5FLindholm?ref=andrewliptak.com) and am a little surprised more people haven't fleshed it out. I am proud of [Christine Hallquist's page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine%5FHallquist?ref=andrewliptak.com) which I mostly created and built out when she was campaigning for Governor. But yeah it's the quirky old-time article that often pique my interest, ones where there's barely enough information to support an article. The [Daisy Turner article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy%5FTurner?ref=andrewliptak.com), for example. She's decently well-known here but there aren't a lot of independent sources. And I added a small part of a photograph that was a low-resolution version of one that is in the Vermont Historical Society collection according to fair use guidelines. Also there are people with complicated legacies such as [Helen Day Montanari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen%5FDay%5FMontanari?ref=andrewliptak.com), the namesake for the Arts Center in Stowe who was a businesswoman who had practices which were antisemitic. Making sure her article was accurate was important to me. Or [Brianna Maitland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance%5Fof%5FBrianna%5FMaitland?ref=andrewliptak.com), who disappeared twenty years ago. I expect if anything happens with that case it will show up on Wikipedia. Similar with [Paula Jean Welden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula%5FJean%5FWelden?ref=andrewliptak.com). Not a household name by any stretch, but her disappearance quite likely led to the formation of the Vermont State Police. [Emily Davenport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily%5FDavenport?ref=andrewliptak.com) is one of those "Her spouse had an article about his achievements and she had only the barest of stubs" people and I helped add more relevant details. But I often rely on tips from people who say "Isn't it odd that this person who should be famous doesn't have a Wikipedia page?" and I'll look into it. A lot of the time, they're right. I appreciate your occasional tips in this direction. It's a fun librarian hobby and great for those long winters. ### Harry Potter is getting a new audiobook adaptation URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/harry-potter-audible-audio-drama/ Last updated: 2024-04-29T19:43:56.000Z I'm generally reluctant to write about things that have to do with J.K. Rowling these days ([ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/they-should-know-better/)), but this strikes me as an interesting thing: Audible and Pottermore [have announced](https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/original-harry-potter-stories-to-be-released-as-full-cast-audio-productions?ref=andrewliptak.com) that they are partnering up for a full-cast audio adaptation of the entire Harry Potter series, which will launch sometime in 2025\. [They Should Know BetterOh no, J.K. Rowling and Richard K. Morgan > A couple of disclaimers before I dive into this letter: First: To make it very clear where I stand here: trans rights are human rights. I’m the interloper here. I’m a white, cis male who hasn’t experienced the![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_f9269f6d-cc09-4734-a943-0e9eedaaf2e7_2400x1350.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/they-should-know-better/) The project will cover all seven novels in the series, which had previously been narrated by Jim Dale and Stephen Fry (interestingly, Fry's narration is now available in the US via the audiobook platform). The dramatization will be exclusive to Audible, and will feature more than 100 actors to voice the characters, [according to *Variety*](https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/harry-potter-audiobooks-full-cast-audible-1235978363/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Neither company has announced who'll be voicing the characters, and *Variety* notes that these adaptations will be "unrelated to the eight Warner Bros. movies chronicling the saga of the boy wizard." That's not a huge surprise, given the principle cast's [differing views on trans people](https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/daniel-radcliffe-responds-to-j-k-rowlings-tweets-on-gender-identity/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to that of Rowling's. Rowling has spouted some pretty terrible and bad-faith rhetoric about trans people in recent years, which has certainly colored my views on the books and the various products and stories that have come out in recent years. But I do think that it's a notable project. The audio editions of the *Harry Potter* hold a huge place for the series' fans and have been a huge business for Pottermore and Audible over the years, and we've seen an uptick in publishers re-recording audiobooks with big-name narrators and actors, like [Rosamund Pike for *The Wheel of Time*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/06/26/rosamund-pike-dragon-reborn-audiobook-wheel-time-robert-jordan/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Rosalind Chao for [*The Three-Body Problem*](https://winteriscoming.net/posts/3-body-problem-star-rosalind-chao-to-narrate-new-audiobook-ahead-of-netflix-show?ref=andrewliptak.com), and Andy Serkis, who's run through J.R.R. Tolkien's [*The Hobbit*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-will-record-a-new-audiobook-edition-of-the-hobbit/), [*The Lord of the Rings*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-is-recording-the-lord-of-the-rings-audiobooks/), and [*The Silmarillion*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-audiobook-the-silmarillion-jrr-tolkien/). (I'm waiting on Frank Herbert's estate to redo the *Dune* novels, [scammed narrators notwithstanding](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune/).) I've found these new adaptations to be more than just a marketing gimmick: as the audiobook industry has exploded in popularity in the last decade, listeners and publishers have realized that these are projects that go beyond just reading the words on the page: I've found the audiobooks like Rob Inglis's narration of *The* *Lord of the Rings* to be a tedious listen, while Serkis's was far more engaging. Part of that is Serkis's role in Peter Jackson's films, but he's also blessed with a truly engaging voice. What's interesting about this new *Harry Potter* project is that the existing audiobooks are pretty well loved by the fans who listened to them, and for many, they *are* the definitive versions of the stories, whether it's Fry or Dale narrating. Audio dramas are big, complicated affairs, and this strikes me as something that will be an entirely new version of the story for a new generation of fans. I can imagine that this new adaptation will serve somewhat as a new introduction to the original novels in advance of the announced TV adaptation that's in the works for the Max streaming service. [Renervate!Warner Bros. is working to reboot Harry Potter as a streaming series, and it’ll have to contend with its ingrained problems![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/04/hp.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/harry-potter-series-warner-bros/) As I noted back then, Audible could face some headwinds because of Rowling's views, although that particular controversy [didn't seem to have dampened sales](https://www.fastcompany.com/91013150/best-selling-video-game-year-2023-hogwarts-legacy?ref=andrewliptak.com#:~:text='Hogwarts%20Legacy'%20sold%2022%20million,Potter'%20author%2C%20J.K.%20Rowling.&text=When%20it%20comes%20to%20the,t%20much%20of%20a%20contest.) for the recent video game *Hogwart's Legacy*. I have some doubts about how well controversies that originate on places like Twitter really trickle down into other spaces, but an ambitious project like this feels like it's designed to reach beyond the existing fan base for the novels, and as younger audiences like Gen Z and their successors are a bit more comfortable to shed traditional gender attitudes, Rowling and her attitudes feel like something of a hurtle, even if it might just turn out to be a minor one in the greater scheme of things. At the present moment, it's not something that I'd be terribly inclined to listen to aside from a curious listen to see what it sounds like. While I enjoyed the books, and I'm not entirely sure what a new adaptation would really bring that would enhance or change my views on them. And of course, Rowling going out of her way to bait people and generally act like a [Twitter Poisoned](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), always-online personality isn't exactly something that'll entice me back. ### Apple has renewed For All Mankind for a fifth season URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-for-all-mankind-renewed-star-city-streaming-series/ Last updated: 2024-04-20T12:00:22.000Z Apple [released some exciting news](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/04/apple-renews-globally-acclaimed-hit-space-drama-for-all-mankind-for-season-five-and-announces-new-spinoff-series-star-city/?ref=andrewliptak.com) earlier this week: it has renewed its space series *For All Mankind* for a fifth season, and has ordered a spinoff series called *Star City,* which will go back and explore the Soviet side of the story. I'm pleased with this news: the show has remained a favorite since I first started watching, and while it hasn't blown up the cultural zeitgeist like *Game of Thrones* it's slowly and steadily built up an impressive story of our future in space. If you haven't seen it, the series starts at the end of the 1960s when the Soviet Union puts a cosmonaut on the Moon before NASA can, kicking off an alternate space race where the US has to catch up. The first season is a little uneven: it focuses quite a bit on the efforts to build up the country's space capabilities (by allowing women and African Americans to join the astronaut corps), before settling in to a race to set up a base at the Moon's South Pole. [Apple series For All Mankind isn’t thrilled by America’s role in the space raceThe alt-universe drama finds room to improve history![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/hub/sbnu_logo_minimal/405/touch_icon_ipad_retina_1000x1000.7014.png)PolygonAndrew Liptak![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Ru1Jkr6gtdtzAePNneXv6w7nwUA=/0x149:2200x1301/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19337251/For_All_Mankind_Unit_Photo_03.jpg)](https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/1/20941718/for-all-mankind-review-apple-tv-plus-ronald-moore?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) From there, each season roughly jumps ahead a decade: season 2 is set in the 1980s as tensions between the US and USSR reach a breaking point on the Moon, while season 3 charts the progress of the efforts to reach Mars from both countries and a private space firm in the 1990s. The latest season is set in the 2000s as a Martian colony has taken root. When a valuable asteroid loaded with iridium passes by, the workers plot to rise up and take control of their fates. In the season's last episode, we see another time jump into the 2010s: there's an extensive mining operation taking place on the asteroid, and presumably, this upcoming season will deal with the growing pains and tensions with Earth. What's equally exciting here is the news of a spinoff: *Star City.* Star City is the home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and has been the center of the country's space activities since the space race. According to Apple, "is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon." It looks as though we're going back to the 1960s, which would be cool, given that the show opens as the Soviets take the Moon: there's clearly some setup that they can play with. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the long run; I can't quite imagine that the show will be *For All Mankind-*but-from-the-Soviet's-perspective would be all that fulfilling, but we'll see what we get. TV production is such a delicate thing: there's never a guarantee that you'll be able to finish a story you set out to tell. The show's creators have said [that they'd set out to do seven seasons](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/for-all-mankind-creators-discuss-their-seven-season-plan/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and even if they don't quite reach that milestone, they've laid down an excellent story thus far. Equally promising is that Apple's putting a spinoff series into play: that feels like a bit of added confidence on their part to keep exploring the world. There's no word on when Season 5 will debut: there's generally been a year or a year-and-a-half gap between seasons, so maybe it'll be something to look forward to in 2025? ### Participation trophy URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/participant-media-science-fiction-newsletter-roundup/ Last updated: 2024-04-19T15:59:10.000Z Here's a bummer of a headline from *Variety* from earlier this week: "Participant Shutting Down Operations After 20 Years." I was sad to see it, because it's the studio behind a handful of films that I've really liked: *Contagion, Good Night and Good Luck, Spotlight, Syriana*, and a whole bunch of others. Some (especially *Spotlight*) are films that I'll randomly throw on to watch when I'm feeling down about the state of the world, while films like *Syriana* had a big impact on how I look at stories and storytelling. [Participant Shutting Down Operations After 20 Years: Film Studio Was Behind Oscar Winners ‘Spotlight,’ ‘Green Book’ (EXCLUSIVE)Jeff Skoll’s Participant is shutting down after 20 years, leaving a library including Oscar winners “Spotlight and “Green Book.”![](https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety-2020/assets/app/icons/apple-touch-icon.png)VarietyMatt Donnelly![](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/participant.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/participant-shuts-down-film-studio-1235971644/?ref=andrewliptak.com) According to *Variety* (which obtained a memo from the studio's founder), it's changes in the media landscape that have pushed it to shut down: "the studios are just not making as many movies for adults, especially ones with a conscience." There's a [viral clip of an interview with Matt Damon](https://youtu.be/yaXma6K9mzo?si=UuwwUDhRPMg6MFKE&t=841&ref=andrewliptak.com) in which he explains the reasons behind the changing economics of the film world: the DVD and home release market has collapsed. Where studios could count on some income from a theatrical release *and* from home media releases, they can't any longer. Last year, Best Buy [announced](https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-blu-ray-disc-sales-1235754919/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it'll no longer be selling physical DVDs or Blu Ray releases, and I've noticed that the film section at my local Walmart has been shrinking. Places where I could reliably find a good film, like FYE, have vanished, at least here in Vermont. As Damon notes in that interview, these forces mean that studios like Participant can't rely on this post-theatrical release income, and as a result, it's hard to justify making the types of films they've been known to produce. [Shelf spaceStreaming shows The Mandalorian, Loki, and Wandavision are getting a physical release![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/08/dvds.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mandalorian-marvel-loki-home-release-physical-media-streaming/) Films like *Syriana* and *Spotlight* don't pull in Marvel-sized blockbuster numbers. They'll do decently and recoup their budgets and get some critical acclaim, but that doesn't seem to be good enough in the theatrical / streaming world that we're living in. It's a shame, because these are the types of films that I think leave an outsized impact on viewers: Participant had a specific social mission with its projects, which I think matters more than ever in 2024\. --- ### Support Transfer Orbit *Transfer Orbit* has been steadily growing in the last couple of months: welcome to the newcomers who've found it! It's free to read, but it does have a cost to produce. There's a small contingent of readers who support this newsletter as paid members, and I'm immensely grateful for that support. My goal with this newsletter is to talk about the state of science fiction, writing, and reading, and how those topics intersect with the real world. So: if you've found this newsletter interesting, discovered a book through a book list, or learned something from it, I'd ask that you consider supporting it. Membership runs $40/year or $4/month, and those supporting subscribers get a handful of pieces directly, as well as access to the TO Slack channel, where I and others drop links to news, discuss books / films, and so forth. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-screenwriting-film-production-storytelling/#/portal/signup) Thanks in advance for considering! --- ![No photo description available.](https://scontent-lga3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/398176692_842603121199689_7088483700691233521_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=Y9vL0D0m9n4Ab66AauM&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-2.xx&oh=00_AfBrHve_dQomK1YkkIXma1Skb_luSuyGeOAPlCBnIrPpwQ&oe=66285840) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Current reading It's been a little while since I've done a reading update. I've been a bit slow lately, working my way slowly through a handful of books. I recently re-read Cixin Liu's *The Three-Body Problem* while watching the Netflix adaptation, and really enjoyed it. What I'm currently loving is Alix E. Harrow's latest, [*Starling House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799050?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a wonderful gothic mystery about a young woman who's been entranced by a mysterious house in Eden, Kentucky, its strange keeper, and some horrors that are lurking under the surface. Other books on the to-read list are [*Nuclear War: A Scenario*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593476093?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Annie Jacobsen, [*Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517915230?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Shigeru Kayama and translated by Jeffrey Angles, [*Womb City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660569?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Tlotlo Tsamaase, and [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Martha Wells. --- ## Further reading ### 2024 Hugo finalists Glasgow 2024 announced the finalists for this year's Hugo Awards. Hopefully this year's awards will be less dramatic than last year's. [Here are the 2024 Hugo FinalistsHopefully this year’s awards will be less dramatic than last year’s![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6558.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-hugo-award-finalists-glasgow-worldcon/) ### 2024 Nebula Finalists Aaaand, SFWA also announced the Nebula finalists for the year. [Here are the finalists for the 2023 Nebula AwardsHonoring notable works of SF/F from 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6353.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-nebula-awards-2023-scifi-fantasy-books/) **ALL the trailers**. Studios have been dropping a ton of trailers in the last couple of weeks. Here are previews for [*Star Wars: The Acolyte*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtytYWhg2mc&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Alien: Romulus*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P357CTDLzU0&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Beetlejuice Beetlejuice*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yDanmWI1E&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Doctor Who*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL5ihOUUcs&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Furiosa*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVswuip0-co&ref=andrewliptak.com), [two for](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnxB9xZByyQ&ref=andrewliptak.com) [*House of the Dragon*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csSaSrJJPRs&ref=andrewliptak.com) [*The Penguin*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQghiGQi6Lo&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Rebel Moon: Part 2*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEJuNHOd8Dw&ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Transformers One*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a09yJU-mCI&ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Wild Robot*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67vbA5ZJdKQ&ref=andrewliptak.com). There's lots to look forward to! ### Book lists March had a ton of books, so I put together a [second book list for the month](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/). I've also belatedly sent out the first list for April, which you can read [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2023-book-list-star-wars-cixin-liu-gladstone/). I've got another one coming soon. [17 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read March 2024New books from Peter V. Brett, Harlan Ellison, Stephen Graham Jones, Téa Obreht, Brandon Sanderson, Timothy Zahn, and more.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6367.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/) **The future of *Star Trek***. *Variety* ran a [big cover story](https://variety.com/2024/tv/features/star-trek-future-starfleet-academy-section-31-michelle-yeoh-1235952301/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the immediate future of Star Trek, with some hints at what's to come with the [Section 31 movie](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-section-31-streaming-service-experiments/) and new series *Starfleet Academy*. Looks like it's [time to update this timeline](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-new-star-trek-film-timeline/). **Genre contract**. Miciah Johnson wrote one of my favorite recent books, *The Space Between Worlds*, and has an [excellent essay](https://crimereads.com/genre-communicates-a-contract-with-the-reader/?ref=andrewliptak.com) up on *Crime Reads* about the limitations that genre puts on art, and some of the things that it does well. ### Goods made to last I recently picked up and blew through Steven Kurtuz's book *American Flannel*, an interesting look at the efforts that a handful of entrepreneurs are making to reshore the US textile industry. Here's my review: [Goods made to lastSteven Kurutz’s American Flannel is an intriguing look at the challenges of reshoring America’s lost textile industry![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6516.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/american-flannel-steven-kurutz-textile-history-book-review/) **Grossman newsletter**. Author Lev Grossman recently launched a newsletter ahead of his next book, *The Bright Sword*. You can subscribe [here](https://levgrossman.substack.com/), and read his [first issue](https://levgrossman.substack.com/p/the-silence-of-arthur). **Iain M. Banks Exhibition**. The University of Sterling has [announced that it'll be hosting an exhibit about Iain M. Banks](https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2024/march-2024-news/iain-banks-personal-archives-on-exhibit-as-university-of-stirling-shares-work-of-its-famous-alum/?ref=andrewliptak.com), running from April until August. ### Machine revolt Read this excellent speech by Martha Wells. [Machine revoltRead this fantastic lecture by Murderbot author Martha Wells![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/04/IMG_5005.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-jack-williamson-lecture/) ### Movie mecha Netflix has a new film coming soon called *Atlas*, which looks like a lot of fun. [Who doesn’t love giant mechs?Atlas begins streaming on Netflix on May 24th![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/Untitled.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/atlas-movie-netflix-trailer-watch/) ### Remembering Vernor Vinge Author Vernor Vinge, author of *A Deepness in the Sky* and *A Fire Upon the Deep* passed away earlier this month. My obit: [RIP Vernor VingeAn immense figure who helped transform how we see the future![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6416.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vernor-vinge-singularity-science-fiction-author-obit/) ### Revealing Karin Lowachee's *The Mountain Crown* Karin Lowachee is one of my favorite authors and people, and I had the opportunity to interview her about her new book, *The Mountain Crown*, which comes out later this year. [Revealing Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain CrownA Q&A with one of my favorite writers![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/) ### RIP Caitlin Thomas Some sad news from the SF fandom world. [RIP Caitlin ThomasThere’s some sad news out of the SF/F field this week: Caitlin Thomas, the daughter of Uncanny Magazine founders/editors Michael and Lynne has passed away. Michael reported the news on Twitter yesterday: Dear Friends and Family of Caitlin: Caitlin passed away at 1 am this morning in the![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/04/jeremy-perkins-uhjiu8FjnsQ-unsplash.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rip-caitlyn-thomas/) ### *Rogue Squadron* isn't dead yet A glimmer of hope for those wishing for *Star Wars'*s *Top Gun*. [Wings up?It looks like the Rogue Squadron film still has some life in it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story-X-Wing-at-Scariff-Shield-Gate.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-rogue-squadron-patty-jenkins-development-update/) Something Good. TO reader Mark Slutsky has an excellent newsletter called Something Good. He recently moved off of Substack and over to Buttondown, and has an [interesting post up about Christopher Priest](https://www.markslutsky.com/archive/something-good-97-inversions/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Scary Stories I interviewed Michael Dirda about his Folio Society collection *Weird Tales*. [Scary storiesAn interview with Michael Dirda about his Folio Society collection, Weird Tales![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6153.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/weird-tales-horror-folio-society-michael-dirda-interview/) ### RIP Caitlin Thomas URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/rip-caitlyn-thomas/ Last updated: 2024-04-18T15:20:59.000Z There's some sad news out of the SF/F field this week: Caitlin Thomas, the daughter of *Uncanny Magazine* founders/editors Michael and Lynne has passed away. Michael reported the news on Twitter yesterday: > Dear Friends and Family of Caitlin: > Caitlin passed away at 1 am this morning in the Lurie Children's Hospital PICU. We never left her side, and she was made comfortable for her last 10 hours. She listened to David Bowie, Neko Case, and the New Pornographers. 1/4 > > — Michael Damian Thomas (@michaeldthomas) [April 17, 2024](https://twitter.com/michaeldthomas/status/1780696663088083031?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=andrewliptak.com) I've written for *Uncanny* before, and through their online presence, they've documented the challenges in caring for a person with [Aicardi syndrome](https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/diseases-conditions/aicardi-syndrome?ref=andrewliptak.com). Caitlin was a constant presence in their online lives and at conventions, and they've noted that she's been in decline for a short while now. I never met her in person, but she seems like she was a delightful individual who enjoyed everything from listening to music, watching *Doctor Who*, and going to conventions with her parents. It's an incredibly sad moment. The family has noted that Mary Robinette Kowal has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help defray some of the costs that they've picked up over the last couple of months of surgeries, care, and medications. You can donate to it [here](https://www.gofundme.com/f/lynne-michael-thomas?ref=andrewliptak.com), if you're so inclined. ### Machine revolt URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-jack-williamson-lecture/ Last updated: 2024-04-13T19:45:03.000Z Each year, the Eastern New Mexico University holds the [Jack Williamson Lecture](https://www.enmu.edu/academics/colleges-departments/college-liberal-arts-sciences/department-languages-literature/special-programs/jack-williamson-lectureship?ref=andrewliptak.com) (named for science fiction writer and professor [Jack Williamson](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/williamson%5Fjack?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and this year's speaker was Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series. She's posted the text of her lecture, and it's a powerful read that explores the nature of autonomy and slavery in science fiction: > Arguments against and in support of the enslavement of sentient beings are baked into the origin of robot and machine intelligence stories. The first story to use the word robot in English was R.U.R. (Rossom's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, written as a play in 1920, about a slave revolt by artificial beings created by a corporation to serve humans. Karel was against the enslavement of sentient beings, and he was pretty clear on that point. So it is interesting to watch how many machine intelligence stories written since then do assert the idea that if humans create a sentient being whose only reason and purpose for existence is to serve them, that's somehow okay. Many of those stories end with a machine intelligence objecting strenuously to this and going on a murderous rampage, which the brave humans have to defeat. The entire speech is worth a read, and you can find it on her website [here](https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649804.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). You can watch Wells deliver the speech [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS%5FVEqvfC68&ref=andrewliptak.com) (the sound is a bit iffy, though.) [Martha Wells on her upcoming Murderbot novel, System CollapseA short interview with Martha Wells about her upcoming Murderbot novella, System Collapse![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/12/B6412F35-B23F-45E1-A0FD-6CFB6DBF23B7.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-system-collapse-interview/) ### 11 sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this April URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/april-2023-book-list-star-wars-cixin-liu-gladstone/ Last updated: 2024-04-12T17:57:43.000Z As usual, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make will yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost (the bill came due earlier this week: $99 for the month) as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it: the time it takes to read, review, outline, write, transcribing, and so forth. Folks have written in to say that they like this newsletter because it helps keep them informed about the state of science fiction, pop culture, and the world at large, and if you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/#/portal/signup) If that's not in the cards now, please consider forwarding this newsletter to your friends and fellow readers, or by sharing it on your social media of choice. It's greatly appreciated. Okay, here are 11 new SF/F books that you should check out for the rest of the month: ### [*Mal Goes to War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250286314?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Edward Ashton (April 9th) I was a big fan of Edward Ashton's novel *Mickey7*, a story about a member of a terraforming mission who's an expendable–he's the guy who gets sent out on the super dangerous missions, because he can be brought back to life. I still need to read the followup, [*Antimatter Blues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250322012?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* but in the meantime, Ashton is taking a break from that world in his next, *Mal Goes to War.* Mal is an AI who's not a huge fan of the war between various factions of humanity: the technologically-driven Federals on one side, and the anti-technologist Humanists on the other. He spends his time rooting around the battleground between them, looking for things to salvage, and finds himself trapped when the Humanists cut off his access to infospace. Now stuck in the body of a cyborg mercenary and tasked with protecting a modded girl, he has to figure out how to survive and save his unexpected ward. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/mal-goes-to-war-1802297?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Mal’s voice has all of Murderbot’s snark, along with its uncomfortable regard for humans. His escapades with the misfit gang that gathers around his charge compel the reader through his adventures even as the costs of the war grow higher.*"* [Review: Mickey7 by Edward AshtonThe baggage that lingers under the surface![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/08/FY3_ftsWQAA8KWc.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mickey7-edward-ashton-scifi-book-review/) ### [*The Familiar*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250884251?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Leigh Bardugo (April 9th) A servant named Luzia Cotado toils away for a family in Madrid, using what little magic she knows to get through her day. When the family discovers her talents, they press her into service to try and improve the family's standing. Her magic work brings her to the attention of Antonio Pérez, a disgraced secretary to Spain's king, and he plans to use Luzia to improve his fortunes in the royal court. And Luzia isn't helpless: she works to seize upon the opportunity to succeed, even if the increased attention might bring her Jewish heritage before Spain's inquisitors. [Writing for *The Washington Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/08/leigh-bardugo-familiar-review/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Charlie Jane Anders says "This is a story about the suffering that results when the majority imposes its religion on everyone else, using coercive authority to control the identities of all. That, alone, makes “The Familiar” an essential read." ### [*Ghost Stations*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250884923?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.A. Barnes (April 9th) Psychologist Dr. Ophelia Bray has spent her career trying to study a contagious condition known as Eckhart-Reiser syndrome, which affects people who have been in space for too long. She's assigned to an expedition that recently saw a death amongst their numbers, and hopes to prevent an outbreak. But the crew is hiding something, and while they go off exploring an abandoned planet, it's up to Ophelia to figure out if it's an outbreak or something worse. Ryan Howse [reviewed the book for *Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-ghost-station-by-s-a-barnes/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and says that it's "an excellent science fiction horror novel, with great characterization, a setting that veers into the uncanny, and a steadily mounting sense of tension. It’s all the more impactful due to Barnes’ use of the unreliable narrator." ### [*Wicked Problems*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395931?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Max Gladstone (April 9th) I've really enjoyed Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence novels ([*Three Parts Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333117?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Two Serpents Rise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333131?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Full Fathom Five*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765335760?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Last First Snow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765379412?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* [*Four Roads Cross*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250813459?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* and [*Ruin of Angels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395894?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)) which put a cool spin on magic. He recently returned to the world for a new trilogy called *The Craft Wars*, which he kicked off last year with [*Dead Country*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395917?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). In this second installment, a new threat has entered the world, and with an apocalypse is approaching, only a girl and a god will be able to stop it from happening, and are willing to remake the world to save it. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fwicked-problems-2201776&ref=andrewliptak.com) "Gladstone’s second “The Craft Wars” book increases the action and devastation, bringing together familiar characters from across the world of the Craft as the battle for survival continues." ### [*Catchpenny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593685082?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Charlie Huston (April 9th) Sidney Catchpenny was once a well-known thief in LA. He's a sly, a person with the ability to move through mirrors, and he's always targeted unique items–things that have accumulated magical abilities over the years. He's been out of the game for years after a bout of depression, but when a friend finds him needing help for an important client, he takes the opportunity, only to discover that the job is far more complicated than he thought. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593685082?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Huston weaves in story lines about a dangerous video game, a death cult, and the fate of Sid’s long-dead wife, underscoring the antihero’s oft-repeated assertion that “everything is connected.” The resulting caper is fast, fun, and memorable." ### [*The Book That Broke the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437940?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mark Lawrence (April 9th) In last year's [*The Book That Wouldn't Burn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437926?ref=andrewliptak.com), Mark Lawrence introduced us to Evar, who was trapped for ages in an ancient library, and who's trying to unravel its mysteries, and who encounters Livira, who arrives and gets entangled in his quest. He's now back with a sequel, *The Book That Broke the World,* which continues their story. Evar has been forced to flee by a mysterious enemy, and Livira has become trapped in a ghost world and has to recover a book she wrote in order to escape. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593437940?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Lawrence makes the intertwining stories fascinating and propulsive, with enough scattered clues and shocking twists to keep the pages flying. This will keep readers up long past their bedtime." ### [*Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316553575?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ann Leckie (April 2nd) Ann Leckie is best known for her novels [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574266?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Translation State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=andrewliptak.com) (I have a longer interview/piece that I need to finish writing about both), and has just released her first collection of short fiction. It includes a brand new novelette, "Lake of Souls," as well as other stories from her Imperial Radch series, The Raven's Tower, and more. [Writing for *Locus Magazine*](https://locusmag.com/2024/04/gary-k-wolfe-reviews-lake-of-souls-the-collected-short-fiction-by-ann-leckie/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Gary K. Wolfe says "Throughout, there’s a sense of a restless imagination at work, and of a writer exploring her options, often in ways that will surprise the admirers of her more famous novels, and often in ways that will reassure them they were right in the first place." ### [*A View from the Stars: Stories and Essays*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250292117?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cixin Liu (April 2nd) Coming right on the heels of a big adaptation of his novel *The Three-Body Problem*, Chinese SF writer Cixin Liu has a new collection of his short fiction and essays, which provide insight into his own story and history with the genre. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cixin-liu/a-view-from-the-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it "offers up a palatable blend of speculative science fiction and insightful articles on the genre’s past and future," and that it's "A must-read for SF fans and writers alike." ### [*Star Wars: The Living Force*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597958?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Jackson Miller (April 9th) 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of *Star Wars: The Phantom Menace*'s release, and to accompany that milestone, John Jackson Miller has penned a new novel set in the year before the film takes place. For generations, the Jedi Order has brought peace and justice throughout the galaxy, and it's members have been contending with its changing role in recent years. When a Jedi outpost on the planet Kwenn is scheduled for decommissioning, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn argues that the Jedi Council has become more isolated, prompting its members to travel to the planet. Their arrival brings about mixed feelings amongst the planet's inhabitants. The sector has been plagued with piracy and the council members become targets as the pirate groups unite to ensure that they have a foothold in the system–even if that means civilians in the line of fire. ### [*The Last Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143137900?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mary Shelley (April 9th) Mary Shelley is best known for [*Frankenstein*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143131847?ref=andrewliptak.com), but it's not the only work of speculative fiction that she's penned. In 1826, she released *The Last Man*, a post-apocalyptic novel about a plague in the 21st century and how it nearly brings down humanity. Penguin Classics has just released a new edition, featuring a foreword by writer Rebecca Solnit. ### [*Someone You Can Build a Nest In*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418854?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Wiswell (April 2nd) A shapeshifter named Shesheshen was driven from her home in a ruined mansion by a group of monster hunters, and in her escape, fell off a cliff and was seriously injured. When she's found and nursed back to healthy by a woman named Homily (who mistakes her for human), Shesheshen realizes that she'd make a good host for her eggs. But as she spends more time with her, she realizes that she likes Homily and has to make some changes if she wants to find happiness. Kirkus Reviews [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-wiswell/someone-you-can-build-a-nest-in/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach." --- That's it for now: I've got another list that I'm hoping to get written up for the second half of the month, and another, longer thing about adaptations that I'm hammering into shape. Andrew ### Scary stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/weird-tales-horror-folio-society-michael-dirda-interview/ Last updated: 2024-04-01T17:18:33.000Z In March, The Folio Society released its 2024 Spring Collection, which [included Stephen Ambrose's WWII history, *Band of Brothers*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/band-of-brothers-stephen-ambrose-folio-society-wwii-military-history/)and a new collection of horror stories called [*Weird Tales*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/weird-tales.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), assembled by noted critic Michael Dirda. In his introduction, Dirda explains that the stories he brought together for this volume are ones that he considers the genre's high points. That table of contents includes the likes of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and more, stretching from the 19th to the 21st century. Like most of the Folio Society's offerings, this is a handsome volume. With its green and purple color scheme, this book [reminds me quite a bit of the company's 2017 release](https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/18/15453802/folio-society-lovecraft-stories-fiction-books?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-call-of-cthulhu-other-weird-stories-core.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), a selection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which oozes with an uncanny and off-kilter feel when you hold it. It features a handful of original illustrations from artist [Harry Campbell](https://harrycampbell.net/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who uses a stark green-and-black woodcut motif for each of the images. It'll make for an excellent book to break out later this fall around Halloween. I had the opportunity to speak with Dirda about his work assembling this volume. Folio Society provided this volume for review purposes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/04/IMG_6584.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Can you tell me a bit about your own interest in genre fiction? What are your early memories of the weird horror or speculative stories, and what keeps you interested in reading them? I've always been drawn to adventure fiction, plot-driven stories, novels in which things happen. When I was in high school, my French teacher lent me his Arkham House editions of H.P. Lovecraft stories, which I found irresistible, partly because of the prose’s delicious portentousness but also because of the rewriting of earth's history and their surprise endings. In these same years, I read with fear and trepidation various Alfred Hitchcock collections with titles like "Stories That Scared Even Me." One lucky afternoon, I even discovered a copy of Lord Dunsany's "Jorkens Remembers Africa" in my school library, misfiled under Travel. These are tall tales, most of them fantastic and set down in lovely prose, recounting the youthful adventures of the now old and world-weary clubman Jorkens. I loved them. Not least, from the library I would check out anthologies such as Wise and Fraser's classic "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural" and Bennett Cerf's "Best Ghost Stories." Much later, in graduate school I would study medieval European literature, which is replete with bogies, heroes, and magic of various kinds. After I came to *The Washington Post*, I convinced my masters that Book World should carry a monthly fantasy and science fiction column. Put in charge of this, I wrote to and exchanged letters with the only SF author I knew, Joanna Russ, who brought me up to date on the field and alerted me to the writers and critics I might ask to contribute to the column. I attended the 1980 Worldcon in Boston–and since then many other SF, fantasy and horror cons–as I grew increasingly familiar with the richness and range of "fantastika." During these same years, I was rediscovering Sherlock Holmes, eventually being invested into The Baker Street Irregulars. Two of my fellow Irregulars, Barbara and Christopher Roden, happened to operate Ash-Tree Press, which specialized in reissuing classic supernatural literature. They asked me to write an introduction to an Ash-Tree volume of Conan Doyle's strange stories titled *The Captain of the Pole-Star*. Around the same time, the Rodens published *A Pleasing Terror*, a huge volume of everything M.R. James wrote in the way of a ghost story or a commentary on ghost stories. Reading both Conan Doyle and James made me eager for more tales of the uncanny. I later reviewed Ash-Tree collections devoted to Sheridan Le Fanu and Vernon Lee. The latter's "Amour Dure" is my favorite ghost story. After bringing out a little book called *On Conan Doyle*, I decided to build on this and write a kind of survey–an appreciation really–of the popular fiction of late 19th and early 20th-century Britain, essentially the period that established the templates for modern "genre literature." I've been working on it for some time, and am now revising the manuscript, which includes–to name just a few–writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, E. Nesbit, Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Rider Haggard, E.F. Benson, Saki, and J.M. Barrie, all of whom produced excellent ghost stories and weird tales. I could go on, but let me finish this overlong reply by mentioning the deeper reason I enjoy weird tales, as well as classic mysteries, swashbucklers, and fantasy of all kinds. Too much modern fiction seems confessional and moralistic, regularly focusing on adolescent angst, unhappy families, sexual and identity confusions, societal injustice, spiritual redemption and earnest accounts of the way we live now. To borrow a phrase from the great bookman Vincent Starrett, I like stories in which things happen and then keep on happening. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/IMG_6164.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### In your introduction, you explained that this collection is what you'd consider the cultural touchstones of uncanny fiction, and that they're stories that often contain the supernatural and make you question the fabric of reality around us. What are the ideal ingredients that go into this type of weird horror? Science fiction is famously said to extrapolate from the present moment, to take some contemporary phenomenon and apply the magic formula, "If this goes on..." Similarly, weird tales often raise the question "Can such things be?" Sometimes they answer with a definite yes, but many of the best keep the whole matter open-ended. Uncertainty might be the most prominent quality of the weird. I myself prefer stories that subtly create a feeling of unease, an atmosphere of wrongness, a growing conviction that the quotidian world isn't what it seems at all. Sometimes a protagonist simply Goes Too Far into matters that he or she would have done better to ignore--and then pays the price. Sometimes, he or she is simply unlucky: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport." I have no belief in the occult or supernatural myself, but while I'm reading any of the contributions to "Weird Tales" I find myself falling under the spell of their uncanny atmospheres, their often heightened, even hysterical prose styles, the sheer audacity of their authors' imagination. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/IMG_6165.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### The first story in this book is Shieridan le Fanu's "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" from 1839, while the last is Mark Samuels' "The White Hands" from 2003\. What scares us now can be different from what was frightening in the mid-19th century, but I'd be interested in knowing what you think has remained consistent in the genre over that course of time. I'm not sure that frightening the reader is really what, deep down, these stories aim to do. Yes, some can be gruesome–raw head and bloody bones–while others depict psychological deterioration or end with a short, sharp shock. But, at heart, weird tales aim to leave you wondering about yourself, the nature of what we call reality, the pathos inherent in mortality. Most, too, are carefully, artfully constructed, satisfying our human thirst for Story and our particular delight in Wonders of all kinds. What one does notice in the selections for *Weird Tales* is the author's awareness that he or she is contributing to an established literary tradition. Many people dislike Robert Aickman's "strange stories" because of the unresolved ambiguities that lie at their heart, but there's no doubt about Aickman's self-awareness and sophistication. Two of the stories in "Weird Tales" are not only unsettling but also deeply metafictional. Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks" plays off the entire history of Lovecraftian weird fiction; Mark Samuels's "The White Hands" overtly pays homage to Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and others in the British tradition of the forbidden and occult. In this way, they honor, continue and subvert the genre they love and work in. --- *Weird Tales* is [now available](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/weird-tales.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) and retails for $75\. ### Here are the 2024 Hugo Finalists URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-hugo-award-finalists-glasgow-worldcon/ Last updated: 2024-03-29T22:21:37.000Z Glasgow 2024, the next World Science Fiction Convention, [has announced](https://glasgow2024.org/hugo-awards/2024-hugo-award-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the finalists for this year's Hugo Awards. It's a solid list of nominees: I'm pleased to see a handful of stories that I picked up last year make the list. This next set of awards falls under a considerable shadow: the 2023 awards were marked with controversy after some tampering from the award's administrators. Those administrators have since stepped down after a series of reports highlighted their roles in removing a number of eligible nominees from consideration by voters. Hopefully, that'll be enough bring some level of trust to the institution as a whole. [Rapid unscheduled disassemblyThe Hugo Awards controversy gets worse![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/tim-mossholder-GoHaYpu7-ks-unsplash.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/) It looks like there is at least one specific correction in place: Xiran Jay Zhao has been nominated again for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. 2023 was their second year of eligibility, but Dell Magazines, which sponsors the award, extended that for another year. Additionally, Paul Weimer, who had been removed as Best Fan Writer last year, was nominated again for the category. The convention's announcement also featured some additional notes at the end: a list of the authors who declined their nominations (enough people nominated a series of promotional tweets to qualify for Best Related Work? C'mon. 🙄) as well as three ineligible works, with an explanation for why they didn't make the final cut. There's another excellent takeaway from this list: a number of Chinese works made a ton of categories. It's not a huge surprise: if you sign up as a member of one convention, you're eligible to vote in the upcoming Hugo awards. Clearly, those Chinese members are still remaining engaged with the process, and we have a bunch of works that likely wouldn't have made it on, judging from just about every other Hugo ballot that's been put out there. That's a good thing: the convention should live up to its namesake! Hopefully, it'll help to steer readers to some new authors and stories that they wouldn't have otherwise picked up. This year's awards will be handed out at the Hugo Awards Ceremony at Glasgow 2024 on August 11th. To vote, you'll need to [sign up as an attending or supporting member](https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here's the full list of finalists for this year's awards: ### Best Novel - *The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi* by Shannon Chakraborty - *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera - *Some Desperate Glory* by Emily Tesh - *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi - *Translation State* by Ann Leckie - *Witch King* by Martha Wells ### Best Novella - “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet”, He Xi / 人生不相见, 何夕, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - *Mammoths at the Gates* by Nghi Vo - *The Mimicking of Known Successes* by Malka Older - *Rose/House* by Arkady Martine - “Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - *Thornhedge* by T. Kingfisher ### Best Novelette - *I AM AI* by Ai Jiang - “[Introduction to *2181 Overture, Second Edition*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/gu%5F02%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Gu Shi /〈2181序曲〉再版导言, 顾适 translated by Emily Jen - “[Ivy, Angelica, Bay](https://reactormag.com/ivy-angelica-bay-c-l-polk-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by C.L. Polk - “[On the Fox Roads](https://reactormag.com/on-the-fox-roads-nghi-vo-2/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Nghi Vo - “[One Man’s Treasure](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/one-mans-treasure/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Sarah Pinsker - “[The Year Without Sunshine](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Naomi Kritzer ### Best Short Story - “Answerless Journey”, Han Song / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, translated by Alex Woodend (*Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers*) - “[Better Living Through Algorithms](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer%5F05%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Naomi Kritzer (*Clarkesworld* May 2023) - “[How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by P. Djèlí Clark (*Uncanny Magazine*, January-February 2023) - “[The Mausoleum’s Children](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Aliette de Bodard (*Uncanny Magazine*, May-June 2023) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)” by Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare Magazine*, October 2023) - 美食三品 (“Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times”), 宝树 / Baoshu (银河边缘013：黑域密室 / *Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain*) ### Best Series - *The Final Architecture* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Imperial Radch* by Ann Leckie - *The Last Binding* by Freya Marske - *The Laundry Files* by Charles Stross - *October Daye* by Seanan McGuire - *The Universe of Xuya* by Aliette de Bodard ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *Bea Wolf*, written by Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet - *Saga*, Vol. 11 written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples - *Shubeik Lubeik*, Deena Mohamed (Pantheon); as *Your Wish Is My Command* - 三体漫画：第一部 / *The Three Body Problem*, Part One, adapted from the novels by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin), written by 蔡劲 (Cai Jin),戈闻頔 (Ge Wendi), and 薄暮 (Bo Mu), art by 草祭九日东 (Caojijiuridong) - *The Witches of World War II* written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo - *Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons* written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha and Nicola Scott ### Best Related Work - *All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays* by Niall Harrison - 中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷，(*Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History*, vols 2 and 3) ed. 杨枫 / Yang Feng - *A City on Mars* by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith - *The Culture: The Drawings*, by Iain M. Banks - 雨果X访谈 (*Discover X*), presented by 王雅婷 - *A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller*, by Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Barbie*, screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, directed by Greta Gerwig - *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves*, screenplay by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Michael Gilio, directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein - *Nimona*, screenplay by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane - *Poor Things*, screenplay by Tony McNamara, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse*, screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson - 流浪地球2 / *The Wandering Earth II*, based on the novel by 刘慈欣 Liu Cixin, screenplay by 杨治学 Yang Zhixue, 郭帆 / Frant Gwo, 龚格尔 Gong Geer, and 叶濡畅 Ye Ruchang, script consultant 王红卫 Wang Hongwei, directed by 郭帆 / Frant Gwo ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Doctor Who: “The Giggle”,* written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Chanya Button - *Loki: “Glorious Purpose”,* screenplay by Eric Martin, Michael Waldron and Katharyn Blair, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - *The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”,* written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists”,* written by Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Jonathan Frakes - *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Subspace Rhapsody”*, written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dermott Downs - *Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder”,* written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Tom Kingsley ### Best Game or Interactive Work - *Alan Wake 2,* developed by Remedy Entertainment - *Baldur’s Gate 3* - *Chants of Sennaar*, developed by Rundisc - *DREDGE*, developed by Black Salt Games - *The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom* - *Star Wars Jedi: Survivor*, developed by Respawn Entertainment ### Best Editor Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - Neil Clarke - 刘维佳 (Liu Weijia) - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - 杨枫 (Yang Feng) ### Best Editor Long Form - Ruoxi Chen - Lindsey Hall - Lee Harris - Kelly Lonesome - David Thomas Moore - 姚海军 (Yao Haijun) ### Best Professional Artist - Micaela Alcaino - Rovina Cai - Galen Dara - Dan Dos Santos - Tristan Elwell - Alyssa Winans ### Best Semiprozine - *Escape Pod*, editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes; assistant editors Benjamin C. Kinney, Premee Mohamed and Kevin Wabaunsee; hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart; producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht; and the entire Escape Pod team - *FIYAH Literary Magazine*, publisher and executive editor DaVaun Sanders, poetry editor B. Sharise Moore, special projects manager L. D. Lewis, art director Christian Ivey, acquiring editors Rebecca McGee, Kerine Wint, Joshua Morley, Emmalia Harrington, Genine Tyson, Tonya R. Moore, sponsor coordinator Nelson Rolon - *GigaNotoSaurus*, editor LaShawn M. Wanak, associate editors Mia Tsai and Edgard Wentz, along with the GNS Slushreaders Team - *khōréō*, produced by Aleksandra Hill, Zhui Ning Chang, Kanika Agrawal, Isabella Kestermann, Rowan Morrison, Sachiko Ragosta, Lian Xia Rose, Jenelle DeCosta, Melissa Ren, Elaine Ho, Lilivette Domínguez, Jei D. Marcade, Jeané Ridges, Isaree Thatchaichawalit, Danai Christopoulou, M. L. Krishnan, Ysabella Maglanque, Aaron Voigt, Adil Mian, Alexandra Millatmal, E. Broderick, K. S. Walker, Katarzyna Nowacka, Katie McIvor, Kelsea Yu, Marie Croke, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Phoebe Low, S. R. Westvik, Sara S. Messenger - *Strange Horizons*, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective - *Uncanny Magazine*, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; nonfiction editor Meg Elison; podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky. ### Best Fanzine - *Black Nerd Problems*, editors Omar Holmon and William Evans - *The Full Lid*, written by Alasdair Stuart and edited by Marguerite Kenner - *Idea*, editor Geri Sullivan - *Journey Planet*, edited by Michael Carroll, Vincent Docherty, Sara Felix, Ann Gry, Sarah Gulde, Allison Hartman Adams, Arthur Liu, Jean Martin, Helena Nash, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Yen Ooi, Chuck Serface, Alan Stewart, Regina Kanyu Wang, James Bacon and Christopher J. Garcia - *Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together*, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla. - *Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog*, editors Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk ### Best Fancast - *The Coode Street Podcast*, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe - *Hugos There*, presented by Seth Heasley - *Octothorpe*, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty - *Publishing Rodeo*, presented by Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford - 科幻Fans布玛 (*Science Fiction Fans Buma*), production team 布玛（Buma)，刘路（Liu Lu)，刘倡（Liu Chang) - *Worldbuilding for Masochists*, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Rowenna Miller, Cass Morris and Natania Barron ### Best Fan Writer - Bitter Karella - James Davis Nicoll - Jason Sanford - Alasdair Stuart - Paul Weimer - Örjan Westin ### Best Fan Artist - ​​Iain J. Clark - Sara Felix - Dante Luiz - Laya Rose - Alison Scott - España Sheriff ### Lodestar Award for Best YA Book - *Abeni’s Song* by P. Djèlí Clark - *Liberty’s Daughter* by Naomi Kritzer - *Promises Stronger than Darkness* by Charlie Jane Anders - *The Sinister Booksellers of Bath* by Garth Nix - *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath* by Moniquill Blackgoose - *Unraveller* by Frances Hardinge ### *Astounding* Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines) - Moniquill Blackgoose (1st year of eligibility) - Sunyi Dean (2nd year of eligibility) - Ai Jiang (2nd year of eligibility) - Hannah Kaner (1st year of eligibility) - Em X. Liu (1st year of eligibility) - Xiran Jay Zhao (eligibility extended at request of Dell Magazines) The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but declined nomination: - Best Novel – *System Collapse*, by Martha Wells - Best Novelette – 极北之地 (“The Far North”) by 海漄 (Hai Ya) - Best Related Work: Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood’s promotional tweets for *This Is How You Lose the Time War* - Best Editor, Long Form: Natasha Bardon - Best Fan Writer: Camestros Felapton The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but were not eligible for specific reasons: - Best Novel – 天帆 (*Cosmo Wings*) by 江波 (Jiang Bo) – publication in 2024 - Best Fancast (1) – 雨果X访谈 （*Discover X*）interviews by 王雅婷 Tina Wong – professional production; also qualified in the Best Related Work category. - Best Fancast (2) – 铥铥科幻电波 (*Diu Diu Sci Fi Radio*) – also a professional production. ### Goods made to last URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/american-flannel-steven-kurutz-textile-history-book-review/ Last updated: 2024-03-27T14:44:09.000Z Ever since I wrote [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com), I've been interested in the history of garments and clothing. Coupled with my work at the Vermont Historical Society, I've been interested in how the history of textile manufacturing played a role in the communities here. I grew up in Vermont, and there's always been some sort of low-level understanding that clothing was once a big part of the economic puzzle here. Water-powered mills along the Connecticut and Winooski Rivers once employed thousands of people (and plenty of children) and throughout the bigger cities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. My mother would point out the big brick factory buildings when we went to visit family in places like Lawrence or Lowell. Those industries have largely vanished from their riverside factories, leaving behind empty buildings. That's part of a story that *New York Times* Style reporter Steven Kurutz recounts in his new book [*American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593329610?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It's a breezy, accessible book that aims to look at the immense decline in domestic textile manufacturing, and how a handful of companies have been working to try and once again produce clothing here in the US. At its core, it's a book about how the country's consumers have voted with their wallets when it comes to clothes, and the effect that's had not only on the nation's economic prospects, but also the quality and pride in the goods that are no longer produced here. Kurutz takes us through a thumbnail sketch of the US's manufacturing history: mill towns in the Northeast produced countless reams of cloth, focusing on a couple of companies like Woolrich of Pennsylvania, and how there was an exodus of industrial power to the American Southeast in the 20th century. In the 1980s, free trade agreements slashed quotas and tariffs on goods produced in places like China, India, and Sri Lanka, prompting companies one by one to shift their production overseas. The textile mills that produced garments shuttered or drastically downsized, hollowing out an entire industry over the course of a couple of decades. In that aftermath, Kurutz explores the rise of two companies: [American Giant](https://www.american-giant.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), founded in 2012 by Bayard Winthrop, and Gina Locklear of [Zkano](https://zkano.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), founded in 2009\. Both were frustrated by the lack of options for high-quality garments produced in the United States, and set out to try and realize that vision, encountering a host of problems that accompanied the globalized textile marketplace. The result is a high-level overview of overcoming those challenges. As the title suggests, Kurutz focuses on American Giant's efforts to produce a flannel shirt (with a nice side trip to Barre, Vermont to talk about the [Vermont Flannel Company](https://www.vermontflannel.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)!) It's a harder task than it might sound because flannel is a complicated fabric to produce (or to produce well. After companies relocated their production overseas in search of cheap labor, Kurutz explores why the efforts to reshore production is so fraught. The offshoring movement didn't just mean that factories went idle domestically; it destroyed the center of gravity of a skilled labor force that had developed for generations. Workers who understood how to work and finesse the machines they used were let go and scattered to find other low-paying work elsewhere, collapsing the network of companies and factories that made up the textile manufacturing process. Kurutz presents a look at the country that is contending with a serious crisis: we've collectively lobotomized ourselves when it comes to producing what we need. We no longer produce a majority of the clothes we buy and wear, and the result are cheap, disposable garments and a significant industrial sector eliminated. A central (and maybe a bit idealized) tenet of this book is that America's textile industry was the product of generations of blue collar workers who maintained a close relationship with their work, work that was deeply embedded in the character of their communities. There are some obvious complications to this argument: the textile industry has always been reluctant to treat those workers well, even if Kurutz pulls out some examples of places where company towns were fairly benevolent toward their employees, like Woolrich of Pennsylvania. This is a point where I wish that he'd dug a little more deeply and critically into the nation's labor history, because it shows that without the rosy nostalgia of a time when goods were made here in America, it's a bloody and fraught history: books like David Von Drehle's [*Triangle: The Fire That Changed America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780802141514?ref=andrewliptak.com) or William Moran's [*The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780312326005?ref=andrewliptak.com)provide some essential perspective here. But what I appreciate about the book is a line from Locklear that Kurutz uses to close out the book: "I'm not a sock seller, I'm a *maker*." Despite the US's troubled history here, there is something valuable about maintaining a tangible connection a consumer and a producer. Knowing that you've made something, or that you're wearing something that was produced just down the street is a key ingredient to this entire process. I have little connection to the Sonoma shirt from India that I'm presently wearing, but I know exactly where the Darn Tough socks that are on my feet came from. I know that my neighbor across the street worked at the factory in Northfield, where I've visited a handful of times during the company's annual Sock Sale. When I need new socks, I'll go out of my way to buy their products because I know they'll outlast anything else I'll buy. As the country's legacy clothing brands have been acquired and sold by financial firms, their reputations have suffered. They've been pushed to water down their work by pursuing cheaper labor, cheaper fabrics, and greater consumer audiences, forgetting why they arrived at their reputations in the first place. Throughout the book, Kurutz speaks with designers who noted that as production went offshore, they no longer spent time going over fabric swatches with producers and they didn't spend time in the factories understanding how the manufacturing process worked. They'd transmit their designs and hope for the best. They're no longer clothing companies: they're merchandisers producing cheap crap. At its most honest, the efforts to bring the "Made In America" label back to clothes isn't an act of empty virtual signaling to people frustrated with the direction of the country: it's an attempt to recognize the underlying work that made the label stand out in the first place, and rebuild the infrastructure that we've lost. It's an understanding that the finished product is just part of the picture: it's the craftsmanship that goes into the making of the thing in the first place, the work that ensures that these aren't just disposable items, but goods made to last. It's an approach that's antithetical to the last half-century of how we've done business in the country: prizing convivence and low costs above all else. It's an attitude that's made us poorer as a whole and it applies to far more than just clothing, it crops up in our movie theaters, in our homes and cars; anything we buy. I came away from this book a bit more optimistic. Kurutz recounts how entrepreneurs were told these sorts of ambitions were fruitless and impossible, but when they examined the challenges, they found that they weren't insurmountable. The result: companies able to withstand challenges like a global pandemic or economic downturns, companies that hired people in their communities, and craftspeople who were able to make good things. Hopefully, consumers will follow. ### Revealing Karin Lowachee's The Mountain Crown URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-mountain-crown-karin-lowachee-cover-reveal-interview/ Last updated: 2024-03-25T16:37:09.000Z One of my favorite SF/F authors is Karin Lowachee. I first encountered her work through a friend who lend me her debut novel [*Warchild*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798396161399?ref=andrewliptak.com), way back in 2002\. It was a space opera novel about a kid who was kidnapped by an alien civilization and trained as a warrior, and she followed it up with two additional novels, [*Burndive*](https://www.amazon.com/Burndive-Karin-Lowachee/dp/1705514111/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Cagebird*](https://www.amazon.com/Cagebird-Karin-Lowachee/dp/B091WCSX16/?ref=andrewliptak.com). (She's recently added to the world with a new novella, [Under the Silence](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798872621935?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a collection, [*Omake*](https://www.amazon.com/Omake-Warchild-Universe-Karin-Lowachee/dp/B091WJGST3/?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Years later, I connected with her online and became a fan of her short fiction: stories like "[Nomad](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/nomad/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" (from John Joseph Adam's anthology [*Armored*](https://www.baen.com/armored.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)) and "[A Good Home](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-good-home/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" in [*People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction*](http://www.destroysf.com/people-of-colour-destroy-science-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com). I was privileged to commission two excellent stories by her for my own anthology [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com) ("[Enemy State](https://apex-magazine.com/enemy-state/?ref=andrewliptak.com)") and "[A Sun Will Always Sing](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4/18139371/karin-lowachee-sci-fi-story-video-seimei-ai-better-worlds?ref=andrewliptak.com)" for *The Verge*'s online anthology *Better Worlds*. Needless to say: when I see a new story from Karin, I'll stop what I'm doing and will pick it up. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. So, I was thrilled to learn that she has a new book coming out later this year: [*The Mountain Crown*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837862399?ref=andrewliptak.com), a novella about dragons. Here's the description: > War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Meka's nomadic people, the Ba'Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakans' yoke and to serve their greed for gold, alongside the dragons the Ba'Suon share an empathic connection with. > A decade later and under a fragile truce, Meka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: culling a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Meka's act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the Kattakan authorities and leads to the unwelcome addition of Raka, a Ba'Suon traitor, to her journey. > The journey is filled with dangers within and without, and as conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba'Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the choices - defiant or compliant - that Meka and her companions make. Here's the full cover, designed by Solaris's Sam Gretton: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/81qrBwRQQjL._SL1500_.jpg) *The Mountain Crown* will come out on October 8th, 2024 from Solaris, and I took the opportunity to chat with Karin about this book and what to expect from it. ### ***The Mountain Crown* is your first new novella in a couple of years: how did you come to this particular world and story?** I plotted out a novel a few years ago that is basically a Prohibition-era inspired fantasy, where “magic” is the commodity banned by the government and bootlegged by a rising criminal element in a post-war situation. In digging into the past of the protagonist, *The Mountain Crown* was born, as it is both the history of Ishia – the archipelago where the novella takes place – and the history of the protagonist’s parents, which bears on why he is the way he is. I also realized that this format, along with the novel hopefully, allows me to show the “evolution” of my world’s magic and I became very interested in this concept in the same way science fiction concerns itself with the evolution of technology. In talking it over with my agent, I decided to write the novellas first that depict the history of this world and the characters that live during a crucial part of its development. ### **You present a world where the state of Kattaka has driven out Méka and her people, the Ba’Suon. Some of your earlier books have looked at these sorts of colonial relationships, and I’m curious if you can tell me why you're drawn to this topic.** All my books deal with colonial relationships, even the science fiction. I’m drawn to it because it’s still going on, and certainly its impacts are still felt generations and centuries down the line. I come from a colonial country, twice over (the one I was born into and the one to which my family emigrated). My ancestry only a few generations back is deeply rooted in colonial history from various sides, as I have at least three different cultures in my blood. If you live in North America, you are rooted in a colonial history that continues to have impact on the descendants of the original inhabitants of this continent. This is not something I take lightly or take for granted. History is a continuum and we are all participants. This “history” – which is still very vital today–cannot be talked about *enough* because it exposes so much about humanity both on a large scale and a small one, and people need to think about the effects. *I* need to think about the effects. I write so I can dig into all the messy nuances and impacts of what it is to be human on an individual basis and a societal one. I might not go into story writing with specific agendas, but there is no denying certain topics that authors are all drawn to on a personal level. ### **Dragons and mountains and hordes of gold have long roots in fantasy: what are some of your influences here, and what ways do you think you’re diverging from them?** I don’t know that I’m influenced by anything directly (except our history of stripping the earth of its natural resources), as in “I read this book and now I want to write my version of dragons.” I’ve always loved dragons and I’ve always wanted to write about them as an adult. One of my first stories I ever wrote – I’m talking when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old – involved a family of dragons. So dragons have somehow been in my life for literally as long as I’ve had the urge to write. As I’m older now, the idea of them as creatures of nature – I suppose more of the Chinese interpretation of them, which is a part of my ancestry – rather than a purely destructive or evil force became more interesting to me. So for *The Mountain Crown* and the Ba’Suon specifically, I became interested in their relationship to nature and the cosmos. The dragons – or suon, as they call them – play an integral part in their beliefs both on a spiritual level and a practical one (to which they see no separation), in that their relationship to them helps to balance the natural world. How the other cultures in this world depict the suon becomes a sort of interrogation, I suppose, of how “dragons” have been generally viewed in Western fantasy in the past: as creatures to be conquered or exploited. But that wasn’t a conscious intention on my part. ### **Do you have any favorite dragons from the larger fantasy canon?** I remember reading Jane Yolen’s dragon series that began with *Dragon’s Blood*, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it beyond a vague recollection of the cover because I read it as a child. I remember loving it, though. I can’t really recall any others off the top of my head that was a major influence. I loved movies growing up that depicted dragons though. ### **It’s been 22 years since you published your debut novel *Warchild* (which you’ve recently reissued, along with its sequels). Looking back over that time, how have you changed as a writer, and what do you think you’ve done here in *The Mountain Crown* that you might not have been able to do back in 2002?** I’ve changed as a person since then. I think (or I hope) I’ve grown a little. I’m still growing as a person (I don’t mean aging, but growing on a personal level) and that is bound to impact your creativity and creative expression in some way because for me those aspects of a person are connected. I think how I approach writing as a craft has matured, as well as my interest in the motions of the world and the psychology of people. I suppose the short answer is I don’t divorce my ability on a craft level from my growth as a person, so I think as I’ve grown as a person I’ve been able to hone my craft a little better on all levels. Maybe I’m a little more surgical in the revision process, a little more free in the conceptual and first draft process. I understand my reliance on the unconscious and celebrate it. One thing that hasn’t changed is I’m not hung up on rules and what other people say writers “should” be doing. Specifically with *The Mountain Crown*, I wanted to write a woman who is grounded in her spirituality, who is contained, who is purposeful in her movements, who outsiders might consider stoic, who is capable without being flashy, who (Western) readers might consider passive as if it’s a fault (it isn’t). I wanted to write about her culture that seeks other avenues besides war, that is connected to nature on an atomic level in a conscious way. I wanted this story to unfold in its own way, with a character who wasn’t pushing to be pigeonholed as a specific type of personality. I think my focus on these aspects of both character and story are because I’ve become interested in narratives that explore people and ways of living that aren’t the commonly considered Western narratives of “active” protagonists and constant “action” to drive a plot. I challenge readers to not only read POC writers because of a label, but to interact with all manner of storytelling that isn’t dictated by screenplay pacing and Western canon. There is more than one way to tell a story and that is something I’ve discovered in the past couple decades that I probably didn’t know consciously when I wrote my first novel. Also, the language is at a level that I wasn’t capable of 20 years ago because I was just younger and less skilled. ### **This is the first installment in a series, *The Crowns of Ishia*: what do you have planned for the future?** Two more novellas in the series will round out this part of the history of Ishia and further explore the idea of the “evolution of magic” – but through the lens of specific characters. The next novella is from Janan’s point-of-view, who we only read about in *The Mountain Crown* because he is separated from the characters in the first novella, but his presence is still vital in that story for a number of reasons. The second novella shows what happened to him and takes the reader to another part of Ishia. The third novella will take readers to yet another part, back to the “beginning” in a way. But all the characters cross over in all of them. The trilogy as a whole also explores the impact of people on nature (which includes the “magic” in this world) and vice versa, and nature’s imperative to balance that connection in ways that my characters can’t foresee. ### ***The Mountain Crown* comes out in October: what do you hope your readers will take away from it?** I hope they love the dragons. I hope they fall in love with the people. I hope there’s a sense of wonder and a sense of compassion and a sense of horror at what transpires. I hope it’s a fun read but I also hope it’s a thoughtful read. If I manage to accomplish all of that for readers, then I’d be happy. I’m happy with it anyway because it accomplishes all of that for me, the first reader. I’m deeply invested in the world and its people, and hopefully that comes through too. --- ### Even more SF/F books to check out this March URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/ Last updated: 2024-03-22T20:36:12.000Z It's technically spring, but you wouldn't know it looking out the window here in Vermont. After a brief warm spell, the temperatures dropped and we're anticipating a huge winter storm this weekend. It's a good opportunity to curl up with a book somewhere. My personal to-read list has stagnated a bit in the last couple of weeks: I've been hopping from book to book, reading a couple of chapters at a time, but I've had trouble sticking with one book at a time. My current read is a nonfiction title that just came out: [*American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593329610?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Steven Kurutz, a style reporter with The New York Times. It's an interesting read–I'm already predisposed to reading things about the fashion industry thanks to my work on [*Cosplay: A History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and I picked it up hoping that we might be able to do something with it at my day job, although it's not looking like he talks about Vermont outside of a mention of the Darn Tough socks. In case you missed it, here's the first list for March, and you can also find other recommendations via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). [16 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read in March 202416 new books to add to your TBR![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6110.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/) As usual, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make will yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*. This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce: it costs money to host this newsletter on Ghost (the bill came due earlier this week: $99 for the month) as well as the other things associated with writing and producing it: the time it takes to read, review, outline, write, transcribing, and so forth. Folks have written in to say that they like this newsletter because it helps keep them informed about the state of science fiction, pop culture, and the world at large, and if you've found it to be a useful thing to read, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) If that's not in the cards now, please consider forwarding this newsletter to your friends and fellow readers, or by sharing it on your social media of choice. It's greatly appreciated. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Okay, here are 18 new SF/F books that you should check out for the rest of the month: ### [*The Hidden Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984817112?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter V. Brett (March 5th) Peter V. Brett continues his *Nightfall Saga* with *The Hidden Queen* (picking up after the events of [*The Desert Prince*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984817105?ref=andrewliptak.com).) This series is set years after his *Demon Cycle* ([*The Warded Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723272?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Desert Spear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593724286?ref=andrewliptak.com), et al) and picks up the story of Olive Paper, a young heir who's destined to follow in her father's footsteps to help save humanity by wielding an artifact that can open the gates of the Spear of Ala. At the same time, Darin Bales possesses supernatural senses, and when his mother is captured by the demon king Alagai Kai he has to find a way to save her. The pair will find themselves each trying to forge their own path in live, only to discover that they're drawn to follow the legacies of their parents as they prepare to confront Alagai Kai to save humanity. ### [*The Feast Makers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660811?ref=andrewliptak.com) by H. A. Clarke (March 26th) H.A. Clarke closes out their Scapegracers trilogy (preceded by [*The Scapegracers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660699?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Scratch Daughters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660446?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *The Feast Makers*, in which Sideways Pike learns that her crush, Madeline Kline has been sing her to get to her specter, and stolen her magical soul in order to recover her own. Sideways sets off to track down Madeline, even if it means that her coven and newfound family aren't able to accompany her. ### [*Floating Hotel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756419301?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Grace Curtis (March 19th) The Grand Abeona Hotel is one of the best destinations int he galaxy: it travels from planet to planet and provides its guests with a luxurious experience, even if there are some oddities about the place, like who's piloting the ship? At the center of the activities and guests is Carl, a former stowaway-turned manager of the place, and as the ship drifts along on its route, a series of forces converge on the place and prompt him to question whether or not it'll remain home for him. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756419301?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Even when the stakes are high, Curtis has a knack for keeping things intimate and understated, peeling back the layers of the novel’s scrappy found family. Centering optimism in the face of an increasingly dark universe, this feel-good saga lingers long after it’s finished." ### [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781636141602?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*Greatest Hits*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781454953371?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Harlan Ellison, edited by J. Michael Straczynski (March 26th) Harlan Ellison remains one of science fiction's best – and most controversial – writers. Acclaimed for stories like "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," and for his work on TV shows like *Star Trek* and *Babylon 5*, Ellison is responsible for some of the genre's best-known stories. After he passed away in 2018 and his wife Susan Toth died in 2020, J. Michael Straczynski took over Ellison's literary estate. He's been hard at work: he's finished the long-uncompleted anthology Last Dangerous Visions (which is slated to come out later this year), and has compiled some of Ellison's best-known works into a new volume, *Greatest Hits*, which should be a good introduction to his career. [At Last, Dangerous VisionsHarlan Ellison’s long-unfinished science fiction anthology might finally see the light of day![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/image-3-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/at-last-dangerous-visions-harlan-ellison/) ### [*The Weavers of Alamaxa*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063114807?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hadeer Elsbai (March 19th) In this followup to her novel [*The Daughters of Izdihar*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063114746?ref=andrewliptak.com),Hadeer Elsbai continues the story of the Daughters of Izdihar, a group of women fighting for a voice in Parliament, only to encounter problems with a fundamentalist group known as the Ziranis, who fear the Alamaxa and the women it trains in the art of magical weaving. Two weavers, Nehal and Giorgina, come together after an attack–the former awakens in a prison and the other is on the run, and and together, they can bring the Alamaxa to resist the threat that the Zirani pose to them and their futures. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-weavers-of-alamaxa-1803161?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Readers looking for fantasy inspired by the wide world of voices out there will find this story’s incorporation of Egyptian history fascinating, while those who love feminist fantasy such as Jenna Glass’s “Women’s War” series will dig right into this fight." ### [*Star Wars: The High Republic: Defy the Storm*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781368093811?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland (March 5th) With all the excitement out there for the new trailer for *Star Wars: The Acolyte*, it's worth catching up on the High Republic series. We're pretty far into the series at this point, and StarWars.com [has helpfully put together a reader's guide](https://www.starwars.com/news/every-star-wars-the-high-republic-book-and-comic-series?ref=andrewliptak.com) for newcomers. This book is set after Claudia Gray's [*Fallen Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355411?ref=andrewliptak.com)and George Mann's [*Eye of Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597934?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* where the galaxy is contending with the loss of the Starlight Beacon station at the hands of the Nihil. Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh believes that her Padawan Imri Cantaros was killed in the station's destruction, and has been resting to heal and find her internal balance. When a friend shows up with news that Imri is still alive and trapped in Nihil territory, the two set off to find him. ### [*Annie Bot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063312692?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sierra Greer (March 19th) An android called Annie Bot was designed to be the perfect girlfriend for Doug, capable of satisfying all of his needs. Doug thinks that she's perfect and that her programming is incredibly realistic. She's beginning to learn how to be a human as well, developing feelings of curiosity, longing and secrecy, all traits that begin to put a strain on the relationship that she and Doug share. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063312692?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the robot science is scant (there’s more about Annie’s skimpy outfits than her wiring) and the plot is slow to boil, but Greer’s take on human-AI relationships captivates (some of the best scenes are of Annie and Doug in couples therapy) while avoiding the overdone trope of androids longing for consciousness." ### [*Toxxic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915202710?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jane Hennigan (March 12th) In her 2023 book [*Moths*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915202697?ref=andrewliptak.com), Jane Hennigan introduced us to a world where the world had been changed by a mutated species of moth that infected men and boys around the world, transforming them into dangerous killers. Humanity eventually found ways to cope, where women were now in charge and the men who survived were kept away in dust-free facilities. Now, scientists have developed a vaccine to cure the infected and allow men to leave their secure facilities. But once they're back out in the world, they discover an alien world that isn't made them, one that harbors new dangers. ### [*The Stars Turned Inside Out*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668018545?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nova Jacobs (March 19th) A physicist found dead in one of the Large Hadron Collider's maintenance tunnels. The scientist appears to have been irradiated by the system, but security can't find any evidence that he had entered the tunnel. To solve the crime, CERN brings in a detective who now has to navigate her way through academic rivalries and culture to discover a larger international political arms race involving the facility, opening up the range of motivations–and suspects–of the killing. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668018545?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Jacobs bestows even minor characters with such convincing motives that the plot’s momentum never slows, no matter how complex things get. Golden age mystery fans will love this." ### [*The Angel of Indian Lake*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668011669?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen Graham Jones (March 26th) Stephen Graham Jones earned widespread acclaim for his love letter to slasher novel [*My Heart Is a Chainsaw*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982137649?ref=andrewliptak.com)and its followup [*Don't Fear the Reaper*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982186609?ref=andrewliptak.com). They follow a young woman named Jade Daniels who's obsessed with horror films, and who springs into action when a serial killer seems to show up in her hometown. Four years after going into prison to protect her friends Letha and her family, Jade's an outcast in Proofrock, Idaho. She's drawn back to town to settle some unfinished business, between serial killer cultists and some ultra-wealthy developers, not to mention the curse of the Lake Witch, all of which have the potential to tear the place apart. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668011669?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Jones weaves in plenty of clues and red herrings to keep the reader guessing just who is responsible for all the mayhem before igniting a climax that plays out like a horror film library exploding its holdings in a fiery spectacular." ### [*The Woods All Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250790316?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lee Mandelo (March 19th) Leslie Bruin is a member of the Frontier Nursing Service, and has a new assignment: the town of Spar Creek, where he's to help with vaccinations, births, and deal with the judgement from the local church members who have a problem with trans people. Leslie thinks he can handle it, but Spar Creek has some particularly dark tendencies lurking amongst its residents. When Leslie arrives, the local congregation is bent on reforming one of the town's youths, and he might be in a position to help them if he acts quickly. But there are other things haunting the hills that pose even greater threats. [Writing for *Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-woods-all-black-by-lee-mandelo/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Fabienne Schwizer says that Mandelo "interrogates how complicity becomes villainy, how being present alone furthers hate – and hate crimes. In this, Mandelo joins a tradition of modern gothic, stories that pick up on the vibes of the traditional gothic novel, but convert it for today’s audiences." ### [*The Morningside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984855503?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Téa Obreht (March 19th) In a future wrecked by climate change, Silvia and her mother move to Morningside, a former luxury tower in Island City. Silvia's long been curious about her family's past, and has an opportunity to learn from her aunt Ena, the tower community's superintendent. As she learns about her family's stories, she becomes enchanted by one of the tower's mysterious residents, Bezi Duras, who she begins to think might be an antagonistic spirit from one of her ancestral fairy tales. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tea-obreht/the-morningside/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Obreht is offering a cautionary vision of what our future might look like, but she’s also asking questions that are as old as storytelling. What do we want to tell ourselves about ourselves? What do we try to hide from ourselves? And what’s the cost of our lives?" ### [*The Mars House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639732333?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Natasha Pulley (March 19th) Earth faces an environmental disaster, and a dancer from London's Royal Ballet named January finds himself arriving at Tharsis, a colony on Mars. There's a lot to adjust to: he's classified as an "Earthstronger", someone who grew up in Earth's heavier gravity, and thus poses a danger to his Martian counterparts, which affects the types of jobs and housing that he has access to--and makes him a target of a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Galewho wants to try and force January's fellow Earthlings to undergo dangerous procedures to naturalize. After a disastrous press interview, Aubrey proposes something unexpected: a political marriage that would benefit both of them. January wouldn't have to naturalize and Aubrey would get a political boost. January accepts, and discovers that his new partner isn't what they appear, and that there are other threats to Tharsis looming in the background. Writing for *The Guardian*, Lisa Tuttle [says](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/08/the-best-recent-science-fiction-and-fantasy-reviews-roundup?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "this is a delicious, often whimsical take on serious issues, with many surprising plot twists and a gentle, gender-neutral romance. I loved it." ### [*Cascade Failure*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250871251?ref=andrewliptak.com) by L. M. Sagas (March 19th) L. M. Sagas' debut novel kicks off a new series, *Ambit's Run*. The spiral is ruled by three major powers: The Trust and the Union, with the Guild trying to keep some sort of peace between them. When a Guild deserter named Jal Red stows away on a Guild ship called the Ambit, he finds it's crewed by an eccentric bunch: an AI captain named Eoan, a doctor/engineer named Nash, and Saint, the ship's XO, who has a history with Jal. When the Ambit responds to a distress call on an abandoned planet, they discover plenty of graves and a survivor who witnessed some high-tech weapons at play. It's an atrocity that the Trust wants to keep under wraps, and they'll go to plenty of lengths to keep it that way. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250871251?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Rapid-fire adventures spiked with army jargon and balanced with touching resolutions of personal conflicts keep the pages turning. Add in a charming found family—and even a space-faring cat—and this spirited space opera is a resounding success." ### [*The Sunlit Man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899712?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brandon Sanderson (March 5th) The last of Brandon Sanderson's Secret Books projects has finally been released in a regular trade edition: *The Sunlit Man*, a new installment of his sprawling Cosmere universe. Nomad has been running from the Night Brigade for years, and he's been jumping through the Cosmere from world to world to keep out of their hands. Now, he's exhausted and trapped on a deadly world called Canticle. While there, he's caught up in a struggle between a tyrant and rebel group, and it's a challenge that will put him to the test. ### [*A Feather So Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564960?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lyra Selene (March 12th) Fia is a fae changeling in a kingdom where magic has vanished, left behind when the High Queen's daughter Eala was kidnapped. The High Queen has raised Fia in her daughter's place, while her daughter grows up in Tír na nÓg, fated to transform into a swan during the day and human at night. When the kingdom discovers a portal to the realm, the queen sends Fia to recover her lost daughter and break the curse placed on her. She's accompanied by her best friend Rogan, who also happens to be engaged to Eala. Their journey to the Fae world brings new dangers and complications. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316564960?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Selene makes the world of the fae mysterious, sensual, and enthralling, and utilizes a delicious love quadrangle and a complex heroine who’s just beginning to unpack the trauma of her upbringing to keep the pages flying." ### [*Welcome to Forever*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803360409?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Nathan Tavares (March 12th) When Fox wakes up in the Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction, he's told that he was injured in a bombing by a scientist named Khadija Banks, who revolutionized memory editing technology before becoming a radical. Fox was one of the digital world's most gifted memory editors, and the attack destroyed the archives of its victims, including that of his husband Gabe. In the aftermath, Fox tries to reconstruct his life and relationship, only to discover that his world and memory aren't what they think, and that he might need to forget the man he loves in order to save the world. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/welcome-to-forever-1804215?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Travers's worldbuilding is complex and fascinating in this kaleidoscope of a novel. The high-stakes science fiction is sharp and tragic, hopeful and thrilling." ### [*The Icarus Job*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193256?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (Match 5th) One of my favorite space opera novels is Timothy Zahn's [*The Icarus Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553573916?ref=andrewliptak.com), a fantastic mystery in a galactic civilization with a really cool twist at the end. Zahn's recently returned to the world with a series he's calling *The Icarus Saga*. It kicked off a couple of years ago with [*The Icarus Plot*](https://www.baen.com/the-icarus-plot.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Icarus Twin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193058?ref=andrewliptak.com), and continues this month with *The Icarus Job.* (Two more books are on the way:[*The Icarus Changling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193485?ref=andrewliptak.com)in July and [*The Icarus Needle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193485?ref=andrewliptak.com)in December). The series follows two explorers named Roarke and Selene who made their living seeking out potentially habitable planets and who're now part of The Icarus Group, a secret government organization looking for portals left behind by an ancient alien civilization. In their latest job, they've been hired to transport a dangerous assassin named Nikki, and in exchange, a crime boss named Robertine Cherno will hand over a new portal to the group. They're not the only ones after the portal, and the Patth, who control interstellar space lanes, will stop at little to get their hands on it. --- ### RIP Vernor Vinge URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vernor-vinge-singularity-science-fiction-author-obit/ Last updated: 2024-03-22T16:21:58.000Z One of the very first "proper" science fiction books that I picked up as a teenager was a chunky paperback with bold red letters with a spaceship approaching what looked like an asteroid. It was a copy of Vernor Vinge's novel *A Deepness in the Sky*, and decades later, I still haven't gotten to read it. It's always been one of those aspirational to-read books for me (I included it in a list of a [pile of classic books](https://www.andrewliptak.com/classic-sci-fi-catchup/) that I want to read last year), because of the influence and acclaim that's been sent its way. Vinge passed away at the age of 79 on Wednesday: [fellow author David Brin](https://www.facebook.com/thedavidbrin/posts/pfbid0mpXVrXr7MjyvRhkzvQqN1QPeGEDmZwa3w7f2VHtHzdtTPaha18252UTo5Z5LfcdXl) posted the news on Facebook, saying that he was "a titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters and the implications of science." The cause of death was complications related to Parkinsons, which he had been contending with for the last couple of years. *(h/t to Nick G. in the Transfer Orbit slack for alerting us to the news.)* Technology and its deployment is often a fixture of the science fiction genre. Authors writing in 20th century pulp magazines often explored the future of air or space travel, imagining new vehicles that transported humans across the world and to the stars. As computer technology became widespread in the later half of the century, authors began to imagine the wild implications for our futures. Vinge was one of those authors. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Born on October 2nd, 1944, Vinge went on to attend Michigan State University, before moving on to the University of California in San Diego, where he eventually earned his PhD in mathematics in 1971, and taught both mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University until 2000, when he retired. He began publishing science fiction in his early 20s in magazines such as *New Worlds, If,* and *Analog Science Fiction* throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In 1969, he expanded one of his novellas into a novel, *Grimm's World*, and followed it in 1976 with *The Witling*. Over the course of the 1980s, Vinge gained attention for his stories imagining digital worlds, which would eventually become a central conceit to the cyberpunk movement. His 1984 novel *The Peace War* and its sequel, 1986's *Marooned in Realtime*explored the ramifications of power and technology and were each nominated for the Hugo Award. In 1982, Vinge helped popularize a now common-place term: "[the singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological%5Fsingularity?ref=andrewliptak.com)", a point in human development where technological progress undergoes an uncontrollable growth, with unpredictable consequences. Writing in *Omni Magazine* [a year later](https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/OMNI%5F1983%5F01/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater), Vinge described it as an " intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding... A Cro-Magnon man brought into our present could eventually understand the changes of the last 35,000 years, The differences between contemporary man and creatures who live beyond the singularity is incomparably more profound; Even if we could visit their era, most of what we would see would be forever incomprehensible." In 2000, he [spoke on NPR's *Fresh Air*](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/writer-vernor-vinge?ref=andrewliptak.com) about technological progress and how a singularity would change everything. Another [great interview to check out from him comes from 2012](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-vernor-vinge/?ref=andrewliptak.com), when he spoke with the podcast *Geek's Guide to the Galaxy*. In 1992, Vinge published *A Fire Upon the Deep*, a space opera set in the distant future involving interstellar superintelligences and efforts to contain a malevolent AI known as the "Blight". It shared the Hugo Award in 1993 with Connie Willis's *Doomsday Book*. In 1999, he published a prequel, *A Deepness in the Sky*, set tens of thousands of years earlier. It too earned the Hugo for Best Novel. In 2011, he published *The Children of the Sky*, a sequel to *A Fire Upon the Deep.* He published his last short story, "[*Legale*](https://www.nature.com/articles/548254a?ref=andrewliptak.com)*",* in *Nature* in 2017\. ![No photo description available.](https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/380993195_817881280338540_739601283021935313_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=OvTIQvFpVsMAX_eME-L&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=00_AfC-J6MrHs0YACN40VpsT9JcfgWUAc0gaOXWlUO2inEmgA&oe=66012F58) Tor Books recently republished A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky as part of its Tor Essentials line. Vinge's ideas have been incredibly influential within science fiction circles and beyond. Writing in Roger Luckhurst's *Science Fiction: A Literary History*, scholar Gerry Canavan explains that the concept of a world profoundly transformed by technology "has tremendous currency among tech capitalists such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, many of whom have publicly stated that they believe the Singularity is imminent." We live in a world that's increasingly defined by the technology around us. We rely on the infrastructure that extends around the world for almost everything we do. I've come to really appreciate one of the things that science fiction does best: remind us that there's a certain limit to our understanding of the world around us. The world and universe is an immensely complicated place, and that our perception of it is limited by the sensory input that we're biologically wired up for. In many ways, the technology that surrounds us has the potential to augment our understanding of the world, unlocking vast potential for how far we can see, hear, and speak into the world–provided we don't destroy ourselves in the process. Of the authors that were influential to my own understanding of the genre, I see plenty of roads leading back to Vinge and his ideas. With his passing, we've lost an immense figure who helped transform how we see the future. ### Who doesn't love giant mechs? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/atlas-movie-netflix-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-03-16T12:00:31.000Z I've largely fallen out of the habit of watching movie trailers. I think my time out of a newsroom and being away from the daily grind of the entertainment news cycle has cured me of some of that impulse to immediately go into writing mode when I see news of one. Or at least somewhat: Netflix released a trailer for an upcoming film, *Atlas*, directed by Brad Payton (*San Andreas*, *Rampage*, *Sweet Girl*), and it's the type of film that I'm perfectly tailored to enjoy. Here's the trailer: The story sounds pretty interesting. [Announced way back in 2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jennifer-lopez-will-defend-humanity-from-an-apocalyptic-ai-in-netflixs-atlas/), it follows a government analyst named Atlas Shepherd (played by Jennifer Lopez), who's tasked with heading off to a dangerous planet to capture a rogue artificial intelligence that she has some prior connection to, and then has to learn to trust in order to survive. It also stars Simu Liu (*Shang-Chi*) and Sterling K. Brown (*American Fiction*), which is promising. [Jennifer Lopez Will Defend Humanity From an Apocalyptic AI in Netflix’s AtlasJennifer Lopez has lined up her next movie, just a week after signing an overall deal with Netflix: Atlas, a science fiction thriller in which an artificial intelligence has determined that the best way to eliminate war is to eliminate humanity. According to Deadline, Lopez will produce the film, which![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/jennifer-lopez-atlas-65bbb301d5409.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jennifer-lopez-will-defend-humanity-from-an-apocalyptic-ai-in-netflixs-atlas/) Will it be good? Who can say? Netflix has a mixed track record when it comes to original films, but as I wrote back when it was announced, while it sounds like a generic human vs. AI story, the script landed on the vaunted [Black List](https://blcklst.com/lists?ref=andrewliptak.com) in [2017](https://d1dlq8f5fkueth.cloudfront.net/annual-lists/2017.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is a good sign. And even if it isn't – it feels like it could fit alongside films like *Battle: LA* or *Edge of Tomorrow*, which are perfectly fine military SF action films. And, y'know: giant mechs. I get some neat *Titanfall* vibes from this, and it's making me think that I should dust off the draft that I've got of a mech story (written for an anthology eons ago that I never ended up finishing) and take another swing at it. ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 Nebula Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-nebula-awards-2023-scifi-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2024-06-07T16:52:00.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has [announced the finalists](https://www.sfwa.org/2024/03/14/sfwa-announces-the-finalists-for-the-59th-nebula-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for this year's Nebula Awards! The Nebulas are one of SF/F's biggest awards, selected by the organization's members. This is the 59th year the awards have been held, and it's a really solid list. SFWA will present the awards on Saturday, June 8th during its 2024 Nebula Conference, which will be held in-person in Pasadena, CA and online. Here are the finalists. I've dropped links where stories are available online: ### **Nebula Award for Novel** - *The Saint of Bright Doors*, Vajra Chandrasekera - *The Water Outlaws*, S.L. Huang - *Translation State*, Ann Leckie - *The Terraformers*, Annalee Newitz - *Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon*, Wole Talabi - *Witch King*, Martha Wells SFWA notes that Martha Wells' book System Collapse was also nominated, but she declined, citing the acclaim that her Murderbot Diaries series has already garnered. ### **Nebula Award for Novella** - *The Crane Husband*, Kelly Barnhill - “Linghun”, Ai Jiang - *Thornhedge*, T. Kingfisher - *Untethered Sky*, Fonda Lee - *The Mimicking of Known Successes*, Malka Older - *Mammoths at the Gates*, Nghi Vo ### **Nebula Award for Novelette** - “[A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair](https://samovar.strangehorizons.com/2023/02/27/a-short-biography-of-a-conscious-chair-breve-biografia-de-uma-cadeira-lucida/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23) - *I Am AI*, Ai Jiang (Shortwave) - “[The Year Without Sunshine](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Naomi Kritzer (*Uncanny* 11-12/23) - “[Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu%5F06%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Angela Liu (*Clarkesworld* 6/23) - “[Saturday’s Song](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/saturdays-song/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Wole Talabi (*Lightspeed* 5/23) - “[Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/six-versions-of-my-brother-found-under-the-bridge/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (*Uncanny* 9-10/23) ### **Nebula Award for Short Story** - “[Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont](https://www.fantasy-magazine.com/fm/fiction/once-upon-a-time-at-the-oakmont/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, P.A. Cornell (*Fantasy* 10/23) - “[Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, R.S.A Garcia (*Uncanny* 7-8/23) - “[Window Boy](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha%5F08%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld* 8/23) - “[The Sound of Children Screaming](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Rachael K. Jones (*Nightmare* 10/23) - “[Better Living Through Algorithms](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer%5F05%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Naomi Kritzer (*Clarkesworld* 5/23) - “[Bad Doors](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/bad-doors/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, John Wiswell (*Uncanny* 1-2/23) ### **Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction** - *To Shape a Dragon’s Breath*, Moniquill Blackgoose - *The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern*, J. Dianne Dotson - *Liberty’s Daughter*, Naomi Kritzer - *The Ghost Job*, Greg van Eekhout ### **Nebula Award for Game Writing** - *The Bread Must Rise*, Stewart C Baker, James Beamon - *Alan Wake II*, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala - *Ninefox Gambit*: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan - *Dredge*, Joel Mason - *Chants of Sennaar*, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel - *Baldur’s Gate 3*, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke ### **Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation** - *Nimona*, Robert L. Baird, Lloyd Taylor, Pamela Ribon, Marc Haimes, Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, Keith Bunin, Nate Stevenson - *The Last of Us*: “Long, Long Time”, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin - *Barbie*, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach - *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves*, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio, Chris McKay - *Spider-Man*: *Across the Spider-Verse*, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham - *The Boy and the Heron*, Hayao Miyazaki ### Wings up? URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-rogue-squadron-patty-jenkins-development-update/ Last updated: 2024-12-27T20:14:41.000Z If there's one thing that I know about *Star Wars*, it's that its creators are hoarders. I like to think of Lucasfilm HQ as a building stuffed with ideas, and that for all of the concept art, film concepts, scripts, characters, and story ideas, nothing's ever really thrown out: they're just waiting for the right thing. You see this in shows like *The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Mandalorian*, or films like *Solo*: character designs are reused and repurposed, or ideas are stripped from older stories like the Star Wars EU, like [Grand Admiral Thrawn](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-grand-admiral-thrawn-zahn-ahsoka/). So, I'm not entirely surprised when I see word that maybe that *Rogue Squadron* movie isn't dead, just hibernating. According to director Patty Jenkins, she's back to work on the project. ![Michael A. Stackpole's Rogue Squadron novels unlocked Star Wars' vast potential](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_517afabc-f817-4797-b320-77644cd07aa3_4032x3024.jpeg) *Rogue Squadron* is a uniquely exciting project within the Star Wars universe. Rogue Squadron originally shows up in *The Empire Strikes Back* as the unit of fighters defending the Rebel base on Hoth, and they show up again in *The Return of the Jedi*. As Lucasfilm continued the Star Wars saga in the 1990s with the Expanded Universe–a mix of tie-in novels, video games, and comic books–[the unit became the focus of a multimedia campaign called X-Wing](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/). It began in 1994 with the combat simulator game *X-Wing*, and publishers Bantam Spectra and Dark Horse Comics reached out to novelist and game designer Michael A. Stackpole. He had become well known for his Battletech novels, and seemed like a good fit to take on the combat-focused exploits of a fighter squadron. Stackpole began work on a run of comics, which began hitting stands in 1995, and from there, he began writing an initial quartet of novels:[*Rogue Squadron*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593359792?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Wedge's Gamble*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497074?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Krytos Trap*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497340?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Bacta War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593498927?ref=andrewliptak.com), which began hitting stores in 1996 and 1997\. From there, author Aaron Allston took over for another arc, and Stackpole provided another entry in the series, [*Isard's Revenge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553579031?ref=andrewliptak.com)in 1999\. [Michael A. Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron novels unlocked Star Wars’ vast potentialShowing a bigger world beyond people named Luke, Leia, and Han![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_517afabc-f817-4797-b320-77644cd07aa3_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-a-stackpoles-rogue-squadron-novels-unlocked-star-wars-vast-potential/) Taken together, these books, comics, and video games etched out a bigger story of the New Republic's efforts to topple the Galactic Republic, one sortie and planet at a time. These novels stood out because they helped demonstrate something that the Star Wars franchise desperately needed: to break away from the core group of the film's heroes (Luke, Leia, and Han), and introduce a new cohort of characters: Corran Horn, Tycho Celchu, Ooryl Qyrgg, Gavin Darklighter, and a host of others. The main film characters did pop in from time to time, but they were side characters in the larger world. --- After Disney purchased the *Star Wars* franchise began work on the sequel trilogy, it faced the prospect of a franchise that would have to evolve in order to survive. With aging actors and a long-standing expectation that the "Skywalker Saga" would consist of three trilogies, they'd have to start looking for new avenues for stories. Alongside those trilogy films, LFL and Disney released two standalone films: *Rogue One* and *Solo*. The former was inspired by a line in the opening crawl of *A New Hope*: how the rebels stole the plans for the Death Star, while Solo recast some classic characters for an origin story. Of the two, *Rogue One* feels the closest to the spirit of Stackpole's books, even if it wasn't inspired by them. (A lot of people, [myself included](https://www.andrewliptak.com/before-star-wars-rogue-one-takes-off-a-history-of-the-x-wing-series/), assumed that we'd get some sort of Rogue Squadron film based on the title.) Since then, we've seen the franchise head a bit in that direction, with shows like *Andor* and *The Mandalorian* introducing new characters into the world to further expand it. And in 2020, following the release of the Episode 9, it looked like we'd get another entry: [*Rogue Squadron*, directed by *Wonder Woman* director Patty Jenkins](https://www.andrewliptak.com/patty-jenkins-star-wars-rogue-squadron/). Disney announced the project during an Investor's Day presentation, alongside a video of Jenkins explaining that she'd wanted to make a movie about fighter pilots for a long time, and that this was an opportunity to make "the greatest fighter pilot movie of all time." Stackpole [chimed in](https://twitter.com/MikeStackpole/status/1337179202626355201?ref=andrewliptak.com) to say that he was excited to see what she'd do with it, with Jenkins noting that they were well aware of his books. The release date was set for December 2023\. But, like a lot of projects, it seems as though Lucasfilm jumped the gun. The studio picked up a writer for the project, but just under a year later, [reports surfaced that it would be delayed because of Jenkins' workload](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rogue-squadron-philip-dick-ghostbusters-star-trek-roundup/): she was already working on *Cleopatra* and *Wonder Woman 3*, and it seemed as though the latter would be the first out of the gate. With the entire DC franchise upended in 2022, Jenkins' sequel was shelved, and [she confirmed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/patty-jenkins-rogue-squadron/) that she'd left the *Rogue Squadron* project because of her schedule, but that it was still in the development stage and that she was still somewhat involved. But, it seemed as though it was one of those projects that just wouldn't work out: in 2023, [LFL announced](https://www.starwars.com/news/swce-2023-new-star-wars-films?ref=andrewliptak.com) a handful of films: a post-sequel trilogy film about Rey, to be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (which is apparently going before cameras this year), an origins of the Jedi film from James Mangold, and a Mando-verse film from Dave Filoni. Since then, the [studio announced another film](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/), *The Mandalorian and Grogu,* to be directed by series creator Jon Favreau, which is apparently shooting this year. That's a lot on their plate, but it does seem like the studio and Disney are committed to bring *Star Wars* back to theaters in a big way. And now, it looks like *Rogue Squadron* might be back in the mix. Earlier this week, Jenkins spoke with host Ben Mankiewicz on an episode of the [TCM/Max podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ualzkFkIwg&ref=andrewliptak.com) (41:30 mark) and provided an update on its status. She notes that she had left *Rogue Squadron* to work on *Wonder Woman 3*, with the understanding that she'd return once that was finished. When the DC film was canceled: > "Lucasfilm and I were like 'oh, well, we gotta finish this deal.' We finished the deal right as the strike was beginning, so I now owe a draft of *Star Wars*. And so we'll see what happens there. Like, who knows? It's a–they have a hard job in front of them, of what's the first movie they're going to do. They have other directors who've been working, but I'm now back on doing *Rogue Squadron* and we'll see what happens. We need to develop–you know get it to where we're both super happy with it." From there, she notes that she's very excited to be working on the project, and about what its appeal is for her, noting that the original films came out of the post-WWII era, and she's always wanted to make a fighter pilot movie. "I always had a hard time with it because I'm in love with the jets of the '70s and '80s, and that's not where the great dogfight stories are. And so *Star Wars* becomes a great playground for that. If I can do something beautiful *and* do something that serves that audience and is great, I would love to do it, of course." As far as updates go, this is a pretty small one: this particular film is far from a done deal and as we've seen already it's already experienced its share of ups and downs. [I recently listened to a podcast called *Going Rogue*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-going-rogue-one-solo-podcast/), about the behind-the-scenes efforts to film *Rogue One* and *Solo*, and I found that to be a particularly enlightening experience to understand just how complicated the entire lifecycle of these projects can be. From concept to premiere, these are films that undergo an incredible amount of writing, re-writing, and preproduction work before cameras start rolling on sets. Even once a script is locked, the decisions that the actors, directors, editors, and writers make to the story and characters means that the final product can be vastly different from what they set out to make. I'll admit: I'm paying close attention here because this segment of the *Star Wars* franchise speaks loudly to me. I adore the non-mystical chunks of the franchise that stories like Stackpole's *Rogue Squadron* and productions like *Rogue One* and [*Andor* depict](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/). Listening to Jenkins on this podcast, it feels like she has the right amount of enthusiasm and passion for the film, and if she can get it through the gauntlet of writing and preproduction, I think the potential is there for an exciting film–if it gets made. But even if this film doesn't materialize, I imagine that whatever's generated, whether it's the concept, characters, designs, or initial screenplay, some element of it will appear in some form down the road. So, we'll see! ### Brandon Sanderson v Audible URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-secret-projects-backerkit-audible/ Last updated: 2024-03-21T19:24:14.000Z Brandon Sanderson is one of those authors that I've never quite gotten around to reading, but I've been fascinated by the shape that his career has taken in the last decade or so. He's become immensely popular for his work: he's a prolific writer who debuted in 2005 with his novel *Elantris* (he'd written a full dozen prior to that) and who was tapped by editor Harriet McDougal to complete her late husband's (Robert Jordan) fantasy series *The Wheel of Time.* Many of his books are set in a larger world known as Cosmere, and he's currently working on a massive epic fantasy series called *The Stormlight Archive*, which kicked off in 2010 with *The Way of Kings*. That's a lot right there, and on top of all that, Sanderson launched a massive Kickstarter project to self-publish four novels that he wrote during the COVID-19 lockdowns, all of which he's since flipped over to Tor for regular market editions. The Kickstarter, which raised a staggering $41 million helped fund a huge operation to print and ship those books and additional boxes of stuff for backers. It was a pretty incredible operation. That attention spawned a snotty profile in [*Wired*](https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/?ref=andrewliptak.com)and a better one in [*Esquire*](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43438119/brandon-sanderson-profile/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that provides a good overview of what he's been doing with that popularity. [It takes a villageThe wild success of Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter holds lessons for building a resilient fan community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-01-at-5.05.29-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/) I find the underlying logistics of storytelling fascinating, which makes Sanderson an interesting person to watch. He's been busy lately, too: first, he launched a new [crowdsourcing campaign on Backerkit](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/dragonsteel/words-of-radiance-leatherbound?ref=bslnchgldbnrday1#story%5Fsection%5F4474) to fund a leather-bound, two-volume edition of his novel *Words of Radiance*, the second installment of *The Stormlight Archive.* Another part of the campaign? A new "secret" book, which he'll announce in due time. The campaign ends on March 30th and it's already raised $18 million. Buried in this news is something a bit more interesting: Sanderson has reached an agreement with Audible to bring some of his books to the audiobook platform. Back in 2022, he [revealed that while he had produced audiobook editions of those books, he was withholding them from the platform](https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022/?ref=andrewliptak.com) over concerns that he had. He was blunt: "Audible has grown to a place where it’s very bad for authors. It’s a good company doing bad things." He called the deals that they make for authors "unconscionable" – that creators made around 40% for an exclusivity deal, and 25% for non-exclusive publishing rights. So, he decided to make a point by not selling them through the site. Two years later, that's changed: Sanderson [announced](https://www.brandonsanderson.com/regarding-audible/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he had reached a deal with Audible with some much better rates. He explained that he had taken meetings with company executives, which yielded a better royalties structure for authors. He noted that it isn't perfect, but a much better improvement over what he had seen before, and he'll be bringing those four books to the marketplace in the near future. It's a good thing to see: an author using their platform and fanbase to push for some major changes within the industry. It's a good demonstration of not only of his weight in these circles, but that these types of changes *are* possible to implement with enough pressure. I don't think that these types of changes should only come from those types of players (and I doubt that these changes are *just* a result of Sanderson's actions), but it's worth remembering that any step in the right direction is generally a good thing. Hopefully, it'll lead to some bigger changes for the larger author community. **Update (3/21/24)**: *shortly after I sent this out, I spoke with an author who is heavily involved in the audio world. These changes, they noted, are a long time coming, and that while it's good that Sanderson has been an outspoken advocate for these changes, there are other factors that played a big role coming to this point: Spotify's foray into audiobooks is upending the traditional credits model that Audible and others have used for years, and it's not entirely certain how these changes will play out for authors in the long run. It's something certainly worth keeping an eye on.* ### Clarity of vision URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-screenwriting-film-production-storytelling/ Last updated: 2024-03-12T17:55:32.000Z A while back, I read a [book about the history of the MCU](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/) by Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales, and Joanna Robinson. It's a good overview of how Marvel and Marvel Studios built up this massive engine to churn out superhero blockbusters, starting back in 2009 with *Iron Man*. Superhero films had something of a hit-or-miss track record, and with the success of the franchise, they've come to dominate the film industry and theaters. One of the things that really stuck with me from that overview was just how precarious it is when you pull the curtain back to see how it comes together. Theatergoers generally only get to see the finished product, and the only time we get an inkling of the sausage's production is when something goes really wrong, like bad CGI or an incoherent story. What that book showed was that most Marvel films come together as they're in production: Disney sets a release date, and the cast and crew race to meet it, sometimes working up to the last minute to get things finished up. (A podcast that [I listened to recently](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-going-rogue-one-solo-podcast/) did something similar with Lucasfilm's *Star Wars* films.) The process (varying a little from film to film) is that Marvel Studios has a longer roadmap, and hires some writers to script out the films that are part of it, sometimes before the director or cast are set. They go through that pre-production process, but are continually tweaking, adding, and subtracting from that script as production goes on. They might bring in additional writers to polish the script just prior or during production. Some of this is influenced by *Iron Man*'s production, where Robert Downey Jr. heavily improvised on set, but also that the film didn't really have a third act (a climactic battle between Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane) until super late in its production. The film that they set out to make is often quite a bit different than the version that ends up in theaters. It seems to have worked well for Marvel, but we've been seeing cracks in that system in some of the latest releases, especially in its streaming shows, like *She-Hulk, Falcon and the Winter Soldier*, and *Secret Invasion*, as well as films like *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania* and *The Marvels,* where you see issues in stories or seams where it feels like you can see where things were changed later in production. This isn't necessarily limited to big-budget superhero films: it's any creative endeavor where creatives go into a process and have to rush it. John Scalzi's novels *The Consuming Fire* and *Starter Villain*, where he's said that he's had to work on both quickly – [the former in a mere two weeks](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/12/03/an-interesting-fact-about-the-consuming-fire/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and the [latter up to the last possible minute](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/12/19/process-notes-on-starter-villain/?ref=andrewliptak.com). This isn't to ding Scalzi, but while I think his books are [perfectly readable and fun](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/), I've been coming away from them feeling like they could have been quite a bit better given more time in the editing process. (Especially *The Consuming Fire*). When [I interviewed Craig Alanson a couple of years ago](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) to learn about his process, I was shocked that his particular production cycle saw him churning out a massive book every three months in order to keep his fans satisfied. [Expeditions in self-publishingHow Craig Alanson forged a new path a a self-published author![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/03/IMG_3522.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) There's a commercial process at play here, which is important to keep in mind: the film / book / TV industries require high release tempos for some of their marquee names. And, I think that there is space on bookstore shelves and movie theaters for books and films that fall into the "commercial product" and "Art" buckets, with the understanding that this is less buckets and more a spectrum. What got me thinking about this is a [Tweet from screenwriter Joe Russo](https://twitter.com/joerussotweets/status/1765785461958881353?ref=andrewliptak.com) (not the Marvel director), in which he says that he spoke with a VFX artist who worked on *Dune Part 2*, who explained that the reason why the visual effects looked so good was "Specificity of vision. The way the footage is captured and blocked. Creative choices made on the assets early and consistently. Less executive meddling late in the process."[ ](https://twitter.com/joerussotweets/status/1765785461958881353/photo/1?ref=andrewliptak.com) That's not a ton to go on, but *if* it's accurate, I think it highlights a couple of reasons why *Dune* has done so well as a blockbuster: director Denis Villeneuve had a good idea of what he was doing going into the film, with a script in place and a good idea of what they were going to be shooting. Villeneuve has said that he's planning on writing a third installment of the series, based off of *Dune: Messiah,* but has also noted that he's working to make sure that the script is done, [telling *The Hollywood Reporter*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/denis-villeneuve-anya-taylor-joy-dune-casting-secret-explained-1235835959/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "I want to come back with a strong screenplay. It’s almost done but it needs work, a bit, now.” I think that's a good sign. Given the box office haul and acclaim that *Part 2* has gotten, rushing *Dune 3* into theaters for a repeat performance seems like a thing that a studio would do, not realizing that the film's success comes from a solid story and excellent visuals, things that you really can't rush if you want it to be good. What's the maxim? Quick, Cheap, or Good; you can only pick two. Warner Bros. seems like it's intent on building out a bigger franchise out of *Dune* and its successors, and that could work if they have the patience to take the time to do it right, rather than rushing it for the sake of hitting a release date. *Dune Part 2* was [announced with a release date](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/dune-2-greenlit-movie-release-date-1235036655/?ref=andrewliptak.com), but the plan seems to have always been to do the film in two parts, and [worked in such a way that they could immediately get started](https://apnews.com/article/dune-part-two-denis-villeneuve-cc980b23d3b7c774ed2297bad6f9aaf5?ref=andrewliptak.com) when they had the green light to do so. I think the results speak for themselves: the film has been a financial and critical success, and I think it's inevitable that we'll get a *Dune Part 3* greenlit at some point in the near future. It also seems like it'll take a while, as Villeneuve already has a handful of other films on his plate, [like an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's *Rendezvous with Rama*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/rendezvous-with-rama-dispatcher-black-sun-adaptations/)*,* a remake of *Cleopatra*, and a third unannounced film. That wait is a good thing in my book: over the last couple of decades, we as an audience have been conditioned for instant (or at least quick) gratification. Enjoy this *Star Wars/Marvel/DC/*etc. film? Look for the next a year from now. This trilogy of books is being released every three months. This TV show will come out every year with 8-10 massively-budgeted episodes. When the calendar becomes the driver for a story's completion, the artistic vision takes a hit. HBO's *Game of Thrones* comes to mind here: it famously flubbed its last couple of seasons, all while author George R.R. Martin has been scribbling away at the next, penultimate installment. It feels very much like the show and its creators rushed its ending, while Martin has been deliberate in his work to complete it. It's impossible to say if *Winds of Winter* will turn out to be better than the show, but if there's anything that's illustrative of fandom's craving for *content* and glowing with rage when it's not delivered to them, it's Martin's deliberative pace. Time allows for reflection and revision for a creator. Ideas don't always happen from the get-go, and I've often found as I write that I'll find connections and things that I didn't recognize or understand while writing an initial draft, and only once I finish, step back and see the bigger picture and how things can be tweaked to be better. Having that clarity of vision helps a story grow like roots reaching into the soil: the more time and care \[generally\] means a stronger end result. --- ### Support Transfer Orbit *Transfer Orbit* has been steadily growing in the last couple of months, thanks to a couple of mentions in some newsletters (Thanks [Robin](https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Christopher](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)!) as well as via social media. This newsletter is free to read, but it does have a cost to produce. There's a small contingent of readers who support this newsletter as paid members, and I'm immensely grateful for that support. *TO*'s mission is to talk about science fiction, writing, and reading, and how that all intersects with the real world, my way to explain everything from the latest books and films to the publishing industry, and how those visions of the future play out in reality. I have a handful of longer-form pieces that I'm working on, which have involved everything from transcribing interviews to taking photographs to travel to interview subjects, all of which has some costs associated with them, on top of the hosting that Ghost provides for this newsletter to go from my computer to your inbox. So: if you've found this newsletter interesting, discovered a book through a book list, or learned something from it, I'd ask that you consider signing up to help support it. Membership runs $40/year or $4/month, and those supporting subscribers get a handful of pieces directly, as well as access to the TO Slack channel, where I and others drop links to news, discuss books / films, and so forth. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Thank you for considering! --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/432248416_924326943027306_2494843524142202644_n.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently Reading While I've had *Dune* on my mind, I went and picked up Frank Herbert's [*Dune: Messiah*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098233?ref=andrewliptak.com)and read and listened through it. I *think* I read it when I was in high school or college, but I didn't remember anything other than glimpses. (I did see the SCI FI channel series though). It was an interesting followup, and a very different read from that of the first installment. I'll have to pick up *Children of Dune* next. This time around read this in three places: the audiobook edition while driving two and from work, the mass market paperback while out and about, and [the Folio Society edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/) at home. It was a fun experience. I also picked up and read [*The Art and Soul of Dune Part 2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886630718?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Tanya Lapointe and Stefanie Broos, the behind-the-scenes book about the making of the film, which is loaded with concept art, production photographs, and descriptions of the work that went into the film. (And which reinforced my thinking that there was a lot of deliberative thought that went into the writing and design of the film.) Currently on the list? Martha Wells' [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Katherine Arden's [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com), both of which I'm enjoying. --- ## Further reading **Dune & the climate**. [The History Channel's website has a story up](https://www.history.com/news/dune-science-fiction-novel-climate-environment?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jesse Greenspan up about Frank Herbert and *Dune,* specifically about it helped bring environmentalism into genre fiction. ### **Expanse playthings** Who doesn't want to play with the crew of the Rocinante? [The Expanse: now in action figure formPick up your own crew of the Rocinante![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-White-Black-Minimalist-Bottle-Label--1-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanse-action-figures-kickstarter-campaign-nacelle/) **Fanfic problems**. 404 Media's Samantha Cole has a [fascinating story](https://www.404media.co/fanfiction-community-roiled-by-etsy-sellers-turning-their-work-into-bound-books/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how some sellers on Etsy and other marketplaces are selling fanfiction that's been turned into hard copies, and it's roiling the community. Fanfiction is unauthored, fan-written stories, and a cardinal rule here is that you're not to make money off of them. (h/t to TO subscriber [Max Covill](https://itsthepictures.substack.com/)!) Another fanfiction-related story comes [via Maddie Ellis of *Today*](https://www.today.com/popculture/books/manacled-senlinyu-alchemised-interview-rcna138822?ref=andrewliptak.com), who writes about author SenLinYu turned a 900-page Harry Potter story into a book deal (after stripping out the Harry Potter references.) **Field Notes**. I don't think that I've hit preorder quite as quickly: Christopher Brown [revealed the cover](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/love-in-the-ruins?ref=andrewliptak.com) of his upcoming nonfiction book, *A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places*, his upcoming nonfiction book based on his excellent newsletter, Field Notes. It sounds like it'll be an outstanding read. ### **March books** 16 new SF/F books to check out this month. I'll have the second list coming out in a week or so. [16 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read in March 202416 new books to add to your TBR![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6110.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/) ### **The Original Dunes Part 1 and 2** Denis Villeneuve's *Dune* is now out in theaters, and it's a good opportunity to look back on how it was originally published [The original Dunes Part 1 and 2Denis Villeneuve Dune is now out in theaters, and it’s a good opportunity to look back on how it was originally published![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/430074146_919100470216620_4037519820437062827_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/frank-herbert-dune-serialized-analog-denis-villeneuve/) **The prescient Stanislaw Lem**. Rivka Galchen [writes about Stanislaw Lem and his uncanny ability to imagine the future for *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/thinking-about-ai-with-stanislaw-lem?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It's a decent profile of Lem and some choice moments in the history of science fiction. **Three Body stories**. Two stories caught my eye about Chinese science fiction, timed for Cixin Liu's *Three-Body Problem* (And the upcoming series based on it). First up, Simina Mistreanu writes about the [history of Chinese science fiction via the AP](https://apnews.com/article/china-science-fiction-censorship-three-body-chengdu-9040ca9084fc8ec07935d461e4e65ac0?ref=andrewliptak.com), wrapping in some of the recent issues about last year's Hugo Awards. Over on *The Telegraph*, Simon Ings [interviews](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2024/02/29/cixin-liu-chinas-megastar-author-three-body-problem/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Liu about his work and writing. ### **War Stories** The Folio Society has a new edition of Stephen E. Ambrose's *Band of Brothers*, and it got me thinking about some storytelling lessons. [War storiesSome thoughts on the storytelling lessons from Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/03/IMG_6160.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/band-of-brothers-stephen-ambrose-folio-society-wwii-military-history/) --- ### War stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/band-of-brothers-stephen-ambrose-folio-society-wwii-military-history/ Last updated: 2024-03-07T13:00:18.000Z In the recent [March Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/), I noted that The Folio Society has released its Spring 2024 collection, and in that selection is Stephen E. Ambrose's World War II book [*Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/band-of-brothers.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* I was pretty excited to see this: *Band of Brothers* was one of those books that really stoked my early interest in history, way back when I was in high school, and in a lot of ways, it helped set my path in college and after. Ambrose originally released the book in 1992, and it was the culmination of a series of interviews that he had conducted with the survivors of the unit. The book was the basis for HBO's big 2001 miniseries by the same name, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks after their work on their WWII film *Saving Private Ryan*. That series also had a huge impact on me, visually showing what some of that war in Europe would have been like. I've read *Band of Brothers* a couple of times over the years, and like most of Folio's books, it's an extremely nice edition. [I've written about their titles over the years](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/), and for the most part, I've stuck with their science fiction or fantasy titles, which have some extras like forewords and specially-produced artwork. This edition doesn't have the artwork, but it does have an extra foreword by Cole E Kingseed, who co-wrote [*Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425213759?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/IMG_6161.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak As I've been flipping through the pages of this volume (Folio send me this copy last week to look over), I've been thinking a bit on why this book has endured so well. It's an interesting time to revisit it: Apple has recently released its big streaming series *Masters of the Air*, which comes from the same folks who did the *Band of Brothers* and *The Pacific* shows. *Band of Brothers* set an incredibly high bar for storytelling, one that neither of the followup shows have really been able to capture (that said, I'm enjoying *Masters of the Air* quite a bit). As my wife and I have been watching and talking about this (she's a huge fan of the book and show – her personal copy of the book has signatures from some of the members of Easy Company that she met,) we realized that Ambrose's story really succeeded because it's not a story of any of the individual members of Easy Company, but their shared journey as they slogged and fought their way through the European campaign between 1944 and 1945\. Ambrose – for all of the academic issues he faced later in his career – is a hell of a storyteller, utilizing the men as guides through France, Belgium, and Germany at the end of the war. There's a good storytelling lesson here: the charisma of individual characters certainly matters, but it's the shared bonds between them that really helped elevate the story. These were men who came from all walks of life who went through an enormously traumatic and difficult period of human history, and who survived because of one another. I've been having a lot of discussions about military history recently: I'm getting sucked down a rabbit hole at work with the story of a Vermont WWII veteran, and it's tremendously easy for readers and historians to get enamored of the dates and movements of soldiers, and units, looking at the day to day actions to construct a chronology of a conflict. *Band of Brothers* certainly has that, but Ambrose understood that it's how people approached and were impacted by the conflict, and that that's the most important part of the story: war is the ultimate test for one's beliefs, convictions, friendships, and personality. That's the dynamic that really makes this book stand out. As such, it's a book that I think is worth picking up to view as an exercise in storytelling. Ambrose's introduction lays out the broad stakes of who these men were and what they were tasked with accomplishing, then follows them as they're shaped by their training and the battles they went through. What I appreciate the most out of this book is the specifics that he was able to bring to light for readers. It's easy to look at a unit and talk about how they went here, did this, did that, and went on to the next thing. *Band of Brothers* certainly has lots of that, but it's those specific memories and recollections that really helps show the impact of those movements. A good example comes halfway through the book while Easy is in Belgium: > "Headquarters Company brought up some 81-mm mortars to add to the fire. Artillery at Veghel joined in, but cautiously, because elements of the 502d PIR were attacking the salient from the South. > > It was a long, miserable, dangerous night for the company, but the battalion S-2, Captain Nixon, had a lovely evening. He found a bottle of schnapps somewhere and drank it himself. He knew he had the perfect excuse–his close call that afternoon when the bullet went through his helmet. He got roaring drunk and spent the night singing and laughing until he passed out." That says so much, doesn't it? I like how these two paragraphs really contrast one another: one delivering the contextual, bigger picture, while the next lays out just how this one officer coped with what he was going through. The book is loaded with examples like this, and because of that, you really get a sense of who characters were *as people.* It's only as we follow them through the war, we see the last acts of the Second World War play out. This is why I appreciate this particular book. It's a history of the war, but it never loses sight of the most important part of the story: the men who fought. I think that's the most important lesson for any story: the bigger picture and details matter, but it's the characters who really carry the action. This is a book that neatly balances the two sides of that equation. ### The Expanse: now in action figure form URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/expanse-action-figures-kickstarter-campaign-nacelle/ Last updated: 2024-03-06T13:16:52.000Z During the pandemic, I went down the rabbit hole of collecting *Star Wars* action figures. I had picked up a handful of the 6-inch Black Series troopers, and somewhere along the way, I realized that if I picked up one or two more, I'd be able to do a whole "evolution" of the trooper from the franchise. It snowballed from there, and I have a pretty complete set of the troopers as seen from *Attack of the Clones* all the way up to *Revenge of the Sith*. It was a cathartic thing, and fortunately, Hasbro has let up on the gas a bit when it comes to new trooper figures, so I – and my wallet – have had something of a reprieve. That might come to an end soon though: toy/media company Nacelle partnered with Alcon Entertainment [a year ago](http://www.actionfigureinsider.com/nacellecompany-strikes-deal-with-alcon-entertainment-to-produce-line-of-action-figures-for-the-acclaimed-sci-fi-series-the-expanse/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to produce a line of action figures from *The Expanse* TV series, and last week, launched a [Kickstarter campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thenacellecompany/the-expanse-collectable-action-figures/description?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the project. This is pretty neat: I've been a fan of the series ever since I read an advance copy of the first novel, and I really enjoyed the TV adaptation that ran on the Syfy Channel and Prime Video. It's not the most [toyetic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic?ref=andrewliptak.com) of franchises, but it's one of those stories where I've definitely bought my fair share of merchandise. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) Nacelle is looking to raise $225,000 in the next month, and fans can pick a selection of 1:12 scale figures of characters from the series: Chrisjen Avasarala, Amos Burton, Bobbie Draper, Camina Drummer, James Holden, Detective Josephus Miller, Naomi Nagata, and a Protomolecule Hybrid. Notably missing? The Rocinante's pilot, Alex Kamal. That's not a huge surprise: actor Cas Anvar was fired from the series after allegations of sexual misconduct and an investigation from Alcon. They all come with a variety of extras as well. The price isn't too bad for this type of figure: you can back the campaign for individual figures (which'll run you $39 plus shipping), and there are some additional tiers that have some of the figures packed together (like Bobbie and the Protomolecule Hybrid). If they hit certain benchmarks, they'll unlock some additional things, like a stand for all eight figures, and some other things. Nacelle says that they're anticipating shipping orders in the spring of 2025\. As with any Kickstarter or crowdfunding campaign, expect some slippage or potential bumps in the road that could push that date back a bit. Kickstarter does seem to be the route to keep fans engaged with the series and characters: [a year ago](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-dragon-tooth-kickstarter/), BOOM! Comics launched a campaign for a spinoff comic series called *Dragon Tooth*, which is set after the series ended. I received my first pledge for it a while back, and I've been steadily picking up the issues from a local comic shop. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/image.png) Image: Nacelle I don't know that I'd want to snag all of the figures, but there is one that I am eager to snag: Bobbie Draper. She's long been my favorite character in the series, in no small part because I thought Alcon nailed the look of the powered armor that she wears. She'll make a nice addition to the shelf alongside my other armored troopers. ### Here's a pile of books for you to check out this March URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/march-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2024-03-05T17:59:31.000Z Now that we're into a new month, it's time to take a look at some of the new books hitting stores in the first half of March: 16 new SF/F (and some others) books to consider adding to your TBR. You can find past lists [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). (I'll have another list for you mid-March as well.) As usual, books with a Bookshop.org link are affiliates, and any purchases you make will yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*, which helps us cover the hosting costs. If you'd like to support the site in other ways, you can always sign up as a supporting subscriber ([details](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)) or share this list by forwarding it to your your friends and fellow readers or by sharing it on social media. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- ### [*Band of Brothers*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/band-of-brothers.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen E. Ambrose (March 5th) This is decidedly not a science fiction or fantasy novel, but it's one of the books that I'm most fond of. *Band of Brothers* left a huge mark on my academic interests when I was in high school and in college, and I was pleased to see that it's a new release from The Folio Society as part of their Spring 2024 collection. I'll have some more thoughts on this edition soonish. ### [*The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262547611?ref=andrewliptak.com), edited and trans. by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (March 12th) MIT Press has been steadily releasing entries in Joshua Glenn's Radium Age series for the last two years. It's a fascinating series that has been dredging up early works of speculative fiction from the turn of the 20th century, shedding new light and complexity to the story that is science fiction. The latest installment in the series is an anthology edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: a selection of Bengali science fiction stories called Kalpavigyan that was popular in India in the early 1900s. This collection contains a number of stories never before published in English, and it looks like a fascinating read. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2022/03/Blank-8-Grids-Collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) ### [*Weird Tales*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/weird-tales.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Michael Dirda (March 5th) Another entry in The Folio Society's Spring 2024 collection is an anthology of early horror stories, selected by critic Michael Dirda. This book contains stories from the likes of Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and H.P. Lovecraft, each introduced by Dirda and illustrated by Harry Campbell. ### [*Man's World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262547635?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Charlotte Haldane (March 12th) Another installment of Joshua Glenn's Radium Age series is Charlotte Haldane's *Man's World*. Set in the near future, it's set in England where reproduction is strictly regulated and women's lives are controlled to fulfill eugenical constraints, and it's about a woman who works to fight against the social conditioning that surrounds her. ### [*Jumpnauts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422117?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu (March 12th) A couple of years ago, I picked up Hao Jingfan's novel [*Vagabonds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422094?ref=andrewliptak.com), about the complications involved between two hostile governments on Earth and Mars. Jingfang's next is *Jumpnauts*, and it looks as though she's exploring some similar themes. It envisions a world where tensions have been rising between the Pacific League of Nations (PLN) and the Atlantic Division of Nations (ADN). When an advanced alien civilization sends Earth a message, three PLN scientists form an alliance to begin decoding the message in an attempt to find out its contents before their rival ADN counterparts. [Endless Universes and Tales of Two WorldsHello! It’s been a weird week, hasn’t it? I spent the weekend getting away from home for a couple of days by visiting my parents in upstate New York. (Fortunately, Vermont has relaxed some travel restrictions, allowing us to go out to low-impact counties and return without having![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_18cf738e-b0a8-4e06-8945-7214c66c2ddb_2048x1536.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/endless-universes-and-tales-of-two-worlds/) *Kirkus Reviews* [notes in its review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hao-jingfang/jumpnauts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the themes explored, involving humankind’s violent and self-destructive tendencies, conclude with a glimmer of hope: 'For all mankind to be one brotherhood is the grand dream of every great teacher in our history, and now we know it is also the article of faith of cosmic civilization.'" ### [*Those Beyond the Wall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497500?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Micaiah Johnson (March 12th) One of my favorite reads a couple of years ago was Micaiah Johnson's debut novel [*The Space Between Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593156919?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which Cara works for a tech company as an explorer who can jump to alternate worlds to study them. In her latest, Johnson returns to the same world, where we pick up the story a decade later in Ahstown, a desert community that's ruled over by the Emperor, who's trying to keep his wealthier neighbors of Wiley City at bay. The Emperor has one person he can trust, a woman named Scales, who works as an enforcer to keep everyone in line. When she witnesses a woman getting mangled and killed before her, it's an incomprehensible scene, one that doesn't seem to have a culprit. Scales is tasked with trying to find the cause of the killing, and find a way to bring it to an end, discovering a much bigger plot as she does so. [The Space Between Worlds is a clever read about power and parallel worldsMicaiah Johnson’s debut is all about identity and the struggle for power![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_05492219-e54b-45ba-bdb8-84ded812f3a8_4030x3022.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-space-between-worlds-is-a-clever-read-about-power-and-parallel-worlds/) *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/those-beyond-the-wall-1803155?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This book packs an emotional punch, as brutality lies next to the thin edge of caring, wrapped up in friendship and rage, and love will not stop hearts from shattering." ### [*The Haunting of Velkwood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982172374?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gwendolyn Kiste (March 5th) For decades, the Velkwood Vicinity has been the subject of tabloids and conspiracy theorists after a neighborhood vanishes behind a mysterious, impenetrable veil that only a handful of survivors have been able to enter. Talitha Velkwood has tried to put the incident behind her after it took the life of her mother and sister, but when a researcher comes to her with an offer to pay her to go back in, she takes them up on their offer – she needs the cash. But going back might give her a chance to reunite with a former friend and discover what happened to her mother and her friends all those years ago. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-haunting-of-velkwood-1803137?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Readers will be captivated as Talitha and Brett face the past they abandoned and search for answers they’re not certain they want." ### [*Empire of the Damned*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250245335?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jay Kristoff (March 12th) Jay Kristoff continues his *Empire of the Vampire* series (which began with [*Empire of the Vampire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250246516?ref=andrewliptak.com) last year), in which vampires have been waging war against humanity for decades, following a Silversaint named Gabriel de León, who's one of the last soldiers standing against the onslaught. Gabriel saved the Holy Grail, but missed out on a chance to end the war. He enters into an alliance with a vampire named Liathe, and has to bring the Grail to an ancient order in order to learn how to bring the conflict to an end. It won't be an easy journey, and he and his companions might not survive to see daylight. ### [*The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886630718?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tanya Lapointe and Stefanie Broos (March 1st) *Dune: Part 2* hits theaters today, and accompanying its arrival is a new art book, *The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two*. This follows a [similar volume](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647221553?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the first film, and like it, it contains some commentary from Tanya Lapointe (filmmaker and wife of director Denis Villeneuve), as well as lots of concept art and photography from the production of the film. I've been reading this ever since I saw the film, and I'm learning a lot about how it came together. If you're *super* into this, you can plunk down $795 for a [special, limited edition](https://insighteditions.com/pages/the-art-and-soul-of-dune-2-artifacts?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*The Siege of Burning Grass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837860463?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Premee Mohamed (March 12th) In the midst of an interstellar war, the leader of a resistance movement, Alefret, has been captured tortured by his own government. He's now offered his freedom, provided he infiltrates one of the enemy's flying cities and instigating their citizens into an uprising. He's trapped between his desire to continue to resist what he sees as another gambit in a pointless war and the opportunity to bring the conflict to a real end. *Publishers Weekly* [says that](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781837860463?ref=andrewliptak.com) "readers will need to give Mohamed’s challenging commentary on human nature a slow and careful reading to glean her insights into this chilling and demoralizing war. This is not for the faint of heart." ### [*Blade*](https://www.amazon.com/Blade-Inverted-Frontier-Book-4-ebook/dp/B0CS4BJ6XK?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Linda Nagata (March 5th) Linda Nagata brings out a fourth installment of her *Inverted Frontier* series (following [*Edges*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937197261?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Silver*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937197285?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Needle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937197407?ref=andrewliptak.com)) with *Blade*. The starship Dragon and the rest of its fleet have pierced deep into a region of space called the Hallowed Vasties, where a series of worlds have been torn apart by a Blade. The Dragon's crew have detected signs of life in the ruins, and they're tempted to continue, only to lose contact with the Griffin. That ship's silence is worrisome: like the Dragon, it's a ship that was once controlled by an alien mind and designed to lay waste to worlds, and they now have to contend with the possibility that it's been taken over once again to fulfill its original mission. ### [*Star Wars Legends: I, Jedi*](https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780593910146?prhc=PRHA9A5E24CFB&ref=andrewliptak.com)by Michael A. Stackpole, narrated by Marc Thompson (March 12th) The paperback edition of this book came out last year, but it's worth pointing out that with its (and the other Legends re-releases), Random House Worlds has been doing new audio editions of the classic Star Wars EU novels. It's Michael A. Stackpole's turn with *I, Jedi*, read by Marc Thompson. ### [*House of Open Wounds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781035901388?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (March 5th) In his British Science Fiction Association award-winning novel [*City of Last Chances*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781801108447?ref=andrewliptak.com) Adrian Tchaikovsky introduced us to the city of Llmar, which has been occupied by Palleseen and dealing with a criminal underworld, oppressive factory owners, and an ancient curse, priming it for a revolution. He now returns to the world with a standalone sequel, *The House of Open Wounds. In it, the Palleseen* work to bring their doctrine of Perfection and Correctness to the world, taking over city and kingdom to do so. Their revolution has a devastating cost behind the front lines, and Yasnic, a former priest and healer has been saved from hanging and has been dispatched to a medical unit led by "the Butcher", where he and his new companions confront the the horrors that the war is bringing. ### [*The Truth of the Aleke*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250849052?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Moses Ose Utomi (March 5th) In this sequel to [*The Lies of Ajungo*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250849069?ref=andrewliptak.com), Moses Ose Utomi jumps ahead 500 years, where the City of Truth is the last free city remining in the Forever Desert. It's endured countless attacks from a cult that's been trying to take it over, and we follow Osi, a 17-year-old peacekeeper in the city. After an attack from the cultists leaves countless dead and the sacred God's Eyes stolen, Osi is tasked with taking on the cult and recovering the artifacts. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250849052?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This heart-wrenching sequel recaptures the tone of the opening volume and again packs an epic’s worth of worldbuilding into a limited page count. Osi’s flaws and naivete make him a realistic and relatable protagonist and the lesson that truth can be both fixed and flexible depending on one’s perspective is well taken." ### [*These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964122?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Izzy Wasserstein (March 12th) A trans woman named Theodora “Dora” Madsen returns home to a queer anarchist commune in Kansas after her ex apparently dies of an overdose. She finds a bit more than she bargained for, and as she investigates, discovers more about the nature of the commune and the circumstances that forced her out years ago. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964122?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Wasserstein makes clever use of genre tropes, including clones, snappy noir-style dialogue, and the damaged, insomniac detective archetype." ### [*Big Time*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316305778?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ben H. Winters (March 5th) Ben H. Winters is back with a new speculative thriller. I really enjoyed his book [*Underground Airlines*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316261258?ref=andrewliptak.com)when I picked it up a couple of years ago, and this one looks intriguing: FDA administrator Grace Berney has become stuck in her career, believing that her life has passed her by. Everything changes when she receives a picture of a young women undergoing a strange medical procedure. It prompts her to find the girl and bring her to safety, only to discover that she's now in the crosshairs of a mercenary hired to bring the girl back to the company that was experimenting on her – a company that's been researching some radical theories about the nature of time and existence. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316305778?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Winters’s many jaw-dropping plot twists are always grounded in pitch-perfect depictions of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events." --- ### The original Dunes Part 1 and 2 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/frank-herbert-dune-serialized-analog-denis-villeneuve/ Last updated: 2024-03-08T15:25:55.000Z *Dune: Part 2* hits theaters this weekend. It's the culmination of the adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel *Dune,* directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. *Dune* is famously a big book that's stymied filmmakers who've tried to adapt it in the past: *Planet of the Apes* producer Arthur P. Jacobs attempted an adaptation in the 1970s, while Alejandro Jodorowsky famously worked on his own take shortly thereafter, which is recounted in the excellent documentary Jodorowsky's *Dune*. The first adaptation that did make it into theaters was from David Lynch, and the SCI FI channel also produced its own miniseries adaptation in 2000, directed by John Harrison. That was followed up by a second miniseries, *Children of Dune*, which mashed up the second and third books in the series, *Dune Messiah* and *Children of Dune*. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Those adaptations have been polarizing: Lynch's film gets many of the story's big beats into a two hour runtime, while Harrison's adaptation was done on a large TV budget. It wasn't until Villeneuve's adaptation came along that it felt like a director had the resources and vision to really capture the essence of Herbert's novel: an epic story of a power struggle in the desert, one that touches on environmental concerns, religious fundamentalism, and the impact of colonialism, all with a big special effects budget that brought the world to life. [Dreams are messages from the deepDenis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune succeeds because it understands the grounded nature of Frank Herbert’s novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/11/Dune-Trailer-Spice-Harvester-Harkonnens.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-review/) A big part of that success, I think, is the fact that Villeneuve split the film into two parts, not only giving him a couple of additional hours to contain more of the book's plot, but also to narrow in on some of those [complicated elements](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-trailer-war-epic-frank-herbert/) of the story that really makes *Dune* stand the test of time. It's also a neat, (probably) unintentional nod to the route that Herbert took when publishing the novel in the first place. Starting in December 1963, Herbert serialized *Dune* in the science fiction magazine *Analog Science Fiction & Fact.* Years before, he had been inspired to write an article about some efforts from the USDA to use European Beach Grass to stabilize some sand dunes near Florence, Oregon. Herbert began work on the project, and it sort of grew from there: he imagined a world that was entirely sand dunes, and began working on what became this sprawling epic. He submitted the story to editor John W. Campbell Jr. at *Analog*, who acquired it. Magazines such as *Analog* would often publish a novel – any work of fiction 50,000 words or over – sometimes in a single issue, and sometimes broken up into installments. Herbert's novel was big, so he and Campbell opted to split the novel into two parts, each of which would be serialized. The first part, titled *Dune World* hit stands in December 1963, accompanied by art from John Schoenherr, and continued in the January and February 1964 issues. The next serialization, titled *The Prophet of Dune,* was published over five installments in the magazine between January and May 1965\. ![No photo description available.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/03/387739877_825859936207341_988690848068458771_n-1.jpg) A Science Fiction Book The book industry had been undergoing some major changes in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1920s and into the 30s and 40s, the main outlet that science fiction writers had were magazines such as *Amazing Stories* or *Astounding* (which became *Analog*): it wasn't until a bit later that authors would begin to compile some of these stories into books – [often called fixups](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/e-van-vogt-and-fix-novel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) – or publish their novels as standalone volumes. But as the publishing industry grew, authors would often take those serialized stories and resell them to a genre publisher. Herbert tried to find a publisher to publish the novel in book form, no publishers would take it: it was too large and complicated. It wasn't until an editor working for Chilton Books (known for making automotive manuals) convinced his employer to take the gamble and publish the book. It came out in August 1965, while Ace Books published a paperback in 1967\. ![May be an image of 2 people, matchbook and text that says '17261 $1.25 WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD AND THE NEBULA SCIENCE SC FICTION NOVEL OF THE YEAR! DUNE FRANA HERBERT'](https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/428707936_914378354022165_6987274940810150697_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=dd5e9f&_nc_ohc=PNyyCyHEXSEAX-C0bav&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=00_AfDS3n09RcrWbeuGr6fV9Kvc-V3LNJnvA4XeyRlXUn0_tw&oe=65E781BC) A 1967 Ace Paperback. Image: Andrew Liptak Prior to publishing *Dune* in *Analog*, Herbert had already begun working on a sequel, *Dune Messiah*. He wanted to explore and continue some of the ideas that he'd put into that first novel: the dangers of power in a person's hands, and ended up inverting some of the lessons that he left off with. Campbell wasn't pleased: he clashed with Herbert about the trajectory of the character's journeys, and ended up not acquiring the for the magazine. Herbert took it instead to another science fiction publication, *Galaxy Science Fiction*, which published it between July and November 1969\. By the time he had written a third installment, *Children of Dune*, Campbell had passed away, and it ran as a serial between January and April 1976 in *Analog*. When Herbert republished it as a hardcover at Berkley/Putnam, it was a massive hit: it's often cited as the first-ever science fiction novel to hit a bestseller list. *Dune*'s publication history is a fascinating story, and with the new film hitting theaters (and a third installment already in the works), the novel and Herbert's world has never been more popular. It's heartening to see that there's an appetite amongst film audiences (and the people who make them) for stories that aren't just light, popcorn fare, something that Herbert's readers have known for decades. --- *Here's some additional pieces that I've written about Dune for this newsletter over the years*: - [Dune is a War Epic](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-trailer-war-epic-frank-herbert/) - [Inaudible](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune/) - [Dreams are Messages from the Deep](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-review/) - [Property Lines](https://www.andrewliptak.com/spice-dune-dao-crypto-nft-alejandro-jodorowsky/) ### Apple's next big sci-fi show? Neuromancer URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-neuromancer-adaptation-william-gibson/ Last updated: 2024-02-29T23:39:30.000Z Here's a fun bit of news that dropped yesterday: Apple has [greenlit an adaptation](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/02/apple-tv-announces-neuromancer-new-drama-based-on-the-multi-award-winning-science-fiction-novel-by-william-gibson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of William Gibson's novel *Neuromancer* for a 10-episode series created by Graham Roland and J.D. Dillard. Of all the novels a tech company could adapt for its home-grown streaming service, this would be the one. Published in 1984, *Neuromancer* is one of the best-known and influential cyberpunk novels. Gibson had grown up reading science fiction, but his interest in the genre had been rekindled when he was in his thirties and re-read Alfred Bester’s *The Stars My Destination*, later noting that it was “a book that had absolutely ignored everything that science fiction had been doing when it was written.” He began writing on his own and published his first short story “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” in 1977\. His next, “Johnny Mnemonic” appeared in *Omni* in 1981, and from there, he published a string of other short stories, many dealing with dystopic, sprawling futures that we now think of when we hear the phrase “cyberpunk.” Gibson didn’t start that genre, but he was An early proponent of it. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. When Terry Carr, an editor of his, joined Ace Books and launched a line of science fiction paperbacks, he asked Gibson for a book, who accepted. He started playing with the cyberpunk worlds that he’d visited in prior stories, and began writing what would eventually become *Neuromancer,* whichcame out in 1984\. The novel follows a former hacker named Case, who had been caught stealing from an employer and was severed from the world’s digital VR world known as the “Matrix.” When he’s approached by a mysterious woman named Molly Millions with an offer to restore his access, he jumps at the chance. He discovers that he’s working for a former military officer named Armitage who’s looking to pull a digital heist that leads them to a much larger plot involving an artificial intelligence and a corporate dynasty. Gibson went on to write two more books set in the same world: *Count Zero*, which he published in 1986, and *Mona Lisa Overdrive* in 1988\. Neuromancer went on to win a whole host of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards in 1985. Roland will serve as the series showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot episode. The series will join a growing library of science fiction shows from Apple, which includes the [alternate space history *For All Mankind*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/for-all-mankind/)*, Monsterverse* series *Monarch*, adaptations of [Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/)*,* Hugh Howey's *Wool*, and [Martha Wells' *Murderbot* series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/), and a bunch of others. *Neuromancer* is one of those novels that's been in and out of development for years. There was an adaptation in the works in 2007 from Joseph Kahn, while Vincenzo Natali took a crack at the screenplay in 2010\. The last effort was back in 2017, when Simon Kinberg and *Deadpool*'s Tim Miller were working on a film adaptation for Fox. Since its publication in 1984, the novel has been an enormous influence on other films and TV shows: The 1999 film *The Matrix* owes a particular debt to the novel, as does 1995’s *Ghost in the Shell*, not to mention a whole generation of cyberpunk novels, such as Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* and Ernest Cline’s *Ready Player One*. It's not the first Gibson novel to get the adaptation treatment: *Westworld*'s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy [adapted his novel *The Peripheral* for Amazon in 2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-the-peripheral-william-gibson/) (sadly, its renewal was nixed due to last year's writer's strike), while his short stories *Johnny Mnemonic* and *New Rose Hotel* were adapted as films in 1995 and 1998, respectively. The adaptation is simultaneously a big get for the tech company's streaming service, and one that feels a little strange. Cyberpunk was in many ways a reaction to some of the tropes and trends of science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: a subversive and as writer and editor Bruce Sterling [described it in his anthology *Mirrorshades*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-mirrorshades-gibson-cadigan-rucker-free-science-fiction/)*,* “disentangling SF from mainstream influence, much as punk stripped rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies ‘progressive rock.’” [Cyberpunk’s power came from global dystopian politicsIt might look like the 1980s, but we’re still living in it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/image-9-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-power-came-from-global-dystopian-politics/) With that in mind, it’ll be positioned as of Apple’s biggest gets: one of the most influential novels of the technology age, adapted by one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Apple played up its image as an upstart company in the computer world, notably with its [1984 ad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%5F%28advertisement%29?ref=andrewliptak.com) (directed by Ridley Scott), which saw a protagonist throwing a hammer through a screen with a Big Brother-like figure in a dystopian world, a statement about what Apple hoped to do in a world dominated by IBM. The announcement comes at an apt time for Apple: it just launched its own augmented reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, which retails for $3500 and promises to be something of an advance in the world of VR. I have to imagine that you’ll be able to watch the series with some sort of crazy special feature like extra wraparound, spatial sound, immersive something or other to go along with the experience. Or at the very least, some sort of video or marketing that shows off how you can watch the series wearing one of these headsets. It’s hard to imagine Apple being subversive in the way that cyberpunk authors have often imagined giant tech conglomerates: it feels like the type of company that an author would use to pull a heist against. But, it does seem like the type of story that they’d be all over, if anything, because it’s one of those stories that’s so influential for the people who’re part of the technology sector. Hopefully, they won’t lose sight of the subversive mindset that really makes *Neuromancer* — and the other novels like it — stand out. ### Imagining the way to a small, angry planet URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-becky-chambers-van-dijk-art-interview/ Last updated: 2024-02-28T19:42:38.000Z One of my favorite science fiction novels of recent years was Becky Chambers' *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet*. It's a delightful space opera, one in which a young woman named Rosemary Harper joins the crew of a ship called the *Wayfarer*, and who accompanies them as they make their way through the galaxy. It – and the sequels that Chambers penned, are wonderful books with vibrant characters and an emphasis on the bonds that bring people together. Here are my reviews of [*The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet* from 2015](https://gizmodo.com/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet-is-this-year-s-mos-1730270921?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*A Closed and Common Orbit*](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-reviews-january-2017/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from 2017 and [*Record of a Spaceborn Few*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/becky-chambers-record-of-a-spaceborn-few-scifi-book-review/) from 2018\. *The Galaxy, and the Ground Within* came out in 2021, and finished off that particular world. [Becky Chambers on writing optimism and ending her Wayfarers seriesBecky Chambers won the inaugural Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and with her latest novel, The Galaxy and the Ground Within now out, she talks about building “wonderful and insignificant” stories about space.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/05/IMG_0818.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/becky-chambers-wayfarers-galaxy-and-the-ground-within-sci-fi-interview/) I was delighted to see that for the book's tenth anniversary this year, The Folio Society [has selected it for a limited edition release](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is now available. I've long been a fan of the publisher's work, which produces high-end editions of classic literature. Its books are gorgeous: they come printed on excellent paper and original illustrations, and often feature some extras, like forewords or new introductions. For this edition, Folio Society tapped LA-based illustrator [Zoe van Dijk](https://zoevandijk.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the artwork. This particular edition is limited to 750 hand-numbered copies, and it's got a steep price tag: $430\. (As of the time of this writing, Folio tells me that it's sold about half of the run.) While that's pricy, the book comes with a slick presentation box, a print, and come signed by both Chambers and van Dijk. Hopefully, there'll be a less-limited release somewhere down the road, because this is really a beautiful-looking edition of a beautiful novel. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/008_LWAY_8_sissix.jpg) Art: Zoe van Dijk I had the opportunity to interview van Dijk recently about her work on this book. ### First off, can you tell me a bit about your background? Who were some of the artists who inspired you to pick up the pen/pencil/paint? I’m from a very small rural town called Grass Valley, population 4,000, in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. The closest mall was an hour drive away and we didn’t have internet until I was about 12-years-old so in a way, I kind of grew up in a bit of a time warp bubble. We seemed to get fashion and culture shifts on about a 2-5 year delay so all of my first exposure to fantasy and sci-fi art was strictly through book covers at the library. Leo and Diane Dillon were some of the first cover artists that really blew me away. I also remember being so obsessed with all of the art inside of RPG guide books from Dungeons & Dragons and White Wolf Game studios. I had a BIG time werewolf era. But I wouldn’t necessarily say these books inspired me to pick up a pencil. I had that at home! I was very lucky to have an artist for a mom, so art supplies were always around me from day one. I was always drawing! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/004_LWAY_4_akaraks.jpg) Art: Zoe van Dijk ### *The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet* has become a favorite novel of many people since its first publication: when did you first pick it up? What about it grabbed you when you read it? I read this book once when it first came out, and then again when I was invited by The Folio Society to illustrate the limited edition. I remember feeling so welcome in this book — the instant knowledge that if I ever needed a home, I would be welcome on the Wayfarer. ### How did you go about conceptualizing the look and feel of the characters and scenes? I spent a lot of time reading, rereading and reading again every character description in the book. It is a credit to Becky’s descriptive prose that I was able to connect through the pages with how she imagined them. My first impression of the crew was how approachable and normal they all were — I wanted them to have bodies and clothes that felt lived in. Other than Ashby because if you don’t have a ripped captain, honestly what. is. the point!? ### Can you tell me a bit about your process for creating these images? I am a digital painter, so other than ideation--I like to sketch away from my computer if I can when I am doing rough exploratory sketches. I typically start with line drawings and then paint from there, often incorporating traditional media textures that I've made for myself and creating bespoke brushes when a project calls for it. For this project in particular I made several star texture brushes and other geometric patterned brushes to help build up a tactile quality in their environments and clothes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/frontispiece_LWAY_blindpunch.jpg) Art: Zoe van Dijk ### Looking over the illustrations from the interior, I feel like I get some vibes from some of the classic illustrators like Michael Whelan and others illustrating covers from that period – is that something you were tapping into? Wow, Michael Whelan. That’s a high compliment! I would never dare imagine myself in those ranks. I can’t say I was purposefully trying to channel any particular aesthetic beyond my own in these illustrations but what are human beings at the end of the day but unique pastiches of every thing they’ve ever liked, loved or looked upon. I definitely had a huge Anne McCaffrey *Dragonriders of Pern* era, circa age 12, and I’m not sure if I would have picked those books up if not for Michael Whelan's jaw-dropping covers. ### Coziness is a feeling that I get from these books: a sense of closeness and intimacy from the characters. That feels like something that's difficult to convey in environments like a spaceship: how did you go about conveying that in these images? This book was fun for me because it’s essentially an ensemble cast and I *love* an ensemble cast. It’s a story that’s driven by its relationships more than it is by a complex plot. I think in my own brain I didn’t use the word cozy as much as I used the word *interior.* It’s about interior lives in an interior space. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/005_LWAY_5_jenksfinal.jpg) Art: Zoe van Dijk I had the unique opportunity to give each character their own illustration that either focused on their hero moment, an emotional breakthrough or a moment of connection with another crewmember. There is only one truly exterior scene — the double page spread of the Toremi attack. It’s a huge moment for the crew — their emotional, interior bubble is quite literally burst. ### What do you have coming up that we should keep our eyes out for? I have some TTRPGs coming out soon from Restoration Games and a whole lot of book covers on the horizon! But mostly I’ve been trying to carve out some time to make work for myself which proves to be an increasingly daunting task in the busy life of a commercial illustrator. --- That's all for now: stay tuned in the next week or so for another Q&A around a Folio edition, as well as a new book list for the month of March! Andrew ### Rapid unscheduled disassembly URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-awards-chengdu-controversy-scifi-fandom/ Last updated: 2024-02-23T18:38:23.000Z Last week, writers Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford [released a bombshell report about the 2023 Hugo Awards](https://www.patreon.com/posts/2023-hugo-awards-98498779?ref=andrewliptak.com) and the public relations crisis its administrators bumbled into. The report (which has been picked up by major outlets like [*The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/15/authors-excluded-from-hugo-awards-over-china-concerns?ref=andrewliptak.com), [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/books/booksupdate/hugo-awards-china.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)) helps answer a couple of questions that have lingered since the controversy, thanks to emails shared to the pair. The short version of the story is that the awards were unveiled in Chengdu, China in 2023\. Typically, the award's administrators will release a detailed list of voting statistics that shows how WorldCon members voted, and what other works were nominated by members, but which didn't make the finalist list. (This is how I learned that my book, *Cosplay: A History* got a handful of nominations). This time, that long list didn't come out until the end of January, and when it did, it showed that a handful of nominees were deemed "ineligible", including R.F. Kuang's novel *Babel*, Xiran Jay Zhao for the Astounding Award, an episode of the TV series *Sandman,* and Paul Weimer for Fan Writer. [Stress testThe 2023 WorldCon and Hugo Awards are embroiled in controversy, but fixing the problems will be difficult![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/IMG_5479.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-award-2023-chengdu-worldcon-controversy/) Awards administrator David McCarty offered a wanting statement when asked by fans about the exclusions: "after reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible," and went on to stonewall and belittled fans who asked for clarification. He later apologized and [resigned](https://www.wsfs.org/2024/01/31/announcements-from-worldcon-intellectual-property/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from his position as director of the WorldCon Intellectual Property corporation, and was censured by the organization for his actions. Still, questions remained about the reasoning behind the exclusion, which threatened to undermine the faith in the award's long-standing fixture within the science fiction / fantasy community. The award is probably the most notable and visible award from SF Fandom: a book with "Hugo Award Winner" emblazoned on its cover is generally regarded as a sign of quality for readers, and it's a notable honor that includes some of the best writers in the genre within its ranks. The leaked emails shared with Barkley and Sanford shed some light on the reasoning behind the decisions: McCarty directed his team to conduct additional scrutiny on potential nominees, saying in an [email](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1%5FQqmsxQkACoYcxSx2LVqbxD39-DJI%5FgS/view?ref=andrewliptak.com) that because the convention was taking place in China, "we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It's not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue \*in\* China...that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot (or) if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.” From there, those administrators raised concerns about a number of authors who fans had nominated. Some of those authors, such as Kuang, Weimer, and Zhao were left off the final ballot, despite meeting the award's eligibility requirements. This vetting included looking into their respective works for which they were nominated, as well as their social media discussions. They went on to create a "[validation](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhCwKLMydCto6HvXvcqjR553DqrhTfBu/view?ref=andrewliptak.com)" document to collate those concerns. Additionally, the report notes that a number of works by Chinese authors might have been unilaterally eliminated in various categories, due to their appearance on a list from a Chinese magazine. The administrators characterized this as "collusion" and as a “slate", and removed them. And it's unfortunate for the folks who took home awards last year. Sam Mills, winner of the Best Short Story category for her story "[Rabbit Test](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/?ref=andrewliptak.com)", [has said](https://samtasticbooks.com/2024/02/17/rabbit-test-unwins-the-hugo/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that she can't in good faith consider herself a winner of the award and described it as "ill gained." Adrian Tchaikovsky, who won for Best Series, [issued a statement on his site in which he said](https://adriantchaikovsky.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site." At the end of the day, this situation appears to have been an effort of preemptive, self-inflicted censorship from McCarty and his team, either in an effort to keep the awards and convention from any potential or perceived problems from the Chinese government, or an act of sabotage to put their thumb on the scale to ensure that works by non-Chinese authors were on the final nominations list. However it was reasoned, these are actions that have a profound impact on this pillar of the SF community. It throws into question not only this particular set of awards, but the entire system that's been in place for the awards in years past. And it goes beyond just the award and to me, speaks to a bigger picture within the larger world of SF Fandom: artist Meg Frank has a [good series of observations](https://bsky.app/profile/peripateticmeg.bsky.social/post/3klov2id3ck22?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how Fandom is experiencing a generational divide of its own making, because traditions and unspoken rules are kept in place from year to year, which creates the perfect environment for people like McCarty to make these sorts of decisions. My entire time watching and attending conventions since 2008 or so has seen these sorts of environments and how unwelcoming they can be to new authors and fans. It's unfortunate, because it's been a body of people and a community that's not only incubated talent and authors, but provided the environment for countless stories and connections that helps make the SF/F world tick. I fear a cascading effect: fewer people who'll subscribe to short fiction magazines, fewer people who'll find the resources and connections to learn how to write, and a less vibrant scene. That's not all on this particular controversy, but it feels very much like it's a symptom of some larger, unaddressed problems. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/02/IMG_5710-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently reading My to-read list has ballooned in recent weeks: I've been bouncing around this list as the mood takes me. [***The Warm Hands of Ghosts***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Katherine Arden**. This is one that I've been excited to read for a while: Katherine's a friend, and I went to her book launch for it last week. I've been reading and listening to this one, and I'm enjoying it so far. [***Starling House***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799050?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Alix E. Harrow**. I really loved Harrow's novel [*The Ten Thousand Doors of January*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421973?ref=andrewliptak.com) and some of her follow-up books, and have been really enjoying this one. It's a gothic horror set in Kentucky, and I'm about halfway through. [***The Spear Cuts Through Water***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593156612?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Simon Jimenez**. This has been on my to-read list for ages: it's earned a ton of acclaim and accolades from other readers and reviewers that I trust. It's also a very ... unconventional book, and listening to the audiobook has been an interesting experience. [***Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517915230?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Shigeru Kayama, translated by Jeffrey Angles**. I've been on something of a Godzilla kick recently: I saw *Godzilla Minus One* twice in theaters, watched Apple's *Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,* and have been rewatching some of the older films. This has been a fun read of the original novelization, translated for the first time into English by Angles. [***The Tusks of Extinction***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855527?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Ray Nayler**. Nayler's novel [*The Mountain in the Sea* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com)was one of my favorite reads of 2022, and I've been looking forward to this next book, about resurrected woolly mammoths. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) [***Of Mice and Men***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780140186420?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by John Steinbeck**. I noted on my [Facebook page the other day](https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=903774411749226&set=pb.100063500262392.-2207520000) that the book was published in 1937, and it reminded me that I've been meaning to re-read it. I started that the other night, and I'm remembering why Steinbeck's prose has stick with me ever since I first picked up the book back in high school. [***Womb City***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660569?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Tlotlo Tsamaase**. This is a difficult book to read for me: it's a bit triggering on some specific anxieties, but Tsamaase is sketching out a pretty interesting (and disturbing) future and I'm going to try and stick it out. [***System Collapse***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Martha Wells**. It's a Murderbot book. What can I say? [***The Icarus Plot***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Timothy Zahn**. I ended up DNF'ing the audiobook for this, but I've been enjoying the story and world thus far. --- ## Further reading ### A decade stranded Andy Weir's *The Martian* turned 10 the other week, and to celebrate, he penned a new diary entry from Mark Watney. [A decade strandedCelebrate 10 years of The Martian with a new entry from Mark Watney![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/427983100_907240861402581_8364380697859539834_n.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-martian-andy-weir-decade-10-years-short-fiction/) AI cringe. Tor's been dinged (again) for [using AI in one of its covers](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/94388-tor-books-imprint-bramble-criticized-for-use-of-ai-generated-art-in-gothikana-cover-design.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### February books In case you missed it, here are the [two book](https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-books-arden-kelly-link-talabi/) [lists for February](https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-book-list-tolkien-wells/)! [19 new sci-fi & fantasy books to check out February 2024Books by J.R.R. Tolkien, Martha Wells, and many more to add to your TBR.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/IMG_5821.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-book-list-tolkien-wells/) **Django Wexler adaptation**! This is a book that I've been keeping my eye on: Django Wexler’s *How to Become the Dark Lord (and Die Trying)*, which is coming out in May. Legendary has [snapped up the rights for an adaptation](https://deadline.com/2024/02/how-to-become-a-dark-lord-and-die-trying-legendary-television-adam-wingard-1235833599/?ref=andrewliptak.com), with *Godzilla vs Kong* director Adam Wingard tapped to direct. **Marvel moves**. Marvel's had a rough couple of years in theaters: its films have been underwhelming and the guy they tapped for its lead antagonist, Jonathan Majors, has been summarily booted after a criminal conviction. *The Hollywood Reporter* [has a rundown](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/marvel-fantastic-four-avengers-movies-1235830951/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on what the studio has been doing to retool and try and recapture some of its glory years: it looks like they're bringing in some new writers and are reworking some of those plans. The studio did have a good couple of weeks: it (finally) [announced the cast of the upcoming *Fantastic Four* film](https://www.marvel.com/articles/movies/fantastic-four-cast?ref=andrewliptak.com), [unveiled a trailer](https://www.marvel.com/articles/movies/deadpool-and-wolverine-teaser?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the upcoming *Deadpool & Wolverine* film at the Superbowl, and a [trailer](https://www.marvel.com/articles/tv-shows/marvel-animation-x-men-97-trailer?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *X-Men '97*. ### Messy postmortem I came across this excellent podcast by way of Mark S. in the TO Slack channel the other week, and ended up blowing through it: host Tansy Gardam took a deep dive into the productions of *Rogue One* and *Solo,* then took a detour into looking at how the 2007 writer's strike impacted Hollywood, and has done a couple of standalone episodes. It's a great look into the process of making films and TV, and I realized when I was done that it reminds me a lot of the deep-dive YouTube videos that channels used to do. [Messy postmortemAn excellent podcast takes a look at Rogue One and Solo’s troubled productions![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/IMG_1311.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-going-rogue-one-solo-podcast/) ### Two sets of awards Here are the finalists for the L.A. Times Book Awards and the Bram Stoker Awards. [Two sets of awards finalist listsHere are the finalists for the L.A. Times Book Awards and the Bram Stoker Awards![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/IMG_5929.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/two-sets-of-awards/) --- ### Two sets of awards finalist lists URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/two-sets-of-awards/ Last updated: 2024-02-22T15:28:27.000Z In a bit of keeping-up-with-genre-lit-news, two organizations announced their finalists for their respective book awards this week. I generally view awards as a hit-or-miss-thing (stay tuned for tomorrow's post about some updates around last year's Hugo Awards), but they do make for some good places to find some good books to read if you're looking. First up, *The L.A. Times* [announced the finalists](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2024-02-21/l-a-times-book-prize-finalists-2023?ref=andrewliptak.com) for its 44th annual L.A. Times Book Awards, which includes a speculative fiction category. Here are the finalists for that category: - [*The Reformatory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982188344?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Tananarive Due - [*Whalefall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781665918169?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Kraus - [*Lone Women*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525512103?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Victor LaValle - [*The Fragile Threads of Power*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765387493?ref=andrewliptak.com) by V.E. Schwab - [*Jewel Box: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660484?ref=andrewliptak.com) by E. Lily Yu *\*Usual disclaimer: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links.* There are some other books on the list that I was pleased to see make the cut: [*The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780300244052?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ned Blackhawk, which I’ve been picking away at, as well as S.A. Crosby’s [*All the Sinners Bleed*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which I really enjoyed reading last year. What I like about this list is that it's nicely varied. ([Here's last year's finalists](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-la-times-book-award-ray-bradbury-prize-finalists/)). The award seems to have dropped Ray Bradbury from the name of the award. (It was previously sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation, which makes me think that they're not this year?) This year's awards will be announced during this year's L.A. Times Book Festival on April 19th. Next up is the [2023 Bram Stoker Award finalists](https://www.thebramstokerawards.com/front-page/the-2023-bram-stoker-awards-final-ballot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the Horror Writer’s Association, which recognizes “Superior Achievement” in a number of categories. This is a really long list, so I won’t put down the entire thing, but here are the “superior” novels: - [*The Reformatory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982188344?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tananarive Due - [*How to Sell a Haunted House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593201268?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Grady Hendrix - [*Don’t Fear the Reaper*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982186593?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen Graham Jones - [*Lone Women*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525512080?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Victor LaValle - [*Black River Orchard*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593158746?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Wendig This – and the other categories – seem like it's a solid list. Tananarive Due's *The Reformatory* has really been earning a lot of acclaim since it was published in October, and I have a feeling we haven't seen the last of it yet. Members of the Horror Writer's Association will now begin voting on the awards, and the winners will be announced during the Annual Bram Stoker Awards Banquet held during StokerCon™ 2024 in San Diego, California. ### Read this excellent ghost story by Aimee Picchi URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/aimee-picchi-internet-horror-short-story-vermont/ Last updated: 2024-02-21T13:16:08.000Z I've fallen out of the habit of reading short fiction on a regular basis, but there are a couple of authors for which I'll drop everything and check out their work when I hear that they have something out. One of those authors is a good friend of mine, fellow Vermonter Aimee Picchi, who recently published a short story in *The Deadlands*, "Image Not Found: Francesca's Bridge." The story plays out through a series of forum posts as an amateur ghost hunter goes searching for a Vermont bridge that's rumored to have been the site of a young woman's murder in the Northeast Kingdom, and ends up finding a little more than she bargained for. Give it a read here: [Image Not Found: Francesca’s Bridge, by Aimee Picchi - The DeadlandsI’ve tried to post the photo of Francesca’s Bridge—yes, the bridge—about a gazillion times. Hopefully you all can see the pic? This might be the biggest discovery yet for our Haunted New England group!![](https://thedeadlands.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cropped-icon-270x270.jpg)The Deadlandseditor\_td![](https://thedeadlands.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/05_image-not-found-1024x577.jpg)](https://thedeadlands.com/issue-32/image-not-found/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [I highlighted one of Aimee's flash stories](https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-fiction-brett-cox-aimee-picchi-horror/) about a year ago, "[9 Lies You Tell Yourself About Ghost Hunting](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/9-lies-you-tell-yourself-about-ghost-hunting/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)", which appeared in *Nightmare Magazine*. One of the things that I really appreciate about her work is that she's an expert at really finding a neat formatting hook, like a list of [Google search queries](https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/magic-and-wizardry/aimee-picchi/search-history-for-elspeth-adair-age-11?ref=andrewliptak.com) or a [Reddit AITA post](https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/aita-for-using-my-side-hustle-to-help-my-boyfriend-escape-the-clutches-of-death/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and playing out a tiny story that feels bigger than the couple of hundred words that she jots down. It's harder than it looks! (You can find more of her stories via this [list on her website](https://www.aimeepicchi.com/new-page?ref=andrewliptak.com).) This story fits nicely into that same style: it's told through a thread of posts, the back and forth of the forum's users. It's a clever format, and it's as much a ghost story as it is about internet culture and misogyny. It's well worth the read. ### Messy postmortem URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-going-rogue-one-solo-podcast/ Last updated: 2024-02-20T13:30:53.000Z In December of 2015, I left my job at Norwich University and struck out as a freelance writer. It was a bit of a terrifying leap: I'd worked for six months at *io9* as their weekend editor, and in June of 2016, I went from freelancing to full time editing at *The Verge*. My focus was on popular culture, and it was an exciting time to be covering film and TV: it was the moment that Disney was releasing its first *Star Wars* films. *The Force Awakens* came out in December 2015, and the first standalone film, *Rogue One* hit theaters a year later. *Rogue One* had a famously convoluted production: in the summer of 2016, just as the publicity campaign for the film was heating up, news was breaking that Lucasfilm wasn't terribly happy with what director Gareth Edwards had shot, and was making some serious efforts to reshoot and retool the film. Ultimately, they [brought in Tony Gilroy to do some rewriting and oversee the reshoots](https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/3/11856240/star-wars-rogue-one-reshoots-tony-gilroy?ref=andrewliptak.com). Sitting behind the news desk, we saw some evidence of that: [what we'd seen in the film's trailers was significantly different](https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/15/14268850/star-wars-rogue-one-reshoots-disney-gareth-edwards-tony-gilroy?ref=andrewliptak.com) from what ended up getting released in theaters. After the film's release in December 2016, bits and pieces of that story came out: Edwards' style as a director was a bit too chaotic and while they had a lot of footage, the story really wasn't coming together in a satisfactory way. Lucasfilm brought in Gilroy, [who later cast a pretty dire picture](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-wars-rogue-one-writer-tony-gilroy-opens-up-reshoots-1100060/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for what that original cut of the film was. I've never really seen a good post-mortem of the film though, and that's why I was thrilled to come across a podcast that came out back in June 2022 called *Going Rogue, (h/t to Mark S. in the TO Slack channel for digging it up!)* which pretty much lays out the story of how *Rogue One* came to be and struggled its way through production. [‎Going Rogue: Going Rogue I: The Pitch on Apple Podcasts‎Show Going Rogue, Ep Going Rogue I: The Pitch - Jul 24, 2022![](https://t2.gstatic.com/faviconV2?client=SOCIAL&type=FAVICON&fallback_opts=TYPE,SIZE,URL&url=https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-rogue-i-the-pitch/id1636196453?i=1000570995426&size=128)Apple Podcasts![](https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts123/v4/84/ff/f6/84fff651-1b46-58cd-d78f-99aa9eec2e12/mza_8925144775366031834.jpg/1200x630wp.png)](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-rogue-i-the-pitch/id1636196453?i=1000570995426&ref=andrewliptak.com) I have a high bar for skepticism when it comes to internet-generated reactions to *Star Wars* stuff, but this particular production and host Tansy Gardam seems to have done a lot of research, going through public interviews that the film's crew gave and what could be gleaned from books like [*The Art of Rogue One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419722257?ref=andrewliptak.com). This particular season is six episodes, covering how the film was pitched by ILM Chief creative officer John Knoll, how the script came together, how Edwards shot it, the editing process, the reshoots, and release. The result is a pretty fascinating picture of how this film came together. Gardam editorializes a little more than I would have in something like this, but she throws in a lot of good context for how *Rogue One* sits in alongside the productions of other *Star Wars* films. I'm reminded quite a bit of [the book I read recently about the MCU](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/) and how that came together and it reinforces a useful lesson: blockbusters are messy, collaborative processes, and there's a lot of improvisation and making-it-up-as-you-go filmmaking that means the film studios set out to make is a bit different from what they finish with. I’ve spoken a lot about *Rogue One*, but Gardam returned for a second, four-episode season that looks at the issues with *Solo*, the next standalone film and why that went off the rails. This one’s a little more straight-forward: issues between the directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and writers Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan over their filming style, the tone of the film they were working on, and how they were wildly diverging from the screenplay. Like the first season, it’s an excellent look into how a film is made. All in all, the show is a really interesting listen. ### Here's a whole pile of sci-fi and fantasy books for the rest of February URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-book-list-tolkien-wells/ Last updated: 2024-02-16T19:54:42.000Z I hope that you've had a good week: here's the second book list for the month of February! It turned out to be something of a packed month, with a lot of variety and some interesting-looking books hitting shelves before the month turns over into March. In case you missed it, here's the first book list of the month: [11 new sci-fi and fantasy novels to read this FebruaryA new pile for your TBR![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02/IMG_5661.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-books-arden-kelly-link-talabi/) You can also check out past lists by hitting the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. As always, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make might result in a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*, which helps offset the hosting and distribution costs of this newsletter. I'd also invite you to sign up as a [supporting member](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/), which gets you some additional posts in your inbox as well as access to the vibrant TO Slack channel. Your support helps keep this newsletter running! Here are 19 new SF/F books hitting stores over the rest of February for you to check out: --- ### [*The* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597736?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Frame-Up*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597736?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gwenda Bond (February 13th) A former thief named Dani Poissant was once at the top of the art theft world: she and her mother were renowned for pulling off impossible jobs, with the help of a bit of magic, something that the magical world has kept secret from the rest of us. But a decade ago, Dani had a falling out with her crew, and turned in her mother. Years later, she's approached for a new job that only she and her former colleagues can undertake, and it's got a big enough payoff that it's worth reconciling with her mother and friends. The only problem? They have a week to do it, and there's more to the job than meets the eye. ### [*Dune: Exposures*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647229269?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Josh Brolin, photographs by Greig Fraser (February 13th) *Dune: Part 2* debuts in theaters on March 1st, and in advance of that, one of the film's stars, Josh Brolin (who plays Gurney Halleck) explores the production of the film and its predecessor through the photographs of set photographer Greig Fraser. ### [*Fathomfolk*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316564922?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eliza Chang (February 27th) The half-submerged city of Tiankawi has been an oasis of calm in a chaotic world, but trouble is brewing within its limits. The humans who live in the city have an uneasy relationship with the fathomfolk – the sirens, seawitches, kelpies and kappas – who live in the waters below, who are tired of the pollution that's making their home unlivable. Mira is a half-siren border guard who's recently been promoted, and is hoping that she'll be able to help her people in her new position. But she has trouble gaining the trust of her human counterparts, and when Nami, a fathomfolk princess is exiled to the city, that makes her job all the more harder. Tensions escalate after an attack during a city festival, prompting both Mira and Nami to question whether the system is worth upholding. ### [*Kindling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063269354?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Traci Chee (February 27th) The world experienced a devastating war, one in which both sides fought using kindlings: magical warriors who could wield devastating power against their opponents – at great cost to their own lives. Now that the war is over, the kindlings who have survived are trying to figure out what to do with their lives: their magical powers are banned and they're haunted by the ordeal they went through. While the war has ended, the countryside is still chaotic, and seven kindlings step up to help save a village that's come under siege. They'll have to work together and to work through their past trauma in order to save those around them, and the people under their care. ### [*Faith of Dawn*](https://www.cemeterydance.com/faithofdawnDeaborn?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kristin Dearborn (February 15th) Kristin's a good friend of mine, and I'm eager to check out her latest book: *Faith of Dawn*. A PI named Amanda Lane is working to rebuild her life after losing her leg during a tour of duty in Afghanistan and coping with the trauma she endured. Returning to the small town where she grew up in Florida was supposed, she decides to pick up a cold case involving the disappearance of a pair of college students. She hopes that if she can find them, she'll be able to reconnect with her estranged husband. The case takes her into the heart of the Ocala National Forest, where a horrifying secret involving her childhood rears its ugly head, and she'll have to confront some horrors (human and nonhuman) in order to survive. ### [*Vangie's Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212175272?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Di Filippo (February 20th) Unbeknownst to her foster parents, three-year-old Vangie has a special power: she can see alternate versions of herself from infinite parallel universes. When she's injured after a tornado destroys her home, Vangie finds herself in another reality where she survived, but her foster parents didn't. This sets her on a path of jumping between realities and timelines to try and find a better life – and to escape from those who'd attempt to exploit her powers. When the "Council" of Vangies appears and warns her about a new threat to the multiverse: a mysterious man known as Massive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781538450307?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Di Filippo gleefully pursues the imaginative range of his tale’s premise, recasting his key characters with new personas and aptitudes as Vangie puts them through shifting realities." ### [*The Bezzle*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865878?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cory Doctorow (February 20th) Cory Doctorow follows up last year's [*Red Team Blues*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865854?ref=andrewliptak.com)with a new adventure following Martin Hench, a freelance forensic accountant who's spent his entire career uncovering money from the folks who try to keep it hidden. When he accidentally upends a scheme while on vacation at Catalina Island, he hasn't realized that he's kicked a hornet's nest. This particular scheme involves a privatized prison system that the ultra-wealthy has been using to extract as much money as they can from the government and the prisoners they have in custody. With a friend behind bars, it's up to Hench to try and uncover the scheme and bring it crashing down. ### [*Island Witch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593549261?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amanda Jayatissa (February 20th) Amara Akki's father, the village Capuwa or demon priest, was once respected by their neighbors, only to fall on hard times after British colonial rule. While they've fallen out of favor, the village still called on them for help. But when a series of men have gone missing in the jungles in a string of mysterious attacks, their neighbors have accused her father of carrying out the attacks. To try and clear his name, Amara has been trying to figure out who's behind the attacks, and is plagued by foreboding dreams that spell darker times ahead and which might help her locate the culprit. ### [*Star Trek: Firewall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668046357?ref=andrewliptak.com) by David Mack (February 27th) Paramount Plus's *Star Trek: Picard* series might have come to an end, but the story is still playing out in novel form. David Mack's latest is *Firewall*: a prequel to the series, which follows Seven of Nine after the *USS Voyager* returned from the Delta Quadrant. She's been rejected for a position in Starfleet, and has instead found a place with the Fenris Rangers, an interstellar rogue law enforcement outfit. While it seems like a good fit, she has to leave everything she's ever known behind, including her friendship with Admiral Kathryn Janeway. ### [*The Forgotten Beasts of Eld: 50th Anniversary Special Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964108?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Patricia A. McKillip (February 29th) In 1974, Patricia A. McKillip published *The Forgotten Beasts of Eld*, which went on to earn the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Tachyon Publications is releasing a hardcover 50th anniversary edition that features new illustrations from Stephanie Law and an introduction by Gail Carriger. The novel follows Sybel, an heiress who lives along on a mountain, attended to only by a plethora of magical beasts. When a mysterious soldier named Coren arrives with an infant named Tamlorn, she's tasked with raising and loving him. When he returns more than a decade later to collect the child, she finds her world upended. ### [*The Butcher of the Forest*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250881786?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Premee Mohamed (February 27th) In this new fantasy novella from Premee Mohamed, we're introduced to a magical, forested land on the border of the kingdom of a malevolent Emperor. Only one person has ever survived the forest, Veris Thorn, who had entered once before. When the Emperor's children, Eleonor and Aram, go missing in the forest, the ruler gives Veris a day to find them, or he'll kill her family. ### [*Redsight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781786189387?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Meredith Mooring (February 27th) A priestess named Korinna is trying to stay under the radar. She's the weakest member of her order – whose members can manipulate space time – and she's resolved to stay aboard the Navitas and out of trouble. But when she's named the navigator onboard an Imperium ship, she discovers that everything she knows about herself is a lie: she's brimming with power and is intended to be used as a pawn and weapon. When her ship is attacked by a pirate with a vendetta against the Imperium, she finds that she has a choice in her destiny and with her former masters close behind her, she has to figure out which side she'll pick. ### [*Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593314180?ref=andrewliptak.com) by GennaRose Nethercott (February 6th) Gennarose Nethercott (a fellow Vermonter!) has a new collection of 14 dark fairy tales that get to the heart of darkness that lurks within us. These stories range from teenagers finding a weird roadside attraction to a zombie rooster to a woman who discovers that her body is changing according to her boyfriend's whims. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gennarose-nethercott/fifty-beasts-to-break-your-heart/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Teenage (and adult) heartbreak, class anxiety, societal cruelty against those who are different, and the everyday losses of women trying desperately to conform to patriarchal standards are all explored here with great sensitivity and almost always a surprising twist." ### [*Exit Black*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212631020?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joe Pitkin (February 20th) In this space thriller, Joe Pitkin takes us up to the Imperium, a former research laboratory in orbit that's since been converted into a space hotel for Earth's wealthiest. The first batch of tourists have just arrived, and along with them are members of a terror group known as the Reckoners. They're intent on upending the economic status quo, and the ultra-wealthy tourists are ripe targets. One of the station's researchers, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, is both frustrated by the new arrivals and their only hope for survival. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798212026451?ref=andrewliptak.com) "through rotating perspectives Pitkin punctuates the action with intriguing commentary on death, animal instincts, and the wealth gap...Fans of suspenseful hard science fiction will revel in every detail. ### [*Tomorrow's Children*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915202857?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Polansky (February 27th) Daniel Polansky is one of those authors that I've been meaning to read for years: I have his book [*Low Town*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/low-town-daniel-polansky/9787584?ean=9780307743343&ref=andrewliptak.com) on my longer to-read list. This new story from him is set in Manhattan, which has been cut off from the mainland for generations by a mysterious, toxic cloud. The remaining mutated inhabitants have held on to their lives in the rubble, with a delicate power balance keeping everyone in check. But when the first tourist in centuries arrives, their presence threatens to upend the entire system. *Grimdark Magazine* [says](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-tomorrows-children-by-daniel-polansky/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Full of Polansky’s trademark snark and character bitterness and snappy dialogue, with excellent twists and turns and imagination in spades, *Tomorrow’s Children* is well worth the read." ### [*River Mumma*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645661351?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Zalika Reid-Benta (February 20th) A former student named Alicia has been trying to figure out what to do with her life after grad school when she's confronted by River Mumma, the Jamaican water deity, who presents her with a task: she has a day to search her home city of Toronto to locate a comb that has gone missing, with devastating consequences if it isn't found. Alicia is at a loss for why she's been chosen, but along with her coworkers Heaven and Mars have, she begins to search the city. Along the way, they're chased by malevolent spirits and others, realizing along the way that their connections to one another might be their only hope for saving the city. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781645661351?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Into this simple plot are mixed elements from every stratum of a young adult’s life, including heritage, family, neighborhood, work, school, pop culture, and more. It’s a rich and sometimes even dizzying brew that marks the emergence of a powerful new voice." ### [*Moon of the Turning Leaves*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358673255?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Waubgeshig Rice (February 27th) A couple of years ago, I picked up Waubgeshig Rice's [*Moon of the Crusted Snow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781770414006?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* an intriguing post-apocalyptic novel set in an Anishinaabe community in Canada that has to deal with the aftermath of a massive power outage that cuts them off from the rest of civilization. This new book is set in the same world, but stands on its own. 12 years after the lights went out and society collapsed, the Anishinaabe community has figured out how to survive, but with their food sources drying up, they need to find a new place to live. Evan Whitesky leads an expedition south to try and bring his people back to their original homeland near the Great Lakes, and as they venture into the wilderness, they'll face new dangers: other survivors. Rice earned a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780358673255?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Publishers Weekly*, which says "Rice puts a refreshing, Indigenous perspective on postapocalyptic tropes, folding in both nostalgia for a world fading away and hope for a different future from a people who have survived similar harsh conditions in the past." ### [*The History of Middle-earth Box Set #1*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-history-of-middle-earth-box-set-1-christopher-tolkienjrr-tolkien?variant=41120605012002&ref=andrewliptak.com)by Christopher Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien (February 6th) Harper Collins and the Tolkien Estate have been re-releasing some of Tolkien's classic works in recent years, and the latest endeavor is a series of new boxed sets called *The History of Middle-earth*. The first box came out earlier this month, and includes four handsome hardcovers of *The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales Part 1*, and *The Book of Lost Tales Part 2*. The publisher is releasing three additional boxed sets over the course of the year: #2 comes out in May and includes *The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth,* and *The Lost Road*, #3 will hit stores in July with *The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring,* and *Sauron Defeated*, and the final one will be out in September and will include *Morgoth's Ring, The War of the Jewels, The Peoples of Middle-earth,* and *The History of Middle-earth Index* ### [*The Book of Ile-Rien*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250873132?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (February 27th) Martha Wells repackages two of her books from the 1990s, *Element of Fire* and *Death of the Necromancer*, into a new and updated volume: *The Book of Ile-Rien*. In the first story, the kingdom of Ile-Rien has come under siege from magical threats, and Kade, an illegitimate sister to King Roland, has reappeared, bringing trouble and mystery around her intentions, and it's up to the Captain of the Queen's Guard, Thomas Boniface, to protect the kingdom. In the second, Nicholas Valiarde is a renowned thief in the kingdom of Ile-Rien, using his ill-gotten gains to fuel a campaign of vengeance, and ends up embroiled in a plot involving dark magic and an ancient evil. --- That's it for now: thanks as always for reading! Let me know what catches your eye, and what you're reading right now. Stay tuned in the next week or so: I've got a couple of posts brewing for your inbox. Andrew ### A decade stranded URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-martian-andy-weir-decade-10-years-short-fiction/ Last updated: 2024-02-13T15:40:37.000Z Author Andy Weir celebrated a fun milestone over the weekend: his debut novel *The Martian* turned 10 (sort of), and to celebrate, [he wrote a bit of additional content](https://twitter.com/andyweirauthor/status/1756690693727154586?ref=andrewliptak.com) in the form of a new diary entry from the book's main character, Mark Watney. *The Martian* is nothing short of a lightning-in-the-bottle example of overnight success for Weir. He was a computer programmer and began writing science fiction on the side. He began writing this story, about an astronaut stranded on Mars and his efforts to survive, in 2009, initially serializing the story on his website. He began incorporated the advice and corrections he got from readers as he went, and began selling the book on Amazon's Kindle store, where it raced up the charts. That success earned the attention of major publishers, and in the spring of 2013, he sold the audiobook, print, and film rights to the book: Crown released an updated version of the story in hardcover, which debuted on February 11th, 2014\. The book quickly became a major bestseller, and 20th Century Fox fast-tracked a film adaptation. Directed by Ridley Scott (*Alien, Blade Runner*) and starring Matt Damon as the lead character, it debuted on October 2nd, 2015. This, is should be said, is not the story for most books: it's a remarkable and rare success story for Weir, [who told me in an interview back in 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/16008270/andy-weir-the-martian-artemis-books-science-fiction?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it made releasing another book pretty daunting. That book was a crime thriller set on the moon called *Artemis.* He's since released another book, *Project Hail Mary*, which was another big hit for him. Ten years is a long time in the book world, and it's pretty remarkable for a book to remain on shelves (and to continue to sell well) for that period of time. It's not hard to see why: Weir's book is breezy and accessible, with an appealing and funny main character solving a formidable problem. I blew through the book in a single sitting. As I [wrote in my review a decade ago](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/tag/The+Martian): "you can't help but cheer for him as he overcomes just about everything that Mars throws at him. This is high-tech Robinson Crusoe, with a much steeper difficulty curve." So, it's exciting to see that Weir's returned to the world for a small addition to the story, [which he posted on his website](https://galactanet.com/lostsols.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's in the form of one of the journal entries with an explanation that it was a corrupted entry, given that his laptop was on Mars longer than anticipated, and thus subjected to more radiation. [Destination: MarsHow we imagined the Red Planet![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/05/51897858204_c5754685a2_b.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mars-history-science-fiction/) The story's from later in the story, following Watney after he encountered a problem as he drove out to his launch site at the Schiaparelli crater to get rescued. It's a fun excerpt: Watney's just as profane and entertaining as I remember, and I sort of wonder if Weir will use this conceit again to add to the story. It's a fun story that I wouldn't mind returning to if he finds the right way to do it. ### 11 new sci-fi and fantasy novels to read this February URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/february-2024-scifi-fantasy-books-arden-kelly-link-talabi/ Last updated: 2024-02-05T19:35:05.000Z I neglected to get the second January list together in time, but I did get that posted yesterday: it's got 11 SF/F books that came out in the second half-ish of last month, and I hope you find something interesting there. You can find the first January list [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-books/). [Another book list for the end of January11 new SF/F/H books to check out![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/IMG_5565.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/) These lists are fun to put together. If you find something you like, please consider signing up as a supporting subscriber. This newsletter is powered by readers, and if helps to keep it going. Another way to support the newsletter is by purchasing a book through a Bookshop.org affiliate link, and might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit. Okay, with that out of the way, here are 10 new SF/F books hitting stores in February for you to check out. (Stay tuned – I'll have a second list hitting your inbox in a couple of weeks.) --- ### [*Star Wars Legends: Wraith Squadron*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726075?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aaron Allston (February 6th) The X-Wing novels have long been one of my favorites arcs in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and I've always been delighted by Aaron Allston's *Wraith Squadron* stories. While Michael A. Stackpole wrote the first four novels ([*Rogue Squadron*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593359792?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Wedge's Gamble*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497074?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Krypto Trap*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497340?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The Bacta War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593498927?ref=andrewliptak.com)), Allston picked up the series with another set of characters – an eclectic group of pilots who're tasked with the strange and dangerous missions that require a slightly different skillset. This unlikely band of rejects and castoffs are given another chance to complete their training, and their first mission is to go after a former Imperial Admiral to try and uncover a secret weapon. To do that, they'll have to take over an imperial warship and infiltrate his fleet. If you haven't read these books, they're a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to giving this one a re-read. ### [*The Warm Hands of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katherine Arden (February 13th) I'll say up front that Katherine is a friend who lives in the area, and I've been waiting for this book for a while. It's something that I've watched her struggle with, going through draft after draft (I read parts of an early version), and I'm very excited to see her finish it and get it into stores. [My most anticipated books of 202420 new books that I’m excited to dig into this year![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Beige-Brown-Grey-Minimalist-Aesthetic--Inspiration-Moodboard-Photo-Collage--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/) I really enjoyed her novel [*The Bear and the Nightingale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101885956?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and this new book is a little different from that style of fantasy: it's set during the First World War, and it's about a nurse who learns that her brother had been killed in battle. But that's not quite what happened and we learn more about her brother and his fate. There's some supernatural and spiritual elements here as well, and it's a novel that gets to the heart of the horror that is warfare. Arden earned a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/katherine-arden/the-warm-hands-of-ghosts/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Kirkus Reviews*, which said "Arden titles her chapters with quotations from *Paradise Lost* and the biblical Book of Revelation, and appropriately so: The landscape, both physical and spiritual, that the characters navigate is hellish, and for better or worse, their old world is being transformed into a new one." ### [*The Tainted Cup*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820709?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Robert Jackson Bennett (February 6th) I literally finished Robert Jackson Bennett's last novel [*Locklands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820709?ref=andrewliptak.com) (the final installment of his *Founders* trilogy – stay tuned for more on that soon), and I'm eager to see what he has in store in his next novel, *The Tainted Cup*. In this book, an imperial officer is seemingly murdered at the edge of the Empire's boundaries, where strange things are known to happen. A brilliant, eccentric detective named Ana Dolabra is tasked with investigating the murder, and her new assistant, Dinios Kol has to figure out how to work with her. He's been magically augmented to assist her, and as the two set about working to solve the case, he's amazed and shocked at how his new superior operates. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781984820709?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The worldbuilding is immediately involving, Bennett’s take on a classic detective duo dynamic feels fresh and exciting, and the mystery itself twists and turns delightfully." ### [*The Book of Doors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063323988?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gareth Brown (February 13th) I really enjoy multiverse stories, and this debut novel from Gareth Brown is giving me the same vibes as Alix E. Harrow's [*The Ten Thousand Doors of January*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421973?ref=andrewliptak.com) and Peng Shepherd's [*The Cartographers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062910691?ref=andrewliptak.com). In this novel, a bookseller named Cassie Andrews is distraught when one of her favorite customers dies in the store. She soon discovers that he was reading a book called *The Book of Doors*, which is filled with mysterious drawings and shows her that doors can be portals to anywhere else. It's a powerful, much-sought-after tome, and her possession of it means that she's now the target of a number of people who would like to get their hands on it for their own purposes. She's approached by a mysterious librarian named Drummond Fox, who looks over such books, and she has to decide whether or not to trust him to keep the book safe and free with those with darker motives. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gareth-brown/the-book-of-doors/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "A whirlwind journey that opens doors into other worlds but also into the heart of the human experience." ### [*The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472858665?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Myke Cole and Michael Livingston (February 6th) I've long been a fan of Myke Cole's novels and his nonfiction books about the Spartans ([*The Bronze Lie*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472843760?ref=andrewliptak.com)) and Greek/Roman infantry tactics ([*Legion vs. Phalanx*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472841124?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and I'm interested in seeing what he and fellow historian Michael Livingston have in their new book, *The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae*. Thermopylae is an infamous location in the annals of military history, and while we primarily know about it for a battle in 480 BC, there's quite a bit more to the area: a total of 27 battles have been fought there over the centuries, and Cole & Livingston take a look at all of them. ### [*The Book of Love*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780812996586?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly Link (February 13th) This seems to be *the* book that everyone is excited for this spring. Three high school students disappeared from their school in Lovesend MA. Everyone was correct in presuming that they'd died, but a year later, they reappear. Their music teacher seems to know something about their disappearance and was responsible for bringing them back, and as they work to return to their lives, they strike up a bargain: they have to undertake a series of magical tasks, and if they complete them, they can return, but can't tell anyone what happened to them. Their return hasn't gone unnoticed from the supernatural realm, and as they work to figure out how to return to the world of the living, mysterious figures have begun to arrive in their town, bringing danger and chaos with them. The novel earned a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780812996586?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Publishers Weekly,* which says "in less capable hands, the amount of uncertainty both characters and readers must endure before answers are revealed might grow frustrating, but Link makes the slow trickle of information both tense and tantalizing.*"* ### [*The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250906793?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Malka Older (February 13th) Malka Older follows up last year's [*The Mimicking of Known Successes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250860507?ref=andrewliptak.com) with *The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles*. In the first book, an investigator named Mossa hunts for clues into the disappearance of a man on a colony on Jupiter, one that brings her back in contact with an ex, Pleiti, who's studying Earth's former ecosystems. In this new story, Mossa returns to Valdegeld, and has to once again get Pleiti's help after 17 members of Valdegeld University's population have gone missing. Their investigation will take them to Io and this new case will threaten everything Pleiti has worked for – as well as humanity's future. *Library Journal* [says](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-imposition-of-unnecessary-obstacles-1801519?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "readers of their first outing, *The Mimicking of Known Successes*, will be thrilled to have Mossa and Pleiti back on the case as it takes its surprisingly cozy mystery into this sci-fi setting and grounds it in an on-the-nose portrayal of academic politics in all of its delicious viciousness." ### [*Jubilee*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787588844?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Stephen K. Stanford (February 13th) An artificial world called Jubilee exists in its own parallel universe, ruled over by a strange AI system. A pair of detectives, Col and Danee are dispatched to the world to try and recover the body of a politician who was engaged in some nefarious affairs. But the recovery mission runs into some snags: the body has been switched, and Col and Danee find that they're coming closer and closer, something that might imperil their mission. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781787588844?ref=andrewliptak.com) "replete with botched plans, daring escapes, and amusingly flawed conspiracies, Col’s adventure is a series of old-fashioned hijinks with a new AI twist....The result is an amusing and fast-paced saga sure to please fans of classic space opera." ### [*Convergence Problems*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418830?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wole Talabi (February 13th) Wole Talabi has earned a considerable amount of acclaim for his short fiction in recent years: his novelette "A Dream of Electric Mothers" picked up Hugo, Nebula, and Locus nominations for the category, while he's also picked up a number of nominations and wins for the Nommo Awards for African Speculative Fiction. Now, he's releasing a new collection of his short fiction: *Convergence Problems*, which brings together 16 stories, including "Debut," "An Arc of Electric Skin," "A Dream of Electric Mothers," "Blowout," and "Ganger" (a brand new novella). Publishers Weekly awarded the book with a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756418830?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "beautiful, vibrant, and electrifying, this has the makings of a modern classic." ### [*Republic Commando: Order 66*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593726068?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karen Traviss (February 6th) The fourth installment in Karen Traviss's run of *Republic Commando* novels gets the Essential Legends treatment (after [*Hard Contact*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599495?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Triple Zero*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722169?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*True Colors*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722206?ref=andrewliptak.com) – the final installment is [*501st*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780345511133?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which follows the members of Delta and Omega Squads as the Clone Wars comes to a bloody end, and they're forced to take a side: the Jedi that they've served alongside for years, or the new order that's coming. ### [*Beyond Enemies*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193218?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Marisa Wolf (February 6th) A soldier named Talinn Reaze and the AI tank that she serves with, Bee, are part of the United Colonial Force's Artificial Intelligence Troops. They've worked together since before Talinn was born, and the pair are some of the most talented forces that the UCF has been able to field against their enemies, the Interstellar Defense Corps. The pair are assigned to a distant base where they find they don't have much to do, only to have their world upended from under them, forcing them to question everything they've ever known. This looks like a fun Military SF read. --- That's all for today: thanks as always for reading. Let me know what you have on your TBR pile, and what catches your eye here. ### Another book list for the end of January URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-2024-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-2/ Last updated: 2025-04-29T16:06:52.000Z January kicked off the year with a whole bunch of new SF/F books, and you can check out the first list I published [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-books/). But as always, there's more than I like to contain in one list, so here's the second (belated) one for the month. *As always: books with a link to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and might yield a small commission to Transfer Orbit. You can also support this newsletter by signing up for a paid subscription (details* [*here*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)*)* [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-books/#/portal/signup) Here are 11 new books that you should check out for the remainder of January: ### [*The Longest Autumn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250896490?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Amy Avery (January 16th) Tirne is a woman who is one of four people who're help the gods change over the seasons. She's tasked with escorting god of Autumn between the human and ethereal realms, and will stick around with her until Winter comes to take his place. This time around, their portal between the worlds has broken, leaving both of them trapped in the human world, bringing with it devastating consequences for humanity and the pair. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/amy-avery/the-longest-autumn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's a "whodunit in fantasy form makes for a complex, original tale." ### [*Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593129722?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebecca Boyle (January 16th) The Moon last long been a source of fascination and inspiration for scholars, artists, and everyone in between. This new book from Rebecca Boyle takes a look at how the Moon has had an impact on human life, looking at everything from how it influenced the development of life to how we mark time, and imagined worlds beyond our own. ### [*The Knights of Breton Court*](https://www.amazon.com/Knights-Breton-Court-Maurice-Broaddus/dp/1625676425/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Maurice Broaddus (January 9th) Maurice Broaddus has written some excellent, inventive novels in recent years, and this month, he's gone out and reissued some of his earlier books. This omnibus edition features three novels: *King Maker, King's Justice, and King's War,* in which he retells the story of Arthur and Camelot in the modern world of Indianapolis. ### [*Faebound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593723005?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Saara El-Arifi (January 23rd) Saara El-Arifi kicks off a new trilogy with *Faebound*, about a pair of sisters: Yeeran, who has spent her entire life in the elvish military, and Lettle, who is seeking out prophecies for a new future. When Yeeran is exiled, the sisters have to contend with the wild world beyond the Elvish realm. They find themselves in the fae world, and have to figure out how to navigate this strange, magical, and dangerous place. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593723005?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The worldbuilding is lush and exciting, and the focus on character development and relationships makes for a cast that readers will be excited to revisit in future installments." ### [*Unbound*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212613835?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Christy Healy (January 16th) A queen named Rozlyn Ó Conchúir has spent her entire life in waiting for others: she's been waiting for a monster to be killed, or a prophesied lover to arrive, and waiting for a curse to be lifted. When a suitor named Jamie arrives, she thinks that her time waiting has come to an end. But it's clear that Jamie has other intentions, and as she continues to wait, she discovers that her own powers are growing and that the only person she can really depend on is herself. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/christy-healy/unbound-healy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Healy has also clearly taken inspiration from Grendel’s mother, and even goes so far as to have Rozlyn reading *Beowulf*. The resulting tale, told in chapters alternating between Rozlyn’s and Jamie’s points of view, is a delightful amalgamation that readers will find familiar but that stands on its own as a delightful, heart-clenching story of love and betrayal." ### [*This Wretched Valley*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781683693680?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jenny Kiefer (January 16th) In her debut horror novel, Jenny Kiefer takes us on a trip into the wilderness of Kentucky to follow four graduate students as they set out to climb an untouched cliffside and become rock climbing legends. Three of their bodies are recovered months later: one a skeleton, another missing its organs, and the third missing its tongue, eyes, ears, and fingers. The final student, Dylan, is still missing. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781683693680?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Through vivid descriptions of the creepy setting and thoughtful character portraits, Kiefer maintains a feeling of unease and nail-biting tension throughout. Devotees of daylight horror will be entranced." You can listen to an interview with Kiefer [over on NPR](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/14/1224674073/in-jenny-kiefer-on-her-new-horror-novel-this-wretched-valley?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593653456?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shubnum Khan (January 9th) A mansion called Akbar Manzil sits on the coast of South Africa, and was once a grand house and grounds. A century later, it's fallen into disrepair, occupied by misfits who are looking to escape from the world. One resident, Sana, has been exploring the house and its history, discovering a locked door to a bedroom. The room has been frozen in time, and holds the story of a woman named Meena, who died a century ago. It's also occupied by a djinn who's been grieving and watching over the mansion in that time. As Sana digs into Meena's story, she discovers some terrible secrets that linger in the estate and which could affect those who still reside there. Lauren Beukes [reviewed the book](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/books/review/the-djinn-waits-a-hundred-years-shubnum-khan.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *The New York Times*, saying "Despite the Gothic trappings, this is not a novel of creeping dread. It’s rich and swoony, tilting for the ecstasy of Sufi poets like [Rumi,](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/books/review/rumi-brad-gooch.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a wink to those epic Indian romance movies Pinky adores." ### [The Parliament](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250820976?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aimee Pokwatka (January 16th) A chemist named Madigan Purdy and a group of students she volunteered to teach have found themselves stuck in her local library: tens of thousands of owls have flocked around the building, attacking anyone who attempts to leave. To distract her students, she looks to a favorite childhood book for inspiration to try and escape, especially as their food and water have begun to run low. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250820976?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Pokwatka manages both a unique exploration of the effects of trauma, especially on children, and a thoroughly moving portrayal of the power of solidarity in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, combined with a healthy dose of rage at the lack of care and effort on the part of the government to combat gun violence." ### [*Machine Vendetta*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462846?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alastair Reynolds (January 16th) Alastair Reynolds brings out a new standalone adventure in his *Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies* series (it's preceded by [*Elysium Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316555678?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Aurora Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316462587?ref=andrewliptak.com)), in which an orbital police force called the Panoply is tasked with keeping the peace amongst settlements over a planet called Yellowstone. One of the Panoply's operatives is Ingvar Tench, who was killed when she walked into a habitat occupied by people who really hated her and her unit. As her colleagues investigate her death, Prefect Tom Dreyfus has to figure out what his role was in her death, and try and solve a long-simmering mystery. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316462846?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Every chapter reveals another layer to the far-reaching mystery, all the while building to a stunning crescendo in which characters old and new band together to face a long-dreaded scenario." ### [*Kinning*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250212696?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Nisi Shawl (January 23rd) Tor re-released Nisi Shawl's novel [*Everfair*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250212313?ref=andrewliptak.com) last year (it had been released previously in 2016), in which she introduced an alternate history where she reimagined Belgium's colonization of the Congo, one where African American missionaries carve out a free state called Everfair, a home for formerly enslaved people to come to. In this sequel, Everfair has fended off some internal strife and conflicts, and we pick up the story of Tink and his sister Bee-Lung, who have been traveling around the world to spread spores of a fungus that helps generate empathy, building up sentiment for the principles that their nation was founded on. At the same time, Everfair's Princess Mwadi and Prince Ilunga have returned home from a trip to Egypt, and are each bent on taking the throne, and have to deal with new problems, external and internal, in order to survive as a symbol of hope for the rest of the world. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250212696?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Shawl has "clearly done the research to create this expansive and well-crafted world." ### [*Three Eight One*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837860753?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Aliya Whiteley (January 16th) Set hundreds of years in the future, Aliya Whiteley follows the story of Rowena Savalas, the curator of an archive of the 21st Century internet, when she discovers a strange story posted in 2024\. It's a story of a person named Fairly who is undertaking a quest now that she's come of age, followed by a mysterious "breathing man", and it's unclear if it's a true story or a fantasy. As she follows the rabbit hole of this story, Rowena begins to question the choices she's made in her life, and muses on some of the story's recurring elements, such as the number 381\. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-83786-075-3?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Whitely’s ear for poetic prose will draw in readers who prefer their speculative fiction on the more literary side. Strange and slippery, this experimental outing offers lots to chew on." ### Stress test URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/hugo-award-2023-chengdu-worldcon-controversy/ Last updated: 2024-01-27T01:54:43.000Z If you pay any attention to the SF/F world, you've likely seen the news: last year's Hugo Awards are embroiled in a new scandal. This latest set of issues concerns a handful of folks who were nominated by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, but deemed "not eligible" by committee staff for a variety of suspect reasons. The Hugos are one of the biggest awards in the speculative fiction publishing / fan scene. It's been handed out nearly every year since 1953, and the list of works that have earned the prize include some of the genre's best, interesting, and thought-provoking stories and authors. The award has come under fire in the last decade: a series of scandals from fans trying to game the system for their own benefit have undermined the prestige that it's accumulated over the decades, while a series of other awards have arisen within fan circles further reduces its significance. This recent scandal threatens to do the same, and frustratingly, it's one that appears to be an unforced error on the part of the team administering the award. Here's what happened: the 20232 World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) was held in Chengdu, China. It was the second time the convention was held in Asia (the first was Nippon 2007, held in Yokohama–*thanks for the correction, James!*), and had already encountered some significant headwinds. A number of authors and fans [voiced their objections](https://www.thebookseller.com/news/authors-come-out-against-china-as-2023-worldcon-host?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the con's location and the country's [history of human rights violations](https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/china?ref=andrewliptak.com). The convention itself seemed as though it went through some organizational struggles: it was pushed back rather substantially to the end of October. When the [convention held its awards ceremony](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-winners-chengdu/), there were a handful of other anomalies: the award's organizers didn't release the typical long-list of voting data that usually accompanies the awards. This information shows off the voting behavior and serves as a useful tool to see how the award's voting went down. It's a neat feature, one that helps with transparency and ultimately, a reassurance that the awards are fair. There were a handful of excuses: folks who were traveling back to the US and dealing with full time jobs, but it wasn't [until last weekend that the information was finally released](https://www.thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Hugo-Award-Stats-Final.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com). A handful of things jumped out immediately upon its release. At the time that the nominations came out, [I noted the following](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-finalists/): > My initial reaction to the list is that it's a bit of a perplexing one: the novel category has a bunch of books that I thought for sure would get a nomination but didn't, like Ray Nayler's **The Mountain in the Sea**, R.F. Kuang's **Babel**, or Simon Jimenez's **The Spear Cuts Through Water**, each of which have been fairly highly acclaimed within fan circles, and in the larger literary / reading world. The longer nominations list shows that Kuang's *Babel* should have made the list under the Best Novel category: it garnered the third most votes, and should have made the list of finalists. Had it been there, I think there would have been a strong chance of it winning the category. Nayler's *The Mountain in the Sea* is also on the long list, but didn't get enough initial votes to make the final ballot. But *Babel* was labeled as "not eligible", with no further explanation. A handful of other awards were also given the label: - "Color the World" by Mu Ming (Best Novelette) - "Fongong Temple Pagoda" by Hai Ya (Best Short Story) - *History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century* (Best Related Work) - Paul Weimer (Best Fan Writer) - Xiran Jay Zhao (Astounding Award for Best New Writer) - Sandman, episode 6 (Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) Some of those were given explanations for why they weren't eligible, such as *History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century*, whose author was was on the Hugo Committee. Another work, "Color the World", seems to have been published in 2019, and while I can't see if "Fongong Temple Pagoda" was published prior to 2022, it's included in an anthology of Galaxy Award (China's big SF award) published that year, so I'm guessing it was. But that leaves Kuang, Weimer, and Zhao, all three of whom were left off the ballot for unknown reasons. Weimer [noted on his Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/posts/hugo-award-final-96866335?ref=andrewliptak.com) that he had no idea why he was left off, Zhao [noted that they were specifically listed as an eligible author](https://www.instagram.com/p/C2bCHwtvRQM/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and had no explanation from the Hugo team, and Kuang [says that she didn't decline](https://www.instagram.com/p/C2aTcbMLn49/?hl=en&ref=andrewliptak.com), and that "I assume this was a matter of undesirability rather than ineligibility. Excluding 'undesirable' work is not only embarrassing for all involved parties, but renders the entire process and organization illegitimate. Pity." The news has brought about a firestorm online, with Hugo administrator Dave McCarty [issuing an evasive non-answer for a statement](https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave) (“After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible”) before going on to insult commenters who had questions about the process. McCarty has pushed back on allegations that he and his team were pressured into removing the authors from the ballot, but it *appears* very much like this was a decision from the award's administrators to head off political issues, even if they weren't told to do so. That said, Cheryl Morgan [pointed out on her blog](https://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=29404&ref=andrewliptak.com) that one of the con progress reports noted that the "The Chengdu organizing committee will review the nominated works and validate the votes," and that voters would be able to select "works and individuals that comply with local laws and regulations." Hm. Over on his blog, author Charles Stross has a [good rundown of the culture around WorldCon](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and how the process got jammed up when Chinese fans were able to secure a site nomination: it boils down to a pair of cultures colliding in some predictable ways. *The Guardian* also has a [high-level overview](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/24/science-fiction-awards-held-in-china-under-fire-for-excluding-authors?ref=andrewliptak.com) that highlights some quotes from the snubbed nominees. *Transfer Orbit* has not reached out to Chengdu, the Hugo committee, or McCarty, given that none have issued useful statements. --- I've held off on writing about this over the last week: plenty of fellow writers have jumped in on the debate with their own takes and rundowns on the situation. The consequences are fairly clear: a handful of authors were removed and the larger body of SF fandom were denied an opportunity to make a fair selection. I've spent the last couple of days trying to think about how to think about this latest issue and *why* this feels like a notable point in the history of the awards. On its face, there's the general news interest for a community of readers invested in the award because they're a part of it. But that's a relatively small community, especially when you zoom out to look at fandom writ large: the horror community has its own awards, the crossover between the fandoms of the larger science fiction franchises and SF fandom feels as though it's growing further and further apart, and for the lay person, this sort of incident is the most inside of inside baseball in the science fiction fan/publishing/writing world, incomprehensible if you're not in the community. But what I keep coming back to is that this feels like it's part of a larger, systemic issue within fandom, and how the community's traditional institutions and traditions feel ill-prepared for a world that's vastly changed in the seven decades since the first Hugos were announced. This isn't the first crisis that the awards have experienced in the last decade: between 2013 and 2017, a group of fans launched a right-wing, anti-diversity campaign called "Sad Puppies", which exploited some of the rules to place their preferred nominees on the finalist ballots, before some safeguards were put in place. While these two issues aren't linked in any meaningful way, both situations have arisen because WorldCon and the Hugo Awards are volunteer organizations run on string, superglue, and lots of unpaid hours from passionate fans. As Stross noted in his piece, the World Science Fiction Society is something like a parasite that gets glommed onto a convention that wins a WorldCon site bid, with those teams then taking on the responsibility of administering the awards and programming for the event. The WSFS and Hugo Awards are guided by some overarching guidelines and constitutions, documents that have grown up alongside both institutions over the decades, and they function because fans have generally approached them in good faith: they understand how the rules work, vote accordingly, and accept the results. It helps that the Hugos have a fairly transparent voting process, and it's that faith in the system that has allowed the awards to remain a centerpiece in the science fiction publishing world. It's these instances where bad-faith actors find ways to manipulate the vote, or where a democratic process runs full-tilt into an author-minded system that we can see some of the breaking points in this sort of patch-work organization: if the Hugos and ancillary fandom relies on a measure of good faith for the system to work, it breaks down when it's not able to operate in those environments. Things get even more problematic when the administrators in charge use the rules and environment to make the sorts of unilateral decisions that leave potential nominees off the ballot. The resulting consequences feel like they'll be something of a downward spiral: as SF fandom loses trust and faith in the strength of the award and its institutions, they'll become less relevant – the creators and works that receive them won't garner the same respect as their predecessors. There's considerable value that'll be lost: not only as a sales and marketing tool for those authors, but because it's an award that holds particularly significant meaning and recognition for not just fandom, but for folks outside of the community as well. Place this in an environment where there are more awards and diverse fandoms than ever: there are the [Ignyte Awards](https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [Dragon Awards](https://awards.dragoncon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), the [Goodreads Choice Awards](https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2023?ref=andrewliptak.com), and so forth, which capture a significant number of participants that go far beyond SF fandom. The bigger comic cons pull in massive numbers of participants, while there are enormous dedicated fandoms that arise for various multimedia franchises, films, shows, games, and comics. Platforms like TikTok have brought about the rise of phenomenon like BookTok that have brought about a resurgence in interest in books of all types. I think that there's much from the literary traditions that captivates SF Fandom that would appeal to the much wider networks of fans out there, and that Fandom can and should grow beyond the traditional networks of local conventions, blogs, and in-person social networks that have existed for nearly a century. It has a lot that it can learn from the other fandoms, institutions, and organizations that are out there. [Walled gardensFandom often has some significant blinders when it comes to adopting or authors and books![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/03/IMG_0955-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-crichton-scifi-genre-fandom/) The next couple of years will be worth watching, to see how the next couple of conventions – Glasgow in 2024 and Seattle in 2025 – will react to this situation and contend with potential problems that arise. But even if these conventions go out of their way to ensure that there aren't problems with nominees, it's still a decentralized system, and there's still the potential for problems moving forward. A big part of this problem comes from the structural nature of the World Science Fiction Society, and how it's not an organization that directly oversees conventions or awards, but handles the administrative elements. Transforming this organization (or phasing it out and replacing it with a successor) into one that has more control over its programming strikes me as a way to remove some of the uncertainty and bring about a more professional approach to the planning and administration of the awards, one that would prevent folks from gaming or meddling with the awards, and restore some element of trust into them by actually being able to enforce its rules and constitutions with its conventions. It needs administrators that do more than throw up their hands and give non-statements to a frustrated group of people. That wouldn't be an easy thing to do (Morgan posted a [blog about it on her site](https://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=29408&ref=andrewliptak.com)) – fans and organizers can be decidedly finicky about the nature of the conventions they're running and taking part in. But at some point, the entire system will have to contend with the understanding that there will be actors and organizations that will find ways to hijack the system and institutions for their own purposes, and will need to plan accordingly. --- An aside to all of this: I was pleased to see that my book *Cosplay: A History* showed up in the longer list of numbers: 16 people nominated it for Best Related Work, and while it was knocked out of contention in the runoff, it was still neat to see it listed there. Thanks to those 16 people! Congratulations are also in order to Aidan Moher, whose book *Fight, Magic, Items* was also on that longer list with 25 initial votes. --- ### Traffic signals URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/traffic-signs-game-of-thrones-star-wars-geek-culture/ Last updated: 2024-01-20T00:29:10.000Z For as long as I've been interested in genre fiction and nerd stuff, there's been this persistent argument that it's a persecuted thing. You've probably heard the stories of kids getting stuffed into lockers or been made fun of for playing *Dungeons & Dragons* or going to school with a *Star Wars* lunchbox. It's a mindset that's persisted, even as it's increasingly clear over the last two decades that nerd stuff has dominated pop culture: just look at the success of everything from Peter Jackson's *Lord of the Rings*, *Dungeons & Dragons*, the rise of cinematic universes and superhero franchises, and... you get the picture. One of my favorite indicators for just how well this sort of pop culture has penetrated the mainstream world was seeing the words "WINTER IS COMING" in big electric letters on the side of I-89 here in Vermont. That catch phrase from HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's novels, *Game of Thrones*, works well here in Vermont: the winters here can be brutal, and snow tires are essential six months out of the year. I've seen these messages pop up up quite a bit over the years here in Vermont and elsewhere. Massachusetts switched their overhead road signs along I-93 on the way to Boston to various *Star Wars* references last May 4th (as my friend Dan and I were amused to see as we drove down to take part in the [Red Sox's *Star Wars* night](https://twitter.com/RedSox/status/1654256420479733760?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and there's been plenty of other examples that have popped up over the years. They're funny, in that you're catching a reference to something that you're a fan of, and recognize that there's another fan out there programming the signs. Of course, there's room for error, which brings me to this [week's news](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-joke-feds-banning-humorous-electronic-messages-highways-rcna134240?ref=andrewliptak.com): the US Federal Highway Administration released a new set of guidelines back in December, in which it [specifically says](https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/pdfs/11th%5FEdition/Chapter2hthu2n.pdf?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the messages displayed on the Changeable Message Signs (CMS) should be "simple, direct, brief, legible, and clear," and should not use "messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous," because they're potentially going to confuse drivers. The rules will take effect in 2026\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/01/12191336_10153241102852896_4435504829024361273-1.jpg) Image: [Vermont State Police](https://www.facebook.com/VermontStatePolice/photos/a.237732957895/10153241102852896/?paipv=0&eav=AfYN3l7DkGYJZzeg6eu1KU3RjmDEVSeWEaTvZ22aAOfEMpz5acGX772urH8H-1I3Nck&%5Frdr), 2015 The earliest recollection that I have of something like this is of people going up to the traffic control trailers, finding them unsecured, and typing in their own message. *Wired* has a [story of this happening in 2009](https://www.wired.com/2009/02/austin-road-sig/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and somewhere along the way, you started to see them percolate into official channels. I reached out to the Vermont Agency of Transportation to ask about this, and VTAOT's Josh Schultz, Operations and Safety Bureau Manager, provided me with the following statement: > "In recent years, the agency has increased its use of fun, funny, and witty highway safety messages. With few exceptions, the public has responded with an overwhelmingly positive appreciation for this type of messaging. Because of this feedback, the agency has continued to create and display these unique messages, along with standard highway safety messages. The funny and witty messages tend to generate conversations among drivers, passengers, coworkers, friends, and family. These conversations indicate a raised awareness of highway safety, so we view this as a positive outcome that we hope will change driver behavior for the better." The intentions make sense to me: seeing "WINTER IS COMING" along the highway is certainly eye-catching, and it can [grab the occasional headline](https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Do-you-have-an-idea-for-Vermonts-interstate-road-safety-signs-571512021.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) or [generate some talk amongst drivers](https://www.reddit.com/r/vermont/comments/18qbtc8/best%5Froad%5Fsafety%5Fsign%5Fyouve%5Fseen%5Fduring%5Fholiday/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Genre fiction has long had a stigma attached to it, often dismissed as fanciful or shallow entertainment because of their mass-produced nature. That's not the entire picture: genre stories have had wide appeal for decades (Frank Herbert's *Children of Dune* is often cited as the first SF bestselling novel), while J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings* enjoyed enormous popularity that's only grown over the decades. But even with those examples, SF, comics, gaming and other such hobbies were often relegated to the side as childish or beneath things proper literature or adult concerns. I don't think you can make an argument that these sorts of stories *haven't* grown into mainstream culture in recent years. Just look at *Dungeons & Dragons*, often held up as that nerdy thing that outcasts did, and how it's become a cultural juggernaut in recent years. When I started playing D&D as a summer camp counselor starting in 2000: at first it was just a couple of friends and I, but by the time I left, a number of our fellow counselors had joined in on the fun – the camp still has D&D as part of its class lineup. It's only gotten bigger since then, with new editions, with the rise gaming podcasts, appearances in big shows like *The Big Bang Theory* and *Stranger Things*, and so forth. D&D is only one part of the picture: it's been joined by countless other big nerd properties, like Marvel's cinematic universe, the *Lord of the Rings* and *Harry Potter* film franchises, various big television shows like *LOST, Battlestar Galactica*, *Game of Thrones*, and so forth. It always boggles my mind that what was once a chunky, dense epic fantasy novel has become the bases for one of the most popular shows in the world. That's why I've often felt that things such as signs and shirts are good anecdotal examples of just how popular these stories and hobbies are. Tossing "WINTER IS COMING" up onto a traffic sign is a pretty specific reference, but the fact that it exists as such shows how recognizable it is. At the same time, I can see why the feds want to rein this practice in. Years ago, I read a book by Earl Swift, *The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers who Created the American Superhighways*. It's an intriguing read that explores how the highway system came together, and one thing that stuck out for me was a description of how much work engineers put into ensuring that highway signs were readable, debating over differing combinations of color, fonts, letter spacing, and so forth. These aren't trivial things to consider! On the side of the road near my house was an older road sign, and surrounded by its modern counterparts, the differences are noticeable. Clarity is important for safety, and we're in dire need of that. The US Department of Transportation [notes that we're in a crisis situation](https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem?ref=andrewliptak.com) when it comes to traffic fatalities. So, cutting back on some of the fun – but ultimately secondary – messaging makes quite a bit of sense. I can't imagine that a sign like this is responsible for any meaningful number of accidents, but it strikes me as the type of messaging that can be more effective elsewhere. We'll just have to look to other ways to see nerd culture taking root in the wider world. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2024/01/IMG_5421-2-1.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently reading It's been a little while since I've tallied up my reading list. Here's what I've been reading lately: - [*Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517915230?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shigeru Kayama (translated by Jeffrey Angles). I've been on a Godzilla kick lately: I caught *Godzilla Minus One* in theaters twice, then rewatched a couple of the films (I'm going to check out Apple's *Monarch* next), and this seems like a fun thing to pick up alongside that. - [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells. The latest Murderbot. Need I say more? - [*A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780520294004?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Henry Notaker. This is for an upcoming *Transfer Orbit* report that I'm working on. - [*Starling House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799050?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alix E. Harrow. I've really enjoyed Harrow's novels, particularly [*The Ten Thousand Doors of January*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421973?ref=andrewliptak.com). This one's an excellent gothic house novel. - [*Blood in the Machine: The Origin of the Rebellion Against Big Tech*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316487740?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian Merchant. As soon as I send this out, I'm going to finish this book. I'm a big fan of Merchant's [*The One Device*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316546249?ref=andrewliptak.com), his history of the iPhone. This one's just as good. *\* Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases made through them might result in a commission to Transfer Orbit.* --- ## Further reading ### **11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to pick up in January 2024** In case you missed it, here are 11 new SF/F books that caught my eye coming out in January. I've got another list brewing for next week, so stay tuned for that. [11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to pick up in January 2024We got our first real snowstorms of the season here in Vermont and it finally feels like it winter. I like the snow and winter season quite a bit (more when my snow blower actually works), and it’s a time of the year when I feel like I get get![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/IMG_5292.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-books/) **All the types of science fiction**. The folks at [McSweeney's has a side-splitting list](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/all-the-types-of-science-fiction?ref=andrewliptak.com) of various types of science fiction. It's hilarious and dead-on. My favorites? "The Strugatsky brothers do not like Stalin" and "David Cronenberg has something to show you" **Butler the prophet**. This is an [interesting piece in *The Atlantic* from Tiya Miles](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/octavia-butlers-guide-surviving-apocalypse/677106/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who takes a look at how Octavia Butler went about thinking about the future. **Dune II**. David Lynch's *Dune* wasn't the next *Star Wars* his studio wanted it to be, but there had been some efforts to put a sequel together. [Max Evry writes in *Wired*](https://www.wired.com/story/david-lynch-dune-sequel-script-unearthed/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how he found the script for Lynch's adaptation of *Dune: Messiah*. ### **Fire in the hole** I was really let down by Paramount's *Halo* series, but the trailer for the second season looks like it might be better? We'll find out next month. [Fire in the holeThe trailer for the second season of Halo looks enticing enough to try it again![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Halo-Season-2.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/halo-season-2-trailer-watch/) ### **Here are the finalists for the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award** Six 2023 books are up for the annual PKD award. It' a good batch. [Here are the finalists for the 2024 Philip K. Dick AwardThe best paperback science fiction novel published in 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Blank-6-Grids-Collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-philip-k-dick-award-carey-coney-jacobs/) ### **My most anticipated books of 2024** Every year brings a new class of books: here are 20 that I'm most looking forward to reading. [My most anticipated books of 202420 new books that I’m excited to dig into this year![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Beige-Brown-Grey-Minimalist-Aesthetic--Inspiration-Moodboard-Photo-Collage--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/) ### **Netflix's *3 Body Problem* looks ambitious and thrilling** I've long been a fan of Cixin Liu's *Three-Body Problem*, and I'm really eager to see what this adaptation will look like. Also, something that I just learned the other day? Amazon Prime has the Chinese version up for [streaming as well](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body/dp/B0B676WP3C?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Netflix’s 3 Body Problem looks ambitious and thrillingStreaming on March 21st, 2024![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/Untitled.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/3-body-problem-netflix-trailer-watch/) **Obits**. Two big names in SF/F died in January: [Terry Bisson](https://locusmag.com/2024/01/terry-bisson-1942-2024/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [Howard Waldrop](https://locusmag.com/2024/01/howard-waldrop-1946-2024/?utm%5Fsource=bluesky&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=fedica-RSS). ### **The next *Star Wars* movie will be *The Mandalorian & Grogu*** Newcomers FYI, I write a lot in this newsletter about *Star Wars*. Here's the latest big news from the franchise: a new film will be a *Mandalorian* spinoff. [The next Star Wars movie will be The Mandalorian & GroguComing to theaters ... at some point![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/unnamed.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/) ### **There's a new *Star Trek* movie coming ... again** I'm less of a *Star Trek* fan, but I've been enjoying the newer iterations. There's a new film coming out, and I took some time to jot down the timeline of will-they-or-won't-they film *Star Trek 4*. [There’s a new Star Trek movie coming ... againLet’s see if this one sticks?![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/StarTrek-2009-Abrams-1.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-new-star-trek-film-timeline/) ### **What I read in 2023** I didn't read nearly as much as I wanted to in 2023\. Hopefully 2024 will be better. [What I read in 202338 books in 2023.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2024/01/IMG_5221.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2023/) --- ### There's a new Star Trek movie coming ... again URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-new-star-trek-film-timeline/ Last updated: 2024-01-16T12:00:52.000Z Restart the clock: Paramount has [announced](https://deadline.com/2024/01/andor-toby-haynes-star-trek-movie-seth-grahame-smith-writing-1235712646/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it has a new *Star Trek* film in the works, with *Andor*'s Toby Haynes set to direct. It's being described as a prequel to J.J. Abrams' 2009 film *Star Trek*, which rebooted the franchise in a new timeline (known as the Kelvin universe), and that it'll be something of an origin story for the world. Also in the announcement was word that the long-in-the-works *Star Trek 4*, a sequel to 2016's *Star Trek Beyond*, was still in development and now being billed as the "final" installment of that series. Stop me if you've heard this before: in the eight years since the studio released *Beyond,* Paramount has struggled to put into production a follow up project, something made all the more difficult by a competitive theatrical environment where major franchise films are routinely expected to cross the $1 billion box office mark. At the same time, it's complicated matters by building out an impressive television universe on its streaming service, Paramount+, which has steadily added shows that have revitalized the franchise in its original medium. That split in focus has led to a messy decade and-a-half for *Star Trek*: competing storylines, casts, and canons, all of which seems to have made it difficult for the studio to figure out what story to tell to keep the exploits of Starfleet in theaters. I've written a number of these updates over the years, but it's worth laying everything out in a timeline to see just how complicated and sprawling this effort has been. --- Here's the saga of *Star Trek's Kelvin* timelinefranchise: - A prequel to the original *Star Trek* series had long been in the works, but after *Star Trek: Nemesis* (a spinoff of *Star Trek: The Next Generation*) bombed in 2002, the franchise sort of went on the back burner. - Paramount hired director J.J. Abrams for a franchise reboot, *Star Trek* in 2007\. The film is set in an alternate timeline from the rest of the main franchise, thanks to some handwaving, which allowed Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman to sidestep some of the canon baggage that came with the rest of the franchise. The film was a pretty big success when it was released in 2009\. The main cast (Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, John Cho, Karl Urban, and Anton Yelchin) sign up for two sequels. - Abrams is tapped to direct a sequel after the success of the first film, *Star Trek Into Darkness*, which comes out in 2013\. The film featured Benedict Cumberbatch as a character named "John Harrison" who turned out to be an alternate version of Khan Noonien Singh, the principal villain in *Star Trek: Wrath of Khan*. The film was heavily criticized for this and a bunch of other things, like its darker tone, some gratuitous scenes, and generally underwhelmed with fans and critics. - Because Hollywood likes trilogies, Paramount started working on a third film. Abrams opted not to direct (having been tapped to direct *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*) and eventually, Justin Lin is hired. The film, *Star Trek Beyond* hits theaters in 2016 and underperformed at the box office, but was generally well received. This is where things start to get fun. - The original cast has signed on for a trio of films, and in 2015, Pine and Quinto had scored [some raises in renegotiations](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-3-stars-raises-805204/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) for another installment. They and the other cast members are starting to see their stars rise. Tragically, [Yelchin dies in a car accident in the summer of 2016](https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-actor-anton-yelchin-has-died-in-a-car-acciden-1782247263?ref=andrewliptak.com). Pegg [later explained](https://www.gamesradar.com/simon-pegg-interview-star-trek-beyond/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that his death put a damper on the cast's enthusiasm to return. - A month later, Paramount [announced](https://deadline.com/2016/07/star-trek-4-movie-set-chris-hemsworth-chris-pine-1201787943/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that it had greenlit *Star Trek 4,* which would bring back Chris Hemsworthas Kirk's father (who died in the opening of the 2009 film.) - In November 2015, Paramount gets in on the streaming game by announcing an original *Star Trek* series for its streaming service, CBS All Access, *Star Trek: Discovery*, which would be set a decade or so to the original series, but would remain in the franchise's main storyline, rather than the Kelvin universe. - In 2017, [word breaks](https://deadline.com/2017/12/quentin-tarantino-star-trek-movie-jj-abrams-1202220032/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Abrams and director Quentin Tarantino were developing a *Star Trek* film, one unconnected to the Kelvin franchise. - In April 2018, Paramount [announced](https://variety.com/2018/film/news/s-j-clarkson-star-trek-4-chris-pine-chris-hemsworth-1202787592/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that it had hired S.J. Clarkson to helm *Star Trek 4*, reiterating that it would feature Hemsworth. - June 2018: Alex Kurtzman signs a five-year deal to oversee Paramount+'s *Star Trek* efforts, which includes some word of a handful of shows, including one about Starfleet Academy, a *Wrath of Khan* story, an animated series (eventually *Lower Decks*), and a limited series (eventually *Picard*?) - Just a couple of months later in August, [word breaks](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-4-chris-pine-chris-hemsworth-talks-fall-1133802/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that contract talks between Pine and Quinto broke down and the pair walked away. Clarkson [moves on](https://deadline.com/2019/01/game-of-thrones-prequel-hbo-pilot-s-j-clarkson-to-direct-naomi-ackie-7-more-cast-1202531071/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) to direct a *Game of Thrones* prequel series pilot for HBO. - November 2018, the first season of *Star Trek: Discovery* is released. - January 2019, Paramount [announces](https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-discovery/news/1009002/cbs-all-access-goes-black-ops-with-michelle-yeoh-for-new-star-trek-series/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that it's developing a *Discovery* spinoff series featuring Michelle Yeoh called Section 31, about a secretive branch of Starfleet. - Paramount hasn't given up on *Star Trek*, and in November 2019, [taps Noah Hawley](https://www.andrewliptak.com/legions-noah-hawley-will-direct-the-next-star-trek-film/) to write and direct a new film. The film would reportedly feature a new cast and would be about them confronting a deadly virus, but would be set in the Kelvin timeline. - Tarantino [noted in an interview](https://consequence.net/2019/12/filmmaker-of-the-year-quentin-tarantino/2/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that he was "steering away" from his *Star Trek* project. - January 2020: Paramount releases the first season of *Star Trek: Picard*, a *Next Generation* followup for its streaming service Paramount+. In August 2020, it debuts an animated series, Star Trek: Lower Decks, set during the *TNG* era. - That project is [short-lived](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-has-reportedly-put-noah-hawleys-star-trek-film-on-hold/), however. In August 2020, Paramount tapped the brakes after bringing in a new executive, Emma Watts, to oversee its film slate. One of her priorities was to figure out what the future of *Star Trek* would be for the studio, especially with the success of other franchises like *Star Wars* and Marvel. As a result, Hawley's film (and presumably other projects) was paused. - March 2021: Paramount [announces development](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-is-moving-forward-with-new-star-trek-movie/) of a new film, this one to be written by *Star Trek: Discovery* writer Kalinda Vazquez. It's not known where this one would fit into the larger scheme of things. - April 2021: [word breaks](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-scheduled-new-star-trek-film-2023/) that Paramount has put another *Star Trek* film on the schedule for 2023, something that was apparently completely new, and it wasn't based on the script that Vazquez had just begun working on. - In July 2021, Paramount [announces](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wandavision-matt-shakman-director-star-trek-film/) that it has hired Matt Shakman (*WandaVision, Always Sunny in Philadelphia*) to direct a new *Star Trek* film, possibly the one that was announced in April of that year. - October 2021, Paramount releases an animated series set during the *Voyager* era, *Star Trek: Prodigy*, which is aimed at younger audiences. - November 2021, the studio [reshuffles its slate of films](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-transformers-movie-release-date-1235045937/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io): the film scheduled for 2023 was bumped from June to December. - January 2022, Paramount [announces](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-universe-discovery-strange-new-worlds-picard-renewals/) a bunch of updates for its streaming shows (lots of renewals) and in February, it [revealed](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-section-31-starfleet-academy/) that it was developing a new series, Starfleet Academy, an idea that had been kicking around for years. - Later in February 2022, Abrams [reveals](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-4-kelvin-universe/) at a presentation that *Star Trek 4* is back in the works, with the original cast slated to return. This *might* be the secret film destined for 2023? [There's also a hitch](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-sequel-reveal-surprised-its-own-stars-1235097557/?ref=andrewliptak.com): apparently nobody told stars of the Kelvin films that this was happening. Pine [later notes](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a43023561/chris-pine-dungeons-and-dragons-interview-2023/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the film feels "cursed" and that he hadn't heard anything about it as of March 2023\. - Also in February 2022, we get confirmation that *Picard* would [end with its third season](https://trekmovie.com/2022/02/19/interview-akiva-goldsman-on-picard-going-beyond-season-3-and-his-star-trek-anthology-series-idea/?ref=andrewliptak.com). - May 2022: *Strange New Worlds*, a direct prequel to the original series debuts on Paramount+. - Director Matt Shakman [departs](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-4-loses-director-matt-shakman-2023-movie-1235207049/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) his *Star Trek* film in favor of Marvel's *Fantastic Four in August 2022\.* Shortly thereafter, Paramount [removes](https://www.thewrap.com/star-trek-4-new-sequel-release-date-removed-from-schedule/?ref=andrewliptak.com) the film from its release calendar. - March 2023: Paramount [officially greenlights](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/star-trek-starfleet-academy-series-paramount-plus-1235568891/?ref=andrewliptak.com) *Starfleet Academy*, with production slated for sometime in 2024\. We also [learn](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/star-trek-discovery-final-season-5-paramount-plus-premiere-date-2024-1235541321/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that *Star Trek: Discovery* will come to an end with Season 5\. In April, Paramount announces a long-in-the-works spinoff, *Section 31* starring Michelle Yoeh [will be a straight-to-streaming film](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-section-31-streaming-service-experiments/) rather than a series. - June 2023: Paramount [cancels *Star Trek: Prodigy*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/paramount-plus-removes-grease-star-trek-prodigy-queen-of-the-universe-the-game-1235522633/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* of which production had largely been completed for its second season. In October, Netflix [announces](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/star-trek-prodigy-season-2-netflix-1235752032/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's picked up the show's second season, which would debut in 2024\. - January 2024: the [](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/new-star-trek-movie-in-the-works-1235209150/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[news arrives](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/star-trek-origin-story-movie-set-andor-director-star-trek-4-still-in-development-1235868141/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Paramount has put a new *Star Trek* film into development, with *Andor's* Toby Haynes tapped to direct and Seth Grahame-Smith set to write. The film will be set years prior to the 2009 film and serve as an origin story for Starfleet. Along with that announcement came confirmation that *Star Trek 4* was also still in development, with it now being described as the "final" Kelvin film. --- Got all that? In one way, this entire saga is illustrative when you look at the economics and drama of Hollywood productions. Most of the actors involved in Kelvin films have been doing pretty well, career-wise. Chris Pine has been landing roles in films like *Wonder Woman* and *Dungeons & Dragons*, Zoe Saldana has been a big part of Marvel's *Guardians of the Galaxy* films and James Cameron's *Avatar* films, and Simon Pegg has been doing pretty well for himself in the *Mission Impossible* films. The talent is just getting more and more expensive to retain in a series of films that haven't exactly been doing gangbusters at the box office. Pine himself observed that in an interview with *Esquire* last year: “I’m not sure *Star Trek* was ever built to do that \[*Avengers*\-class box office amounts\] kind of business. I always thought, 'Why aren’t we just appealing to this really rabid fan group and making the movie for a good price and going on our merry way, instead of trying to compete with the Marvels of the world?'” That's a question that comes up a lot, especially with the recent waves of news about studios cutting back on streaming ambitions, and seeing major blockbusters struggle to make a profit. At the same time, films like Gareth Edwards' *The Creator* made [headlines for delivering a slick-looking film at a fraction of the price](https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/the-creator-gareth-edwards-greig-fraser-oren-soffer-ilm-1235738107/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of other films, showing that it is possible to produce big films without the $300-$400 million dollar price tags. The bigger those budgets, the higher the expectations of a bigger return at the box office. This is something that Disney has stumbled into in recent years: *Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness*, *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever*, *Thor: Love and Thunder*, *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,* and *The Marvels* all roughly fell into the $200-$250 million dollar range, while the various new *Star Wars* films cost anywhere from the $250-$500 million dollar range. Most of those have done pretty well, but when they miss, they really miss. The various Kelvin films came in under those numbers: they ranged between $150-$190 million, but weren't able to translate those smaller (!) costs into much greater gains. Compare these franchise blockbusters with the economics of horror films. Back in 2015, NPR's Planet Money [aired an excellent episode](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/21/433505958/horror-is-the-best-deal-in-hollywood?ref=andrewliptak.com) that pointed out that these films get the most bang for their buck for studios because these films can be made fairly cheaply and can go on to really earn a considerable amount of money. *Star Trek* has a huge, multi-generational fan base, so on paper, you'd assume that these types of films would be capable of pulling in those sorts of numbers: cheaper films = better profit margin, yes? An element here is that *Star Trek* has always been a story that aspired to intelligent storytelling over big-screen spectacle, and that's hard to pull off in a [four-quadrant movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-quadrant%5Fmovie?ref=andrewliptak.com) that has to feature plenty of action and special effects. In a lot of ways, Abram's *Star Trek* was a huge boost to a franchise that had gotten fairly stale by the end of the 1990s / early 2000s, and it did really well because it was a return to theaters after a significant break. We saw the same thing happen when *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* came out: there was a lot of pent-up demand and excitement for the franchise to return to theaters and a huge box office return. But Abrams' approach to the world remains somewhat controversial. Plenty of long-time fans were displeased at how out of step it felt with the rest of the franchise – blockbuster sci-fi epic over cerebral space thriller, and I've heard more than one Trek fan describe it as a *Star Wars* film in a Starfleet uniform, and I think it highlights an interesting point for diverging away from an existing continuity that's been around for decades. I think the relative success (critically, [not financially](https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/paramount-plus-lost-238-million-q3-earnings-mission-impossible-1234921672/?ref=andrewliptak.com)) of the streaming shows comes from the fact that the franchise is a bit more at home as a television show: its strengths are as an ongoing character drama that untangles all sorts of mysteries and cosmic conundrums that work better on a weekly basis rather than an action-packed 2 hours. Those TV shows also tend to budget in at around or under $10 million an episode, which means you get quite a bit more story for $100 million than the bigger budgets that films command. The shows have also been helped by the lack of need to prove that they're bringing in globs of money, although I suspect that'll be shifting. Paramount hasn't done itself any favors by essentially building out two competing franchises: one in theaters, with lengthy gaps between installments with a cast and story that fans aren't bonding with as strongly as their streaming counterparts. Under Alex Kurtzman, Paramount has built out a big plan for its TV franchise and provided something of a roadmap for the future. On the film side of things, there's a sense that they aren't really sure where to take the franchise next, other than the idea that they need one more installment. This isn't anything terribly new: plenty of franchises have build their stories installment by installment, but in a world where Marvel's demonstrated the ability to build out an impressive, interconnected world with the MCU, there's more of an expectation from fans that these successive films will build on one another and continue to grow – much like the TV shows have operated for a long time. (Marvel also makes it look super easy, [even though they've gotten lucky more often than not](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/).) There's been some promising developments along the way: Paramount taking the time to step back and evaluate its film strategy and seemingly taking the steps to cap off the Kelvin franchise with a finale would help end that bifurcated franchise, and maybe get back to a point where they're able to take those popular television shows and see if audiences will follow from their TVs to films. Of course, this could all be moot: [Paramount and its various holdings are about to go up for auction](https://nypost.com/2024/01/10/business/shari-redstone-launches-auction-of-paramount-global-holder-source/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and there's been some speculation that Warner Bros. is interested in acquiring the studio, as [is studio Skydance](https://www.wsj.com/business/media/skydance-backers-explore-all-cash-deal-to-gain-control-of-paramount-3530a409?ref=andrewliptak.com). Another change in owners / leaders will undoubtably bring about some changes for the future of the franchise and its other properties, meaning that everything that's happened could change again, and the handful of film that are on the books or in development could be taken back off when the creators decide they're wasting their time and move onto other things. So: we'll see. *Star Trek*'s greatest legacy has been its inspirational and optimistic view of the future, and hopefully, the studio will figure out some sort of cohesive plan that ensures that the franchise sticks around in a meaningful way. --- An aside: after I wrote this, Charlie Jane Anders sent out a [new issue of her newsletter *Happy Dancing*](https://buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/reboot-star-wars/?ref=andrewliptak.com) yesterday, making the case for *Star Wars* to be completely rebooted, and that sort of ties in with these thoughts about the troubles that *Star Trek* has experienced. It's worth a read, although it's not a take that I agree with: that it would be a good opportunity to recenter some focus on character journeys and inconsistencies that exist throughout the original trilogy. I don't think these longer-running franchises can easily be rebooted from ground up like a superhero story, but I *do* think that it's preferable to simply reinvent them. It got me thinking a little about the idea of building on these big foundations or just razing them to the ground to reboot them, and I *think* that's sort of why we've seen diminishing returns for Abrams' Kelvin films: the films gave *Trek* a new look, but lost something in the translation. In his book [*Phasers on Stun!*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593185698?ref=andrewliptak.com), Ryan Britt makes a compelling argument for *Star Trek*'s continued relevance coming down to different creators coming up with new takes on the world. When you go back to the well for a new take on those original characters, you don't always come away with the same emotional weight. I love Abrams' 2009 *Star Trek,* but I don't think it has the same resonance as the characters that it's imitating. At the same time, *Strange New Worlds* is playing some of the same characters, but it's got a slightly different approach, and it's not quite aiming to replicate what came before, but put a new spin on it. For *Star Wars*, I'd say that we've seen something similar: Abrams' *The Force Awakens* acts as a sort of soft reboot of the world and characters, and that trilogy only occasionally doe something interesting with the characters. But: look at the approach that Tony Gilroy took with *Andor*: he was able to look at the world in some completely different ways, and the result of that differing approach is a very compelling story, yet in a way that adheres to the same continuity. So: I think long-term planning is a good thing for any sort of franchise, with enough allowance for creators to take it in interesting places when the opportunity arises. *(We've had a good chat about this in #movies-tv-streaming in the Slack channel – join us!)* --- ### Fire in the hole URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/halo-season-2-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-01-15T12:00:36.000Z The next season of *Halo* is coming to Paramount+ in just a couple of weeks (it debuts on the streaming platform on February 8th), and to get everyone ready, the network has released a trailer for what to expect. When Paramount debuted the show back in 2022, it made some ... choices with the original source material, and the show has largely been seen as underwhelming following its release. Expectations for the show were sky-high: there have been a number of attempts to adapt the video game franchise for a film and then TV series, most of which never came to fruition or underwhelmed. Neill Blomkamp had been tapped to adapt the game for a film way back in 2005, and when that didn't work out, he went on to direct his debut film *District 9*. From there, Microsoft helmed a short series called *Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn* in 2012*,* a series of five, 15 minute episodes that were stitched together into a short film, then *Halo: Nightfall* in 2014, a five-episode series. In 2013, word broke that Stephen Spielberg was producing a live-action series, which lingered for a couple of years until Showtime picked it up. Shortly before that first season aired, the [network announced that it had renewed the show for a second season](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paramount-plus-halo-series-renewed-season-2/) – notably with a new showrunner, David Weiner, who replaced Steven Kane (who had in turn replaced the original showrunner, Kyle Killen back in 2019.) The result was something of a mess: the series felt like it was all over the place, and couldn't quite pin down what it was about. The horrors of what the UNSC did to children to turn them into super soldiers? A weird hunt for some ancient Forerunner artifacts? The dynamics between the UNSC and the colonies? All of the above? The series never felt like it had a concrete direction and as a result, never really gelled for me, turning from an entertaining story to being something of a slog to wade through. Not something you want for a big-budget IP for your streaming service, especially with a massive existing fan base! I have a feeling that those problems in Season 1 came in part because of the long chain of people that have been attached to and then left the project. Everyone adds a bit to the pot, and by the time they're getting down to the wire to produce and film it, there's just too many competing visions and ideas in there. I'm hoping that with a change in showrunners for this season, we'll get a bit more focus for the season's overall story. Watching this trailer, it looks like that might be the case. There's certainly a lot of action on display here as the Covenant hone in on a major human colony on the planet Reach and begin an invasion. There's a lot to play with there, especially given that fall of Reach is the subject of an entire game, *Halo: Reach* (one of my absolute favorite installments of the series.) I'm guessing that we won't see Noble Squad centered in it, but at the very least, it's a major event in the larger storyline that leads directly to the original video game, *Halo*. At the very least, this looks and feels more like what *Halo* should be: an action-packed military SF story. That's a hard thing to do, jumping from video games to television! The games put you in the action, and as Master Chief (or The Rookie or Noble Six), you're constantly going from battle to battle. You can't really do that in a TV series, both for storytelling and budgetary reasons. For one, it would get super expensive quickly, and two, there's a lot of downtime between action that doesn't make for good gameplay. I think the first season did a decent job at that, trying to get into the mind and background of Master Chief (seeing him out of armor didn't bother me as much as it did other people), and taking those steps to build up his character makes for a better story, at least in theory. It's always hard to tell from marketing material how these sorts of things will turn out, but if this trailer is any indication of how Season 2 will go, it's something that I'll take another crack at, and hope that I can chalk up the first season's missteps as growing pains. ### Netflix's 3 Body Problem looks ambitious and thrilling URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/3-body-problem-netflix-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2024-01-13T12:00:42.000Z After teasing [the series way back in June 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-netflix-trailer/), Netflix released a full trailer for its upcoming science fiction series *3 Body Problem*, as well as a release date: March 21st, 2024\. The series is an adaptation of the novel and trilogy by Chinese SF author Cixin Liu, about humanity's devastating first contact with an alien civilization known as the Trisolarans, beginning in the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and extending all the way to the heat death of the universe. It's safe to say that this is a series that's epic in scale. This trailer really leans into the mystery at the center of the novel: a number of scientists begin committing suicide after experiencing some mysterious hallucinations, with a mysterious virtual reality game potentially connected to them. There's a bit more to it than that: the novel begins with an imprisoned astrophysicist during the Cultural Revolution who makes contact with a distant alien civilization, and their impending arrival to escape their hellish solar system. I'm digging how this looks: the first novel has *a lot* in it, from social commentary to virtual reality, astrophysics, alien contact, and that's just the first book: the second and third novels are even bigger and it'll be wild to see how that ends up in streaming form. The trilogy ([*Three-Body Problem*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765382030?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Dark Forest*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765386694?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Death's End*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765386632?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinen) has garnered considerable critical acclaim from readers and reviewers since their publication between 2014 and 2016\. *Three-Body Problem* earned Cixin Liu the first-ever Hugo Award for Best Novel to be won by a Chinese author in 2016, and it helped to open the floodgates of translations of science fiction from the country. In recent years, publishers have released novels like Hao Jingfang's [*Vagabonds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422094?ref=andrewliptak.com) and Chen Quifan's [*Waste Tide*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389336?ref=andrewliptak.com), while magazines like *Clarkesworld* and *Uncanny* have released a number of translated short stories from Chinese authors, introducing them to English-speaking audiences for the first time. [Narratives of modernizationA history of Chinese science fiction Image: Andrew LiptakIn 2015, author Ken Liu stepped up to the podium at Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, to accept the Hugo Award for Best Novel on behalf of Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem. It was a historic moment: Liu![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_6232f0a5-8633-45b3-8aba-df7d74cd3636_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/narratives-of-modernization/) Netflix [announced the series](https://www.andrewliptak.com/liu-cixin-three-body-problem-netflix-game-of-thrones/) back in September 2020 with some high-profile names behind it: it was created by *Game of Thrones* creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, with *Star Wars: The Last Jedi* director Rian Johnson and his producing partner Ram Bergman, *The Terror: Infamy* producer Alexander Woo, translator Ken Liu, and and Liu Cixin serving as producers. I know the *GOT* guys caught a lot of flack for how they bungled the ending of that adaptation, but they did have a good track record of adapting a sprawling and complicated story into a successful TV series. I'm optimistic here, although it does look like there'll be some changes – this feels like it has more of an international angle to it, rather than being set mainly in China. [Writing for *The Hollywood Reporter*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/3-body-problem-benioff-weiss-netflix-thrones-interview-1235783117/?ref=andrewliptak.com), James Hibbard (author of the excellent [*Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524746773?ref=andrewliptak.com)) peeled back the curtain a bit on the genesis of the series, noting that Benioff and Weiss recognized that it was an ambitious story (not unlike *GOT*), and that it was less about the horrors of alien contact and more about how humanity responds to a global challenge – not well. The whole piece is worth a read: it provides a good amount of detail about how the series came about, as well as some bits and pieces about their post-*GOT* experience, and what happened to their canceled HBO series *Confederates* and the *Star Wars* film they were working on. Liu's *Remembrances of Earth's Past* trilogy has remained one of the highest-profile science fiction stories to come out of China, and has catapulted the author into domestic and international fame. He's released a number of other books over the years, but his novella *The Wandering Earth* garnered headlines when it was adapted and billed as "the first Chinese sci-fi blockbuster" when it was released back in 2019 (a prequel, *The Wandering Earth 2* was released in 2023), while *Three-Body Problem* has endured adaptations – a film back in 2015 that was produced but shelved, an [animated series in 2014](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cixin-liu-the-three-body-problem-minecraft/), and a [Chinese live-action series in 2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-chinese-sf-watch/). I'm looking forward to checking this one out when it debuts in March. ### Here are the finalists for the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2024-philip-k-dick-award-carey-coney-jacobs/ Last updated: 2024-01-12T11:59:59.000Z The folks at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the Philip K. Dick Trust, and the Philip K. Dick Award have announced the six finalists for the 2024 award. The award is handed out annually to a "distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year." Kali Wallace won the award for her novel [*Dead Space*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984803726?ref=andrewliptak.com)in 2022, while Kimberly Unger earned the award for her novel [*The Extractionist*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963767?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2023\. Here are this year's finalists (*usual disclaimer about Bookshop.org links and commissions*): - [*Danged Black Thing*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781955765114?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Eugen Bacon - [*The Museum of Human History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781953534910?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebekah Bergman - [*Infinity Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316504386?ref=andrewliptak.com) by M. R. Carey - [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316504386?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Wild Spaces*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250866837?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S. L. Coney ([My review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sl-coney-wild-spaces-lovecraftian-horror/)) - [*Where Rivers Go To Die*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780578368030?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Dilman Dila - [*These Burning Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316463324?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Bethany Jacobs This year's award and special citation be handed out at [Norwescon](https://www.norwescon.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Friday, March 29th, 2024 at Norwescon 46\. ### 11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to pick up in January 2024 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/january-books/ Last updated: 2025-04-29T16:06:08.000Z We got our first real snowstorms of the season here in Vermont and it finally feels like it winter. I like the snow and winter season quite a bit (more when my snow blower actually works), and it's a time of the year when I feel like I get get my reading priorities straightened back out. I've reset the clock on my goals for the year: 52 book for 2024\. I'm ditching Goodreads this time around: I just reactivated my account on StoryGraph, a newish reading website that does many of the same things that Goodreads does, but hopefully in a better fashion – already the prompts for reviews look like they're a lot more interesting. We'll see how it goes. (You can find me [here](https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/andrewliptak?ref=andrewliptak.com) if you're on it) And of course with the new year upon us, there's no stop to the book that are coming down the pipeline. I've already sent out a note that highlights my most anticipated reads for 2024 (you can find that [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/), if you missed it). There are a whole bunch of other books hitting stores in January. As always: books with a link to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and might yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*. You can also support this newsletter by signing up for a paid subscription (details [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/)) [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Here are 11 new books that you should check out this month: ### [*The Atlas Complex*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855138?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Olivie Blake (January 9th) Olivie Blake brings her Atlas trilogy to a close with *The Atlas Complex* (preceded by *The Atlas Six* and *The Atlas Paradox*). In those first two novels, we're introduced to a world where a secretive magical society called The Society of Alexandrians brings on six new magicians once a decade. Blake now brings the trilogy to a conclusion as her six Alexandrians return to the magical library where they have to contend with threats from outside and within. The choices they make to uphold the system or upend it will have wide-reaching consequences. ### [*A Quantum Love Story*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780778369509?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Chen (January 30th) When a neuroscientist named Mariana Pineda loses her best friend Shay, she's ready to give up everything, even her new job at a top-of-the-line particle accelerator. She'd go through with it, too, save for the arrival of Carter Cho, who claims that they've known each other for a long time, and that she can't give up her work, and needs to remember what she's tells her: time is about to stop. Mariana finds herself stuck in a time loop, and the pair have to figure out how to escape. As the loops pile up, they have to work quickly: Carter's memories are beginning to fade, along with their chances of escaping. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7783-6950-9?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Despite the stress of their predicament, Chen’s charming young lovers find time to share some exquisite meals and tactfully presented love scenes. Frequent flashbacks to Mariana’s friendship with Shay provide sound motivation for her heroic action." ### [*Exordia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250233011?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Seth Dickinson (January 23rd) A Kurdish refugee named Anna Sinjari fled a genocide only to have an encounter with an alien in New York City's Central Park – Ssrin, a serpent-like alien who's on the run from a galactic empire . The two are brought together in strange ways, and as they each confront elements of their past – Anna in Kurdistan and Ssrin on the run from imperial agents – the two attract wider attention from the world that could have drastic complications for their lives and the rest of the planet. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250233011?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Layering in a bromance, an odd-couple pair of female physicists, an Iranian fighter pilot with a *Top Gun* obsession, and mother-daughter conflict, Dickinson skillfully puts the cosmic scale of the Exordian rebellion into manageably personal terms." ### [*Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593500194?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Heather Fawcett (January 16th) Heather Fawcett published her novel [*Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593500156?ref=andrewliptak.com) last year, about a scholar who's working on documenting Fae culture and ends up in a remote village with an insufferable academic rival, Wendell Bambleby. In this sequel, she's still dealing with Wendell, who happens to be an exiled faerie king, and who's trying to find a way home. Emily is working on a new project: mapping the faerie realms, and while preparing for her work, Wendell has landed himself in a new spot of trouble as assassins sent by his mother have arrived in Cambridge. Their adventures will take them further into Europe, where Emily thinks they can find a door back to Wendell's realm and find a way to free himself of his family's darker plans. ### [*Termush*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374613587?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sven Holm, Translated by Sylvia Clayton (January 16th) Originally published in 1967 in Denmark, this new translation of Sven Holm's novel is about a destination getaway that caters to the wealthy who want to get away from the effects of an ongoing "disaster" that's destroying the planet. This edition comes with an introduction from Jeff VanderMeer (Author of the [*Area X trilogy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374261177?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Hummingbird Salamander*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250829771?ref=andrewliptak.com), among others). This looks like an engrossing, entirely too relevant read for 2024\. ### [*Scorpio*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542035491?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Marko Kloos (January 1st) As noted in my 2024 anticipated books list, I recently finished Marko Kloos's *Frontlines* series, and was a bit bummed to see it come to an end. Fortunately, he's not done with the world just yet: Scorpio is the first in a new series set on a distant colony that follows a settler named Alex, eight years after Frontlines came to an end. The Lankies that have menaced humanity are still out there, and Alex and her canine companion (Ash) have to hold out after their shelter is discovered by the aliens. ### [*Kindling*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618732132?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kathleen Jennings (January 23rd) Author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings compiles her short fiction into her first collection. It includes a [number of her short stories](https://tanaudel.wordpress.com/2024/01/10/kindling-coming-very-soon/?ref=andrewliptak.com) including "[The Heart of Owl Abbas](https://www.tor.com/2018/04/11/the-heart-of-owl-abbas-kathleen-jennings/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," "[The Present Only Toucheth Thee](http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-present-only-toucheth-thee/?ref=andrewliptak.com)," and a number of others. *Kirkus Reviews* [describes it](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kathleen-jennings/kindling-jennings/?ref=andrewliptak.com) as "Women with guts and men of good fortune in search of their personal treasures. ### [*Under the Silence*](https://www.amazon.com/Under-Silence-Warchild-Mosaic-Novella-ebook/dp/B0CQBDSL7M/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=EZXG414FTDEW&keywords=Under+the+Silence+by+Karin+Lowachee&qid=1704742169&sprefix=under+the+silence+by+karin+lowachee%2Caps%2C102&sr=8-1&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karin Lowachee Karin Lowachee is one of my favorite authors: she wrote the excellent novel [*Warchild*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798396161399?ref=andrewliptak.com), and followed it up with *Burndive, Cagebird*, and recently, a collection of short stories from that world called *Omake*. Now, she returns to the world with a novella, *Under the Silence*. (I also have an excellent story from her in my anthology [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com)) In it, she picks up the story of Ryan Azarcon (the lead character from *Burndive*) who has been dealing with the fallout from an assassination attempt and has struck up a friendship with Jos Musey, a former alien agent and now negotiator. The two have to navigate their new relationship as everything begins to change unexpectedly around them. ### [*Mislaid in Parts Half-Known*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250848505?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Seanan McGuire (January 9th) The latest (9th!) installment of Seanan McGuire's [*Wayward Children*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250784285?ref=andrewliptak.com)series follows a child named Antsy who arrives at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children. She has a gift for finding doors, and when the school's resident mean girl discovers this, Antsy flees with a small group of friends, looking for the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, encountering harsh memories and more. ### [*The Tusks of Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855527?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ray Nayler (January 16th) I was a big fan of Ray Nayler's novel [*The Mountain in the Sea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io), and this new book from him is another one that I've been eager to pick up this year. It's set in the near future where a company has resurrected the Woolly Mammoth, but to stay ahead of poachers, they have to take some drastic actions. One of those actions? Importing the digitally-preserved mind of a scientist named Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior into one of those mammoths. This looks like it'll have a lot to say about ecology, corporate ethics, and quite a bit more. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) ### [*Stations of the Tide*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250862495?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by** Michael Swanwick (January 23rd) Tor adds to its "Tor Essentials" lineup with a new edition of Michael Swanwick's novel *Stations of the Tide*, accompanied by an introduction from critic John Clute. Originally serialized in *Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine* in 1990, the book earned the Nebula Award for Best Novel the following year, and was nominated for the Hugo and Campbell Awards in 1992\. The story is set on the planet Miranda, where an apocalyptic storm is approaching that will flood its continents. As the storm approaches, an agent from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies arrives try and track down a wizard who's brought with him some forbidden technology in an attempt to remake the world in his own image. ### [*Womb City*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660569?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tlotlo Tsamaase (January 23rd) This was another entry on my 2024 anticipated list: a new-future dystopian tale about a woman named Nelah whose life is upended after an accident and works to hide a body, only to have that secret come back from the grave to haunt her. This sounds like a really fascinating book about autonomy, cybernetic, state surveillance, and quite a bit more. I'm eager to dig into this soon. --- As always, thanks for reading: let me know what catches your eye, and what you're reading at the moment! ### The next Star Wars movie will be The Mandalorian & Grogu URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-mandalorian-and-grogu-baby-yoda-movie/ Last updated: 2024-01-09T18:17:56.000Z Lucasfilm [announced](https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-and-grogu?ref=andrewliptak.com) that its next theatrical *Star Wars* film will *The Mandalorian & Grogu*, a spinoff of its streaming series, *The Mandalorian*. The film is slated to go into production later this year, and will be directed by Jon Favreau (creator of *The Mandalorian*, director of such films as *Iron Man, The Lion King*, and others.) The film will be the first theatrical release in the franchise since 2019's *The Rise of Skywalker*, which capped off the "Skywalker Saga" – episodes 1-9\. Since then, Lucasfilm has put the brakes on the series after a series of cancelled films and diminishing box-office expectations, not to mention a global pandemic and strikes from both the actors and writers guilds in Hollywood. Not for the lack of trying: Lucasfilm has announced ambitious projects since then. In December 2020, the studio laid out a Marvel Cinematic Universe-like roadmap for the future of the franchise on Disney+ and in theaters: ten shows / seasons, with a pair of *Mandalorian* spinoffs (*Ahsoka* and *Rangers of the New Republic*), and a new theatrical film, [*Star Wars: Rogue Squadron,* to be directed by *Wonder Woman*'s Patty Jenkins](https://www.andrewliptak.com/patty-jenkins-star-wars-rogue-squadron/). Had everything gone to plan, that film would have come out last month, but it's [remained in a sort of limbo](https://www.andrewliptak.com/patty-jenkins-rogue-squadron/) and while it might still be in some form of development, it wasn't on the [last roadmap that Lucasfilm unveiled back at Star Wars Celebration in London](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-celebration-mandalorian-storytelling-updates/) in April 2023: three new films to be directed by James Mangold (a "Dawn of the Jedi" film), Dave Filoni (a *Mandalorian* crossover film), and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (a post-sequel film about Rey rebuilding the Jedi Order.) In today's announcement, Lucasfilm noted that all of those projects are still on the docket, so this looks like it'll be a *Mandalorian* film separate from the one that Filoni is working on. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Buried in the announcement was word that Filoni is in the midst of developing a second season for *Ahsoka* (which ended last year on something of a cliffhanger), while [*Variety* notes](https://variety.com/2024/film/news/star-wars-movie-baby-yoda-jon-favreau-1235866277/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Lucasfilm is also working on developing a fourth season of *The Mandalorian.* News of the film is interesting, because there were some [persistent rumors](https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2023/12/the-mandalorian-season-4-rumored-to-be-a-movie-releasing-before-daisy-ridley-star-wars-movie.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the show's fourth season would be reworked as a film, and I sort of wonder if this is a result of the 2023 actors / writers strikes: shrinking an eight-episode series into a \~2-hour film, especially if Disney is keen to take some of the pressure off of its streaming business and back to theaters. 2023 was a rough year for the studio, which saw Universal eclipse it at the box office for the [first time since 2015](https://variety.com/2024/film/box-office/universal-overtakes-disney-highest-grossing-studio-box-office-1235859823/?ref=andrewliptak.com). [A Brief History of Star Wars’ Mandalorian WarriorsThe Mandalorians have had a long and vivid history within the Star Wars universe, and their popularity will only rise from here![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/02/mandos.001.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-mandalorian-mandalorians-explainer/) We now get to play the scheduling game: the next one on the calendar was for May 22nd, 2026, with another to follow on December 18th that year and a third for December 17th, 2027\. From the sounds of things, Favreau's *The Mandalorian & Grogu* will likely be the first out of the gate, followed by Obaid-Chinoy's Rey film, followed by the other two. (I'm still holding out hope that *Rogue Squadron* will get made eventually.) Obviously, there's a lot of unknowns here, and we'll get some news trickling out in the next couple of months. From where I sit, I think is an entirely logical move for Lucasfilm / Disney. *The Mandalorian* [was the most streamed series of 2023](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mandalorian-tops-list-most-watched-190000278.html?guccounter=1&ref=andrewliptak.com), and that strikes me as a *very* easy sell for Disney to make to exhibitors, especially after the shellacking that the studio took with its theatrical films in 2023\. While the show and its spinoffs have their ups and downs, the series had a huge role in bringing some new energy to a franchise that's really struggled to figure out where it'll head next, and if something is selling well, the folks at Disney are most definitely going to try and replicate that success, especially if they're able to get budget and go beyond the tools that were developed to ensure that they could produce a *Star Wars* show on a television (ish) budget ($120 million per season vs. the $416 million *Rise of Skywalker c*ost). But not just from a business standpoint, I think *The Mandalorian* would look great on the big screen. The series has captured the action-adventure-western elements of the world, and that always looks fun on the big screen. And, a 2-hour film feels like a really good way to tell a straight-forward story without having to expand it out into an eight-hour streaming series, something that the third season felt like it suffered from. So, we'll see what this ends up looking like. Hopefully, it'll be a meaningful entry in the larger story. At the very least, it'll be something for *Star Wars* fans to look forward to: a return to theaters. ### My most anticipated books of 2024 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-2024-anticipated-books-list-grossman-corey/ Last updated: 2024-08-21T19:24:19.000Z A big part of this newsletter is talking about books: what I've been reading, what's coming out, and what I'm looking forward to. With 2023 kicked to the curb, I'm left with an enormous pile of books that I didn't get around to reading, and while I'm hoping to take a good chunk out of that this year, the publishing engine doesn't stop, and we have a new crop of books slated to come out this year. It's always fun to look at what's coming up, and 2024 has a number of books that I'm particularly eager to read from some favorite authors, as well as some others from authors that I'm excited to meet for the first time. As always: this newsletter is powered by readers. If you like this list and find a book that you want to buy on it, please consider signing up as a paid subscriber. Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and purchases made through them yield a small commission to TO. Supporting subscribers get access to a TO Slack channel and help keep the newsletter going (Ghost, time, and tools aren't free!). You can find details about subscribing [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). Here are my anticipated lists for [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/most-anticipated-sf-f-books-of-2020/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/my-most-anticipated-sf-f-reads-for-2021/), [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-anticipated-books-scalzi-darnielle-expanse-janelle-monae-sci-fi-fantasy/), and [2023](https://www.andrewliptak.com/science-fiction-fantasy-anticipated-books-2023/). Okay, here are the 20 books that I'm looking forward to the most this coming year. --- ### January [***Scorpio***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542035491?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Marko Kloos (January 1st)** I'm a big fan of Marko Kloos's Frontlines series, an excellent military science fiction story that followed a soldier named Andrew Greyson as he joins the military to escape poverty and ends up embroiled in an interstellar war after Earth encounters a malevolent alien civilization. Kloos brought the series to an end with *Centers of Gravity*, but he's not done with the world: *Scorpio* is the first installment of a new series, *Frontlines: Evolution*, which will feature a new cast of characters. This book is set on a distant colony, eight years after it was invaded by the Lankies. The remaining survivors have escaped to an underground shelter and have been cut off from humanity. One of those survivors is Alex Archer and her dog Ash, who's helped them fend off threats. That relative safety comes to an end when a salvage operation goes wrong and the Lankies begin to close in on the remaining survivors, with Alex trying to find any reason to hang onto hope to survive another day. [***The Tusks of Extinction***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250855527?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Ray Nayler (January 16th)** One of my favorite books from 2022 was Ray Nayler's *The Mountain in the Sea*, a mind-blowing book about the nature of intelligence and capitalism. His next novel is a slim novella from Tordotcom: *The Tusks of Extinction*. It looks like he'll be playing with some similar themes: scientists have resurrected woolly mammoths from extinction, and now they have to figure out how to integrate them back into the ecosystem. Their hope lies in Dr. Damira Khismatullina, a slain elephant expert whose digital consciousness has been downloaded into a mammoth. It'll be her job to help guide the new generation of animals to avoid poachers while they work to regain their numbers. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) [***Womb City***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660569?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Tlotlo Tsamaase (January 23rd)** I'd not come across Motswana's Tlotlo Tsamaase before, but the cover for xer debut novel *Womb City* is simply arresting. The plot sounds amazing as well: a new-future dystopian tale about a woman named Nelah whose life is upended after an accident and works to hide a body, only to have that secret come back from the grave to haunt her. Her victim's ghost is apparently exacting revenge by going after the people close to her, set against the backdrop of a society ruled by a surveillance state and dealing with themes about bodily autonomy, cybernetics, and power. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### February [***The Warm Hands of Ghosts***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593128251?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Katherine Arden (February 13th)** One of my very favorite people in the world is Katherine Arden. She's a fellow Vermont author, and I really enjoyed her novel [*The Bear and the Nightingale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101885956?ref=andrewliptak.com). Her next is something a little different: a story about the First World War and a nurse who learns that her brother had been killed, but that there's more to the story, and as we learn more about her brother's story, we delve into some supernatural and spiritual elements that get to the heart of the horrors that warfare brings. I've read parts of some earlier drafts and enjoyed what I was reading: I'm eager to see how the book shakes out, and to see where Arden takes us. [***The Tainted Cup***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820709?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Robert Jackson Bennett (February 6th)** One of my favorite stories that I've picked up over the last couple of years is Robert Jackson Bennett's *Founders* trilogy ([*Foundryside*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525573845?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Shorefall*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984822772?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Locklands*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820686?ref=andrewliptak.com) – I still need to get through that last one), which were breathtaking in their scale and approach to the genre. I'm looking forward to what he's moving onto after that: *The Tainted Cup*, in which an imperial officer is apparently murdered at the edge of the Empire's boundaries, where strange things are known to happen. Investigating the murder is an eccentric detective named Ana Dolabra and her assistant, Dinios Kol. Ana is renowned for her abilities, and Dinios has been magically augmented to assist her, and as the two set about working to solve the case, he's amazed and shocked at how his new superior operates. I've loved Bennett's worldbuilding and characters, and I'll be really interested to see what he does with this story. [***The Book of Doors***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063323988?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Gareth Brown (February 13th)** I'm a sucker for a good multiverse and hidden world story, and this one sounds like it'll be a very cool read. Cassie Andrews is enjoying her work at a bookshop in New York City when one of her favorite customers dies in the store. She discovers that the last book he was reading was something different: *The Book of Doors*. It's filled with mysterious drawings and shows her that doors can be portals to anywhere else, and it's a powerful, much-sought-after tome. With the book in her possession, she's now the target of a whole community of people who want it for themselves. She's approached by a mysterious librarian named Drummond Fox who looks over such books, and she has to decide whether or not to trust him to keep the book safe and free with those with darker motives. ### March [***Jumpnauts***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422117?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu (March 12th)** A couple of years ago, I picked up Hao Jingfang's intriguing book about the colonization of Mars, [*Vagabonds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422094?ref=andrewliptak.com), enjoyed it. It's a trippy interrogation of how different cultures get along – or don't. Jingfang is back with a new novel this year called *Jumpnauts*. It's set in a near future where the world has aligned into two dominant factions: the Pacific League of Nations and the Atlantic Division of Nations, bringing about a new Cold War. Neither side are prepared when a new party arrives on Earth: an alien civilization that's been trying to make contact with humanity, prompting a trio of PLN scientists to try and unravel the mystery before their ADN counterparts do, hoping to avert an even greater crisis. [Endless Universes and Tales of Two WorldsHello! It’s been a weird week, hasn’t it? I spent the weekend getting away from home for a couple of days by visiting my parents in upstate New York. (Fortunately, Vermont has relaxed some travel restrictions, allowing us to go out to low-impact counties and return without having![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_18cf738e-b0a8-4e06-8945-7214c66c2ddb_2048x1536.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/endless-universes-and-tales-of-two-worlds/) [***Those Beyond the Wall***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497500?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Micaiah Johnson (March 12th)** One of my absolute favorite books of 2020 was Micaiah Johnson's debut, *The Space Between Worlds*, a thrilling novel about a traveler named Cara who's enlisted by a mysterious tech company called the Eldridge Institute to study alternate worlds. It was an outstanding read about the consolidation of power and the inequality that comes with it. In this new book, Johnson returns to the world, where the leader of Ashtown has had to rule with an iron fist to fend off their wealthier neighbors of Wiley City. He has one person he can trust: an enforcer named Scales. She's helped keep a sort of peace that's broken when she sees a woman destroyed in front of her, seemingly without anyone responsible. Scales is tasked with finding out what's behind the death, and as she does so, she discovers a deeper mystery that brings out some secrets that want to stay buried. [The Space Between Worlds is a clever read about power and parallel worldsMicaiah Johnson’s debut is all about identity and the struggle for power![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_05492219-e54b-45ba-bdb8-84ded812f3a8_4030x3022.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-space-between-worlds-is-a-clever-read-about-power-and-parallel-worlds/) ### April [***Wicked Problems***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395931?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Max Gladstone (April 9th)** Max Gladstone's Craft sequence have been some of my favorite recent urban fantasy reads. The first batch of books ([*Three Parts Dead*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333117?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Two Serpents Rise*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765333131?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Full Fathom Five*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765335760?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Last First Snow*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765379412?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Four Roads Cross*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250813459?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Ruin of Angels*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395894?ref=andrewliptak.com)) but a cool spin on magic, and he recently returned to the world for a new trilogy The Craft Wars, which he kicked off last year with [*Dead Country*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765395917?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Wicked Problems* is the next installment of that sequence, in which a new threat has entered the world, and with an apocalypse is approaching, only a girl and a god will be able to stop it from happening, and are willing to remake the world to save it. It's been a while since I've read the books, but I'm thinking it'll likely be a good time to re-read them before digging into this new installment. [***The Wings Upon Her Back***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616964146?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Samantha Mills (April 23rd)** Last year, Samantha Mills scored a number of awards for her story for *Uncanny Magazine,* "[Rabbit Test](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/?ref=andrewliptak.com)." This year, she's publishing her debut novel, *The Wings Upon Her Back*, in which humanity has been trying to figure out why five slumbering gods below the city of Radezhda turned their backs on humanity, sparking war between sects. A teenager named Zenya ran away from her home to join a warrior sect that augments their soldiers with mechanical wings, and begins learning their ways to protect her city. Years later, she becomes tired of warfare and the rulers whose will she upholds. When she's cast out, she has to rethink everything that brought her to that place in order to survive. ### May [***Fight Me!***](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446205/fight-me-by-grossman-austin/9780241555941?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Austin Grossman (May 23rd)** I distinctly remember when I picked up Austin Grossman's novel [*Soon I'll Be Invincible*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307279866?ref=andrewliptak.com)years ago: a cynical, eye-opening take on the superhero genre years before we got the realistic trappings of the MCU or shows like Amazon's *The Boys*. Grossman is returning to the world with a new story, about an English professor named Dr. Rick Towers, who's been living under that assumed identity for years. Decades ago, he was brought to a secret government facility with a trio of other teenagers, who were then trained to use their new powers to try and protect the world. Decades after being forced him out from that life, Towers is forced to figure reunite with his former teammates to try and uncover the details of a mysterious disappearance, navigating their own agendas and motives while they do so. ### June [***Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393881516?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Annalee Newitz (June 4th)** I've long been a big fan of Annalee Newitz's writing – first at io9 (where I worked for a time), then with their novels [*Autonomous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392084?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Future of Another Timeline*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765392107?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228017?ref=andrewliptak.com), as well as their nonfiction books [*Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307949424?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393882452?ref=andrewliptak.com). [Review: Annalee Newitz’s The TerraformersAn outstanding book about the power of communal action in the face of overwhelming odds![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/05/IMG_1166.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/) Their next is a nonfiction book that looks very intriguing: a deep dive into how storytelling can be used in psychological warfare and how disinformation and propaganda is used in a variety of ways. They take a look at how people have used information as a weapon over the centuries, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War and up to the modern day election cycle and how everything from newspapers to social media plays a role. This looks like it'll be a fascinating, essential book for 2024\. [***Moonbound***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374610609?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Robin Sloan (June 11th)** One of the more intriguing novels that I've read in recent years was Robin Sloan's [*Sourdough*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250192752?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* a funny take on the tech industry and finding one's tribe. His next looks just as intriguing. 11,000 years in the future, a boy named Ariel lives in a small village that's ruled by a wizard, and is called to adventure to find treasure and maybe slay a dragon. Before that happens though, he encounters a piece of technology containing an artificial intelligence from a long-lost civilization that's designed to keep track of history and provide some context for the entirety of humanity's existence. From the sounds of it, this'll be a story about stories and storytelling, and I'm eager to see how this turns out. [***Horror Movie***](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/horror-movie-paul-tremblay?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Paul Tremblay (June 11th)** Paul Tremblay has written some of my favorite horror novels. In books like [*A Head Full of Ghosts*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062363244?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Disappearance at Devil's Rock*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063312470?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Cabin at the End of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062679116?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Survivor Song*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062679178?ref=andrewliptak.com), he plays a deft hand at genre tropes, often with a light touch – you don't always know if there's something supernatural at work, or if people are just awful. His next takes a shot at cursed horror films: a team of filmmakers set out in 1993 to make a low-budget horror film that was ultimately never released, save for a handful of scenes. Despite that, it became a cult classic, and decades later, a studio wants to remake it. But the only surviving cast member has reservations, remembering the troubled production and strange events that took place while the cameras were rolling. This sounds like it'll be an intriguing take on not only the genre, but on the nature of Hollywood itself. [Pushing against nostalgiaPaul Tremblay on his next horror novel, The Pallbearer’s Club![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-07-at-3.06.01-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-pallbearers-club-horror/) ### July [***Navola***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593535059?ref=andrewliptak.com)**by Paolo Bacigalupi (July 9th)** One of the first authors that I've gravitated to when I started reading and reviewing science fiction was Paolo Bacigalupi, author of [*The Windup Girl*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597808217?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Water Knife*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780804171533?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a [number of grim short stories](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781597802024?ref=andrewliptak.com). I've appreciated his focus on climate change and economics, and I'd been wondering what he had been up to lately, although I have been hearing through the grapevine that he had been working on a fantasy novel. That book is *Navola*, set in a city state that's ruled by a group of powerful families who've built an empire across the world. The heir to one family, Davico di Regulai, is being groomed to take over the family business, aided by a powerful family relic, a fossilized dragon's eye. The transition will test him to the limits, especially as plenty of other families are playing their own long games. [***The Bright Sword***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780735224049?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Lev Grossman (July 16th)** It's a banner year for the Grossman family: Lev Grossman's long-awaited novel that reimagines Arthurian legend is coming out this year. [I wrote ](https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13090002/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-announced-magicians-author-books?ref=andrewliptak.com)[about this book way back in 2016](https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13090002/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-announced-magicians-author-books?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I know he's been tinkering with it ever since. I'm a big fan of Grossman's take on magic and fantasy in his [*Magicians* trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780147517388?ref=andrewliptak.com), and I'm eager to see what he does with the story of King Arthur and his knights with this book. In this novel, Grossman follows a young knight named Collum, who arrives at Camelot to try and find a place at Arthur's Round Table, only to discover that the legendary king has died without an heir, and with only a few knights still sitting at the table. Those who remain are the oddballs of the group, and with the King's passing, Britain is poised to enter a new, strange era as old factions are beginning to turn against one another, and supernatural creatures creep back into the world. It's up to Collum and his new companions to try and figure out how to restore Camelot and England from ruin. [***The Seventh Veil of Salome***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593600269?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 16th)** Silvia Moreno-Garcia has written a number of inventive, genre-bending novels over the years ranging from thrillers ([*Velvet Was the Night*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593356845?ref=andrewliptak.com)), horror ([*Mexican Gothic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525620808?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Silver Nitrate* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355367?ref=andrewliptak.com)– still need to read that one) and science fiction ([*The Daughter of Doctor Moreau*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355350?ref=andrewliptak.com)). [Three horror novels to keep you up at night in 2020Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, and Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_a6eb18c9-9b1b-4fa2-9ddd-39d2e3af8cd4_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-horror-novels-mexican-gothic-only-good-indians-survivor-song/) Her next is a historical novel set in Hollywood's golden era: about an unknown Mexican actress named Vera Larios who's case in a career-breaking role of Salome in a historical drama. Her rise is watched with envy by another actress, Nancy Hartley, who's trying to pull her career out of a stall. This sounds like it'll be a gripping character drama. ### August [***Crypt of the Moon Spider***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250291738?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by Nathan Ballingrud (August 27th)** I'm a big fan of Nathan Ballingrud's short fiction (His collection [*North American Lake Monsters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618730602?ref=andrewliptak.com) is superb), and he recently released his debut novel [*The Strange*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534449954?ref=andrewliptak.com), which is still on my to-read list. His next book looks very interesting: a spider once lived in a cave and its silk provided its worshippers with some incredible powers. Fast forward to 1923, and a woman named Veronica Brinkley has arrived on the Moon to stay at a treatment facility called the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. Its doctor's methods are unconventional: brain surgery and spiders, but it's been successful in treating those afflicted with various conditions. But lurking under the surface, there are some problems that have begun to crop up, and Veronica might be one of the reasons. [***The Mercy of Gods***](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316525572?ref=andrewliptak.com) **by James S.A. Corey (August 6th)** If you've read this newsletter (or followed me for any amount of time), you'll know that I'm a big fan of James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* series. That story came to an end a while back, and I've been excited to see what they'll do next ever since. This year, they're kicking off a new space opera trilogy, *The Captive Wars*, which begins with *The Mercy of Gods.* [James S.A. Corey’s next novel is The Mercy of the GodsThe start of a new space opera series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/mercy-crop.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-the-gods-scifi-expanse/) This story is set in a very far future in which the Carryx a hive that has taken over vast parts of the galaxy over the centuries, and now faces a new enemy that could destroy them. The human population of Anjiin might be the key to their survival. One of the humans is Dafyd Alkhor, a scientist's assistant who watches as the Carryx decimate his home and carries off him and his neighbors with them. Those humans find themselves in the midst of an incomprehensible war, and are forced to compete with other species in order to survive – the price of failure is extinction. ### October ***The Secret History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from an American Edgeland* by Christopher Brown (October 15th)** One of my favorite newsletters is [*Field Notes*](https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from Christopher Brown – author of [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062563811?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Tropic of Kansas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062563811?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Rule of Capture*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062859099?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Failed State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062859105?ref=andrewliptak.com) – in which he looks at the relationship between our modern civilization and the natural world. His next book isn't speculative fiction: it's an extension of his nature writing, which he [described](https://christopherbrown.com/2022/10/the-secret-history-of-empty-lots/?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a "work of narrative nonfiction about urban nature and how to find the path to a greener, rewilded future." [Failed State’s Christopher Brown on building utopias out of dystopiasHappy Friday! (or whatever day it is you’re reading this on.) One of my favorite discoveries recently has been author Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State, as well as a whole host of short stories. He’s popped up in some interesting![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_f12eb1e6-c99a-48a3-b7c6-95f8c0f755a6_722x1080.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/failed-state-christopher-brown-on-building-utopias-out-of-dystopias/) I always come away from his newsletters with some new insight about the world, and have been paying more attention to the sorts of "edgelands" that he's talking about: the boundaries between humanity and the natural world. I'm looking forward to seeing what I learn from this one. --- These anticipated lists are, of course, somewhat speculative and relies a lot on the authors that I'm already largely familiar with. I'm always excited to see new books from the authors I like, but what's equally exciting is knowing that there'll be books coming that I'm coming to blind. I might just pick one up, or something will grab me unexpectedly at some point. I'm excited to see what goes on the pile this year. What catches your eye on this list, and what are you most excited to add to your TBR pile for the coming year? ### What I read in 2023 URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2023/ Last updated: 2024-01-03T16:25:48.000Z Something that I've done over the years is keep track of what I'm reading: I usually keep track on social media in a longer thread, but that sort of broke when I stopped using Twitter last fall. I had a goal of 52 books to read this year, and came up pretty short: I was only able to finish 38 before the end of the year. It was *a* year, so I'm not terribly surprised. I didn't really find myself in the right mindset to sink into books for most of the summer and fall. Here are my lists for the last couple of years: [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2022/) (52), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2021-reading-list-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-books/) (52), [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/what-i-read-in-2020/) (44), [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/what-i-read-in-2019-books-science-fiction-fantasy-history-reading?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (42), and [2018](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2018/12/6/all-the-books-i-read-in-2018-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-history?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) (74). I've been thinking a lot about *why* I keep track. Some of it is to keep me honest and to keep reading, rather than to mindlessly scroll through social media feeds. I had a lot of plans for 2023 – including an ambitious plan to read a number of SF classics – but fell short there. But I did find some books that I did really enjoy, some that were unexpected, some that were rereads that I happened to pick up, and some anticipated novels that I'd been looking for. I ended up reading a lot of nonfiction, too – books about the space race, eugenics, nuclear disasters, and pop culture. Despite the lower book count, I did come away from the year a little more interested and knowledgeable, so that's a win, right? Here’s what I read in 2023: 1. *Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories* by qntm 2. *Dune* by Frank Herbert 3. *Ghost of the Hardy Boys: The Writer Behind the World’s Most Famous Boy Detectives* by Leslie McFarlane 4. *Babel* by R.F. Kuang 5. *The Fisherman* by John Langan ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-langan-the-fisherman-gothic-horror-book-review/)) 6. *Tread of Angels* by Rebecca Roanhorse 7. *Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer* by Kathy Kleiman 8. *Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings* by Earl Swift 9. *README.txt* by Chelsea Manning 10. *Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them* by Tove Danovich 11. *Sphere* by Michael Crichton ([Post](https://www.andrewliptak.com/used-bookstore-library-discovery/)) 12. *The Terraformers* by Annalee Newitz ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/)) 13. *Yellowface* by R.F. Kuang 14. *Starter Villain* by John Scalzi 15. *Consider Phlebas* by Iain M. Banks 16. *Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat* by Bill Watterson 17. *Ancillary Justice* by Ann Leckie 18. *The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe* by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry 19. *The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us* by Steve Brusatte 20. *The Middling Affliction* by Alex Shvartsman 21. *Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster* by Adam Higginbotham 22. *Rose/House* by Arkady Martine ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/review-arkady-martini-rose-house/)) 23. *Wild Spaces* by S.L. Coney ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sl-coney-wild-spaces-lovecraftian-horror/)) 24. *All the Sinners Bleed* by S.A. Cosby ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sa-cosby-all-the-sinners-bleed-review-rural-america/)) 25. *“Vermont for the Vermonters”: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State* by Mercedes de Guardiola ([Interview](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-eugenics-book/)) 26. *Vampires of El Norte* by Isabel Cañas ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vampires-of-el-norte-isabel-canas-horror-book-review/)) 27. *Translation State* by Ann Leckie 28. *MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios* by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards 29. *A Wizard of Earthsea* by Ursula K. Le Guin 30. *The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series* by Jessica Radloff 31. *Orders of Battle* by Marko Kloos 32. *Centers of Gravity* by Marko Kloos 33. *Flight Risk* by Cherie Priest 34. *A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies* by Bartolomé de las Casas 35. *The Culture: The Drawings* by Iain M. Banks 36. *The Time Machine* by H.G. Wells 37. *The Hard Switch* by Owen D. Pomery 38. *Eon* by Greg Bear ([Obit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/greg-bear/)) So, with 2024 now on the books, I've reset the clock: we'll see if I can muster up another 52 reads in the next 12 months. What did you read this year? What books stuck with you, and what are your plans for this year? ### The will to survive: Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2023-12-22T19:46:30.000Z There’s an image that I have embedded in my mind of the world that cyberpunk imagines our future as: bleak urban landscapes where people are packed together while they spend their lives laboring away under their corporate overseers. It's the end result of how technology enables the uncomfortable optimization of our existence. And of course, lots of neon lights, limbs replaced with cybernetic enhancements, and glowing screens as far as the eye can see. Cyberpunk at its best is a satirical genre, something that speculative fiction has a long history of. H.G. Well’s [*War of the Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780141441030?ref=andrewliptak.com)and[*The Time Machine*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780141439976?ref=andrewliptak.com)can be read as poking holes in the UK's image of itself as it ruled the world, while Frederik Pohl’s [*The Space Merchants*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250000156?ref=andrewliptak.com)provided an ideal welcome mat for the stories like William Gibson’s [*Neuromancer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441007462?ref=andrewliptak.com) or Neal Stephenson’s [*Snow Crash*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553380958?ref=andrewliptak.com), which took aim at the hyper-capital Reagan era of the 1980s. [Cyberpunk’s power came from global dystopian politicsIt might look like the 1980s, but we’re still living in it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/image-9-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-power-came-from-global-dystopian-politics/) These are fine works, but I'm sometimes bothered by the idea that these futures are inevitable. I've often felt that the genre still carries some of the scares and tropes from that “greed is good” era by imagining capitalistic futures over and over again. Cyberpunk, is of course a satire until it isn’t; look no further than Facebook’s unironic Metaverse ambitions or Tesla leaning into the aesthetics to devise the stupidest-looking vehicle (the Cybertruck) as examples of where those ideas and trappings were taken at face value. That’s one big reason why I enjoyed Annalee Newitz’s latest novel [*The Terraformers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250228017?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) so much when I read it earlier this year. It's a joyous book about collective action, gentrification, urban planning and equality that pushes hard against the idea these bleak futures are inevitable. Their characters recognize the systemic inequalities and problems that degrade their world, and instead of working within the confines of the system, actively work to change it for the better. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. What better metaphor for that than the terraforming process? Newitz sets their novel in the year 59,006 on a distant planet called Sask-E. It's being terraformed by an interstellar corporation called Verdance as a future destination modeled after a Pleistocene-era Earth for those who can afford to make the trek out to it. Destry is a humanoid Ranger from the Environmental Rescue Team who's been tasked with helping along the terraforming process (She's accompanied by Whistle, a moose-like creature that serves as her companion and steed) by overseeing and guiding the development of the planet's ecosystems. Destry and Whistle soon make an unexpected discovery: descendants of the first set of genetically-modified workers that Verdance deployed to the planet 10,000 years ago to begin the terraforming process. They shouldn't have survived; the changes to the planet's atmosphere would have caused their numbers to dwindle and eventually die off, leaving behind a pristine planet for their corporate overlords to take over and exploit for their highest-paying customers. But they didn't vanish: Destry and her fellow ERT rangers discover an ancient door that leads to a settlement populated by those people under a volcano. They've been there for thousands of years, setting up a conflict between those original inhabitants and the customers that Verdance is building the world for. Newitz plays with this dynamic over the rest of the book and thousands of years as these two sides clash against one another. They play with ideas about urban planning and public transportation, painting a vivid picture of a bustling, joyous city populated by a diverse population of people (of all species) and sentient trains who call it home. On the other side, Verdance isn't willing to divest themselves of this massive investment, and is working to find any way it can to get rid of the inhabitants who can lay a claim that this planet is rightfully theirs. They do this in a handful of ways: we follow their efforts over centuries as Verdance tries everything from outright war to messing with treaty legalese to try and get their way, opposed every step along the way by the city's inhabitants. There are some big, relevant ideas embedded in this story, and Newitz neatly ties this far-flung future of terraforming and genetic engineering to our very real history of colonialism and even more local issues like gentrification, racism, and the types of urban "renewal" projects [that tore apart communities and neighborhoods](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-freeways-flattened-black-neighborhoods-nationwide-2021-05-25/?ref=andrewliptak.com) throughout US cities in the 20th century. In doing so, they paint a picture that the sorts of excesses that capitalism brings out are formidable issues that will challenge people and communities if they persist long into the future. It's hard not to read this book in 2023 and recognize the issues that Destry and her allies face: housing problems, vast, sociopathic corporate systems, and a wealthy class that doesn't care who they're trampling over as they enjoy a carefree, fantasy life. These challenges are formidable ones for Newitz's characters: there's no shortage of tragedy and heartbreak along the way. But it's a novel that showcases the power of a community's will, one that I've seen make up the defiance, joy, and willpower embodied by any people who've come under impossible stresses as outsiders try and snuff them out. Like some of those important, earlier science fiction novels books this is a book which explores the role of imperial/capitalism/political power and how it can be stopped or undermined, reminding us that the will survive, thrive, and flourish is a powerful motivator, and that those inevitable futures are anything but. ### Unforced errors URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/communities-writing-sockpuppets-goodreads/ Last updated: 2023-12-19T19:00:14.000Z If you've paid any attention to the online sphere of book publishing over the course of the last couple of weeks, there's been a whole lot of drama. As a rule, I avoid highlighting the "authors/creators/people acting badly online" types of stories, but I think there's a bigger lesson to be learned between the three of them: it's far healthier to act well with your peers online than not. --- ### Cait Corrain's sockpuppet reviews It's never a good thing when the online book drama spills over into [actual, mainstream news](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/author-cait-corrain-goodreads-review-bombing-allegations-fallout-rcna129134?ref=andrewliptak.com), but that's what happened with a debut author named Cait Corrain, whose book *Crown of Starlight* was due to hit stores next May. By all accounts, it had earned some good buzz within the YA community, until it turned out that they had opened a whole bunch of accounts on GoodReads to leave a slew of negative reviews for a handful of other debut authors (who happened to be mostly authors of color). A bunch of other authors and reviewers noted that these sockpuppet accounts seemed to be boosting one another, and pretty quickly realized what was happening. Corrain first tried to blame a friend for the reviews, then admitted that it was their doing. The consequences have been pretty swift: Corrain was dropped by their publisher and agent, and their book was pulled from the schedule. It seems pretty likely that their career as an author is over before it started. They [apologized](https://twitter.com/CaitCorrain/status/1734447140041359751?ref=andrewliptak.com) and say that they're checking into a treatment facility to recover, and hopefully, they'll find the help they need. Maybe they'll attempt to find another publisher or self-publish it, but folks within the publishing community have long memories for that. As one friend put it, it's like R.F. Kuang's novel *Yellowface* come to life. There's been a lot of takes on this entire episode: from the optics to the apology to the pressures of a debut author, but [one of the best that I've read is from Charlie Jane Anders on her fantastic newsletter Happy Dancing](https://buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/how-to-fix-goodreads/?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which she talks about the problems that allow this sort of thing to happen: Goodreads itself, and the mechanics of the reviews that go up on the site. I don't think I've ever heard an author say that they like the site. I know I'm not a huge fan: the only reasons I use it is for the annual book challenge and to remember what I've got on my to-read list. Ratings are incredibly annoying when it comes to reviews, because everyone gravitates towards the ends of the spectrum. I can completely understand an author getting in over their head over the perceived completion that this environment fosters. Anders has some good suggestions for how to reform the system a bit more, and it's worth reading and thinking about if you're a reviewer or consumer. (Also, here's your reminder that if you have books you like, leave a review of them! The people who read it and hate it will certainly be doing that.) [QuantifiablesWriting, reviews, and building bland worlds through meaningless numbers![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1585853565090-5227d79f2171?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHJhdGluZ3N8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjkxNjk0NzQyfDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000content/images/size/w1200)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/prosecraft-writing-entertainment-ratings/) ### Fanfic author's lawsuit backfires If there's one tenet of fan fiction, it's that you never, ever try and profit off of your work. An author named Demetrious Polychron seems to have not learned that lesson: back in April, he [filed a lawsuit](https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/cacdce/2:2023cv02831/881511?ref=andrewliptak.com) against the Tolkien Estate, the Tolkien Trust, Amazon, Amazon Studios, John D. Payne, Patrick McKay, Simon Tolkien, Jennifer Salke, and Jeff Bezos for infringing on his copyright of his sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings* trilogy, *The Fellowship of the King*, saying that the studio's streaming series *Rings of Power* had taken ideas from it. [Fan fiction is the lifeblood of fandomFan fiction’s strength isn’t based on its literary merits, but on the fans that it brings together![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_5168d41f-afe9-4a46-b6f1-41d584f1fb36_2000x1000.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fan-fiction-is-the-lifeblood-of-fandom/) First of all, probably not, and second of all, suing a rights-holder for stealing ideas from a book in which you've technically stolen IP from said rightsholder is a baller move. [Polychron has been ordered](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/18/copyright-claim-against-tolkien-estate-backfires-on-lord-of-the-rings-fanfiction-author?ref=andrewliptak.com) to destroy all of the copies of his books and pay Amazon and the Tolkiens legal fees. I can't fathom what this guy was trying to accomplish, other than getting a court to order him to pay lots of money to the people he was suing. He'd have been better off buying 6,700 copies of the *Lord of the Rings* trilogy (or 1,914 copies of the spiffy illustrated edition.) ### Copyright threats And finally, the latest tempest-in-a-teapot comes from an author named Lauren Davis, who took issue with another author's (Marve Michael Anson) announcement of an upcoming book in which her main character has some special, sun-based powers. Davis made some [vague claims about copyright infringement](https://twitter.com/AuthorLMDavis/status/1736248274779066749/photo/1?ref=andrewliptak.com) [when she called Anson out](https://twitter.com/AuthorLMDavis/status/1737160552638505252/photo/1?ref=andrewliptak.com). The two books don't really sound like they're all that similar, outside of some of the characters having some similar abilities and situations? That doesn't strike me as the level to which you'd have actual copyright infringement, and [according to the U.S. Copyright office](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), "copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner." Taking characters from Tolkien's legendarium and turning them into your own sequel book series is a big copyright violation. Happening to have similar tropes, character types, and other fixtures in a book isn't – you'd see big media owners stomping on any number of authors and creators for their works over perceived similarities. Even when there is a direct connection, like in the instance of E. L. James and her *Fifty Shades of Grey* novels (which [originated as fanfiction for Stephanie Meyers' *Twilight* novels](https://www.adweek.com/galleycat/fifty-shades-of-grey-wayback-machine/50128?red=as&ref=andrewliptak.com)) or Terry Brooks' *Sword of Shannara* ([inspired somewhat by Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings*](https://medium.com/a-dribble-of-ink/how-terry-brooks-saved-epic-fantasy-8af7084f94a3?ref=andrewliptak.com)), there are still ways to "file off the serial numbers" and come up with an original work. My guess is that this is an instance of an author getting a bee in her bonnet over a misunderstanding over what copyright law actually is, and after being Book Twitter's main character of the day, will figure the situation out somehow. --- As I noted, I don't really like highlighting or engaging in these sorts of stories. Everyone has a bad day, and the mechanics of social media make it extremely easy for things to snowball quickly and badly. The internet can be utterly ruthless, and while there are people who say or do things that certainly deserve consequences for their behavior, there are others who've had their lives ruined over misunderstandings or even mistakes that they could have otherwise learned from. What struck me about these three instances is how avoidable each of these situations could have been. Corrain could have decided not to open up multiple sockpuppet accounts to ding her perceived competition. Polychron went out of his way to poke Amazon's / Tolkien's lawyers, and Davis decided to approach an author out of the blue and threaten copyright infringement. None of these situations needed to happen, and did because of some pretty bad choices on their respective parts. These are all pretty dramatic instances, too. These aren't just spur-of-the-moment decisions: there was work involved, whether it's hiring lawyers or setting up accounts. The thing that really gets me here is that the book world really isn't a zero-sum game. This isn't *Highlander*, where there can be only one: the authors that are working alongside you are to an extent some competition, but not really. They can be colleagues and friends and supporters who can boost and cheer you on. I can count a handful of authors who're in the same rough field as me: Aidan Moher (*Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West),* Ryan Britt(*The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies* and *Phasers on Stun!: How the Making (And Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World*), and Adam Rowe (*Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s*), all of whom are great people and who've written some excellent nonfiction books about the genre we all love. (I've also been saying that I'll interview them over their books and haven't, because I'm a bad and forgetful and overwhelmed person. Someday?) I can't imagine doing any of these things to them, not because the consequences would be bad, but because it's just not a great thing to do to people you like and admire – or anyone. I've seen this sentiment echoed from a lot of other authors around the SF/F world. Surviving in the publishing world has always been a difficult endeavor without the worry that your fellow authors are out to cut your throat. It's better to be supportive and enthusiastic amongst your peers simply because it's a good thing to do. Communities are built on mutual support, and there's no faster way of getting drummed out of one by acting out and undermining those supports. A couple of years ago, one Twitter user [summed up](https://twitter.com/maplecocaine/status/1080665226410889217?lang=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) the online experience nicely: "Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it." Good words to live by. ### Citizen, Soldier, Veteran, Writer URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-science-fiction-david-drake-vietnam-veteran/ Last updated: 2023-12-15T15:00:06.000Z Some sad news surfaced earlier this week: veteran and author David Drake passed away at the age of 78, [according to his family](https://www.donaldsonfunerals.com/obituary/David-Drake?ref=andrewliptak.com). He was a prolific author who is best known for his military science fiction stories, which he began writing after serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war. Drake was one of the military science fiction authors that I've read very little of: I have a copy of his collection [*Hammer's Slammers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781439133095?ref=andrewliptak.com)that I picked up at some point. I've leafed through it, but it's one of those books that's sort of sat on the back burner for a while. What I have been reading has been his newsletter, which he's sent out with regular updates about his thoughts on the world, writing, and his health. He announced in November 2021 that he had stopped writing completely because of health issues: "My health problems continue, whatever they are. I can't concentrate enough to write a novel ... I just couldn't keep my texts straight. I'm still able to write stories and I think they're pretty good." --- The Vietnam War was a divisive moment in American history, divisions that have lingered in our collective psyche as a nation. Science fiction fandom wasn't immune to this: in a 1990 essay titled "[The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy](https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/pioneers/franklin52.htm?ref=andrewliptak.com)"in *Science Fiction Studies*, H. Bruce Franklin noted that the conflict was a source of inspiration for a range of genre creators, who turned to writing as a way to process the complexities and impact of the war that was unfolding a world away. The war was also a source of direct inspiration for a new generation of authors: Drake, Joe Haldeman, Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, Robert Jordan, and others. Haldeman's *The Forever War* is probably the best-known example, a story about a soldier who experiences a generations-long conflict thanks to faster-than-light time dilation, and through which we see him become more and more alienated form a society that's changed so much he has a hard time recognizing it as his home. Drake's part of this post-war movement. Born in 1945, he studied history and went on to Duke University to study law when he was drafted into the U.S. Army and deployed to Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Earlier this year, he [wrote in his newsletter](https://david-drake.com/2023/newsletter-132/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the war "turned my life over in unexpected ways. I wasn’t injured in Nam and Cambodia. On the other hand, I came back a different and less good person than the guy who went over. I was very angry, sort of generally." (You can read a bit more about his experiences [here](https://david-drake.com/2009/vietnam/?ref=andrewliptak.com).) He had taken up writing in the 1960s, but after coming back from overseas, he completed his legal studies and became a lawyer, and began writing science fiction in earnest, [noting](https://david-drake.com/2000/hammers-slammers-1979/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the experience of writing military science fiction was a sort of therapeutic exercise: "The stories were more important to me as self-therapy than they were as the start of a career. They gave me a chance to write about what I’d seen and heard; about the men I’d served with and person I’d become in that time. Being able to get that out on paper helped me keep it between the ditches and (from what they’ve told me) helped other veterans by showing them that they weren’t alone." Science fiction about the military has deep roots in science fiction: you can go back to stories like H.G. Wells' [*War of the Worlds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780141441030?ref=andrewliptak.com) to look at the consequences of British imperialism or George Tomkyns Chesney's [*The Battle of Dorking*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65882?ref=andrewliptak.com)to see how authors were using fiction as a way to imagine what the future of warfare might look like. Science fiction is particularly attuned to warfare: there's no shortage of gadgets and tools for authors to play with, and there's no shortage of stories playing with different types of imaginary weapons. [Mushroom Clouds on the Future HorizonScience fiction was born in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_30decfbc-ca0e-46ac-b83e-4c320e2565a6_956x577.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mushroom-clouds-on-the-future-horizon-science-fiction-was-born-in-the-fires-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/) You can probably trace the roots of Military SF as a distinct genre to books like Robert Heinlein's [*Starship Troopers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780441014101?ref=andrewliptak.com): a techy, violent political parable about the relationship between war and society, and which spawned plenty of successors from authors enamored by the allure of power armor and alien guts, like Haldeman's Forever War and John Steakley's [*Armor*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780886773687?ref=andrewliptak.com). (And more modern versions like Kameron Hurley's [](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481447973?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Light Brigade*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481447973?ref=andrewliptak.com) and John Scalzi's [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765348272?ref=andrewliptak.com).) In his book *Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980*, Mike Ashley notes that there was a good amount of variety in that genre: where Jerry Pournelle's Falkenberg stories were "military engagements against political machinations," Drake "concentrates on military tactics in alien environments." His early military stories followed a group of tank-borne mercenaries known as "Hammer's Slammers", which hew drew upon from his own experiences during the Vietnam war, or from various mythological sources. He sold a handful of short stories set in this fictional world and in 1979 pulled them together in a collection. In the years that followed, he wrote a handful of sequel novels and spinoff projects following the characters and world. --- There's a wide gulf between the world of military personnel and regular civilians in the United States. Until recently in the nation's history, wartime has largely been – with notable exceptions – something of a shared experience for much of the population. Popular and patriotic sentiments about duty to one's nation or to a cause, widespread drafts, or the opportunities that military service afforded citizens meant that the experiences of combat were widely understood. Following the trauma of the Vietnam War, the US shifted policies to focus on an all-volunteer military force. There are nearly 18 million veterans in the US – around 6% of the population – [according to a recent Pew study](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/08/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it's widely understood that the civilian world has a poor understanding of the military world and those who served. That has drastic consequences on a number of fronts; the policymakers and supporters who get us into war don't understand the complexities, purposes, and experience of armed conflict, and on the other side, those who did serve have a difficult time reintegrating back into society. Sebastian Junger's book [*Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781455566389?ref=andrewliptak.com) makes a compelling argument for how that collective ignorance means that we as a society are less able to empathize or understand these experiences. "Modern society," he writes, "rarely give veterans– gives anyone– opportunities to \[vent their feelings to a wider community\]." Drake's stories served as a way to process those feelings that he came back with. Writing on his website, he noted that "At one point I hoped the stories would help civilians understand also. I don’t think that can happen. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just a matter of people not having the background to hear what the words mean to people who’ve been there." The stories he wrote not capture the full story of what he experienced, but they – and others like them – are an important for us as a collective to ingest and process. It's not about agreeing with or opposing the ideology, motivations, or rationale for going into war; it's about understanding the impact and consequences, about listening to those who've been harmed and realizing that the war continues long after the bullets stop flying. Hopefully, Drake's stories can help with that in their own small way. ### Apple is adapting Murderbot URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-tv-plus-murderbot-martha-wells-scifi-adaptation/ Last updated: 2025-02-21T16:26:27.000Z Apple has [announced](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2023/12/apple-tv-lands-murderbot-with-emmy-award-winner-alexander-skarsgrd-set-to-star-in-and-executive-produce-new-series-from-academy-award-nominees-chris-and-paul-weitz/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it will be adapting Martha Wells' acclaimed *Murderbot* stories for its streaming platform, Apple TV+. Directors Chris and Paul Weitz have been tapped to helm the 10-episode adaptation, with Alexander Skarsgård set to star and produce. David Goyer will also be producing. Wells kicked off the series in 2017 with [*All Systems Red*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765397539?ref=andrewliptak.com), introducing us to a security bot that hacked its own programming and began calling itself "Murderbot" after an incident on a distant planet. She's since continued the series with [*Artificial Condition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250186928?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Rogue Protocol*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191786?ref=andrewliptak.com),[*Exit Strategy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250191854?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229854?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Fugitive Telemetry*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765376?ref=andrewliptak.com), and most recently, [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* following Murderbot as it works to figure out its existence, and would prefer to avoid humans and watch an endless stream of television shows. However, it keeps getting pulled into various situations that call for its expertise, and ends up finding new friends and allies along the way. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The books have earned Wells widespread acclaim: *All Systems Red* won the 2018 Alex, Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards (as well as a bunch of others), while *Artificial Condition* and *Network Effect* also won a whole host of awards. In 2021, the entire series earned the Hugo for Best Series. [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/04/IMG_0255.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) It's not hard to see why: Wells has crafted a compelling story about a very particular type of character. When I interviewed her in 2021, she noted that "Murderbot is also very specific about its feelings and its issues," and that "the fact that it has anxiety and depression and everything that it goes through, the more specific you are, the more people find common ground with it." While it's largely robotic, it's a character with plenty of traits that people can easily recognize in themselves, set in a universe that's governed by an oppressive corporate system that's forcing its characters to really jump into action when they're pushed to it. At the very least, the premise of the story alone should make for a good premise: a reluctant cyborg that's helping people by hacking and smashing. Apple's been doing pretty well on the entertainment front: its science fiction shows like *For All Mankind, Monarch,* and *Silo* have been excellent, and I've largely enjoyed its adaptation of Isaac Asimov's [*Foundation*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/). Obviously, there's a long way to go before this hits screens, but it'll be interesting to see how the show's creators approach the books – I have little doubt that fans will have some strong opinions of what a good adaptation will look like. ### Desert warfare URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-two-trailer-three-watch/ Last updated: 2023-12-12T18:39:18.000Z Brazil held its annual CCXP (think San Diego Comic Con-big) at the end of November / December. The con is one of the big events where studios decamp to release a whole bunch of trailers for upcoming films and bring out their casts to talk about those upcoming projects. One of the films in this year's lineup was *Dune: Part Two*, and it seems like it was something of a larger promotional kickoff for the upcoming film: director Denis Villeneuve recently noted that he's been working on a third film based on [Frank Herbert's novel *Dune: Messiah*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/)(the second book in the series), and today, we got a new big trailer for the film. Already, we've seen [two](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-2-trailer-watch/) [trailers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-two-trailer-watch/) for **Dune: Part 2*. Villeneuve [recently noted](https://www.gamesradar.com/dune-2-action-movie-more-than-part-1-denis-villeneuve/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that this second film is "more of an action film than the first part. It’s more muscular," and judging from this new trailer, that's something of an understatement. When I re-read *Dune* over the last couple of years (I finished it in January), I realized how neatly it falls into two parts, and that second half of the book is a huge buildup as Paul and his new Fremen allies take the fight to the Harkonnens after they butchered his family and retook Arrakis for themselves. There's a lot packed into this trailer: Paul's awakening to his psychic powers, the buildup of that coming war, the political maneuverings from the Emperor: there's a reason why Villeneuve and Warner Bros. split this adaptation into two parts, and I have a feeling that taken together, these two films will really do the novel justice. The film drops March 1st: I'll definitely be in line for it when the time comes. ### So say we all URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/battlestar-galactica-miniseries-scifi-tv-anniversary/ Last updated: 2023-12-08T18:04:42.000Z 20 years ago tonight, the SCIFI Channel launched an ambitious new project: *Battlestar Galactica*, a miniseries that reimagined the premise of the original 1978 TV series for a modern-day audience. Set in a distant galaxy, it followed humanity in the aftermath of a devastating attack from a civilization of robots known as the Cylons as they try to find safety in a mythical planet: Earth. The miniseries was an enormous hit for the network: it brought a measure of grim realism to a television genre not often known for deeper, hard-hitting stories (although there [certainly are exceptions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-antifascism-j-michael-straczynski/)) or deeply flawed characters facing overwhelming, hopeless odds for survival. In many ways, *Battlestar Galactica* was a moment where science fiction grew up and demonstrated that it was a genre that could tackle the mature, relevant, and thought-provoking stories in a serious way. --- The success of SCIFI miniseries and four-season show and various spinoffs was far from a sure thing. Following the monumental success of *Star Wars* in 1977, television executive Glen Larson saw an opportunity for ABC: a space opera series like *Star Wars*, but scaled down to television. Science fiction had its ups and downs on network TV: *Star Trek* only lasted for three seasons at NBC in the late 1960s, while CBS had launched an adaptation of *Planet of the Apes* in 1974\. "*Star Wars* gave \[ABC\] the license to say yes," David Larson recounted in Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross's [*So Way We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250823366?ref=andrewliptak.com). "It was a proven model now. They hadn't done anything like that on TV." The series followed the crew of a warship after humanity was attacked by the Cylons – hulking, chrome-armored robot-looking aliens bent on wiping humanity out and pursuing them as they looked for a new home. The series lasted for a single season in 1978 and 1979, with new adventures each week as the fleet found new planets and adventures. In 1980, ABC launched a sequel series called *Galactica 1980*, following the adventures of some of the characters after they discover Earth, which ran for only 10 episodes. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. There had been efforts over the years for some sort of followup to the franchise. Series star Richard Hatch attempted a continuation called *Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming* in 1999 that would have united the original cast, but ultimately, it never got off the ground beyond a 30-minute proof-of-concept pilot for which Hatch screened a [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5Fs8heJPX8xk&ref=andrewliptak.com) at various conventions. According to *So Say We All*, the roots of the reimagined *Battlestar Galactica* came from Ronald D. Moore's tenure on *Star Trek Voyager* and *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine*, where he felt constrained. "Ron came onboard as a writer and he came aboard wanting the show to do all sorts of things," Brannon Braga, *Voyager*'s executive director recounted. "He wanted the show to have continuity. When the ship got fucked up, he wanted it to stay fucked up. For characters to have lasting consequences. He wanted to eradicate the so-called reset button, and that's not something the studio was interested in, because this thing was a big seller in syndication." Following his work on *Star Trek*, Moore worked on a series called *Roswell* and an adaptation of Anne McCaffrey's *Dragonriders of Pern* for Warner Bros., but ultimately backed out after interference from the studio. After he walked away from the show, he was approached by David Eick, a producer at Universal, who told him that the studio had been working on a new version of *Galactica*, but hadn't quite figured it out yet, and if he'd like to take a shot. Their meeting took place shortly after the terror attacks in New York and Washington DC on September 11th, and Eick recounted that when he'd sat down with Moore, he had been reluctant. "We started talking and to my surprise, he recalls that the pilot of the original involved this holocaust, and at that moment, we were bleeding raw from 9/11\. We're thinking, what if we took it really seriously?" "I was like 'okay, if I remake this now, in today's world and about this attack, and what it does to these people, and the questions that would come up, and the survivors – what they would do. And the military verse the state authority. And freedom verses security. My God, this is an enormous opportunity and I could put in effect these ideas about shooting a new kind of sci-fi story and now having a big viewscreen, and not doing the captains' chair. Being more documentary-style in production and doing this naturalistic approach.' I just got excited about it and I said 'Okay, David, I'm in." From there, he went about reimaging what this story and world would look like. The same basic plot points from the original series remained: humanity was fleeing a holocaust and relentlessly pursued. Some of the characters remained: Captain Apollo, Adama, Starbuck, Baltar, but with some changes. Gone was the planet-of-the-week adventure serial and light-hearted exploits of the crew. The resulting story introduces us to the world on the eve of the attack: humanity had once fought against the Cylons – now robots that had rebelled against humanity, and after a long armistice, the Battlestar Galactica was set to be turned into a museum and its captain, William Adama, was set to retire after a long career in the Colonial Fleet. Everything changes when the Cylons launch a devastating attack – aided by a brilliant, egotistical computer scientist named Gaius Baltar that devastates the colonial worlds with nuclear attacks. [The creeping dread of Battlestar Galactica’s miniseriesHappy Friday! This week has been pretty quiet, SF/F-wise: it seems like the news about the royal family, the anniversary of COVID-19, and the passage of the latest stimulus bill has sucked most of the oxygen out of the room. Instead, I’ve got some thoughts on a thing![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_adce806b-ea0b-4620-9c82-4da6e91856c7_1200x675-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-creeping-dread-of-battlestar-galacticas-miniseries/) The three-part pilot is a brilliant example of story pacing. We're introduced to an ensemble of flawed characters who find themselves the last remnants of humanity: hot-headed pilots, a cabinet secretary thrust into the chain of command, crew members dealing with affairs and complicated relationships, now the only hope that their fellow survivors had. It was like nothing that I'd seen on television up to that point. Moore and his team redesigned the science fiction series, grounding every element in the real world. They toured air craft carriers to try and capture the look and feel of how a warship might actually operate, while the characters wore uniforms that were a far cry from the gaudy and colorful ones that you might have seen them wear in decades past. The story took on new relevance as the world contended with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the recent US invasion of Iraq. The series, director Michael Rymer explained to *Sci-Fi Magazine*, is "a powerful allegory for our times...It posits to our world that there are murders, there are despots, there are terrorists, there are terrible people that want to cause us harm, and it's not necessarily true that if we smile and are nice, they'll stop doing it." The miniseries captures that viewpoint perfectly: it focuses on the characters *reacting* to this overwhelming attack and doing everything that they think they can accomplish with what they have. They have to figure out in the moment that they have no hope of surviving if they stand and fight, and accordingly, figure out what their priorities are. Along the way, they have to make incredible sacrifices, leaving crew members behind, making desperate strikes, and making some impossible decisions along the way. By the end of the three hours, they're exhausted and realize that they have only one choice if they want humanity to survive: flee. --- Following the release of the miniseries, Moore penned a [series bible](https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/harvardwood/pages/109/attachments/original/1424565943/battlestar%5Fgalactica%5Fseries.pdf?1424565943&ref=andrewliptak.com) for where the series could go. "Our show is built on the idea that a science fiction series can employ ground-breaking special effects, dynamic cinematography, realistic situations, believable characters and explore contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing dramatic tension or excitement." While shows like *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* and *Babylon 5* were known for their long-running storylines, this wasn't the norm for most shows. Science fiction shows like *Star Trek* and *Stargate SG-1* relied on episodic seasons, where viewers could dip into any given episode and understand the premise. Moore set out to avoid this altogether: using long-term storytelling as a model to explore the bigger problems the characters faced. While there were still episodic elements to most episodes, the longer arcs allowed the shows writers to dig deeper into the characters than they might have been able to do otherwise. It's hard to understate just how much of a revelation this was for viewers back in 2003 and in the years that followed. This was a series that was exploring some difficult topics – everything from how to treat prisoners of war to the balance of power between the military and civilians, tests of loyalty, religion and faith, and how none of the decisions leaders might make have a clear-cut or safe answer. These were questions that were circulating within the US as we watched the beginnings of the wars in the Middle East and the extreme polarization of the nation's politics. The series would end up earning some notable awards like the Peabody, while the [United Nations invited](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5skp16MD9nY&ref=andrewliptak.com) the writers and actors to a panel discussion on human rights and warfare. In his book [*The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101911327?ref=andrewliptak.com), critic David Bianculli noted that there has been a convergence in technological innovation and creativity that have lead to what he calls "The Platinum Age" for the industry that has led to stories that are more complicated and sophisticated than their predecessors. Battlestar – the miniseries and the series – arrived at a critical point in the history of television. Streaming and even binging wasn't a thing, but [DVD sales were hitting their stride](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/the-death-of-the-dvd-why-sales-dropped-more-than-86percent-in-13-years.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) (the peak would come in 2005), allowing viewers to buy and consume entire seasons of TV shows over the course of a couple of days. DVD sales certainly helped with *Battlestar*'s popularity (and with other shows like Joss Whedon's *Firefly*), and it allowed entirely new audiences to pick up the series and rewatch it at their leisure. Moore's approach to the form that *Battlestar Galactica* has had a considerable and lasting impact on the modern TV world; it and shows like *LOST* helped acclimate a larger audience toward serialized storytelling that focused extensively on character growth and consequences that have become commonplace as streaming took over Hollywood. It's hard to imagine shows like Syfy's *Stargate: Universe* or *The Expanse* ([adapted from James S.A. Corey's novels](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/)), *Star Trek: Discovery, The Man in the High Castle*, *Westworld*, *Game of Thrones*, or *Star Wars: Andor* without Moore's grittier view. Audiences have clamored for dense, story/character-driven narratives that explore the complexities of life: *Battlestar* helped pave the way for those stories that now dominate the cultural zeitgeist and make us think about the world in new ways. So say we all. ### Apple's Foundation is coming back for a third season URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-foundation-season-3-renewal/ Last updated: 2023-12-06T12:00:07.000Z Here's some good news: Apple [has renewed](https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2023/12/apple-tv-renews-global-hit-epic-sci-fi-saga-foundation-for-season-three/?ref=andrewliptak.com) its space opera series *Foundation* for a third season. The series is (roughly) based on Isaac Asimov's take on the fall of civilizations, *Foundation*, and it premiered on the company's streaming service back in September 2021\. [Asimov’s empireHow Foundation became the story that powered space opera![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-22-at-1.27.10-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-isaac-asimov-foundation/) The show's an interesting one: it definitely takes its liberties with Asimov's original stories. That led plenty of fans to grouse about how it wasn't a good adaptation, but I felt that most of those changes made some amount of sense and were improvements in some places, even if some of the episodes did some bone-headed things. You can go back through some of the old recaps [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/). What I did really like about that first season is that it felt like the start to an interesting conversation about imperialism in ways that the book really didn't approach, but which a lot of modern SF/F is: look at books like Ann Leckie's *Ancillary Justice* (from which this series seemed to have cribbed some ideas) or C.L. Clarke's *The Unbroken*. I haven't actually gotten a chance to sit down and watched the second season yet: I just rewatched the entirety of *Andor,* which feels like it's playing with those same building blocks, although doing so in a much, much better fashion. But it's good to know that Season 2 won't be the end: the show's creators have spoken about how they've put together a long-term plan for the show, and it's nice to see that we'll actually get to see more of what they have in store. Given how reality has come crashing down on streaming services in the last couple of years, getting new seasons of shows that we're enjoying isn't a sure thing. ### Why we troop URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-make-a-wish-501st-legion-charity/ Last updated: 2023-12-05T18:21:22.000Z I've got two cosplay-related things to share for this week. The first is a PSA: I'll be doing a talk with the Vermont Historical Society tomorrow as part of our Virtual Speaker Series: Storytelling and Costuming. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/12/Winter-Speaker-Series-Thumbnail--6-.png)](https://vermonthistory.org/calendar/virtual-speaker-series-andrew-liptak?ref=andrewliptak.com) I've run a number of talks over the last couple of years since I published *Cosplay: A History,* and as we've had a couple of fashion/costume/accessory-related exhibits in the museum, this seemed like a good time to throw my hat into the ring for a talk. I'll be talking a bit about the history of the scene, but I'll also be looking at how Vermonters have used costumes to tell stories as well. I've got a couple of examples queued up (including this [one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ethan-allen-costume-vermont-history/)) that'll hopefully tie the larger world of cosplay to a smaller local scene. It'll also be virtual: you don't have to be in Vermont to listen in! The talk will take place at noon eastern time and you can find the link to join the talk [here](https://vermonthistory.org/calendar/virtual-speaker-series-andrew-liptak?ref=andrewliptak.com). Oh! I'll also be trooping this weekend at [Rail City Fan Expo's mini event](https://www.railcityfanfest.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Saint Albans on Sunday, December 10th. --- The other thing popped up in the TO Slack channel: a Twitter thread from a man named Brad Simpson who [lost his child Elijah to a brain tumor in April 2017](https://chadtough.org/meet-the-kids/elijah-simpson-sundell/?ref=andrewliptak.com). > Seven years ago, about six months after Elijah‘s diagnosis with terminal brain tumor DIPG, his school held Orange Day to celebrate him. The father of one of Elijah’s friends, knowing how much he loved Star Wars, asked if he could come dressed as Darth Vader. [pic.twitter.com/s3dzfo0l6A](https://t.co/s3dzfo0l6A?ref=andrewliptak.com) > > — Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social) (@bradleyrsimpson) [December 4, 2023](https://twitter.com/bradleyrsimpson/status/1731714220721328422?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=andrewliptak.com) Elijah was a fan of Star Wars, and as his father recounts, a friend offered to dress up as Darth Vader and show up at school during a celebration for him. The word went out and reached members of the 501st Legion, who also offered to show up in costume. Following Elijah's passing, those members showed up at his memorial service as an honor guard. It's a horrifying thing to think about, or even imagine as a parent. We troopers often note that it's a good thing that we're often wearing closed-faced helmets during troops like this: we're often crying under them. I've done a handful of troopers with the Vermont chapter of Make-A-Wish: one boy who looked just like my nephew was headed off to Disney. We did a [couple of troops with a boy who had a brain tumor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM1nyH31r-4&ref=andrewliptak.com): one before his surgery, and another after, when he was headed off on a trip to Legoland Florida. ([It sounds like he's doing better](https://www.manchesterjournal.com/news/local/sammy-wants-to-give-back/article%5Fe98c07f0-9983-5860-ad43-91a985a948e6.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)!) It's heartening to see actors dressing up as their characters to visit children in hospitals to do something similar, or to see communities come together to help boost some kid's spirits a bit. A decade ago, [Make-A-Wish staged a massive event](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/18/1214005742/batkid-10-years-later?ref=andrewliptak.com) in San Francisco to help a 5-year-old fulfill his dream to be Batman for a day. These are incredibly difficult and emotional troops to undertake: we're brought face to face with realization of just how fragile life can be, and just how resilient, and brave these kids are. Cosplay can be an important booster, even for kids who aren't suffering from life-threatening conditions: the picture at the top of this post is from Kid's Day in Burlington Vermont, where we showed up and took part in a parade and just hung out for a couple of hours posting for pictures and answering questions for kids. I've often described cosplay and the 501st as a somewhat self-indulgent hobby, but one that's offset by fact that we get to do things like this; bring a kid's favorite story to life for just a short while, or give them the opportunity to talk with their favorite characters. Brad summed it up nicely: "For at least one day, the shadow of cancer, of grief and death seemed to fade for a bit." Reading Brad's account was moving: a good reminder for how powerful stories can be, and how this scene goes far beyond the folks dressing up at conventions or other pop-culture events. ### 14 new SF/F books to check out this December URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/scifi-fantasy-books-december-2023/ Last updated: 2023-12-02T19:29:53.000Z We've reached the end of the year, and here's the final monthly book list for you. December's usually a pretty quiet month, but there are a bunch of neat-looking books hitting store shelves this month (as well as a handful of holdovers from November that I missed.) I've been woefully behind on my reading this year, and my to-read list from this year is positively overflowing. It's a wealth of choices, and I just wish I had more time and brainpower to get through it. We've had some new folks join us, so here's a rundown of what this feature is: the book list is a monthly roundup of books that catch my eye for the coming month. It's predominantly speculative fiction, but I'll throw in others as well from time to time. If you're looking for some good gifts for the reader in your life (or yourself!), here's the 2023 TO gift guide: [Transfer Orbit’s 2023 holiday gift guideA whole bunch of gift ideas for the reader in your life![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2023/11/IMG_4622-1.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/transfer-orbit-2023-holiday-shopping-list/) Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and if you make a purchase through them, this newsletter might get a small commission. That's one way to help support Transfer Orbit: it helps pay the bills to host it on Ghost, and for some of the tools that I use, like Otter.ai for interview transcriptions. You can also support the site by signing up as a paid subscriber. You'll get some additional posts and missives as I put them together. Some of the recent posts that have come out are [some thoughts about Disney's latest movie *Wish*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/disney-wish-music-power-gender/), a note about a [classic cyberpunk anthology that's now available for free](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-mirrorshades-gibson-cadigan-rucker-free-science-fiction/), [John Scalzi returning to his *Old Man's War* universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-new-book-military-scifi/), and [commentary on Dave Filoni's role at Lucasfilm](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-dave-filoni-storytelling/). You also get access to a Slack channel where we're constantly chatting about books, movies, recent events, and quite a bit more. (If you're an existing subscriber and don't have access, lemme know, I'm happy to get you set up.) [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-book-list-harrow-sanderson-mcu-kuang/#/portal/signup) The price on subscriptions is still half-off: I'll be flipping the switch to bring it back to the full price tomorrow. This is your last chance to get in on it at the discounted rate! Alrighty: here are 14 new SF/F books to check out this December. --- ### [*Sister of Starlit Seas*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593129777?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Terry Brooks (November 14th) Terry Brooks continues his new fantasy *Viridian Deep* series (the prior novels are [*Child of Light*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357408?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Daughter of Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357439?ref=andrewliptak.com)), putting the focus on Auris's adoptive sister Char. She's always been uncomfortable with her role as the youngest member of the family and frustrates them with her impulsive and impatient nature. Those are virtues that she sees as her greatest strengths, and just before she turns 15, she runs away to join a pirate crew. Three years into that adventure and the man she loves is captured by slavers and leaps into action to try and save him. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-593-12977-7?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The theme of belonging strikes a chord and, though Charlayne’s youth brings a YA vibe to the proceedings, her earnestness is sure to charm fans of the previous books. The result is an exciting new direction for the series." ### [*Rebel Moon Part One – A Child Of Fire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803367316?ref=andrewliptak.com) by V. Castro (December 26th) Netflix is releasing one of its bigger films on December 22nd: *Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire*. It's directed by Zach Snyder (*Justice League, 300, Watchmen,* etc.), and it's a big space opera that had its roots in a pitch for the Star Wars franchise a number of years ago. It'll follow a young woman on a frontier moon that is resisting the Imperium as she recruits a band of warriors to save her home. The movie [looks like it'll be a lot of fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FrHLOXbFZtI&ref=andrewliptak.com), and it'll be getting the novelization treatment from V. Castro, who is also writing the novelization for the second part, [*Rebel Moon Part Two – Scargiver*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803367330?ref=andrewliptak.com), which comes out next April. [Snyder’s Star WarsZack Snyder’s failed Star Wars pitch is now headed to Netflix. It could prove to be the start of something interesting, or at the very least, somewhat entertaining![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-07-at-9.16.43-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/zack-snyder-netflix-rebel-moon-star-wars-science-fiction-movies/) ### [*Caliban's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Abaddon's Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James S.A. Corey (December 12th) *The Expanse* is one of my favorite book series, and back in 2021, Orbit released a special edition of *Leviathan Wakes* to mark the 10th anniversary of its publication. It's now turned to the same treatment of the next two books in the series: *Caliban's War* and *Abaddon's Gate*, which each get new covers, endpapers, and introductions from Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The two volumes look very slick, and I'm eager to make some space on my shelves for them. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) ### [*Resurrections*](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/all-books/products/resurrections?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ada Hoffmann (December 19th) Ada Hoffman has a collection of her short fiction that includes stories about aliens, mysterious sea creatures, fossil hunters, strange artifacts, artificial intelligences, and quite a bit more. You can see the full table of contents over on the book's product page over on the Apex Book Company's website. (Preorders are also discounted.) ### [*Liberty's Daughter*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958880166?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Kritzer (November 21st) A woman named Beck Garrison is one of the residents of a decrepit seastead – a seaborne community made up of old platforms and cruise ships made by a libertarian separatist movement decades ago. She's etched out an existence working odd jobs and detective work, and when a debt slave hires her to find her missing sister, she begins to learn a bit more about life on land and some unexpected secrets about herself and her father – secrets that some folks will go to great lengths to protect. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-958880-16-6?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Kritzer shows off her worldbuilding chops in this impressive mystery set in a near future world," and that "the political critique is sharp and the mystery is gripping." ### [*Star Wars The High Republic: The Eye of Darkness*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593597934?ref=andrewliptak.com) by George Mann (November 14th) The latest installment of the *Star Wars High Republic* series jumps a year after the events of Claudia Gray's [*The Fallen Star*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355411?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which the Nihil raiders have destroyed the Starlight Beacon and taken over vast swaths of the galaxy's Outer Rim. Their leader, Marchion Ro has begun to rule over the region with an iron fist, and the Jedi trapped behind the lines have been fighting to save what worlds remain. On the other side, Jedi Knights Elzar Mann, Bell Zettifar, and others have been working to find ways through the barrier and provide desperately-needed aid to the worlds that are under threat. ### [*All the Hidden Paths*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250829306?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Foz Meadows (December 5th) Foz Meadows follows up their 2022 novel [*A Strange and Stubborn Endurance*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250829139?ref=andrewliptak.com)with *All the Hidden Paths.* In that first book, nobel Velasin vin Aaro was outed as gay, potentially upending his family's plans for a diplomatic union, but hatches a plan to marry his would-be bride's brother, Caethari Aeduria instead, only to find themselves targeted by factions opposing the alliance. In this follow-up, they've foiled the plot, Velasin and Caethari have wed and are figuring out their new relationship, while the ramifications of their union still playing out. Their new marriage is soon strained as they deal with their respective pasts and as further attacks come. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250829306?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Meadows "does an impressive job of demonstrating that the path to happiness and self-acceptance does not end \[after someone comes out\]," and that "does an impressive job of demonstrating that the path to happiness and self-acceptance does not end there. ### [*The Hard Switch*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781910395707?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Owen D. Pomery (December 15th) This graphic novel caught my eye from its wonderful cover and artwork: it follows a trio, Ada, Haika, and Mallic who have been salvaging spaceship wrecks so that they can save up enough money to get by. The mineral that has made jumping between systems is running out, and everyone across the galaxy will soon be stuck in place. When the three embark on a new mission to salvage a ship, they might have stumbled across a new discovery that can unlock a new method of interstellar travel. ### [*Blindspace*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781473227484?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jeremy Szal (November 22nd) Jeremy Szal follows up his novel [*Stormblood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781473227439?ref=andrewliptak.com)with *Blindspace*, the second installment of his *The Common* trilogy. We follow the adventures of Vakov Fukasawa, a soldier called a Reaper who was injected with a sterum of alien DNA that made him faster and more aggressive. After killing a cult leader to save his brother, they're now on the run from the group's survivors, who're also trying to reawaken the alien Shenoi to wreck havoc across the galaxy, something Vakov and his allies are trying to prevent. ### [*Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781958121603?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wole Talabi (November 21st) Wole Talabi edits the first anthology in a shared world that draws on a number of African cultures: the Sauútiverse with stories touching on space opera, artificial intelligence and magic. There are a bunch of authors I've read that are included here: T.L. Huchu, Tobias Buckell, and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. You can see the whole TOC [here](https://brittlepaper.com/2023/08/check-out-the-action-packed-table-of-contents-for-the-sauutiverse-anthology-mothersound/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### [*The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358652984?ref=andrewliptak.com) by J.R.R. Tolkien (November 14th) *The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien* has long been a great resource for anyone researching the author's thoughts about his writing and Middle-earth. There's now a new, expanded version of the book that's hit stores, which includes 150 previously unseen letters, which provides some new insights into his classic fantasy works. ### [*Where the Dead Wait*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982182823?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ally Wilkes (December 5th) Ally Wilks has a new horror story set in the far reaches of the Earth. An arctic explorer named William Day's latest expedition failed, returning to England in disgrace after the survivors were forced to eat their dead shipmates. More than a decade later, Day's second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has embarked on another mission and has gone missing. It might be an opportunity for Day to redeem his reputation, but it'll be more challenging than he expected, especially with a reporter onboard looking to dig up stories about the failed expedition, and Steven's wife – a medium who can commune with the dead. *Publishers Weekly* [gave the book a starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781982182823?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Expertly interweaving the two timelines, Wilkes crafts rich physical and psychological landscapes that deepen her terrifying tale as it barrels toward an unforgettable crescendo. This is a breathtaking achievement." ### [*The Icarus Twin*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982193058?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (December 5th) One book that I've been reading off and on this fall has been Timothy Zahn's [*The Icarus Plot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=andrewliptak.com), another entry in the world that he introduced us to in [*The Icarus Hunt*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553573916?ref=andrewliptak.com)(one of my favorite SF books of all time). This month, he has a followup to *The Icarus Plot*: Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene explore uninhabited worlds for signs that they might be good terraforming candidates, and are now working for the Icarus Group, a governmental group looking for portals created by a long-vanished alien civilization. As they embark on a new mission, it becomes clear that they're being stalked themselves, and find that someone named Easton Dent has been looking for them. Shortly after they meet, Roarke is arrested for Dent's murder, and learn that he might have been in contact with one of these portals. They're not the only folks looking for them: the alien Patth, who have a stranglehold on the galaxy's commerce, are also looking for the portals, and they'll stop at nothing to maintain that control. ### Radicalized wishes URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/disney-wish-music-power-gender/ Last updated: 2023-11-30T17:13:26.000Z We spent Thanksgiving down in Pennsylvania with family. One of the nice perks in the area is that there's a nice movie theater in town with good seats, screens, and an attached IMAX theater. I caught *Oppenheimer* there over the summer, and on this latest trip, we caught Disney's latest animated film, *Wish*. It's a cute film. It hasn't landed with the weight of some of their recent animated films like *Frozen* or *Moana* and it's a little formulaic, but I did come away from it with an interesting impression (along with a couple of songs that have been stuck in my head ever since.) The film and story are designed as a bit of a throwback to the central storytelling magic that makes up most of Disney's brand: the power of wishes and the potential that comes with them. We're introduced to a young woman named Asha (Ariana DeBose) in the kingdom of Rosas, where a sorcerer king named King Magnifico (Chris Pine) has set up shop. The kingdom is prosperous and peaceful, and a requirement for living there is that everyone 18 and older has to turn over their "wish" – the greatest desire of his subject – for safekeeping. He then doles them out one by one in ceremonies. Asha is set to interview to be his apprentice and discovers that most of those wishes aren't actually going to be granted: Magnifico only grants them when they seem like they'll be beneficial to his kingdom, and holds onto the rest. Turns out, the nice king isn't as nice, recognizes Asha as a threat to his power, goes off the deep end, and you can probably guess the rest. There are a couple of things that really stood out to me while watching this: *Wish* feels very much like it's cutting against the grain when it comes to the stories that Disney has traditionally put out. Think back to classics like *The Lion King*, *Cinderella*, *Sleeping Beauty*, *The Sword in the Stone*, or *Aladdin*: they're stories about someone trying to engrain themselves with traditional power structures like a monarchy or kingdom. A common criticism against the company is how the characters in their stories are often working to uphold the status quo, rather than undermining it. They make for comfortable stories, but without the context that monarchies – especially the sorts of medieval ones that these stories draw from – really aren't great for the people who live under them. That's an overly academic argument, but I think it's worth entertaining if we're talking about the long-term impact of this sort of storytelling. *Wish* really doesn't follow that playbook: it's about a common girl who's given an opportunity to join in the world's power structure, and recognizing the problems in it, opts to fight back and undermine it: she (accidentally) calls down a star that pushes the paranoid king into utilizing some dark magic, and prompts her and her friends to literally set up a revolution to topple him. The song "Knowing What I Know Now" is the song where this is realized, and not something that I think you'd see in an earlier era of Disney's films. There's a lesson that's stuck with me since I took an American history survey course in college, when my professor explained that the American Revolution really wasn't sparked by ordinary colonists who were just a bit pissed off: they were political radicals who had thought long and hard about using drastic action against their British overseers. This feels like that in a bit of a nutshell: a song about radicalization that swells into a call to action. The other parallel strand that I've been thinking about with this film is how it shows how easy it is for someone to fall to the temptation of power. Magnifico starts off with good intentions: he was forced from his home by violence and vowed to make sure it never happened again when he set up the kingdom of Rosas. He's handsome and charismatic, and has bestowed upon his citizens the tools and freedom to thrive, despite that cost of giving up one's wish. "At All Costs" speaks to that: it's a nice, sweeping ballad between Magnifico and Asha as he shows her the central tenet of his power: these floating orbs that are each of his citizen's wishes. They're eventually singing about two things: Magnifico is protecting those wishes because they underpin his power, while Asha sees it a little more simply: these deeply personal parts of her fellow family members and community. The idea of going to any length to protect something is a brittle thing (I'm reminded of Nemik's [observations of the brittleness of empires](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/) in his manifesto in *Andor*), and when pushed, things start to break. Magnifico's descent into a darker path comes through in the song "This is the Thanks I Get?!": after Asha calls down a wish, he recognizes that his hold on power is threatened and rounds up his subjects to get information from them, only to get some pushback when Asha's friends look to delay them. It's a clever song, because it feels like it's so illustrative of the insecurities that come with power. Sure, he set up a kingdom and sits atop a throne for benevolent reasons, but the longer he sits there, the more he begins to see the possible ways that he can be unseated. How dare these commoners question his judgement and everything he's given them? It's so petulant and off the cuff in a way that feels very true to life. It feels like something that's inherently tied to the specific sense of masculinity that men have been conditioned to feel in the society we live in and how reactive they can feel when questioned or feel like they're being undermined. It's certainly a sense that I've felt and struggled with over the years growing up, and it's something that I can't say that I've seen in one of Disney's films. If the studio can be accused of planting outdated lessons about gender roles in the minds of children, this feels like a welcome change. It's not a lesson that I think should be a taken as "men and rulers are *bad!"* but more along the lines of "this is the shape and form of a power structure that has flaws." This is the power of storytelling: the ability to play with these bigger ideas in an engaging way. I think *Wish* did a pretty good job in flipping some of these long-running ideas, rather than a story that what they might have come up with had they run to some of their older classics for inspiration. That, I think, is notable and interesting. ### Read the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades for free online URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-mirrorshades-gibson-cadigan-rucker-free-science-fiction/ Last updated: 2023-11-29T17:08:33.000Z This is a pretty cool thing that popped up online recently: author Rudy Rucker has [posted the entirety of the seminal cyberpunk anthology *Mirrorshades*](https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/HTML/?ref=andrewliptak.com)to his website to read for free. On Twitter, Rucker [noted](https://twitter.com/rudytheelder/status/1729206173969350959?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the anthology wasn't (ironically) available as an eBook and decided to remedy the situation. He's since added up [downloadable versions](https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to read on your device. Bruce Sterling edited and released the anthology in 1986, rounding up a number of recently-published stories from the likes of William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Rucker, Greg Bear, John Shirley, and others. In his preface, Sterling noted that the collection was a showcase of writers "who have come to prominence within this decade," defined by their examination of the decade's culture, and labeling them as the forerunners of a new movement in the genre. "This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group," he wrote. "But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one has stuck: cyberpunk." He explained that the book was designed to "give readers new to Movement writing a broad introduction to cyberpunk's tenets themes, and topics," and that this subgenre was defined by the changing attitudes towards technology in the 1980s. The roots to cyberpunk, he explained, run deep into the genre's history, drawing on strands of the New Wave movement through authors like J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany, the harder stories from Larry Niven or H. G. Wells. He asserted that "the cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world" – one where technology and computers were beginning to play a role in all parts of society. [Cyberpunk’s power came from global dystopian politicsIt might look like the 1980s, but we’re still living in it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/size/w1200/2021/03/image-9-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cyberpunk-power-came-from-global-dystopian-politics/) The SF Encyclopedia [echoes this by ](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyberpunk?ref=andrewliptak.com)[pointing out](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyberpunk?ref=andrewliptak.com) that a central tenet of cyberpunk is the winnowing distance between technology and the human body: "a future in which machine augmentations of the human body are commonplace, as are mind and body changes brought about by [Drugs](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/drugs?ref=andrewliptak.com) and biological engineering," coupled with the globalization of power facilitated by information technology systems where corporations grow to rival the nation-state. The encyclopedia notes that Sterling's preface is akin to a manifesto, arguing that the world has experienced a major change and that the authors and stories included in the book were prime examples of the movement that would continue to grow. There's a lot in there that I feel is still pretty relevant today: not just in that the stylings of cyberpunk are still going strong, but in that the influences that shaped the genre persist to this day. It's a good opportunity to re-read these foundational stories. ### Transfer Orbit's 2023 holiday gift guide URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/transfer-orbit-2023-holiday-shopping-list/ Last updated: 2023-11-24T17:55:05.000Z It's become something of a tradition with this newsletter: every fall, I've put together a gift guide for readers. I recommend a lot of books on this newsletter via the [monthly book list](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/), so this list features fewer regular trade books and is heavier on the books that are a little more special: art books, fancy editions, and other generally items that I've generally found appealing or useful over the course of 2023. Here are the other Gift Guides from prior years: [2019](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-secret-commonwealth-bn-scifi-and-a-gift-guide/), [2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2020-transfer-orbit-holiday-gift-guide/), [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/gift-guide-books-music-tech-2021/), and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2022-sci-fi-fantasy-gift-guide/). As per usual, any purchases made through Bookshop might result in a commission to Transfer Orbit. Here's what I'd recommend this year: --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4646-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Hawker Hurricane Clowes Automatic watch](https://avi-8.com/collections/all-watches/products/hawker-hurricane-clowes-automatic-acklington-av-4097-02?ref=andrewliptak.com) from AVI-8, $365 I fell into something of a [watch-collecting phase](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-watch-trench-watch-wwi-barre/) over the last couple of years ([thanks, Marko](https://www.markokloos.com/?p=2709&ref=andrewliptak.com).) For years, I wore a trusty Timex watch, but as I began spending more time on Instagram over the pandemic and while writing the book, I somehow trained its algorithms to start serving me watch ads – usually the sorts of military-inspired field watches. They're something that I've come to enjoy wearing, and featured [Szanto's Heritage Aviator Watch](https://szantotime.com/products/heritage-aviator/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) on this list last year. The one that I've enjoyed wearing the most this year has been one from AVI-8, the Hawker Hurricane Clowes Automatic. I love the look and feel of this one: the navy blue/orange/silver really look great, and the patterning on the face is just gorgeous. It's a little on the pricy side, but the company does have a Black Friday deal going on that should knock a decent chunk of the price off. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4648.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Things Could Be Worse mug](https://calamityware.com/collections/mugs-and-tea-sets/products/calamityware-mug-1-things-could-be-worse?variant=31273839034391&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Calamity Ware, $21 I've actually had this mug for a couple of years, and I love it. For a number of years Calamity Ware has been releasing all sorts of neat home-ware products with outstanding images of monsters and creatures. I particularly like their take on the classic Blue Willow porcelain patterns. Rather than idyllic countryside scenes, they've put in monsters and robots into the design. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4623-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Cuneiform Mug](https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/mugs/products/cuneiform-hand-carved-15-oz-ceramic-mug?variant=40090623541325&ref=andrewliptak.com) from Cognitive Surplus, $20 Cognitive Surplus is another one of those neat online storefronts that is perfect for the nerd-inclined person in your life. I’ve picked up a couple of their products over the years, and the one that caught my eye this year is a mug featuring Cuneiforms from ancient Mesopotamia. I love how this looks: the white lettering against the black background really pops out, and it’s a nice size for tea or coffee in the morning. The site says that the text is “comes from the [Hymn to Dungi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-praise%5Fof%5FShulgi%5F%28Shulgi%5FD%29?ref=andrewliptak.com), which sings the praises of a wise and just leader.” ### [*Caliban's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) *and* [*Abaddon's Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com) special editions by James S.A. Corey, $40 2021 marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of *Leviathan Wakes* by James S.A. Corey, and to mark the occasion, Orbit published a special edition of the novel, with a new cover, new endpapers and an introduction. This year, they’re releasing two special editions: one for *Caliban’s War* and *Abaddon’s Gate*, the second and third books in the series, respectively. Like the first book, they feature special new covers, endpapers, and a preface for each book by the authors. These should be some excellent additions to the shelf, and they round out the first “trilogy” of books in the series — they’ll be great for fans of the series, or a good introduction to folks picking them up for the first time. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4626.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Consider Phlebas*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Iain M. Banks, $125 One of my favorite space opera novels of all time is Iain M. Banks’ *Consider Phlebas*, the first novel he published in his long-running, cerebral Culture series. The book is about a mercenary named Horza who’s swept up into a mission to recover a missing “mind” — an artificial intelligence from the Culture that fled after an attack. It’s a gripping read, and I was excited to see that The Folio Society picked it up as one of their new books this year. Like just about all of their other books, it’s a handsome edition: a nice blue with art by Dániel Taylor. I really enjoyed reading this earlier in the year. Hopefully, the other novels in the series will follow. If you’re looking for something a little more budget-friendly, [Orbit UK is re-releasing Banks’ entire back catalog](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/) with new minimalist covers this November, with US editions following sometime next year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4627.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Childhood's End*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/childhood-s-end.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arthur C. Clarke, $80 One of the books that struck me the most when I first read it years ago was Arthur C. Clarke’s *Childhood’s End.* It was something different for me at the time: a novel about a strange future for humanity after first contact, where humanity is guided towards a vast, galactic diaspora and collective mind. It was also one of The Folio Society’s new editions this year, following their beautiful editions of [*Rendezvous with Rama*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/rendezvous-with-rama.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*2001: A Space Odyssey*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/2001-a-space-odyssey.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). This volume features illustrations by Grace Aldrich and a 1989 foreword from Arthur C. Clarke which outlines how he came to write the book. [Matt Griffin on illustrating The Folio Society’s Rendezvous With RamaIn recent years, The Folio Society has made some impressive forays into the world of science fiction, putting out a wonderful edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune back in 2015, and has added new, high-end volumes from authors such as Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale)![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/11/EaUirOaWAAIf3FW.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/matt-griffin-illustrating-folio-society-rendezvous-with-rama/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4649.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Ceramic dishware](https://ericheerspinkceramics.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from Eric Heerspink, variable prices Last year, I included a recommendation for a couple of products from Eric Heerspink, a potter who's known for his Star Wars-inspired wares. Earlier this year, he released a set of *Rogue One*\-inspired bowls and mugs, including this fantastic Shoretrooper-styled one. I absolutely love it, but then again, I love all things Shoretroopers, and didn't hesitate to snag this one. His products are usually on a limited-run basis, and his store is currently out of stock, but his website notes that he'll be restocking at the end of the month (with a *Return of the Jedi* theme), and I'll be really eager to see what he'll be stocking in this next round. They should be well worth it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4628.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Dune Messiah*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/dune-messiah.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Frank Herbert, $110 Way back in 2015, The Folio Society began publishing science fiction novels in earnest with the release of its edition of Frank Herbert’s [*Dune*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/dune.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). It’s a gorgeous edition, and ever since, they’ve been steadily publishing lots of other genre classics. However, we hadn’t seen it follow up with the other books in Herbert’s series — until this fall with the release of *Dune: Messiah*, the second book in the series. This book fits nicely alongside that first volume: it keeps the same grey cover, sand-patterned slipcase and stylings, and features illustrations by Hilary Clarcq. It looks just as great as its predecessor: a beautiful edition that I'm looking forward to digging into. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4629.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Dune Saga Hardcover Boxed Set: Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593548905?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Frank Herbert, $140 If you’re looking for some other editions of Frank Herbert’s *Dune* novels that are a bit of a step up over the regular trade editions, Ace has followed up its Deluxe edition of *Dune* from 2019 with deluxe editions of its sequels, *Dune: Messiah* and *Children of Dune*, and released the trio in a nice boxed set. These three editions all feature new covers from Matt Griffith, as well as introductions by Herbert’s son, Brian. It’s a nice package for *Dune* fans or for newcomers to the series. ### [*The Expanse: The Complete Series*](https://www.amazon.com/Expanse-Complete-Blu-Ray-Various-Contributors/dp/B0CKYF6BCK?ref=andrewliptak.com) Blu-Ray, $80 One of my favorite shows of all time is *The Expanse*, the SYFY / Prime Video adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s books. The show is an excellent adaptation of the books, but it’s also something that stands nicely on its own. After the SYFY channel stopped running the series at the end of Season 3, Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video picked it up and carried it for another three seasons. Now, the entire show is available in physical media on Blu-Ray and DVD. I’ve been waiting for this: I own the physical copies of the first three seasons, but it’ll be nice to have them together in one package, especially given that streaming services have developed a tendency to pull shows off the air abruptly. Time for a marathon. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4634.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Ancillary Justice 10th Anniversary Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574266?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ann Leckie, $40 One of the most important novels to hit the genre in the last decade has been Ann Leckie’s *Ancillary Justice,* the first of her Imperial Radch trilogy, which introduces us to Breq, a former starship artificial intelligence that was forced to flee in the body of one of her ancillary soldiers, and who then sets out on a quest for revenge against the empire and its leader. Earlier this year, Orbit re-released Leckie’s books with new, minimalist covers in advance of her latest novel, *Translation State.* I wasn’t a huge fan of those covers, because I loved John Harris’s artwork so much, but I was pleased to see that Orbit was bringing out a special edition of the novel to commemorate its tenth birthday. This is a wonderful volume, featuring a new cover from John Harris, in addition to some special endpapers and a new preface from Leckie that looks back on the past decade. [Orbit is releasing slick new editions of Ancillary Justice and The ExpanseOrbit is releasing new, special editions of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and James S.A. Corey’s Caliban’s War and Abbadon’s Gate![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/Copy-of-Winter-Speaker-Series-Thumbnail--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4632.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Tales from Earthsea*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/tales-from-earthsea.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ursula K. Le Guin One of my favorite volumes from The Folio Society was of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic fantasy novel [*A Wizard of Earthsea*](https://foliosociety.com/usa/a-wizard-of-earthsea.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* Over the years, the publisher has steadily delivered plenty of other books from Le Guin like [*The Dispossessed*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-dispossessed.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*The Left Hand of Darkness*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-left-hand-of-darkness.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the [other volumes](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-tombs-of-atuan.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) [from her](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-farthest-shore.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) [Earthsea cycle](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/tehanu.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). This year brings out the penultimate volume of that series: *Tales from Earthsea*, once again featuring David Lupton’s beautiful artwork. This isn't a novel but a collection of Le Guin's short stories and essays about the world that she originally published back in 2001\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4637.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Cosplay: A History*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cosplay-A-History/Andrew-Liptak/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Andrew Liptak, $25 I'd be remiss if I didn't toss my own book onto the pile to invite you to check out. This was a massive project for me, and it's my attempt to pull together a comprehensive-ish, holistic overview of where the modern state of the cosplay scene came from, how it's evolved over the decades, and what it says about our relationship to the stories we love. I'm a *little* biased, but I think it'll make a good gift – not just for a cosplayer you might know, but for anyone who's generally interested in science fiction or fantasy. It's available through all major retailers. I also have a box of copies: if you'd like something personalized, contact me! I'm happy to sell copies directly. (I'm going to limit this to US shipping only: I don't have the bandwidth to process international orders at this time.) ### [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Andrew Liptak and Jaym Gates, $19 *Cosplay: A History* wasn't my first book. That honor goes to a project that Jaym Gates and I cooked up a decade ago, *War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*, which was our attempt to tell stories about the humanity behind warfare. It includes stories by authors like Ken Liu, Karin Lowachee, Linda Nagata, Maruice Broaddus, Joe Haldeman and more. I'm very proud of this little book: there are some incredible stories in here, and I think they hold up nicely, even as the battle lines around the world have changed since it first came out. Our publisher Apex Books is also including the book [in a bundle deal](https://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/black-friday-2023/products/black-friday-apex-classics-budnel?ref=andrewliptak.com): for $30, you can get it along with *Dark Faith* edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon and *For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher* by Jason Sizemore. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4635.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*A Handheld History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780008598174?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Lost in Cult, $40 One of my earliest nerd influences was getting a Nintendo Game Boy when I was a child. I really loved that device (and I still have it – it mostly works), because it introduced me to games like *Tetris, Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening* and a host of others over the years. The Game Boy wasn't the only hand-held device I remember playing with: I can't imagine how many hours I spent on the old Tiger Electronics X-Men game when I had one years ago. *A Handheld History* is a book that looks at that place that those types of systems occupied for consumers. There's lots of great photography and additional context throughout this volume, and it'll be a must-buy for a gamer in your life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4624.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [Gandalf and Balrog Brickheadz](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/gandalf-the-grey-balrog-40631?ref=andrewliptak.com) Lego kit, $20 *Lord of the Rings* is one of those stories that I've loved since I first picked them up years ago, helped along by Peter Jackson's films, multiple revisits and the new Amazon series. There's been plenty of merchandising along the way, but nothing has really ever grabbed me (although I *have* always coveted a set of the Argonath bookends that came with one of the DVD sets... someday) until I laid eyes on Lego's Brickheadz set that paired up Gandalf and the Balrog. Look how cute they are! They're amazing little figures and they're the perfect decoration for a desk or bookshelf – where I've had mine for the past year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4639.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*No Country for Old Men*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/no-country-for-old-men.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cormac McCarthy, $70 If you’re looking for some non-genre fare this holiday season, one book that caught my eye from The Folio Society was Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel *No Country for Old Men*, his western about a This edition features stark illustrations by Gérard Dubois that really give the book a unique feel. It's not the usual science fiction/fantasy, but it's a phenomenal read, and well worth picking up. ### [Monteverde Ritma Fountain Pen](https://yafabrands.com/monteverde-usa-ritma-fountain-pen-black/?ref=andrewliptak.com), $50 During last year's Christmas festivities, my uncle (also a big SF/F nerd and writer) and I were talking about writing instruments and notebooks, and he happened to show me the pen that he had been using: a Monteverde Ritma fountain pen. He ended up giving it to me, for which I've been immensely grateful, because it's a really great writing device. I've never really used fountain pens all that much: I picked up a slim Parker pen a number of years ago, but only sporadically used it. This one, however, is something that I've used *constantly*. It's a thick-bodied pen that's easy to hold, it writes very legibly, and best of all, it has this magnetic top that has an extremely satisfying \*click!\* when it snaps on. If anything, it's definitely spoiled me me for regular, ball-point pens and I'll be on the market for some new ones in the coming year, I think. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4638.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### PenguinClassics Marvel Collection: [*The Avengers*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135791?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Fantastic Four*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135838?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and* [*X-Men*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135777?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby et al., $28 For decades, literary-minded folks have relegated comics to the edges of acceptable reading material: they were disposable, low-brow culture and not worth paying attention to. There’s been a change in attitudes in recent years, however, as authors and artists push back against those attitudes: they’re influential cultural touch-points. That was driven home last year when Penguin Classics broke into the comics world with a new series of collections of classic Marvel stories: [*Amazing Spider-man*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135722?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) / [*Black Panther*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135807?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) / [*Captain America*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135746?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*.* This year brings another lineup of comics to the iconic series: collections of the most important stories from *The Avengers, Fantastic Four*, and *X-Men* comics. Each edition comes in a special hardcover and softcover editions (I prefer the classic look of the paperbacks, personally), and alongside the comics, with introductions by series editor Ben Saunders, as well as forewords Leigh Bardugo, Jerry Craft, and Rainbow Rowell, respectively. (*The Avengers* also has an introduction by José Alaniz.) These are great introductions to some of the best-known comics out there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4640.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Rowe, $40 Cover art is something that I feel passionate about, and one of the best social media feeds out there is Adam Rowes' 70s Scifi Art project, where he's curated art from throughout some of the most vivid decades of science fiction. He's collected it into this book, *Worlds Beyond Time*, which puts everything together into one astounding volume. It not only showcases the fantastic artwork from that era, but he provides a ton of context and information about the artists and more. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4641.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [*Roadside Picnic*](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/roadside-picnic.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, $70 One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time is Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's *Roadside Picnic*, a phenomenal novel about humanity's first contact and the utter weirdness and unknowable nature of extraterrestrial life. The Folio Society put together a gorgeous new edition of the book with art fromDave McKean (as well as an introduction from him), along with a foreword byUrsula K. Le Guin. I think it's one of their better-looking editions. [An otherworldly invasionThe Folio Society has released a beautiful new edition of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s classic novel Roadside Picnic![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/03/28F05823-4DF1-4832-87CA-F1AA9BC01F5B.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/roadside-picnic-strugatsky-folio-society/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4644.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak ### [](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### [*The Hobbit*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-hobbit-illustrated-by-the-author-j-r-r-tolkien/19879859?ean=9780063347533&ref=andrewliptak.com) special illustrated edition by J.R.R. Tolkien, $75 Over the last couple of years, Harper Collins has published some special editions of [](https://zdcs.link/ZmOmY?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Lord of the Rings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358653035?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [](https://zdcs.link/NKBKY?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Silmarillion*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063280779?ref=andrewliptak.com), each featuring illustrations and maps by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Now, it's time for *The Hobbit* to get the same treatment. This edition follows the others: it’s wrapped in a beautiful cover, comes with a pair of removable maps, a foreword from Christopher Tolkien (from 1987), a new note about the illustrations from Wayne G. Gammons and Christine Scull from this year, and most importantly, Tolkien’s own illustrations depicting scenes from the story, ranging from sketches, illustrations, and paintings. It’s handsome edition. In addition to this edition of *The Hobbit*, we’ve also got another illustrated book of Tolkien’s: [*Letters from Father Christmas*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/letters-from-father-christmas-j-r-r-tolkien/11852980?ean=9780063340534&ref=andrewliptak.com) ($28), a collection of the letters that he wrote to his children starting in the 1920s. The book features scans of those letters, alongside the text. It’s a whimsical and beautiful book that’ll be perfect for the coming holiday. ### [Transfer Orbit subscription](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup/) ($25/year / $5/week) And finally, a bit of a self-plug: if you've enjoyed reading *Transfer Orbit*, sign up for a membership, or gift one to someone you think would enjoy it. Members get access to a Slack channel, a short updates about what's going on in the SF/F / entertainment world, and a bit more. Supporters help keep the newsletter going in many ways, and form a great, supportive community around it: we'd love for you to join us! I've had the price slashed for a couple of months: December 1st, it'll go back up to the usual rate of $40/year. --- A couple of other gift guides from some Transfer Orbit-adjacent newsletters to consider: - *Astrolabe* by Aidan Moher: [2023 Holiday Gift Guide for Geeks!](https://astrolabe.aidanmoher.com/p/2023-holiday-gift-guide-for-geeks?ref=andrewliptak.com) ([he's also running a sale on his newsletter](https://astrolabe.aidanmoher.com/p/black-friday-astrolabe-sale?ref=andrewliptak.com)) - It's the Pictures by Max Covill: [It's the Pictures 2023 Holiday Gift List](https://itsthepictures.substack.com/p/its-the-pictures-2023-holiday-gift) - Robin Sloan: [Robin’s 2023 gift guide](https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/2023-gift-guide/?ref=andrewliptak.com) ### John Scalzi is returning to his Old Man's War universe URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-scalzi-old-mans-war-new-book-military-scifi/ Last updated: 2023-11-22T15:00:47.000Z Here's some welcome news for military SF fans: John Scalzi has announced that he'll be returning to the world of his *Old Man's War* series with a new entry in 2025! He made the [announcement in a blog post](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/11/21/why-theres-no-new-scalzi-novel-next-year-why-youll-get-two-new-scalzi-novels-in-2025-and-what-ill-be-up-to-in-2024/?ref=andrewliptak.com) explaining that he won't have a novel out in 2024, but rather two in 2025\. The reason for that is that the slot that Tor had allocated to him was November 1st, aka Election Day 2024, which he noted is likely going to be a bit of a mess, so they've opted to bump that book (which he described as being similar in tone to the *Kaiju Preservation Society* and *Starter Villain*) to February 2025\. 2025 also marks the 20th anniversary of his debut novel, [*Old Man's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765348272?ref=andrewliptak.com), and he noted that it's a good time to return to that particular universe. It's a bit of an overdue return: that novel put Scalzi on the map, and he's released a number of sequels over the years, including [*The Ghost Brigades*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765354068?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Last Colony*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765356185?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Zoe's Tale*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765356192?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*The Human Division*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765369550?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*The End of All Things*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765376107?ref=andrewliptak.com). That last one came out in 2016, and while he's moved on to other space opera stories in that time, it's clearly been something that fans have asked him over the years. If you haven't read them, *Old Man's War* is something of Scalzi's take on Robert Heinlein's *Starship Troopers*: a military science fiction adventure that throws its protagonist John Perry into the midst of a galactic war as humanity works to keep its foothold against all the other alien civilizations out there. The premise is a fun one: the Colonial Defense Force recruits elderly citizens to serve in its ranks, using the premise that they've got considerable life experiences that will aid them in battle. These recruits are given new, genetically-engineered bodies, weapons, and are then sent out to the battlefield. Scalzi hasn't revealed any sort of details about what this new entry would be about: he hasn't begun writing it yet, and explained that he's "still in 'moving bits around to see how they play together' mode" when it comes to characters. They're fun books, but Scalzi's managed to build out the series in some interesting ways as the series has progressed, penning a YA novel (*Zoe's Tale*) from one character's perspective, and playing with episodic form (*Human Division* and *End of All Things*) to tell some interesting stories in this particular world. I've consistently thought that they're his better works: while I enjoyed *Kaiju Preservation Society* and his *Collapsing Empire* trilogy, I felt like they were a bit hamstrung by his writing schedule and need for something a bit more light and fluffy. They're *fine* reads, but they're something more along the lines of a bag of chips, rather than an actual meal. [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/IMG_5405.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) When Scalzi finished *The End of All Things* back in 2015, he [noted](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/05/follow-up-on-finishing-the-end-of-all-things/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that despite the title, it wasn't necessarily the end of the series: it was just something he was putting aside, and that he was only planning to "write books in the series if I enjoy the process and have someplace new to take the universe." I can appreciate that attitude: there's nothing worse than a series that's overstayed its welcome. So, we'll see what that looks like in a couple of years. It sounds like he's got a bunch of irons in the fire in the meantime. I wonder if any of those are the [long-in-the-works adaptation in development of *Old Man's War*](https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/7/16748044/netflix-john-scalzi-old-mans-war-military-science-fiction-film?ref=andrewliptak.com)over at Netflix, which Scalzi's hinted is still in play. Now that the writer's and actor's strikes are over (and with another big space opera series, *Rebel Moon* in the works over there) maybe there'll be some movement on that front. ### Creative Control URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-dave-filoni-storytelling/ Last updated: 2023-11-22T01:24:18.000Z Here's an interesting bit of inside baseball news from the *Star Wars* universe: *Clone Wars/Rebels/Resistance/Ahsoka* creator Dave Filoni got a promotion: he's now the Chief Creative Officer at Lucasfilm for the franchise. [Word of this comes from Anthony Breznican over at *Vanity Fair*](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/11/star-wars-ahsoka-dave-filoni?ref=andrewliptak.com), who notes that Filoni will be helping to shepherd the next generation of *Star Wars* projects. Where he was once consulted on projects for continuity purposes, he'll now be involved in shaping them from the onset. This feels like something that's been a long time coming: Filoni has been a major part in shaping the *Star Wars* universe ever since George Lucas brought him on to help shepherd *The Clone Wars* animated series on Cartoon Network. I've heard him described over the years as someone who perfectly understood what George Lucas's vision for what *Star Wars* is, and over the years, he's parlayed that into some really interesting places in shows like *Rebels* and *Ashoka*. When Jon Favreau began developing *The Mandalorian* for Disney+, Filoni became a major collaborator. Breznican [profiled Filoni back in 2019 for *Vanity Fair*](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/dave-filoni-george-lucas-star-wars?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that he was a walking encyclopedia of Star Wars knowledge, but that he was also a willing collaborator who'd listen and provide his input to the stories that they were working on. Since then, he's gone on to jump from directing animation to direction live action (he directed the first episode and fifth episodes of *The Mandalorian*'s first season, the fifth episode of Season 2, the sixth episode of *The Book of Boba Fett*, and the first and fifth episodes of *Ahsoka.* He's also on deck to direct one of the upcoming announced *Star Wars* films), and by all accounts, he's been the major force that helps tie together much of the lore the entire franchise. He's not the only person involved in that department: the "Lucasfilm Story Group" is a team that the company has put together to ensure that the franchise's continuity is consistent across the wide range of products that the company produces, from books to video games to TV shows to movies. Continuity plays a central role in the franchise, and has for a long time: it's something that set *Star Wars* apart from other franchises, the idea that this was one big story that fans could dip into over and over again. According to Breznican, Filoni's not out to overrule directors or other creators: "I’m not telling people what to do," Filoni told him, "I do feel I’m trying to help them tell the best story that they want to tell. I need to be a help across the galaxy here, like a part of a Jedi Council almost." He represents a valuable resource for the company, because there is so much lore – storytelling debt? – that can be overwhelming to newcomers. He also provides something of continuity for Star Wars, given that George Lucas's involvement stopped when he sold the company to Disney more than a decade ago. That's something that's needed, and something that I think Lucasfilm has been slow to recognize. From 2015 through 2019, the company worked to bring Star Wars back in a big way, launching a sequel trilogy (*The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi*, and *The Rise of Skywalker*) and a pair of standalones (*Rogue One* and *Solo*) with an array of filmmakers and just as many problems along the way. Despite a strong start in the form of *The Force Awakens* and *Rogue One,* there were plenty of fans who were put off by the storytelling choices in the later films, as well as a fairly regular revolving door of unfulfilled projects. Storytelling continuity is more than just ensuring that the facts of the world remain consistent; it's also how Lucasfilm can ensure that a variety of filmmakers and writers aren't going to weave wildly back and forth. In many ways, it feels as though Filoni is now going to be filling a similar role to what Kevin Feige has been doing for Marvel. We've gotten a taste of that in the form of *The Mandalorian* and some of its followup shows*.* The show's earlier seasons garnered plenty of praise for going back the perceived roots and strengths of the franchise, from the gritty underworld to morally-ambiguous characters, and I have little doubt that Filoni's played a big role there. There's risks to putting so much on one person, however. Marvel has [recently come under fire from fans and critics](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/) for seeming to lose its luster and power at the box office, due in no small part to Feige's increased responsibilities at Marvel and the ramp-up in streaming content in the last couple of years. Lucasfilm could very easily fall into the same trap with Filoni. And of course, there's the question of whether or not *Star Wars* should be constrained to Filoni's (and by proxy, Lucas's) vision of what the franchise should be. He's done some weird things over the years, dabbling with the strange mythical elements of The Force and leaning more into the space fantasy elements that the franchise is known for. Personally, I've always thought the franchise is stronger when there's more of a lighter touch on those elements, preferring when they go for a bit more realism, like what we've seen with *Andor*. [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/09/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) So, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this: hopefully, we'll see a bit more consistent effort put into the various projects that Lucasfilm decides to field. Rather than throwing things at the wall as different directors come in to pitch, I'm hoping that we'll see them integrate them a bit more completely into the existing world, rather than see them get booted for "creative differences" that seems to pop up so often with this series. ### Feeding the algorithm URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/feeding-the-algorithm/ Last updated: 2023-11-17T21:00:21.000Z One of the first big blogs that I remember coming across via Facebook was [Humans of New York](https://www.humansofnewyork.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (HONY), a photography project run by Brandon Stanton that takes portraits of New Yorkers on the street, paired up with some random bit of wisdom that they might have. It's a little gimmicky, but there's generally a positive stream of optimism and inspiration. Like most everything on social media, it can be flighty: zero-calorie snacks that you consume while you scroll. Every now and then, however, you come across a good one, [like one that Stanton posted the other day](https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/posts/pfbid0VjoVMBWHPo4kYcQY567cdAPXavCa5E5NwvpVqVFRoM4qwuan4Rvqbmt1ViS5Y8g9l): [![“You’re a slut and a whore for the algorithm. I couldn’t do it anymore. You can never feed it enough. You start out making art, and hoping that the door will open. You’re looking for that viral moment so it opens up the door and you can do the thing full time. But you start to compromise just to get the door to open: guessing what it wants, debasing yourself, alienating yourself. Until you’re not even in service to your art anymore. You’re in service to the algorithm. Deep down every artist just wants to be seen. Everyone does. And that’s how it controls you. The algorithm makes you behave in a certain way, create in a certain way, in exchange for being seen. And if something can change what you do, it can change who you are. And I didn’t sign up for that. I didn’t sign up to become a content creator. Art was supposed to be a way for me to be in search of, in service to, in community with. It was my ministry. Art was supposed to be my ministry.”](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/Untitled.png)](https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/posts/pfbid0VjoVMBWHPo4kYcQY567cdAPXavCa5E5NwvpVqVFRoM4qwuan4Rvqbmt1ViS5Y8g9l) Image: HONY It's a little provocative, but as I read it, I realized that it perfectly encompasses nearly all of my thoughts about how we operate on social media, and the pitfalls that you see with creatives operating on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other platforms out there. The thing that struck me the most was "You can never feed it enough," and that as soon as you begin adapt your creation to be better suited to appear to more people on whatever platform you're on, you're falling into a trap. It's like a race where the finish line is always just out of reach. "You’re not even in service to your art anymore. You’re in service to the algorithm." That hits me so hard, because I can't begin to calculate the number of minutes, hours, and days that I've spent over the years working as a journalist and writer trying to figure out how to build an audience online, for all of the practical reasons out there: to find places to write, new freelance gigs, find new subscribers and followers, and so forth. Some creators are great at this: they're funny and insightful and snarky and people gravitate toward them to tap into that humor or whatever thoughts they might have, rocketing them to greater audiences and whatever opportunities that's comes with that. For others (like me), it's a grind. I don't particularly like the work that goes into self-promotion. When the Cosplay book came out last year, someone suggested that I post pictures and tag a handful of the larger cosplayer influencer accounts in the hope that they'd see it and boost the signal. I did one of those and almost immediately deleted it. It just felt ... gross. While writing the book, I ended up re-joining Instagram because I wanted to connect with other cosplayers, but also see how they were using the platform. As I noted in the book, it's a visual-first social network, one that's ideal for a vocation that relies so heavily on visuals. Plenty of cosplayers have found an enormous amount of success on the platform, posting up images and videos of their latest works in progress, the results from their photoshoots, and candids of cons and events that they've attended. I noticed something else happening as well: some of these prolific accounts would post regularly with content tailored for the latest holiday, movie/TV release, the road to their next convention, and so forth. They'd soon start trickling in sponsored content, showing off boxes of stuff that studios or companies would send them, or pictures from various red carpet events in L.A. or New York where they're decked out in a costume from the film or TV show. You see a lot of the same faces show up over and over again. And then they'd go quiet. One child cosplayer (or, I'm guessing, their guardian) abruptly posted up that they were going to be shutting down the account for a variety of personal reasons. I've seen others go dark, only to post up a couple of stories or posts about how they were sorry they were letting their audiences down and weren't posting anything, but they'd just gotten too overwhelmed by the rush and pressure to keep up with the rest of the herd, and were stepping back. I've seen super-low follower accounts do the same, and I want to scream at my phone, telling them that nobody is owed an apology because they haven't been posting regularly. [Twenty years a trooperLooking back at two decades of cosplaying as an imperial Stormtrooper from Star Wars![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/5093298100_3f6660dd47_k.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/501st-legion-star-wars-stormtrooper-cosplay-retrospective/) Burnout amongst cosplayers is a thing. When I started suiting up as a stormtrooper years ago, I did so out of the enthusiasm for the armor that I picked up, and found plenty of friends who shared those feelings along the way. 20 years is a long time, and I've seen plenty of friends come and go, buffered in and out of groups and the cosplay scene because of interpersonal drama or fatigue over the peer pressure either outdo yourself with each new build, come up with a new costume from the latest shiny film, or join up with that latest group build. All of this is feeding the algorithm in some way or shape: if you know what you're looking for, it's easy to see who's trying to jump at the chance to join the latest premiere or have the hot picture that gets shared around the cosplay scene for the next couple of days, basking in the attention and likes that come with it. This isn't to say that's necessarily a bad thing: the attention can be rewarding, and some folks live for the challenge. But that drive shouldn't be the sole motivating factor here: cosplay and art are vocations that I feel should be *fun,* first and foremost. When I meet aspiring cosplayers or 501st members, my major piece of advice is: "pick a character that you love to do," rather than try and race to build a costume *just* because it's the most recognizable figure from that latest TV episode or film. Because if you don't start with passion at the core of what you're doing, you're not doing it for yourself: you're creating for an anonymous audience that has very little stake (with some exceptions) in your work. Audiences aren't known for their loyalty, and as soon as you don't adhere to their expectations or produce something they're interested in, they evaporate and find the next thing to look at. Passion, I feel, is the thesis for any creative endeavor. It's what drives the plot, the brushstrokes, the design, and it's something that's incredibly difficult to fake. Approach a project with passion, and it'll shine through. Go into it only for the attention, and you'll see the emptiness. I don't want to imagine how much time I've wasted writing lists and quick-hit news articles that could have been spent working on something else. I know I have projects and ideas piling up in notebooks that I've never made the time to do. I know I've changed how I approach this newsletter and reviewing and commentating: I've given up trying to hit book release dates or try and tackle the latest controversy in the genre world, opting (in my mind at least) to try and capture the ideas and thoughts as they come. It's a good reminder to go out and build/create/write/paint something that speaks strongest to you. --- ## Currently Reading I've been in a reading rut this summer, but I feel like I've been pulling out of it slowly. At the end of October, I finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin's *A Wizard of Earthsea,* which was just as vibrant and exciting as I remember years ago. I also picked up and finished Jessica Radloff's *The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,* a glorified oral history of the CBS series. I binged the entire series over the course of September and October, and it was interesting to read into the challenges and issues that cropped up behind the scenes as the production played out. The book is what I'd call "Hollywood Nice", in that it's overly superlative, where everyone is brilliant and amazing and outstanding, but where there's not as much attention paid to some of the more challenging points, like personality conflicts and tempers, even if you can see glimpses of it. Still, it was an interesting read / listen. Currently, I'm reading Alix E. Harrow's *Starling House*, an excellent gothic horror and Marko Kloos's *Orders of Battle*, which I've been meaning to read for a couple of years now. I fell into the habit of reading his series two books at a time, and I'm looking forward to the next and final installment of his *Frontlines* series, *Centers of Gravity* when I'm done with it. --- ## Further reading It's been a long while since I've done one of these, so here's a pile of links that have accumulated in the Slack channel since the beginning of November: First up: TO subscriber and friend Nick Goede noted that he was abruptly laid off from his company, and says that he's a software developer and agile coach in the fintech and restaurant industries. If you happen to be in that field and are looking for someone, [drop him a line](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ngoede/?ref=andrewliptak.com) or [visit his site](https://www.nickgoede.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com). **Black Scares.** *The Atlantic* [interviewed](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2023/10/what-scares-jordan-peele/675777/?ref=andrewliptak.com) writer/actor/editor Jordan Peele about his latest project: an anthology of horror stories from Black Authors, *Out There Screaming: An Anthology of Black Horror*. It's a good listen. **Coyote vs. Warner Bros**. This was a rollercoaster of a ride in the last week: word broke that Warner Bros. [was scrapping another completed film](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/john-cena-coyote-vs-acme-movie-shelved-1235643235/?ref=andrewliptak.com): *Coyote vs. ACME,* an animated/live-action hybrid film that would have seen Wile E. Coyote suing the ACME corporation for its faulty products. It's a fantastic premise, and it reportedly did really well with audiences. The reason for pulling it? Tax reasons, which brought no shortage of outcry from fans and filmmakers. Fortunately, the [studio has backtracked](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/coyote-vs-acme-wb-warners-canceled-reversal-shop-film-1235645372/?ref=andrewliptak.com), allowing director David Green to shop the film to other outlets. In related reporting, *The New York Times* [published an extensive look](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/magazine/david-zaslav-warner-media-discovery.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) at David Zaslav’s tenure at Warner Bros. Discovery, the cuts he's made, and the ripple effects that those actions are having throughout Hollywood. **Fantasy exhibit**. The British Library recently installed an exhibit about fantasy literature called *Fantasy: Realms of Imagination*, containing note and sketchbooks from authors like Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin, costumes and movie props, maps, posters, and quite a bit more. The exhibit runs through the end of February 2024\. *The Guardian* has a [good overview](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/27/the-british-library-celebrates-the-surge-in-popularity-of-fantasy-fiction-london?ref=andrewliptak.com). **Goodreads Choice Awards**. Goodreads has launched its annual Choice Awards. These are chosen by its users in a variety of genres (although they've gotten some [blowback](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/93762-goodreads-category-removal-sparks-outcry.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) for cutting a couple of categories out this year). You can take a look at the [initial slate of nominees and vote here](https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2023?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Interview with John Harris This is something I've had in the works for a while: an interview with artist John Harris. He had some really interesting things to say about space and creativity, as well as generative AI. [Sci-fi John Harris on creativity and finding spiritualism in the cosmosJohn Harris talks about finding inspiration in the beauty of space and why AI can’t capture creative imagination![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4554.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/) **J. Michael Straczynski on Harlan Ellison**. Straczynski took over Ellison's literary estate a couple of years ago and announced plans to release the long-overdue anthology *Last Dangerous Visions*. That book will come out next year, but in the meantime, he's also been working on a collection of Ellison's best works, *Greatest Hits*. *io9*'s Cheryl Eddy [interviewed him about the project](https://gizmodo.com/harlan-ellison-stories-interview-j-michael-straczynski-1851024529?ref=andrewliptak.com). [At Last, Dangerous VisionsHarlan Ellison’s long-unfinished science fiction anthology might finally see the light of day![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/image-3-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/at-last-dangerous-visions-harlan-ellison/) **King Arthur by way of Lev Grossman**. I've long been a fan of Lev Grossman's novel *The Magicians,* its sequels, and his YA novels, and waaaaaaay back in 2016, he [announced that he was working on a new book](https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13090002/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-announced-magicians-author-books?ref=andrewliptak.com) called *The Bright Sword*, his take on King Arthur. He's been working on it ever since, and it's finally ready to come out next year: [*Today* revealed the cover and provides some details about it](https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13090002/lev-grossman-the-bright-sword-announced-magicians-author-books?ref=andrewliptak.com). Disclaimer: Grossman provided me with an early version of the book and I've been reading it little by little, and it's quite good so far. I'm very excited to get my hands on this one. ***Legend of Zelda*: the movie**. With the success of the *Super Mario Bros.* movie and the release of *Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom* earlier this year, I suppose this was inevitable: [Nintendo is working on a live-action *Legend of Zelda* film](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2023/231108.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). No idea what this'll end up looking like, but there's no shortage of stories to adapt from the franchise. **Lost and found**. *The Guardian* has a [neat story](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-doctor-who-episodes-found-owner-reluctant-to-hand-them-to-bbc?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how a couple of long-lost *Doctor Who* episodes have surfaced in the hands of collectors, and said collectors are reluctant to work with the BBC over fears that the broadcaster will issue legal threats or actions. ### New from James S.A. Corey I'm a big fan of James S.A. Corey's *Expanse* series, so I've been excited to see what they'll do next. Orbit unveiled the title and cover of the next book, which is set in the very distant future. I'm very excited to get my hands on it when it comes out next summer. [James S.A. Corey’s next novel is The Mercy of the GodsThe start of a new space opera series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/mercy-crop.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-the-gods-scifi-expanse/) ### November books If you're looking for a new read, I've rounded up 24 new titles hitting stores this November. [24 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read this NovemberA new crop of books to read heading into the cold winter months![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/IMG_4387.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-november-2023/) **Rebel Moon trailer**. Netflix released a trailer for its upcoming space opera from Zach Snyder, *Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire*, which follows a woman who sets off to recruit some warriors to save her home from an oppressive empire. It looks like it'll be fun to watch. [Snyder’s Star WarsZack Snyder’s failed Star Wars pitch is now headed to Netflix. It could prove to be the start of something interesting, or at the very least, somewhat entertaining![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-07-at-9.16.43-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/zack-snyder-netflix-rebel-moon-star-wars-science-fiction-movies/) ### Review: Isabel Cañas's *Vampires of El Norte* This was one of my favorite reads thus far this year: a western romance/fantasy from Isabel Cañas that plays with ideas about colonialism and westward expansion with some vampires thrown in. [Monsters on the western frontierIsabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte is the perfect spooky read this October![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3333.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vampires-of-el-norte-isabel-canas-horror-book-review/) **Starfleet Academy: now enrolling**. Paramount [announced](https://www.startrek.com/news/new-series-star-trek-starfleet-academy?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's picked up a new *Star Trek* series: *Starfleet Academy*. This one's been in the works for a long time, and given that *Star Trek: Discovery* is coming to an end, it seems like it's time for some more shows to join the lineup. ### Superhero stumbles I recently finished an interesting book by Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales and Joanna Robinson, [*MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781631497513?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*,* which serves as a high-level look at how Marvel Studios came about. I finished it around the same time I read a piece in *Variety* that detailed the problems that Marvel's facing with its next crop of superhero films. [Marvel’s stumbling blocksA new report from Variety and a new book about the MCU detail Marvel Studios’ growing pains![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/F9C7in_XwAA3Kw4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/) **Supermarket selections**. I've long been fascinated by the mechanics of the bookselling industry: how the development of chain stores and distributors have an impact on the stories we consume. iNews has an [interesting look](https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/supermarkets-defined-taste-books-not-any-more-2731148?ref=andrewliptak.com) at how supermarkets have been steadily stocking and selling fewer books on their shelves: "this has inevitably had a knock-on effect on just how influential, or not, supermarkets are on reading habits." ### Trench Watch This is one of the coolest things I wrote this year: a story in *History Connections*, the Vermont Historical Society member magazine about a Barre man named Harold Hawes and the wristwatch of his that we have in our collection. It's a neat intersection of a couple of stories about the First World War, how watches became a fashion item, and where Hawes fit into the story. [A brief history of a time(piece)Harold Hawes, World War I and the rise of the men’s wristwatch![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/4a-Harold-Hawes-Watch.JPG)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-watch-trench-watch-wwi-barre/) --- ### The substance of space and the human imagination URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/john-harris-science-fiction-art-ai-creativity/ Last updated: 2023-11-17T16:03:31.000Z One of the joys of writing about science fiction (and this particularly this newsletter!) is the opportunity to talk with folks about how they go about their craft, whether it's a writer talking about their latest book, a historian about their research, or an artist about putting paint to canvas. Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to interview an artist that I've long admired: [John Harris](https://shorturl.at/fuFST?ref=andrewliptak.com). You've likely seen his work before: he's known for his abstract, impressionistic science fiction art, blending vivid colors with jagged spaceships and megastructures that grace the covers of books by authors like Ben Bova, Mike Brooks, Orson Scott Card, Ann Leckie, Larry Niven, John Scalzi, and many, many others. His art is the perfect invitation to any science fiction novel – I've often picked up books based on his art alone. In 2014, he published an art book, [*Beyond the Horizon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781781168424?ref=andrewliptak.com), a [beautiful selection of his artwork](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-art-of-john-harris-beyond-the-horizon-review/), and in 2022, he released a follow up, [*Into the Blue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789099553?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which takes another probing look at the worlds that he created. Both are well worth picking up – I've spent hours flipping through the pages. Over the summer, I had the opportunity to chat with Harris and jumped at the chance to talk about his process, thoughts on the cosmos, creativity, and what he thinks about generative artificial intelligence. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. *This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.* --- ### **To** start off, tell me a bit about how you got started as an artist – or let me go back even further: which came first, your interest in science fiction or an interest in art? Now, that is a really difficult question for me to answer because there was no separation (and never has been any separation) from the feeling that I got by reading people like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and that lot. The visual connection with me was immediate, and I couldn't help read stuff without immediately seeing imagery. It was absolutely inseparable and has remained so throughout my whole life. As far as back as I can remember I've always had this sense of wonder about space and the stars and stuff like that, and that was it seamlessly connected with the science fiction that I read. I suppose it's almost like when people ask me, how did you start doing art? And I say, "I don't remember!" \[It was\] long before I went to art college – I went to art college in 1966, and yeah, it was always there. I would imagine it's a feeling related to looking at the sky was the beginning. I just can't separate it. ### Were there any books that have stuck with you from that time, or which still stick with you today? Yes, absolutely. To begin with, I think they're almost all \[from\] Arthur C. Clarke – books like *Childhood's End,* which was a particularly big one for me. I can't remember going back that far or what I read, but certainly I would say that if I had to pin anyone down, it would be Clarke. I ended up going to see him many years later as an adult in Sri Lanka. He was already quite an old man. When I showed him some of my work, he got quite excited by that. ### I know here in the United States, science fiction always had this taboo around it – it wasn't considered a serious body literature. So when you went to school, what was the general attitude towards it? Yes, it was never taken seriously, and in a way, I was looked upon as a bit of an oddity. Even though I learned to do traditional painting, everybody knew that \[science fiction\] was really what I was interested in – this peculiar relationship between the planet and the stars. I had these photographs of various galaxies in my digs, which was a real little hovel. I remember one of the tutors visited me, and \[when\] he saw the stuff on the walls, he says, "this will make you mad, you know." I said, "well, I'll take the chance." \[laughs\] That's never changed, really. One thing that is interesting about that is that I've always been very interested in making images, whatever they were, and that was probably how I got into art college in the first place. I remember when I was very young, about 12 or 13, the art teacher at my school was sort of wandering around and he looked at what I was doing – it was a picture of it was a picture of a poster of a Brigitte Bardot movie with this voluptuous picture of Bardot sort of spread across this poster, and I was just copying it. He looked at what I was doing and said, "you're going to be a painter." I didn't have the faintest inkling of what that really meant, and I just sort of innocently went along. He was particularly struck by the way I used color, and I think that was how I got a sort of a footing in the whole thing, learning to you express myself with color. ![](https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/f/fe/THSLVRLCST1956.jpg) Art: John Richards ### I'm guessing you reading science fiction in the 1950s-60s: what was your impression of the cover art of the time? I'm gonna be really unpopular now, because I've got to say it was one of the reasons why I got into it: I couldn't bear the artwork. It seemed so naff, you know? It seemed in comparison to the imagining of this amazing domains of stars and gases and that these were rather dreadful pictures. I remember getting a wonderful Ray Bradbury book called [*The Silver Locusts*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FMartian%5FChronicles?ref=andrewliptak.com) (published as *The Martian Chronicles* in the US) and thinking, "I can't bear to be seen reading this stuff. I've got to put a cover on it, to hide it." It was really embarrassing to be caught with this sort of pulp picture. I'm sorry, I'm being super critical here, but that was the reality that I had. Particularly when I was at art college, I'd be reading some of these pieces and that's the level of criticism you'd be threatened with. ### I have both of your books, [*The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781781168424?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*The Art of John Harris Volume II: Into the Blue*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789099553?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the thing that strikes me the most while reading them was how you use color. Space is dark, but you've gone the other way with these vivid colors. How do you go about conceiving an image? So yeah, the business is about going about finding the image and the color and all of that is a very subtle business. For me, it's largely about holding a feeling of – quite often – the title alone. As I mentioned in *Into the Blue*, the power of words has always been for me what generates its own imagery. Quite often, without even reading the book, I only need a phrase or some kind of a guideline as to what the book is about. Depending on the words that are chosen to describe it, I immediately have an image. > The power of words has always been for me what generates its own imagery My agent frequently used to ring me up when I did a lot of cover art saying "I've got a book for you." I'd say "just give me a basic idea. What's it about?" She would start telling me the plot of the book and I'd go "All right, I've got it now." It may not have much to do with the actual content of the book, but it will have something of the feeling of it. You know, I can't tell you how that happens. It's a bit of it's a bit of a magic thing for me. ### It's a vibe, as the kids say these days. It's a vibe. It absolutely is a vibe. It's a vibration. It really is that. I don't fully understand it, but I've learned not to question it, because as soon as you start to do that, you end up with something that the brain decided that it had to do it and not the heart. > I've learned not to question it, because as soon as you start to do that, you end up with something that the brain decided that it had to do it and not the heart. ### Overthinking it. Overthinking it is probably the biggest sin this one can do, I think. It really is a very delicate and subtle dance between the first impulse of feeling and it's almost impossible to talk about. ### One thing I'm fascinated by about is the interplay between science fiction writers who are imagining worlds and the astronomers who are showing us the universe. ### You've seen the space race play out with all of these incredible technological advances like satellites and orbital telescopes. How has that played a role in your work? It has been enormously important. But again in a quite a subtle way, not in the most obvious way. When I was very young, I must have been no more than 12, 13, or 14, I saw a program from the National Film Board of Canada about the current state of astronomy and our view of the galaxy and all of this stuff. I remember watching it and thinking, "that's it. That the shape." – this might sound a bit odd – "that's the shape of my dreaming," Interestingly enough, this film also influenced director Stanley Kubrick when he was putting together what eventually became **2001: A Space Odyssey*. I fell into it this sense of wonder about the universe, hook, line and sinker. That is probably the germination of what eventually came into fruition, as it were: this extraordinary black and white film of the newly discovered optical images of the galaxies. ### Have you been paying attention to the [images](https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/albums/72177720305127361?ref=andrewliptak.com) that the James Webb Telescope has been sending back? Yes, I have. It's a funny thing. I mean, the deep field ones are just astounding. I expect a lot of people will find this a bit disturbing, but to me, there is a very deep connection here between what I would call spirituality and science. > I cannot look at the deep field images by the James Webb Telescope without having this recurring sense that actually this is the realm of the spirit I cannot look at the deep field images by the James Webb Telescope without having this recurring sense that actually this is the realm of the spirit, and I include the \[bang\] hard desk – on which I'm hitting my hand – with the same substance as what is out there and that what's out there is the same substance as my spirit. ### That reminds me a little bit of the [Overview Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview%5Feffect?ref=andrewliptak.com), when the first astronauts went up into space, they were talking about how they were profoundly changed by just looking back at the Earth. William Shatner recently went up on one of Blue Origin's flights and he kind of a disturbing reaction – not a wonderous reaction, but a realization how fragile Earth is and how scary space can be. Yes, completely, and that is about what's scary. For me, it's about the threat of the dissolution of my sort of built into that space. It's a very peculiar thing. I really don't know that I should even go down there because to talk about it, it's too subtle, it's too... it doesn't yet it's let me think in words too much. But that's where my pictures come from! I have always tried to convey this sense of the utter unknown, the depth of space, which, as you have already pointed out, is not always black and it is full of color. And that color is, well, I cannot separate it from my feelings about space. Space is full of it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/the-last-colony-1.jpg) Art: John Harris (cover for John Scalzi's **The Last Colony*) ### The dust of nebulas and the planets and stars. Yeah, the heating of gases and stuff, creating these unbelievable rich rainbows of color. ### One of the things I've always admired about the about your work is the sense of scale. I've always really that to be really interesting, because you have these human-made or artificial structures and they're always pretty small, with this vivid space around it. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that and how that figures into your approach to art. Yes, I can remember and I think I've mentioned this somewhere before, but I can remember visiting the home fleet in Portsmouth when I was quite young. In those days, the British Navy was really enormous. There were huge numbers of frigates and big battleships and cruisers and even a aircraft carrier or two. I was immensely struck by the what you would call the furnishings of the intricate radio masts, sonar discs that cluttered the surface of these huge ships. They had they had the extraordinary capacity to give scale to the ships, which you might not otherwise have gotten. I was really struck by that language of the antennae and so on as a means of connecting the viewer with a sense of scale. You'll note that almost all of my space ships have these bits sticking out of them everywhere. The lovely thing about spaceships is, of course, they don't need to be streamlined. That was one of the things that I really objected to in the early days of science fiction art – these super slick fuselages that were made by a lot of my contemporaries. I thought, "no, no, that that doesn't convey the scale of it at all." And so I just sort of stick things on to these fuselages willy nilly just to give a sense of scale. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/FinalAncillaryJusticeComposite1-1.jpg) Art: John Harris (cover for Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy) ### One of my favorite works for me was is the Ancillary triptych for Ann Leckie's books. I love the splash of color against this much larger, drab ship. It's a gorgeous painting. Oh, good. I like the idea of these sort of monolithic slabs of what could be concrete floating. There's this sort of contrast, this idea of the aridness of space and these second great monolithic structures which are just floating there. ### When it comes to designing spaceships, what do you what do you draw on for inspiration? Do you look at like skyscrapers or think back to those battleships? I use everything that I can get my hands on, really. But yes, there's the idea that we as human beings are very familiar with the monolithic idea of buildings and the scale of them. When you look at a rectangle with little bits in it, you're subconsciously assuming a connection to a building of some kind, and you immediately establish some kind of a size ratio of the to the human being by sticking it out in an environment where it shouldn't be, like in space and particularly lit by a harsh sun where you get these heavy shadows. For me, it's an absolute gift to paint those sort of things because it connects with people's unconscious. ### Do you have a method for constructing these images – do you outline, or just go about thinking "this is a good spot to stick an antenna on fuselage or is there more intentional design behind that? That's difficult to answer because sometimes, I've got the idea of a much bigger structure that is quite clear in my mind, and I deliberately edit it so that you can't see it all, so that the viewer is left to feel that there's a lot more of the canvas than what actually you see and that increases that sense of an overwhelming scale in it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/John-Harris-5-1.jpg) Art: John Harris (Cover for Larry Niven's **The Ringworld Throne)* ### I wanted to shift over to your thoughts on how art has changed over the years. Running from the 1970s to now, you've illustrated some of the genre's best works, and I'm curious how you see how science fiction illustration changed in that time? Are there any big trends that you've seen come and go? Yes, absolutely. I think the advent of computer technology and the quality of imagery that you can do relatively easily and digitally has changed things quite a bit. But my take on that is that the way in which something is painted and the direct application of my hand on a canvas, as it were, adds a dimension that I don't think is there when you work digitally. I can't really quantify exactly what that is, but I think it's – again, it's a bit of a magical business, you know? You leave an awful lot to the imagination just by using your hands. The trouble I think – well, one of the difficulties that a lot of people who use computer graphics and so on have – because they can put in infinite detail – my argument is, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I think it's better to cast a veil over it, to let the viewer guess. This is the thing which is quite seamless comes into the whole issue of AI. One of the great joys of living, I think, is the mystery that surrounds us, you know? I don't want to particularly know the full details of anything, I really don't! The unknowing is part of the fun. To me there's not a great deal of separation between the feeling of the fact that I'm flesh and blood, and that I've only got a limited amount of vision or a limited amount of whatever, and that's part of the joy of it! I don't want to be perfect at drawing a straight line. That misses the point, really, of the expression of feeling. ### I'm assuming that you as an artist, you've been watching the developments in generative artificial intelligence? What have you been thinking as you see these platforms emerge? One thing that struck me. My son (who started an [Instagram account](https://www.instagram.com/johnharrisartist/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for me) pointed out that there was quite a lot of stuff online, which was in the style of John Harris. And I thought, "what? That's a bit weird." He showed me some imagery that's been created by AI, which was purportedly in my style and while I was looking at them, I thought "these are pretty damn good!" Superficially, they really are very good. But what is it about them that I can tell that they're not me, if you know what I mean? It was kind of an interesting query, and I looked at it more carefully and I am very aware that there's some accidental stuff going on when I paint, which has quite a lot to do with the way that the paint flows sometimes and they way it doesn't other times, how it gets caught with little bits of texture, and stuff like that. > It's more what the artist is dreaming into their imagery. AI can't do that because it's concerned with the product. What's underneath has a lot to do with it as opposed to what's on top – this layering that goes on is quite often the result of mistakes that I made, where I rectify it but I don't bother to hide my tracks too much, because it all adds to the flavor of a meal. It all adds to the sensation that I'm trying to create. And so all of that is missing in images from AI. They get the macro level dang well and I'm impressed by some of the imagery that comes out. But again, *that's. not. really. the. point*. It's more what the artist is dreaming into their imagery. AI can't do that because it's concerned with the product. It's concerned with the results. The thing about painting in the flesh is that it's not just about the result, it's about the path to it. ### I've been thinking a lot about AI and the thing that I've come to think about it as a writer is it can't do anything that hasn't been done before. None of it's really original, because of the nature of how it's built. It's a bit derivative. Yes, it is exactly that. And of course, it is the first thing that we all think of and know when we think of AI, which is, it's not original, it's not creative. People might say, "well, what do you mean? Those images have not been done before." *That's. not. it*. It's the actual mechanism by which it comes about which is full of \[the\] accidents, feelings, fuzzy logic, that goes on when a human being is struggling to generate a feeling. God bless them \[AI\], but they don't have those feelings! --- ### A brief history of a time(piece) URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-watch-trench-watch-wwi-barre/ Last updated: 2023-11-11T13:00:12.000Z This article was originally published in the Summer 2023 issue of ***History Connections,** the Vermont Historical Society's member magazine. To subscribe and support our work, [head over to our website](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). “Do you have the time?” If you wear a wristwatch, you might have just glanced at your wrist, looking at what the tiny arms and numbers on the dial tell you. Presently, the global wristwatch industry accounts for tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year, encompassing everything from expensive, high-end timepieces like Rolex and the modern Apple Watch, to the ubiquitous and utilitarian Timex. For more than a century, the wristwatch has been a popular and useful accessory. One item in the Vermont Historical Society’s vast collection is a good representative example of how watches became a common and indispensable part of one’s everyday outfit: a Lancet owned by Harold Hawes of Barre. The story of clocks and timekeeping stretches back millennia and is integral to the history of technology and industry. The first mechanical timepieces emerged from Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries for city towers, and technological innovations allowed inventors to devise smaller clocks. When wrist-worn clocks were invented, they were relegated to the realm of women’s fashion, known as “wristlets,” while a pocket watch became an indispensable tool for the men involved in the industrializing workplace, where precision timekeeping was essential. The mechanized nature of war brought a new level of precision to the battlefield: maneuvers and actions could be coordinated in time and space, and in the heat of battle, fishing a watch out of a pocket cost precious seconds of attention. In her book, [*Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780226379685?ref=andrewliptak.com), Alexis McCrossen explains how British soldiers began to strap their pocket watches to their wrists during the Second Boer War in South Africa, so they could read them at a moment’s notice. It was a move that helped prompt the clock’s shift from a man’s pocket to his wrist. With the advent of the First World War, clock manufacturers recognized a growing market for a new product: the trench watch. This is where Hawes enters this story. Born on May 24, 1889 on Vine Street in Berlin, Vermont, he spent his childhood in Montpelier and Barre. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he qualified for the draft, but ended up volunteering for a specialized training program set up by the University of Vermont to train blacksmiths, carpenters, machinists, and mechanics for the Army. After he completed the program, Hawes was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division, where he likely was part of the 336th Field Artillery Regiment, which was deployed to France in September 1918 – mere months before the Armistice in November. Among the items he brought with him was his Lancet wristwatch. Made by Switzerland’s Langendorf Watch Company, Hawes’s watch, and those like it, saw widespread use by U.S. soldiers during the war, with several innovations designed to help the wearer in the field. Fastened to one’s wrist with a sturdy leather strap, it features large, easy-to-read, radium-painted numbers on a white dial, and comes with a metal shrapnel protector for the glass face. We do not know if Harold saw combat while in France (he likely he served in an engineering role), but it’s a tool he would have relied on while there. After returning home, Hawes settled into a quiet life. He married Carol Batchelder in 1922 and found work in the insurance industry, first as a salesperson and then as a fire inspector. He became deeply involved in the Barre community through the local chapters of the Masons, American Legion, and other community organizations. When he passed away on May 11, 1945, the city’s papers reported his funeral was attended by a large gathering of his friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Hawes was, in many ways, a typical citizen soldier. He was someone who went off to serve his country and returned to civilian life in his community, where the utility of the wristwatch did not fade away. In a piece for *The Atlantic*, “[A Brief History of the Wristwatch](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/history-wristwatch-apple-watch/391424/?ref=andrewliptak.com),” Uri Friedman points out that while the pocket watch was an emblem of the railroad era, World War I ushered in a new, modern world, one where the wristwatch quickly became part of the fashion of the new, technological world. It’s endured the technological advances of the last century, a testament to its utility and function, and continues today to function as both a tool and a fashion accessory, ready to tell you the time at a moment’s notice, whether you’re in Barre or a distant country. ### James S.A. Corey's next novel is The Mercy of Gods URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-mercy-of-the-gods-scifi-expanse/ Last updated: 2024-08-21T19:23:47.000Z Way back in 2018, [I broke some interesting news](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/16962264/the-expanse-author-james-sa-corey-science-fiction-space-opera-book-series?ref=andrewliptak.com): James S.A. Corey (the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck was in the midst of wrapping up *The Expanse*, and they had begun to look for a new story. At the time, they told me that their next project would be something a bit grander: where *The Expanse* drew on some Golden Age classics like *The Stars My Destination* and films like *Alien*, their next series would be a bit more like *Dune* and *Hyperion* and T*he Left Hand of Darkness*. Abraham explained that "it’s big spectacle far future space opera, while never losing our focus on the complexity of human nature in these strange new settings.” [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) That was five years ago, and since then, the pair have wrapped up *The Expanse* and its run on television for Amazon's streaming service, and today, Orbit revealed the cover, title, and description of the project: *The Mercy of Gods*, the first of a trilogy called *The Captives War*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/mercy.jpg) Image: Orbit Books Here's the plot description: > The Carryx – part empire, part hive – have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. Now, they are facing a great and deathless enemy. The key to their survival may rest with the humans of Anjiin. > > Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. > > They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure. Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to survive: learning to understand – and manipulate – the Carryx themselves. > > With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. > > Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. He will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. > > This is where his story begins. In the Q&A about the book, Franck explained that he pitched the idea to Abraham midway through their run on *The Expanse*. "I pitched him this idea of [The Book of Daniel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book%5Fof%5FDaniel?ref=andrewliptak.com) from the Old Testament, but as a science fiction story," Franck explained. Abraham noted that it was an interesting direction to go after *The Expanse*: "The Expanse had so much in a particular slice of space opera that was between late Apollo 13 and early Buck Rogers. We spent a lot of time there. This is still space opera, but it's such a very different place, a different part of the genre. There are things we get to do and play with that we couldn't have done any place else." (They also pointed out that this is different from their [recently-launched Patreon project](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-writing-patreon/).) This sounds very intriguing: the story of a man who's taken away from his home and familiar surroundings and into this epic conflict. The pair allude to the appeal of the epic, deep histories that figure into books like *Dune* (something that they told me in my [2021 interview with them](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-interview/))*,* and I'm very excited to see how this turns out. The book is set to come out on August 6th, 2024 as a hardcover. It doesn't look like it's available to preorder just yet, but if you *are* looking for some new JSAC books, they do have special editions of [*Caliban's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Abaddon's Gate*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com) coming out next month. ### 24 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read this November URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-fantasy-books-november-2023/ Last updated: 2023-11-03T19:00:39.000Z We've reached November: time has flown past. As we speed toward the end of the year, we've got another batch of books hitting shelves in the coming weeks: stories about distant space colonies, steampunk airships, tech titans, monsters, art books, and quite a bit more. As usual: links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission for Transfer Orbit, which helps pay the bills for this newsletter. You can also support us by signing up as a paid supporter: [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Supporters get some additional posts emailed to them, and access to a Slack channel where we've been discussing the latest bits of news that come across the wire, what we've been reading/watching/playing, and quite a bit more. Join us! Some recent posts that I've sent out: - [Marvel's stumbling blocks](https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/). A look at a new book about the history of the MCU and some of the problems that Marvel is facing. - [Shared worlds](https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-hill-house-1984-hand-newman/). Some thoughts on what seems to be a growing trend: literary estates bringing in new authors to expand upon the worlds and stories from some classic novels. - [Here are the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-winners-chengdu/). A look at this year's Hugo winners. You can also check out past book lists by clicking on the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). The past couple of months have been overstuffed with books and I've split the usual monthly list into two installments. Fortunately, there's only a single list this month. Here are the 24 books that caught my eye for November: --- ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*Tonight, I Burn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316551816?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Katharine J. Adams (November 7th) A young witch named Penny Albright is a member of the Thorn coven, where she patrols the veil between the worlds of Life and Death. Each night, a witch is tasked with crossing the veil by burning at the stake, using their magic to return. On one morning, Penny's fellow witch Ella doesn't return, and she breaks the rules to follow her and find her, discovering more than she expected in either realm. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/katharine-j-adams/tonight-i-burn/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it juggles a lot, but that "readers will find themselves at the center of a magical rebellion and delight in the power of many kinds of love." ### [*The Future*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668025680?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Naomi Alderman (November 7th) Naomi Alderman knocked things out of the park with her 2019 novel [*The Power*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316547604?ref=andrewliptak.com), where women around the world develop electrical powers and upend the balance of control in the world. In her next book, a woman named Martha Einkorn escapes from her family's compound in Oregon and ends up finding work for a social media titan who's bent on controlling the entire world. Technology companies are making incredible devices to change the weather or predict the future, and Martha begins to see her father's prophecies coming true. On the other side of the world, a survivalist named Lai Zhen flees from an assassin in Singapore when her phone begins giving her directions on how to escape, leading her on a trip to investigate the mysterious software that'll eventually lead her to Martha. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-alderman/the-future-alderman/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "a smart, engrossing fable about digital technology and human community." ### [*Foundation: The Art and Making of Seasons 1 & 2*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789098730?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mike Avila (November 21st) I really enjoyed the first season of Apple's *Foundation* adaptation, especially the design that makes up the world. I'd been wondering if we'd see an art book for it, and as it turns out, one that covers both Season 1 and 2 is out this month. The book includes interviews with showrunner David S. Goyer and several of the show's stars, as well as behind-the-scenes photographs, concept art, and quite a bit more. ### [*Bookshops & Bonedust*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250886101?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Travis Baldree (November 7th) One of my favorite reads earlier this year was Travis Baldree's novel [*Legends & Lattes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250886088?ref=andrewliptak.com), a delightful fantasy novel about Viv, an orc who was tired of life as a mercenary and who sets up in a small city with ambitious plans to set up a coffee shop. Things get a little complicated, but it's a light, fun novel that shows that not every fantasy needs epic, world-ending stakes to be successful. Baldree's next book is a prequel: Viv's part of a mercenary company called Rackam's Ravens, and things aren't going she's hoped. After she was wounded in a fight against a necromancer, she decides it's time to take a break in a beach town called Murk, and ends up spending hours in the town's bookstore, which she finds more relaxing than she imagined. When a stranger arrives in town, she finds that adventure isn't too far away either. [Review: Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes by Travis BaldreeNot all fantasy novels need to have epic stakes![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/11/A8D3FDFE-BB84-440A-8028-4B296F4ECAF2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/travis-baldrees-legends-lattes-a-novel-of-high-fantasy-and-low-stakes-by/) ### [*The Culture: The Drawings*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572873?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Iain M. Banks (November 11th) Announced a [couple of years ago](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-will-publish-two-volume-companion-to-iain-m-banks-culture-series/), the estate of Iain M. Banks is releasing a handsome book that collects the late author's sketches and illustrations of the world that he's known for: the Culture. The book contains commentary from his friend Ken MacLeod, and it looks like it'll be an essential book for anyone who loves the epic science fiction series. [Orbit’s Culture art book is finally coming outIt’s been a long wait![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/04/TheCulture_HB-high-res-660x481.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-culture-art-book-iain-m-banks/) ### [*The Olympian Affair*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451466822?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jim Butcher (November 7th) Jim Butcher's next book is the second installment of his Cinder Spires steampunk fantasy series (following 2015's [*The Aeronaut's Windlass*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780451466815?ref=andrewliptak.com)). The Cinder Spires have guarded humanity floating high above the dangerous surface world. Now, a war has arrived between the various factions of the airship fleet, and the Spire Aurora's Armada has unveiled a new weapon that can destroy entire Spires. Lord Albion of Spire Albion has been working to find a way to prevent all-out war, and at a trade summit at Spire Olympia, he dispatches Captain Francis Madison Grimm and the crew of the AMS Predator to help bolster their forces. Adventures ensue. *Publisher's Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780451466822?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Butcher tops everything off with a dash of romance and plenty of steampunk airship combat. Fans will find this is worth the wait." ### [*The Lost Cause*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865939?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cory Doctorow (November 14th) Cory Doctorow's latest takes a look at the near-future consequences of climate change. Set in the 2050s, humanity has begun making some progress when it comes to blunting the effects of a changing world. But while there's progress and climate change is widely accepted, there are those who are deep in denial, believing that it's still a hoax and that they're being scammed. When Brooks Palazzo is orphaned, he goes to live with his deeply conservative and abusive grandfather in California, and when he graduates from high school, discovers that his grandfather's friends are behind an act of sabotage at his school, and recognizes a movement in which these holdouts are willing to die for what they believe. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "it’s surprisingly hopeful as it delivers a well-told story with plenty of dramatic tension that still manages to convey the message that dealing with entrenched politics is a marathon race, the surest way to lose is to stop running." ### [*Uncanny Vows*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534415966?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Laura Anne Gilman (November 28th) Last year, Laura Anne Gilman released [*Uncanny Times*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534415928?ref=andrewliptak.com), a novel set in 1913 and which the modern, technological age awakened some uncanny things from the shadows, prompting Aaron and Rosemary Harker to investigate the death of a relative and discovering that the world isn't what it seems. The two Huntsmen have been sidelined from their duties after their last report, and they're not sure if they're being tested or punished. When they're sent to the Boston area to investigate some strange activity, they assume they're being tested, because this case involves some wealthy individuals who support the Huntsmen in exchange for extra protection. Test or no, it's a job they can't screw up, and as they investigate, they find that the situation is more complicated and dangerous than they thought. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781534415966?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Gilman lets the suspense simmer, drawing readers in little by little until they can’t help but keep turning the pages." ### [*Hellweg's Keep*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787588813?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Justin Holley (November 14th) In the depths of space, 37 miners vanish in a titanium mine known as Hellwg's Keep, which is located on a distant moon orbiting the planet Terra. The FBI dispatches agent Kendra Omen to investigate the disappearance, and when she arrives, strange things begin happening: there are suicides, shadows within shadows, and Kendra begins to think that she's hearing her daughter's voice in the hallways. As she investigates, she finds evidence of occult practices at play, and to find the miners and untangle the situation, she'll have to go into the mineshafts and tunnels that make up Hellweg's Keep. ### [*Thursday*](https://www.amazon.com/Thursday-Jake-Kerr/dp/B0CLK13LK4/?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Jake Kerr (November 1st) I've really enjoyed Jake Kerr's short stories over the years, like "[The Old Equations](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-old-equations/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" and "Mission. Suit. Self." from my anthology [*War Stories: New Military Science Fiction*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781937009267?ref=andrewliptak.com). He's republished one of his novels, *Thursday*. In the near future, society has escaped from its dismal, broken surroundings and immersed themselves in a virtual reality world. Within the VR world is Sunday, a terrorist leader who leads a group called Order of Days and who is determined to destroy the VR world and bring people back into the real one. On her trail is an FBI agent named Gabby Kane, who encounters another operative named Saturday, and in the process of trying to capture them, is injured and unable to enter the VR world. To keep her career on track, she agrees to try and infiltrate the Order of Days to assassinate Sunday. ### [*Chaos Terminal*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098134?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Mur Lafferty (November 7th) Mur Lafferty follows up her novel [*Station Eternity*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593098110?ref=andrewliptak.com) with a new adventure for Mallory Viridian. In that novel, she found herself escaping to a sentient space station to try and avoid the murders that she's constantly asked to investigate, only to find herself involved in another whodunit involving a serial killer while she's trying to relax. With that case out of the way, a law enforcement officer who she knew on Earth has followed her to Station Eternity, along with Mallory's best friend from high school. And like clockwork, someone is murdered on the ride up. This case promises to be even more complicated, with a killer, an alien threat and the station's AI going wonky, all potentially leading to an intergalactic headache. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/chaos-terminal-1799559?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "just as complex and engaging as its predecessor. Lafferty’s skill with dialogue and emotional arcs make the story equally character- and action-driven." ### [*Ancillary Justice 10th Anniversary Edition*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574266?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ann Leckie (November 28th) Ann Leckie's novel *Ancillary Justice* was a huge novel when it came out in 2013: it was a book that explored gender, colonialism, and consciousness in some interesting ways, following a starship's artificial intelligence after it's abruptly ripped from its body and stuck in a single ancillary – a corpse soldier that carries out the Radch Empire's will across the galaxy. With the novel's 10th anniversary upon us, Orbit is releasing a new special edition of the book, which features some neat bells and whistles, along with a new introduction from Leckie. [Orbit is releasing slick new editions of Ancillary Justice and The ExpanseOrbit is releasing new, special editions of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and James S.A. Corey’s Caliban’s War and Abbadon’s Gate![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/Copy-of-Winter-Speaker-Series-Thumbnail--2-.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/) ### [*The Long Fall Up: And Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781953736260?ref=andrewliptak.com) by William Ledbetter (November 6th) William Ledbetter is a friend of mine from a number of years ago: we were both at the Launch Pad Writer's Workshop together! He's collected a number of his short stories together into a collection called *The Long Fall Up*, which includes stories about artificial intelligence, the future of robotics, and life on Mars. ### [*Refractions*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGM8N6SC?tag=storm058-aut-20&geniuslink=true&ref=andrewliptak.com)by M.V. Melcer (November 16th) Humanity's first extra-solar colony on Bethesda was a thriving home to hundreds of adults and children, only for all of its communications to Earth going silent. Earth mounts a rescue operation, with Nethalie Hart joining as a way to escape from the pain of her sister's death. However, while the mission is enroute, she's awoken from cryosleep too early, and discovers that the mission is in danger. She's thrust into command of the ship, and has to contend with a crew of strangers, their secrets, and a mysterious message scrawled on the walls: someone is trying to stop the mission and revealing whatever secrets Bethesda holds. ### [*The Art of the Creator: Designs of Futures Past*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798886631227?ref=andrewliptak.com) by James Mottram (November 14th) One of the films that I enjoyed a great deal earlier this year was Gareth Edwards' *The Creator*, a science fiction film about a military operative tasked with hunting down a target that will help the US in its misguided war against artificial intelligence. What's most striking about this film is how beautiful it is: the world is incredibly rich, with lots of robots and epic landscapes. To that end, we've got an art book that collects the concept art, commentaries from the actors, crew and designers, and quite a bit more. ### [*Like Thunder*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418793?ref=andrewliptak.com) By Nnedi Okorafor (November 28th) Earlier this fall, Nnedi Okorafor re-released her novel [*Shadow Speaker*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418762?ref=andrewliptak.com), the first installment in her The Desert Magician's duology. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in 2074 where warfare has brought about a cataclysmic change across the planet, it's about Ejii Ugabe, who embarks on a journey of discovery across a changed landscape as she begins to manifest some strange powers. In this new installment, we're reunited with Dikéogu Obidimkpa in Niger, West Africa in 2077\. He's another person who has developed powers – he can bring about rain with his thoughts, and he had accompanied his friend Ejii Ubaid on her journey, and had since parted ways. Dikéogu's powers have grown, and as violence against the Changed builds across the continent, he awakens to find most of his memories from the last year missing, and sets out to try and untangle what has transpired. He reunites with Ejii to figure out what happened as they fight to survive in a world that doesn't want them. *Kirkus Reviews [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nnedi-okorafor/like-thunder/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* that "Okorafor pulls no punches here, openly drawing connections between the public's mistreatment and distrust of the Changed Ones to genocidal campaigns around the world." ### [](https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Wind-Nameless-Republic-Book-ebook/dp/B0BXKXN91R/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?asc%5Fcampaign=kinjagizmodolink-20&asc%5Frefurl=https://gizmodo.com/44-new-sci-fi-and-fantasy-books-to-add-to-your-november-1850900672&asc%5Fsource=&tag=kinjagizmodolink-20&ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Warrior of the Wind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316428972?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (November 21st) Suyi Davies Okungbowa follows up his novel [*Son of the Storm*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316428941?ref=andrewliptak.com) with *Warrior of the Wind*, set in world inspired by the pre-colonial empires of West Africa. Lilong and Danso have escaped from Bassa, and have ended up way from the Empire and its agents in a distant colony, but time isn't on their side: they have bounties on their heads and every newcomer represents a potential threat. Lilong is hoping to return an ibor heirloom, the Diwi, to her home to keep it safe, but the journey back will be dangerous for both of them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/suyi-davies-okungbowa/warrior-wind/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Slow-paced yet expansive, the book follows individual people to paint a much larger picture of empires as they rise and fall." ### [*The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647101107?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Alex Shvartsman (November 14th) The modern spate of artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney have caused no shortage of angst and problems within the storytelling world. Alex Shvartsman's new anthology, *The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI* seeks to explore the intersection between AI and the creative process, bringing together a number of authors to imagine some possible futures, including Ken Liu, Ray Nayler, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tina Connolly, and many others from around the world. [Literary headwindsAlex Shvartsman of Future Science Fiction on why he’s putting the magazine on hiatus and the challenges SF magazines face![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/01/Untitled-collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sci-fi-magazine-challenges/) ### [*Exorcism*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542039505?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Han Song, translated by Michael Berry (November 28th) Earlier this year, Michael Berry translated Han Song's novel [*Hospital*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781542039475?ref=andrewliptak.com) into English, in which a man named Yang Wei arrives in C City for work, only to be hospitalized and embedded in a bureaucratic mess from which he has trouble escaping. In this followup, Yang Wei finds that he's aged decades overnight and is a patient in a massive hospital ship hovering over a blood-red sea, with doctors nowhere to be found – only medical robots. Along with a small group of fellow patients, they set out to explore the ship and figure out its mysteries to find a way to escape. ### [*The King-Killing Queen*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781956000351?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shawn Speakman (November 7th) Shawn Speakman kicks off a new fantasy trilogy with *The King-Killing Queen.* High King Alafair Goode was mortally wounded in his quest to save the world from Mordreadth the Great Darkness, and was saved by a witch who used magic to revive him and fulfill his destiny. That comes with a cost however: his offspring will be immortal, but for only as long as he lives before he dies a natural death. Decades later, an apprentice to the Master Historian, Sylvie Raventress is enaged in research, and makes a striking discovery: she isn't an orphan but is one of Alafair's heirs, and when he dies, she and others will be mortal. Those siblings aren't thrilled that Sylvie's named heir, and as the fighting over the throne begins, she finds allies in a Fae guide, a former knight, and a light-weaver to help her bring the kingdom back together. ### [*We Are the Crisis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982603755?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cadwell Turnbull (November 7th) Cadwell Turnbull is one of my favorite authors: I commissioned a short story from him while I was at *The Verge*, his debut novel [*The Lesson*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-future-of-stranger-things-lessons-from-cadwell-turnbull-and-more/) was excellent, and his last book, [*No Gods, No Monsters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200834419?ref=andrewliptak.com)was outstanding. His next is a sequel to that last one: set in a world where fantastical creatures live on the periphery of society, hidden from the mundane world. Three years after the Monster Massacre and after monsters have begun to come out of hiding, some of the members of Rebecca's old wolf pack have begun to go missing, while an anti-monster group called the Black Hand has begun to organize across the country, with clashes growing between them and pro-monster groups. This looks like an enormously relevant book. Kirkus Reviews gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cadwell-turnbull/we-are-crisis-turnbull/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Turnbull packs a lot of plot and character development in a fairly compact set of pages, using his story to explore complex issues of prejudice, intersectionality, and personal identity, as well as the scars left by the darker parts of one’s past." ### [*A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984881724?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (November 2nd) Settling Mars has long been a dream of space enthusiasts and science fiction fans. While there are real efforts to develop the hardware and infrastructure to begin sending people to the red planet, it's going to be a formidable challenge. In their new book, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Authors of [*Soonish*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780399563843?ref=andrewliptak.com)) take a look at all of the different elements that go into setting up a space colony: how do you build a farm where life doesn't exist? How do you raise kids, or set up a form of governance? *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781984881724?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The cheeky tone is loads of fun, and Zach’s humorous illustrations of, for instance, contraptions proposed to facilitate zero-gravity sex, entertain. It adds up to a boisterous takedown of techno-utopianism." ### [*System Collapse*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826978?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (November 14th) Martha Wells is back with a new Murderbot novel! Need we say more? In this new adventure, (set after [*Network Effect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250229854?ref=andrewliptak.com)), the Barish-Estranza has dispatched a rescue ship to a planet in need of help, along with some SecUnits. Murderbot is suspicious: corporations aren't usually in the business of being altruistic, and finds itself involved. But it's dealing with some of its own problems: it isn't operating within its normal operational parameters. ART, its crew, and their human friends from Preservation are going to have to work out what's going on with Murderbot while also helping the colonists from the company and its forces. Writing for *Locus Magazine*, Liz Bourke [says](https://locusmag.com/2023/10/liz-bourke-reviews-system-collapse-by-martha-wells/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "despite its action-adventure bones, *System Col­lapse* is a more low-key, introspective novel than many of the Murderbot stories have been so far." [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/04/IMG_0255.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) ### [*Iron Flame*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781649374172?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rebecca Yarros (November 7th) Rebecca Yarros's debut novel [*Fourth Wing*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781649374042?ref=andrewliptak.com) has been a massive hit, about a young woman named Violet Sorrengail who had planned on becoming a scholar and who instead ended up in a war college where she learned to ride dragons into battle in a brutal war. ([Amazon is working on a TV series](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/fourth-wing-tv-show-amazon-iron-flame-season-2-1235773492/?ref=andrewliptak.com) based on the book) In this sequel, everyone expected Violet to perish during her first year at the Basgiath War College, but she's survived the Threshing that was designed to weed out the weakest of the class. Now, her training is beginning in earnest, and the next phase of her training is going to take everything she has to survive into the next year. --- ### Marvel's stumbling blocks URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/marvel-mcu-problems-superheroes/ Last updated: 2023-11-02T16:45:26.000Z *Variety* published a [big feature](https://variety.com/2023/film/features/marvel-jonathan-majors-problem-the-marvels-reshoots-kang-1235774940/?ref=andrewliptak.com) earlier this week about the status and future of Marvel Studios, which generated a whole bunch of headlines. Amongst some of those revelations: there's a feeling that Marvel's lost its touch, that they've considered bringing back Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow (both of whom were killed off in *Avengers: Endgame*), that the legal troubles that Jonathan Majors has embroiled himself in has boxed Marvel into an unhappy place given the prominence that he'll be playing as the next phase's main villain, and that the upcoming film *The Marvels* is likely going to underwhelm at the box office. The narrative that we're seeing "superhero fatigue" has been with us for a long time, and I don't really think that it's a *thing.* (A quick comparison between "Superhero Fatigue" and "Marvel Cinematic Universe" between 2004 and 2023 at Google Trends shows that they don't seem to go hand in hand.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/11/compare.png) Red is "Marvel Cinematic Universe", blue is "Superhero fatigue". You'd think you'd see the blue line spike even more. Superheroes have become a major part of the film industry for a bunch of reasons: the increase in CGI capabilities, the basic stories meld on well with a blockbuster format, the growth of theaters in the US and abroad, and the general shedding of the stigma surrounding genre content all contributes. It feels like anytime there's a superhero film about to hit theaters, we'll see commenters and critics say that audiences have been saturated with these types of CGI-driven narratives, and they're starting to get tired of them. The proof they point to is with the failure of DC's cinematic universe efforts, and the other superhero projects along the way that underwhelm. Marvel's latest slate of projects does seem to be drawing less goodwill at the box office, something that *Variety* points to COVID as a factor. I think the reasons go a bit deeper than that: the incredible rise that Marvel saw was thanks to a larger, overarching plan that helped build momentum towards a larger end point – *Avengers: Infinity Wars* and *Avengers: Endgame*. The projects that we've seen since then, like *Black Widow, The Eternals*, *Ant-Man 3, She-Hulk, Moon Knight*, and a handful of others feel a bit aimless, like Marvel is throwing things at the wall to see what ends up sticking. I recently picked up and blew through Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales, Joanna Robinson's [*MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781631497513?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which charts the story of how Marvel Studios came to dominate the film industry with its superhero franchise. ([Another good listen that covers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/wsj-with-great-responsibility-podcast-mcu-listen/) this is the *Wall Street Journal*'s *With Great Power* podcast) The book looks at how Marvel got into the film adaptation business after it licensed a whole bunch of its intellectual property to other studios, and how it set out to create its own films as a way to keep some level of control over how those projects came out. A big part of the book is centered on how important one person is to this entire franchise: Kevin Feige and his rise from assistant all the way up to the head of the entire studio at Disney. In the book, Edwards, Gonzales, and Robinson explore how Marvel produced its films: haphazardly, with constant tinkering and changes throughout the production process, sometimes altering the film right up to the last minute. This is a strategy that seems like it's persisted as they've put each film into production: after finishing the book, I'm a little astounded that the entire franchise has been so successful, because it certainly feels like it's been put together by the seat of their pants – building the airplane while it's in the air. It's a pretty good read, although there wasn't much in the way of surprises if you've followed the ins and outs of the various productions over the years as I have in my work as a journalist. It's a good, high-level overview of the entire story. This feature from *Variety* also neatly dovetails with it. The book goes right up to Disney's efforts to break into streaming and Edwards, Gonzales, and Robinson point out that Feige's responsibilities have increased with that. There's a notable line in this feature: “These days, \[Feige's\] spread thin.” I think that is the key reason for why Marvel seems to be having this sort of slump or moment. It's spread itself across films and TV shows (shows which Marvel ran in a very different way – there was a revelation from the book that a lot of these shows start off strong, but have weaker ends, because they're still writing as they're shooting.) The demand for content has outstripped the studio's ability to deliver it at a higher level of quality across all fronts: stories, acting, CGI, you name it. Certainly, I think that there are projects like *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* or *She-Hulk* that deserved to be their own film, or at the very least, a couple of additional episodes to really get the stories to land in a satisfactory way. It sounds like Marvel's trying to figure out how to get out of its self-imposed problems: it needs to re-figure out what its resource limits are, because it's pretty clear that they're butting right up against them. I suspect they'll figure it out somewhere along the way, but it sounds like they're going to be hurting for a little while as they do so. ### Monsters on the western frontier URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vampires-of-el-norte-isabel-canas-horror-book-review/ Last updated: 2023-10-27T15:18:44.000Z The US expansion into the western reaches of the continent isn't something that we're taught much about in school. Most of the stories that I remember are heroic settler stories along the lines of Laura Ingles Wilder's *Little House on the Prairie* series, the *Oregon Trail* computer game, and the old Disney film *Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier*. Those stories portray the journey out west as a heroic, exciting endeavor, one that brought civilization to the frontier, perfectly captured by John Gast's 1872 painting, "[American Progress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%5FProgress?ref=andrewliptak.com)". It took some upper-level history courses in college and in high school to shake that narrative a bit. The west is coated in the blood and the bodies that those settlers trampled over, aided by a government willing to brutally colonize the continent, and stories that helped us look away. It's a legacy that we're still grappling with as a nation, aided by new research, scholarship, and writers willing to take a look at that history from another angle. Isabel Cañas' latest novel [*Vampires of El Norte*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593436721?ref=andrewliptak.com) is a story that exemplifies the horrors of this era, joining other post-colonial horror reads like Silvia Moreno-Garcia's [*Mexican Gothic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525620808?ref=andrewliptak.com)and Stephen Graham Jones’ [*The Only Good Indians*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982136468?ref=andrewliptak.com)that explore the impact of the expansion into the west. [Three horror novels to keep you up at night in 2020Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, and Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_a6eb18c9-9b1b-4fa2-9ddd-39d2e3af8cd4_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-horror-novels-mexican-gothic-only-good-indians-survivor-song/) Set in the 1840s just prior to the Mexican-American War, we're introduced to the daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher named Nena, and her best friend, Néstor, a poor kid who's future is a farmhand, if he's lucky. Cañas has set us on the path of a classical story of two ill-fated lovers who're separated by status and circumstance. Nena's father has plans to marry his daughter off to a son of another wealthy rancher, in the hopes that he'll be able to secure a viable partnership and alliance as the future in the region looks increasingly grim. Some of that grimness comes from white settlers coming south, looking to buy up land or take it by force. Driven to prove himself more than just a farmhand, Néstor enlists Nena to help him track down a fabled hidden stash of silver, with plans to use the proceeds to buy his own plot of land and future. It's while they're out in the moonlight when they find more than they bargained for: a tall creature with long limbs that attacks Nena and flees when Néstor attacks it with a shovel. Néstor brings Nena home, but when her mother cries out that she's dead, he flees, rather than face her imposing father. From there, the narrative jumps nearly a decade to February 1846 (just months before the Mexican-American War begins in April). Nena survived, but was left with a horrifying scar, while Néstor has wandered the region as a hired cattle driver, trying to forget the events of that horrifying night. As the threat of war between the US and Mexico continue to rise, the pair are unexpectedly reunited when Néstor joins a cavalry group assembled Nena's father and his neighbors to protect their land. Their reunion isn't joyous: Néstor thought Nena had died, while Nena believed that Néstor had abandoned her, and refuses to speak to him. Despite their problems, they're thrown together when Nena demands to join the cavalry group. She's resisted her father's demands to marry, and has spent the intervening years training as a healer. He reluctantly allows her to accompany the mission, but with the caveat that she agrees to marry when she returns. You can probably guess the rough direction of the story from there: Néstor and Nena argue and bicker over the past, with the former pining for a second chance and the latter slowly unfreezing. It's a fun, quick romantic adventure, accompanied with some horrific monsters that lurk in the shadows. Cañas' vampires help drive the two lovers through the plot. They're formidable and horrifying creatures – the same creatures that attacked Nena all those years ago –but they're not copies of Dracula. Rather, they reminded me a bit of the Gibdos that I encountered in *Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*; hulking forms that loom in the darkness, opportunistically attacking whatever comes their way. She sprinkles in encounters with the creatures as the book: men in the cavalry troop find mutilated cattle and other victims, and Nena works to try and help save those who've been attacked. When the cavalry group is attacked by US ranchers, they're separated and have to make their way back to unsafe territory, avoiding potential criminals, enemy soldiers, and the vampires that lurk in the darkness. It's while they're making their way home that they make a horrifying discovery: these creatures aren't here by chance: they've been brought in to be used as a weapon against the ranchers and their allies, softening up the opposition before the main army arrives. The implicit message here is that the *real* monsters here are the invaders: their greed drives their brutal tactics as they fight to annex land and territory from the people already living there. Nena discovers that the monsters – horrifying as they are – aren't exactly willing participants here, and because she was attacked years ago, can form something of a connection with them, a trick that ultimately helps them during the book's climax. With *Vampires of El Norte*, Cañas assembles a narrative that feels like a classic romantic horror. The back-and-forth courtship of Nena and Néstor, while a bit predictable, keeps the book humming along while she slips in a weightier message about the brunt end of colonialist expansion. The result is a gripping, exciting romp across the western landscape. ### Shared worlds URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-hill-house-1984-hand-newman/ Last updated: 2023-10-24T19:55:55.000Z I saw an [interesting piece of news](https://www.comingsoon.net/books/news/1374727-official-anthology-book-based-on-stephen-kings-the-stand-is-coming?ref=andrewliptak.com) the other day: Stephen King has approved an anthology of horror fiction based on his novel [*The Stand*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780307947307?ref=andrewliptak.com). It'll be called *The End of the World as We Know It: Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand,* and will be edited by authors Brian Keene and Christopher Golden. The table of contents boasts an impressive roster: S. A. Cosby, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, Joe R. Lansdale, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, and a whole bunch of others. According to Keene's [announcement](https://www.facebook.com/BrianKeeneOfficial/posts/pfbid033gkoSLN6aZGVWFcpzoY9xjpetB1XuJEwbiWKPqKneKCzNWCTpSgQgBf7c7HB3yyHl?%5F%5Fcft%5F%5F[0]=AZUwrb736KgTX2oblEsUlalxz4ovFsx6JwHjH96IGE7-d4DqpMxbMuUkzuzZ0rTXQ04B8hUiyAXlqvI3iZdZhL2hb9eRSEAvAg3bXcT5BEHZb2BwaNorcNhToX-Iw44Q6ywfFX9BK5WZ3jPMr5V1gYRxXbRcsYNt99KvTbJffXd2dg&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CO%2CP-R) (via [Broaddus](https://twitter.com/MauriceBroaddus/status/1715520825598661050?ref=andrewliptak.com) on Twitter), the book will also feature an introduction from King, and each of the stories will continue to expand the world a little more beyond King's words. There's no word on when the book will hit stores. I found this to be interesting, because in recent weeks, we've seen a pair of other books pop up that are following a similar blueprint: Elizabeth Hand's [*A Haunting on the Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316527323?ref=andrewliptak.com), based on Shirley Jackson's [*The Haunting of Hill House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143039983https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143039983?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Julia*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063265332?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sandra Newman, a retelling of George Orwell's [*1984*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328869333?ref=andrewliptak.com)from Julia's point of view. In all three cases, we're looking at an author's estate deciding to bring in another author to continue the story in some way: either as a continuation or homage to the original book, or reexamining the story in some way. Authors playing in other universes aren't anything new: there are plenty of examples of where the estate of a late author has opted to continue to expand the world of a famous novel by bringing in authors for another take or continuation. There's the 1991 sequel to [*Gone With the Wind*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781451635621?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Scarlett*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780446502375?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Alexandra Ripley, a series of *Foundation* novels by Gregory Benford ([](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation%27s%5FFear?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Foundation's Fear*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061056383?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)* Greg Bear ([](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation%5Fand%5FChaos?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Foundation and Chaos*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061056406?ref=andrewliptak.com)*)* and David Brin ([](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation%27s%5FTriumph?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Foundation's Triumph*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780061056390?ref=andrewliptak.com)), a sequel to Michael Crichton's [*Andromeda Strain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101974490?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel H. Wilson, [*Andromeda: Evolution*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062473271?ref=andrewliptak.com). And of course, there's the litany of *Dune* spinoffs from Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. (That's also not to forget the entire industry of writers who've written for existing franchises like *Alien, Dragonlance, Star Trek, Star Wars*, and so forth.) But it does feel notable that we have Hand and Newman's books coming out around the same time, and news of the anthology right after. I don't know if that's a pattern in the larger publishing industry or a sign that maybe there are more on the way, but I have to imagine that there are some literary estates out there eyeing the stories for which they own the IP and think "hey, we can do something with this." Certainly, there are no shortage of authors for which I can see this calculation playing out: authors who've constructed giant worlds like Iain M. Banks or Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, or others could certainly be utilized in this fashion, with the argument being made that by publishing new homages to these landmark authors and worlds, they're bringing new audiences to those original stories. Thinking about that makes me a little queasy – we're already seeing something of a commodification in the arts world, one where a work of art is reduced down to a salable item that can be replicated over and over. Can you really replicate the insights that made such books so influential in the first place? Or are you just shuffling words around in order to create a viable revenue stream? I haven't read either book (I admire Hand and her writing quite a bit – I'm planning on picking up her book at some point!), but reading the positive reviews, I have to imagine that these two authors and their respective estates aren't jumping into these worlds to cynically drop in for a cash grab. As with all things, it's hard to make broad generalizations. But I have to imagine that there are plenty of folks in the industry willing to overlook any artistic or moral scruples they (or the people whose estates they're looking after) to give the fans of their works another taste of the worlds they fell in love with. Looking at the folks involved in this round, it feels like those worlds are in good hands: folks who understand the author's intent with those original stories, and who can meaningfully add something to it. Hopefully, that tendency will continue. ### Here are the winners of the 2023 Ignyte Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ignyte-awards-2023-bipoc-scifi-fantasy/ Last updated: 2023-10-23T15:52:45.000Z The Hugo Awards weren't the only big awards announced over the weekend: *t*he administrators of the Ignyte Awards announced the recipients of the fourth annual awards. The award was founded alongside FIYAHCON in 2020, and were designed to honor BIPOC contributions to the SF/F genres. This year, the finalists were brought together by a jury of 20 individuals (a mix of avid readers, reviewers, FIYAHCON staff, and winners from previous years), and were then voted on by the general public. Here are the finalists and winners (marked in **bold**) for this year's award. ### Best Novel: Adult - *Babel* by R. F. Kuang - *Kaikeyi* by Vaishnavi Patel - *Siren Queen* by Nghi Vo - ***The Blood Trials* by N.E. Davenport** - *The Spear Cuts Through Water* by Simon Jimenez ### Best Novel: Young Adult - *Ballad & Dagger* by Daniel José Older - ***Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn** - *Blood Scion* by Deborah Falaye - *Lakelore* by Anna-Marie McLemore - *The Kindred* by Alechia Dow ### Best in Middle Grade - *Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion* by K. Tempest Bradford - *The Last Mapmaker* by Christina Soontornvat - *The Marvellers* by Dhonielle Clayton - ***Witchlings* by Claribel Ortega** - *You Only Live Once, David Bravo!* by Mark Oshiro ### Best Novella - [*Bishop's Opening*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/garcia%5F01%5F22/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by R.S.A. Garcia - *Empire of the Feast* by Bendi Barrett - *Even Though I Knew The End* by C. L. Polk - *Helpmeet* by Naben Ruthnum - ***Into the Riverlands* by Nghi Vo** ### Best Novelette - [***If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You***](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/if-you-find-yourself-speaking-to-god-address-god-with-the-informal-you/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) **by John Chu** - [*Men Women and Chainsaws*](https://www.tor.com/2022/04/20/men-women-and-chainsaws-stephen-graham-jones/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Stephen Graham Jones - [*Murder by Pixel: Crime and Personality in the Digital* ](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/huang%5F12%5F22/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*Darkness* by S. L. Huang - *The Epic of Qu-Shittu* by Tobi Ogundiran - *To Carve Home in Your Bones* by Aigner Loren Wilson ### Best Short Story - [*Girl Oil*](https://www.tor.com/2022/02/22/girl-oil-grace-p-fong/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Grace Fong - [***The Lady of the Yellow Painted Library***](https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/the-lady-of-the-yellow-painted-library-by-tobi-ogundiran/id1244649384?i=1000597357212&ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)**by Tobi Ogundiran** - [*The Locked Pod*](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-locked-pod?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Malka Older - *The Voice of a Thousand Years* by Fawaz Al-Matrouk - [*Wanderlust*](http://www.anathemamag.com/wanderlust?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)by LP Kindred ### Best in Speculative Poetry - "[In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/in-stock-images-of-the-future-everything-is-white/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)" by Terese Mason Pierre - "I Shall Not Surrender" by Beatrice Winifred Iker (Anathema: Spec From the Margins) - "The Recipe For Time Travel" by Monique Collins - **"[We Smoke Pollution](https://www.sfpoetry.com/sl/edchoice/45.1-3.html?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)" by Ai Jiang** - "Year of the Unicorn Kidz" by Jason B. Crawford ### Critics Award - Aigner Loren Wilson - Bogi Takács - Charles Payseur - Christina Orlando - ***Nerds of a Feather*** ### Best Fiction Podcast - [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/audio/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) - [***Black Women Are Scary***](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/black-women-are-scary/id1525951037?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) - [*Good Morning Antioch*](https://goodmorningantioch.com/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) - [*PodCastle*](https://podcastle.org/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) - [*Pseudopod*](https://pseudopod.org/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) ### Best Artist - **Aimee Campbell** - Terri Chieyni - N’kai DeLauter - Taj Francis - Raymond Sebastien ### Best Comics Team - Changa And The Jade Obelisk #2 by Matteo Illuminat, Loris Ravina, Massimiliano Veltri & Robert Jeffrey II - Squire by Nadia Shammas & Sara Alfageeh - **Where Black Stars Rise by Marie Enger & Nadia Shammas** ### Best Anthology / Collected Works - *Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century* by Kim Fu - *Night of the Living Rez* by Morgan Talty - ***Reclaim the Stars* edited by Zoraida Córdova, ed.** - *The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer* edited by David Pomerico and Kyle Dargan - *Voodoonauts Presents (Re)Living Mythology* by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, H.D. Hunter & LP Kindred ### Best Creative Nonfiction - [Indigeneity in SFF Gaming: The Ongoing Need for Respectful, Native-Centered Storytelling](https://www.sfwa.org/2022/07/05/indigeneity-sff-gaming-respectful-native-centered-storytelling/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Chesley Oxendine - [Preliminary Observations From An Incomplete History of African SFF](https://www.sfwa.org/2022/06/01/preliminary-observations-incomplete-history-african-science-fiction-fantasy/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Wole Talabi - [**The H Word: Horror in a Country that Is Not Afraid of Death**](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-horror-in-a-country-that-is-not-afraid-of-death/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) **by Dante Luiz** - [The Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy is Blurring and I’m Into It](https://apex-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-line-between-science-fiction-and-fantasy-is-blurring-and-im-into-it/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) by Joy Sanchez Taylor - When Black Boys Find Magic by LaDarrion Williams ### The Ember Award - **Afronauts Podcast** - Alex Brown - Kate Elliott - Maurice Broaddus - Ruoxi Chen ### The Community Award - Carl Brandon Society - Clarion West - dave ring - **Flights of Foundry** - Loyalty Bookstore’s Crowdcast ### Here are the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-winners-chengdu/ Last updated: 2023-10-21T17:53:45.000Z The 81st World Science Fiction Convention took place in Chengdu, China this weekend, and with it came this year's winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards. This was an interesting year for the Hugos – and for a bunch of other awards. I opined [on this earlier](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-finalists/) in the summer when the finalist list was released: it was an internationally diverse list (fitting, given that it was held in China for the first time, although a bunch of folks noted that Chinese representation was a bit lower than they would have preferred). It's worth noting that finalists and winners are the product of the SF/F community, and those selections are an interesting barometer for one of the states of the community's preferences. One thing that I've found interesting this year is how *different* this year's slate of awards have been: the winners of the [2023 Nebulas](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/) had one set of winners, the [Dragon Awards had another set of winners](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-con-2023-finalists-leckie-kuang-tchaikovsky-zahn/), and this year's set of Hugo recipients are another set. I think that spread is a good thing for readers. It can be a bit boring when you see the same handful of books and stories sweep up everything across the board, and when you see a bunch of different books picking up different awards, it's a sign that there's no single consensus of the state of the genre. Here are the finalists and winners (marked in **bold**) for this year's Hugos. Next year's awards will take place at the 2024 WorldCon: [Glasgow 2024](https://glasgow2024.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Astounding Award for Best New Writer - **Travis Baldree** - Naseem Jamnia - Isabel J Kim\* - Maijia Liu - Everina Maxwell\* - Weimu Xin\* \*finalist in their 2nd year of eligibility ### Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book - ***Akata Woman (The Nsibidi Scripts)* by Nnedi Okorafor** - *Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn - *Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak* by Charlie Jane Anders - *The Golden Enclaves* by Naomi Novik - *In the Serpents Wake* by Rachel Hartman - *Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods* by Catherynne M. Valente ### Best Fan Artist - Iain Clark - **Richard Man** - Laya Rose - Alison Scott - España Sheriff - Orion Smith ### Best Fan Writer - **Chris M. Barkley** - Bitter Karella - Arthur Liu - RiverFlow - Jason Sanford - Örjan Westin ### Best Fancast - *Coode Street Podcast* presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, produced by Jonathan Strahan - ***Hugo, Girl!* by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson** - *Hugos There* by Seth Heasley - *Kalanadi* created and presented by Rachel - *Octothorpe* by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty - *Worldbuilding for Masochists* by Cass Morris, Rowenna Miller, Marshall Ryan Maresca ### Best Fanzine - *Chinese Academic SF Express*, by Latssep and Tianluo\_Qi - *Galactic Journey*, by Gideon Marcus, Janice Marcus, Tammi Bozich, Erica Frank, Arel Lucas, and Mark Yon - *Journey Planet*, by Regina Kanyu Wang, Yen Ooi, Arthur Liu, Jean Martin, Erin Underwood, Steven H Silver, Pádraig Ó Méalóid and their other co-editors - *Nerds of a Feather*, by Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer, Adri Joy, Joe Sherry, Vance Kotrla, G. Brown - *Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog*, by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk - ***Zero Gravity Newspaper*, by RiverFlow and Ling Shizhen** ### Best Semiprozine - *Escape Pod*, Co-editors Mur Lafferty & Valerie Valdes; Assistant editors Benjamin C. Kinney & Premee Mohamed, host Tina Connolly, Producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht - *FIYAH,* edited by the entire FIYAH team - *khōréō*, edited by team khōréō - *PodCastle*, Co-Editors Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Eleanor R. Wood; Assistant Editor Sofia Barker; Host Matt Dovey; Audio Producers Peter Adrian Behravesh, Devin Martin, and Eric Valdes - *Strange Horizons*, edited by The Strange Horizons Editorial Team - ***Uncanny Magazine*, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing/poetry editor Chimedum Ohaegbu; managing editor Monte Lin; nonfiction editor Meg Elison; podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky** ### Best Professional Artist - Sija Hong - Kuri Huang Kuri - Paul Lewin - Alyssa Winans - Jian Zhang - **Enzhe Zhao** ### Best Editor, Long Form - Ruoxi Chen - **Lindsey Hall** - Lee Harris - Sarah Peed - Huan Yan - Haijun Yao ### Best Editor, Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - **Neil Clarke** - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - Sheree Renée Thomas - Xu Wang - Feng Yang ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Andor*: “One Way Out” written by Beau Willimon, Tony Gilroy, and George Lucas, directed by Toby Haynes - *Andor*: “Rix Road” written by Tony Gilroy and George Lucas, directed by Benjamin Caron - ***The Expanse*: “Babylon’s Ashes” written by Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner** - *For All Mankind*: “Stranger in a Strange Land” written by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, directed by Craig Zisk - *She-Hulk: Attorney at Law*: “Whose Show is This?” written by Jessica Gao, Francesca Gailes, and Jacqueline Gailes, directed by Kat Coiro - *Stranger Things*: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” written by Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, and Paul Dichter, directed by Shawn Levy ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Avatar: The Way of Water* screenplay by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver, directed by James Cameron - *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* screenplay by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler - ***Everything Everywhere All at Once* screenplay by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert** - *Nope* written by Jordan Peele, directed by Jordan Peele - *Severance (Season 1)* written by Dan Erickson, Anna Ouyang Moench et al., directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle - *Turning Red* screenplay by Julia Cho and Domee Shi, directed by Domee Shi ### Best Related Work - *Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road* by Kyle Buchanan - *Buffalito World Outreach Project* by Lawrence M. Schoen - *Chinese Science Fiction, An Oral History, Volume 1* by Yang Feng - *“[The Ghost of Workshops Past](https://www.tor.com/2022/08/17/the-ghost-of-workshops-past-how-communism-conservatism-and-the-cold-war-still-mold-our-paths-into-sff-writing/?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)”* by S.L. Huang - *Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir* by Wil Wheaton - ***Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes* by Rob Wilkins** ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - ***Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams* by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, Krzysztof Ostrowski** - *DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel* by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, Zid - *Monstress vol. 7: Devourer* by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (Image Comics) - *Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK* by Kieron Gillen / Dan Mora - *Saga, Vol. 10* by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples, Fonografiks (Image Comics) - *Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow* by Tom King, Bilquis Evely, and Matheus Lopes ### Best Series - ***Children of Time Series* by Adrian Tchaikovsky** - *The Founders Trilogy* by Robert Jackson Bennett - *The Locked Tomb* by Tamsyn Muir - *October Daye* by Seanan McGuire - *Rivers of London* by Ben Aaronovich - *The Scholomance* by Naomi Novik ### Best Short Story - “D.I.Y.” by John Wiswell (Tor.com, August 2022) - “On the Razor’s Edge” by Jiang Bo (*Science Fiction World,* January 2022) - **“Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills (*Uncanny Magazine*, November-December 2022)** - “Resurrection” by Ren Qing (*Future Fiction/Science Fiction World*, December 2022) - “The White Cliff” by Lu Ban (*Science Fiction World*, May 2022) - “Zhurong on Mars” by Regina Kanyu Wang (*Frontiers*, September 2022) ### Best Novelette - “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente (*Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed* Romance, Solaris) - Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi (*Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction*, Tordotcom) - “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” by John Chu (*Uncanny Magazine*, July-August 2022) - “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang (*Clarkesworld*, December 2022) - **“The Space-Time Painter” by Hai Ya (*Galaxy’s Edge*, April 2022)** - “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert (*Clarkesworld*, June 2022) ### Best Novella - *Even Though I Knew the End* by C.L. Polk - *Into the Riverlands* by Nghi Vo - *A Mirror Mended* by Alix E. Harrow - *Ogres* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *What Moves the Dead* by T. Kingfisher - ***Where the Drowned Girls Go* by Seanan McGuire** ### Best Novel - *The Daughter of Doctor Moreau* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *The Kaiju Preservation Society* by John Scalzi - *Legends & Lattes* by Travis Baldree - *Nona the Ninth* by Tamsyn Muir - ***Nettle & Bone* by T. Kingfisher** - *The Spare Man* by Mary Robinette Kowal ### Galactic strategist URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-grand-admiral-thrawn-zahn-ahsoka/ Last updated: 2023-10-20T21:00:02.000Z The latest *Star Wars* TV series *Ahsoka* wrapped up its season the other week, and with it came something I've always wanted to see: Grand Admiral Thrawn in the flesh. For generations, George Lucas's *Star Wars* has provided some frightening villains in the form of Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Emperor Palpatine, Boba Fett, and plenty of others. It's hard to understate the menace and sense of evil that comes off of Vader's costume, and even decades after first watching the film in theaters, I still get a bit of a shiver when I catch a glimpse of him, either on screen or [in person](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeditrilobite/5135920038/in/album-72157625163086733/?ref=andrewliptak.com). But Thrawn was something different: when Timothy Zahn introduced him in his 1991 novel [*Heir to the Empire*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553296129?ref=andrewliptak.com) and its two sequels [*Dark Force Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593358795?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Last Command*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593497036?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* he brought a different sense of danger to the world. A cunning strategist, Thrawn was an Imperial officer who seemed as though he was impossible to beat, someone who could out maneuver and out-think his opponents. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/IMG_0529.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak In the late 1980s, *Star Wars* as a franchise was winding down: *The Return of the Jedi* had come out in theaters in 1983, and while there were some roleplaying games and TV shows out there, Lucasfilm had begun closing down its marketing and licensing efforts. Without new movies, there wasn't much interest in new toys or products from companies. It wasn't until 1989 that Lucy Wilson, Lucasfilm's director of publishing attended a book festival in New York and spoke with a publisher who expressed an interest in something a bit different: new stories from the Star Wars universe that branched off from the films. She took the idea to George Lucas, who gave it his blessing, and she began looking for publishers to partner with. Ballantine Books, which had published some of the earlier novelizations and spinoff novels, passed, thinking that without new films, the books likely wouldn't sell well. One publisher had been interested, however: Lou Aronica of Bantam Spectra had written to her a year earlier, expressing an interest in publishing a line of books set in the universe. “I talked about wanting to publish these books as events, launching in hardcover, which was fairly unusual for licensed properties at that time.” Aronica told me several years ago, noting that he wanted the books to land with the same impact as the films. Wilson was impressed with his proposal, and they signed an agreement for a trilogy of books. There was a stipulation: they had to be well-written, they'd have to take place after *Return of the Jedi*, and they couldn't bring back Darth Vader. With an agreement in place, Bantam Spectra began looking for an author. Its senior editor, Betsy Mitchell, suggested Timothy Zahn, an up-and-coming author who'd written an number of space opera novels over the course of the 1980s, and who'd won the Hugo Award in 1984 for his novella *Cascade Point*. Zahn was excited at the opportunity, [telling me in an interview](https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/9/3/21408128/star-wars-books-thrawn-ascendency-chaos-rising-timothy-zahn-interview-thrawn-trilogy?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io) that “It went from very cool to *aaah*!” With some requirements for the book, he noted that he "didn't want a Vader-type or Emperor-type" villain to drive the plot: he needed a different type of threat for the heroes, something they hadn't faced before. He came up with Grand Admiral Thrawn: an alien Chiss who had risen through the ranks of the Empire through his tactical brilliance, who understood an enemy's tactics, strategy and weaknesses, and who commanded his forces not through fear or threats, but through loyalty. "If you’re up against somebody like Thrawn, and he’s four steps ahead of you, your heroes have to bring their A-game to the field," Zahn explained. "When you have smart villains and smart heroes, you have a more exciting, interesting story.” If Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader were rough analogs of Adolf Hitler, Thrawn was Erwin Rommel, a feared German general who fought against the allies in Northern Africa and in France during the Second World War. If the former used brute force to achieve their means, the latter read Sun Tzu's [*The Art of War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780877734529?ref=andrewliptak.com) *and* Carl VonClausewitz's [*On War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780140444278?ref=andrewliptak.com). --- Zahn's Thrawn trilogy was an immediate success, and helped spawn a growing [multimedia franchise over the course of the 1990s](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/). The Star Wars Expanded Universe – now branded and republished as Legends – had its ups and downs as various authors explored the lives of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa in volume after volume. The series has its ups and downs, but there's a nearly unanimous assessment from fans that Zahn's novels are some of the EU's highest points. It's a virtue of setting a high bar right out of the gate, but also because Zahn really understood how the *Star Wars* universe ticked, and how to construct a story that hit the right tone and scale of the films. That's a hard thing to replicate, and over the course of the series, various authors threw a number of new threats against the franchise's heroes. They ranged from the strange (the Ssi-ruuk in *Truce at Bakura* who stole the life energy from sentient life to power their technology) to mythical (a long-dead Sith Lord named Exar Kun in the *Jedi Academy* trilogy or ) to conventional former Imperials (Ysanne Isard from the *X-Wing* series and Zsinj in *Courtship of Princess Leia*). In most cases, their role in the stories weren't able to accomplish what Zahn had set out to do: provide a new challenge for the heroes. At its worst, the EU provided an adventure of the year for the Skywalkers, Solos, and New Republic, one that they'd overcome with a bit of action and luck, before moving onto the next challenge in the next book. That's not to say that these are *bad* books: Exar Kun provided an interesting window into the science fantasy side of the franchise, while Isard comes the closest (for me personally, anyway) to Thrawn when it comes to the former Imperials trying to rebuild the former Empire. As a result, Thrawn was never overshadowed or topped as a formidable villain. He not only provided a different type of threat to the heroes, but he was a villain who was grounded and With his death at the end of the trilogy, Zahn ensured that he was someone who went out on a high note and who couldn't be reused to detriment. Indeed, when Zahn was eventually returned to the EU for a new novel that would cap off the fight between the New Republic and the remains of the Empire, he didn't bring Thrawn back directly, but just the possibility of his return to overturn everything in [*Specter of the Past*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553298048?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Visions of the Future*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553578799?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/grand-admiral-thrawn2-bda317f3-6436bf5c3023c.png) Image: Disney With the release of *The Phantom Menace* in 1999 and its sequels, the focus of *Star Wars* shifted to other eras, and with the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, the entire continuity that was the Expanded Universe was rendered non-canon to pave the way for a new trilogy of films. There was no shortage of speculation about what those new films (which ultimately became *The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi*, and *The Rise of Skywalker*), and [Zahn's trilogy came](https://gizmodo.com/5-possible-storylines-for-the-next-star-wars-movie-5957047?ref=andrewliptak.com) [up plenty of times](https://gizmodo.com/which-star-wars-character-could-star-in-a-live-action-s-5964457?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a possible blueprint for what they could be. (However, word [broke pretty quickly](https://www.eonline.com/news/358685/star-wars-7-plot-will-be-an-original-story-says-lucasfilm-source?ref=andrewliptak.com) that whatever the films would be, they would be original stories.) Still, that didn't stop [fan castings of actors like Benedict Cumberbatch](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/benedict-cumberbatch-explains-why-he-wont-play-thrawn-in-the-mandalorian-4148457/?ref=andrewliptak.com) as Thrawn, or speculation that he'd be included in the films somehow. Even as the Expanded Universe was rendered non-canon, it became quickly apparent that Lucasfilm wasn't above reusing some of those ideas, and in 2016, the [company announced](https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/16/12205852/star-wars-rebels-trailer-grand-admiral-thrawn?ref=andrewliptak.com) at Star Wars Celebration that Thrawn would be returning to the fold by way of one of the animated shows, *Star Wars Rebels*, and that Timothy Zahn would return to write what [eventually became the origin story](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15225634/star-wars-timothy-zahn-thrawn-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the iconic character. The return to canon status was pretty seamless: fans by and large knew who Thrawn was, and the same qualities that Zahn imbued in him remained the same: he was a master tactician with a keen interest in the art of his enemies, and over the course of *Rebels*, we see him become a formidable foil to the crew of the *Ghost* in the early days of the rebellion. As I noted in my review of Zahn's novel *Thrawn, "*if you squint a little, this book could easily be a predecessor for both the new canon, as well as that of the expanded universe.*"* Indeed, that was the goal: Zahn told me in an interview that it wasn't hard to bring Thrawn back into the fold: "I’d never written Thrawn in this part of the *Star Wars* timeline, so it was simply a matter of bringing him into the Empire and chronicling his rise through the ranks," something that he'd teased out in the earlier books. "\[He's\] still the same character as in the 1990s books, just a decade or two younger and in a very different military and political environment ... It's like I never left. I’ve written about him so much over the years that he’s like an old friend who I understand completely." Zahn went on to continue the story of Thrawn: he followed up [*Thrawn*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781101967027?ref=andrewliptak.com)with [*Thrawn: Alliances*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525481287?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*Thrawn: Treason*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984820037?ref=andrewliptak.com) which chronicled his time as a young Imperial officer prior to Rebels, and then another, earlier trilogy that explored his earlier life in the Chiss Ascendency ([*Chaos Rising*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593157701?ref=andrewliptak.com), [*Greater Good*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593158319?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [*Lesser Evil*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593158340?ref=andrewliptak.com)), fleshing out the character a bit more. When *Rebels* came to an end in 2018, it left fans with a bit of a cliffhanger: Thrawn and Ezra Bridger were sucked out into another galaxy, leaving the rest of the rebellion to fight on without them. It led to plenty of speculation as to what had happened to the characters, and how they might return down the line. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/Thrawn-Ahsoka.jpg) Image: Disney The first hint of Thrawn's return to the post-*Return of the Jedi* franchise was a [bombshell at the end of *The Mandalorian*'s season 2 episode "The Jedi"](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-heir-to-the-empire-thrawn-trilogy/). The episode had already brought in another formerly-animated character, Ahsoka Tano, who name-dropped Thrawn after winner a dramatic lightsaber fight. When Lucasfilm announced that it was bringing Ahsoka back to headline her own series, it became readily apparent that the blue-skinned tactician would take on a prominent role in the franchise moving forward. The moment that many fans had been awaiting for decades [arrived halfway through the season](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRK0e00DjOg&ref=andrewliptak.com), when Ahsoka and her allies traverse the space between galaxies to find the place where Thrawn and Ezra had ended up. Thrawn makes a grand entrance past rows of battered stormtroopers. "What was first just a dream has become a frightening reality." It's a powerful scene, one that befits a character of Thrawn's stature, and it's a good reminder that the EU that he came from has some good material to mine for other parts of the new canon. Indeed, there have been hints that we could be seeing more from Zahn's *Heir to the Empire* in stories to come. The animated series *Bad Batch* brought the heroes to Mount Tantiss, a prominent location in Zahn's trilogy, Admiral Gilad Pellaeon popped up in *The Mandalorian*'s third season, and *Ahsoka* shows that Thrawn has some grand plans for the New Republic upon his return to his home galaxy. Dave Filoni, one of the architects of the Mando-verse and earlier animated shows, is set to [direct a new *Star Wars* film in the near future](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-celebration-mandalorian-storytelling-updates/), fueling some speculation that they're headed toward an actual adaptation of Zahn's novels, or at least incorporating some elements of them together. --- Now that Thrawn's made his improbable route from words on a page to live-action, it's worth sitting back and asking if that journey has been worth it. We've seen Thrawn in flesh and blood (played by Lars Mikkelsen), but the mere presence of him in the medium isn't an indication of quality, just of longevity, buoyed by a long-simmering appreciation from *Star Wars* fandom. I'll admit that I'm a little conflicted here. I enjoyed Zahn's novel *Thrawn* a great deal – it lined up nicely with the books that I fell in love with as a kid, and seeing the character step out from the shadows was a great moment. But it's not all great or noteworthy: I thought that Zahn's recent Thrawn novels were a bit ... lacking. Thrawn is a well-defined character: he's brilliant, understands how a culture's art provides clues to how they think and reason, and uses outthinks his opponents, time and time again. When Zahn returned to the character, he brought back a Thrawn that we knew – I never got the sense that we saw a character grow or change. If Thrawn challenged the original trilogy's heroes by forcing them to confront a threat that they hadn't faced before, he never really faced a challenge that he couldn't beat by being smart. This is the challenge that I see for the character moving forward: how do you utilize him in a way that advances the story in a meaningful way? Certainly, he's someone who can present a formidable challenge to the New Republic, and we're starting to see some clues about what the environment looks like through glimpses in shows like *The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett*, and *Ahsoka*. As a friend of mine noted, it's easy to fall back on the quirks that he's known for: he can look at a piece of art, and connect that to an enemy's tactics. It's a lot harder to show how Thrawn plans his strategy, builds coalitions of allies, and undermines an enemy's strengths. *Ahsoka* wasn't really the show to demonstrate all of that, and the entire Mandoverse tonally doesn't really feel suited for this either – it's a sub-franchise that has found its happy space being the space-western, science fantasy adventure show where we're bombing around the Outer Rim fighting the remnants of the Empire. Moff Gideon was great here: bombastic and a little over the top, and clearly out to carve out his own niche in the galaxy. Thrawn's really not that type of villain, and Zahn understood that early on when he wrote Heir to the Empire. The books are a bit of a slow burn that involves some space weirdness (there are clones, weird anti-Force lizards, etc.) but also quite a bit of politics and galactic positioning as the New Republic went about figuring out how to take over from the Empire. There are elements of that in *Ahsoka* (and a bit in *The Mandalorian* and *Book of Boba Fett*), but where Thrawn would best be suited would be a series along the lines of *Andor*, where the show's creators are given a lot of time to carefully lay out the story and world in a way that would really showcase Thrawn's strategic brilliance. I think that's sort of what's tripped me up a bit: by showcasing Thrawn as a leader who happens to have a Star Destroyer with a bunch of broken down troopers, some space witches, and a reputation, we're not really seeing his abilities demonstrated. We're just sort of told that he's a big threat, and have to go along with that. A show that's paced out a bit deliberately would go a long way there. And maybe we'll see more of that: I have to assume that a Season 2 is in order, and that Thrawn will play a bigger role whenever that ends up dropping. We'll have to see, and it might be a while. The next batch of shows will be *The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew* (another Mandoverse show), *Bad Batch* Season 3, and (hopefully) *Andor* Season 2\. --- ![May be an image of text that says 'THE REIGN OF MARVEL STUDIOS MCU JOANNA ROBINSON, ROBIN DAVE GONZALES, AND GAVIN EDWARDS'](https://scontent.fbtv1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/391587761_830984892361512_4897284540167216447_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=zygSCRZSXo0AX-f5sZz&_nc_oc=AQmNaZk9hDpIcPOccZzx8vjq_1UFM3878cMJ3Whd3j899keY-5IOwC40yceu5D5axrk&_nc_ht=scontent.fbtv1-1.fna&oh=00_AfBNwx5MHgIOflOTHHH1vUYSn0o4193rmvxPlvmeMwjtHg&oe=6537BFAE) Image: Andrew Liptak ### Currently reading Guh, what have I been reading? Not much: I've been in such a bad headspace lately that I've been content to just sit and scroll through videos or binge watch *The Big Bang Theory*. But I have been picking away at a handful of books, and I'm starting to carve out more time for them. Now that the museum in Montpelier is open, I'm commuting again, which means it's easier for me to throw on an audiobook. - [*MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781631497513?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards. I picked this up the other day, and it's one of the ones that I've been anticipating this year. It's a deep dive into the history of how the MCU came to be. There aren't a ton of surprises that I've gotten to yet (I'm up to the point where they're working on the first *Captain America* and *Thor* films, but it's a decent overview so far. - [*Eon*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765380494?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Greg Bear. I've been largely listening to the audiobook of this one, and the narrator isn't the greatest. But it's an interesting story. - [*Contact*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501197987?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Carl Sagan. Picking away at this one little by little. Also interesting. - [*A Wizard of Earthsea*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481465588?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Ursula K. Le Guin. I started this a while back, reading to my son before bed, but we fell out of that habit. This has been another audiobook listen, and I'm enjoying revisiting this world. - [*The Icarus Plot*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn. Audiobook listen, and man, the narrator isn't good. Otherwise, I'd be done with it – it's a fun story. --- ### Further reading It's been a while since I've done a roundup. Here's some of the recent posts that I've sent out to TO supporting subscribers: - [20 years a trooper](https://www.andrewliptak.com/501st-legion-star-wars-stormtrooper-cosplay-retrospective/). A look back at dressing up as a stormtrooper for two decades. - [The Folio Society is publishing *Dune Messiah*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/). Finally! I love my copy of *Dune* from them. - October books. Here's the [first list](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books/), and here's [the second](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-book-list-harrow-sanderson-mcu-kuang/). - [Fragility Reminders](https://www.andrewliptak.com/contact-carl-sagan-won-greg-bear/). A look at *Eon* and *Contact* and how they look at the Cold War. - [A new look for Iain M. Banks](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/). Orbit is giving Banks' books new covers, and I mused a bit on minimalist design. - [Fractures along orbital fault lines](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-geopolitics-conflict/). With the sudden outbreak of hostilities in Israel / Gaza, I was reminded of *The Expanse*. - [Spacerush](https://www.andrewliptak.com/for-all-mankind-season-4-trailer/). Apple's For All Mankind returns in November, and I'm very, very excited for it. - [How to write a novel with James S.A. Corey](https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-writing-patreon/). Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck have launched a Patreon where you can follow as they write their next project. - [Orbital editions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/). Orbit is releasing new editions of *Ancillary Justice, Caliban's War*, and *Abbadon's Gate* this fall. --- ### Orbital editions URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ancillary-justice-expanse-leckie-corey-special-editions/ Last updated: 2023-10-19T14:44:02.000Z Last week, [I noted that Orbit will be re-releasing](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/) all of Iain M. Banks' novels with a unified, minimalist series of covers, and mused a bit on the nature of this trend in cover design. As it turns out, Orbit wasn't done: it [announced](https://twitter.com/orbitbooks/status/1714680242894455210/photo/1?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it'll be releasing a special edition of Ann Leckie's [*Ancillary Justice*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316574266?ref=andrewliptak.com), which turns 10 years old this month. Also in the pipeline? A special edition of [*Caliban's War*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573337?ref=andrewliptak.com) *and [Abaddon's Gate](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316573528?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by James S.A. Corey, the second and third installments of *The Expanse* series. I'll have a bit more to say about that milestone for *Ancillary Justice* (and Leckie's latest novel, [*Translation State*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=andrewliptak.com)), but it's cool to see Orbit honoring the book with a nice edition for the occasion, and it should make for a good opportunity to pick up the book if you haven't yet. ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. According to Orbit, the book will feature a new cover (from the excellent John Harris), illustrated end-papers, a foil-stamped case, and a new introduction from Leckie. The edition will be released on November 28th, just in time for the holiday shopping season. It'll retail for $40\. The [product page](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ann-leckie/ancillary-justice-10th-anniversary-edition/9780316574266/?ref=andrewliptak.com) has some additional images as well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/Copy-of-Winter-Speaker-Series-Thumbnail--4-.png) Image: Orbit Books Orbit did something similar a couple of years ago with James S.A. Corey's [*Leviathan Wakes*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316333429?ref=andrewliptak.com): a new edition with an updated cover, introduction and endpapers. I'd been wondering if they'd continue with additional editions of the series, given that *Caliban's War* came out in 2012 and *Abbadon's Gate* arrived in 2013\. Come December, it looks like we'll be getting new editions of each: Orbit is giving them special collector's edition treatment, both of which will hit stores on December 12th. Like *Leviathan Wakes*, they'll get new covers, introductions, endpapers and stained edges. Both will also retail for $40\. You can see some additional images for [](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/abaddons-gate/9780316573528/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[both](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/calibans-war/9780316573337/?ref=andrewliptak.com) [books](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/abaddons-gate/9780316573528/?ref=andrewliptak.com) over on Orbit's website. I really dug the look for *Leviathan Wakes* and for *Ancillary Justice*: while I'm partial to the original covers by Daniel Dociu and John Harris – they played no small part in my picking up the book in the first place – I think this is a good look for the *Expanse* series, and this new edition of *Ancillary Justice* retains that evocative look and feel that the original had. I'll have to make room on my bookshelf for all of them. ### How to write a novel with James S.A. Corey URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/james-sa-corey-writing-patreon/ Last updated: 2023-10-18T12:30:27.000Z I've made no secret that I've really enjoyed James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* series. It's a good adventure with a well-realized world, but it's also a project that I feel that I've [gotten to understand well](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/), and one where I've understood how the process of writing it worked. The two parts of James S.A. Corey are Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck: they let me know (and did an [AMA on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/16htpbi/i%5Fam%5Fjames%5Fsa%5Fcorey%5Fauthor%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fexpanse%5Fand%5Fpen/?ref=andrewliptak.com)) of a new project that they're working on: [James SA Corey Writes a Novel](https://www.patreon.com/JamesSACoreyWritesaNovel?ref=andrewliptak.com). It's a look into their collaborative process as they go about working on a new book: backers will get access to their recordings documents, Q&A sessions and watch the entire process unfold. This is a different project from [their next announced trilogy](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/16962264/the-expanse-author-james-sa-corey-science-fiction-space-opera-book-series?ref=andrewliptak.com) (which will be called *The Captives War*, something loosely inspired by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin): "this project is the two of us writing something else," they write. *"If you have ever wondered what it was like to write a novel, what the nitty-gritty steps looked like, whether your frustrations and confusions were peculiar to you – or if you just wondered what the two of us are like when we’re doing this stuff – this project is your window in.* *We’re going to share our work sessions on a new novel from the brainstorming and kicking around new ideas through outlining and drafting to getting feedback from readers and editors. And along with that, all the written materials – outlines, drafts, revisions, notes on the back of napkins, all the way to the final manuscript."* Since they launched the project back in September, they've been steadily posting updates: most behind the paywall, but here's one glimpse of what they've generated: [Dramatis Personae (in progress) - 003 | James SA Corey Writes a NovelGet more from James SA Corey Writes a Novel on Patreon![](https://c5.patreon.com/external/favicon/rebrand/pwa-192.png?v=af5597c2ef)Patreon![](https://c7.patreon.com/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.patreon.com%2F%2Fpost-teaser-image%2F89832927/selector/%23post-teaser)](https://www.patreon.com/posts/dramatis-in-003-89832927?ref=andrewliptak.com) They've only got one backing tier: $5/month. They've already gotten a decent amount of interest, with nearly 340 backers following along. This seems like it has the potential to be a really cool experiment. In the decade or so that I've been writing, there are certainly no shortage of options out there for those aspiring to write a story; workshops, writer's groups, online forums, how-to books, but I don't know that I've ever seen a window into the writing process quite like this. It seems like it might be a useful, warts-and-all look at what goes into writing a book, and hopefully, it'll be a useful exercise for all involved. ### Even more SF/F books to check out this October URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-book-list-harrow-sanderson-mcu-kuang/ Last updated: 2023-10-16T16:00:29.000Z Before we get started, I wanted to share word of a pair of events for *Cosplay: A History* that I've got coming up that you might be interested in attending: that are coming up: **Tuesday, October 24th, 7:00PM, St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, VT** This'll be an in-person event at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I'll be talking about the history of cosplay and costuming, and I'll be bringing along some costumes and props for folks to check out alongside the presentation. RSVP [here](https://www.facebook.com/events/5302578036533350). **Wednesday, December 6th, 12:00PM, Vermont Historical Society, Virtual** This event will be a virtual one: it's part of the Vermont Historical Society's Virtual Speaker Series, and I'll be talking about the history of cosplay and costuming in Vermont. (It loosely ties in with our exhibit "A Stitch in Time" and "Fancy Goods"). It's free, but registration is required. You can register to attend [here](https://form.jotform.com/232703843826156?ref=andrewliptak.com), and you can RSVP on Facebook [here](https://www.facebook.com/events/626321449666817). --- With that out of the way: we're halfway through October. This month has been absolutely packed with new genre books, enough to warrant a couple of lists. Here's the roundup for the first half of the month: [23 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out October 2023More for your TBR pile!![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/IMG_3947.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books/) If you're new to Transfer Orbit, this is a regular feature that I put out: it's a roundup of the books that catch my eye that are coming out. Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and if you make a purchase through them, this newsletter might get a small commission. That's one way to help support Transfer Orbit: it helps pay the bills to host it on Ghost, and for some of the tools that I use, like Otter.ai for interview transcriptions. You can also support the site by signing up as a paid subscriber. You'll get some additional posts and missives as I put them together, such as [a look at *The Expanse* in light of the recent attacks in Israel](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-geopolitics-conflict/), [some thoughts on minimalist book covers](https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/), and [a look at two books from 1985 and how they portrayed the Cold War](https://www.andrewliptak.com/contact-carl-sagan-won-greg-bear/). You also get access to a Slack channel where we're constantly chatting about books, movies, recent events, and quite a bit more. (If you're an existing subscriber and don't have access, lemme know, I'm happy to get you set up.) [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Alrighty: here are 16 new SF/F books hitting stores over the rest of October that you should check out: ### [*The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063315747?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by John Joseph Adams and R. F. Kuang (October 17th) We're approaching the season of the year where we're starting to see roundups of the best science fiction and fantasy of the past year hitting stores. One of the annual anthologies that always hits the spot is John Joseph Adams' Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series. Each year, Adams brings in a co-editor to help, and this year's guest editor is R.F. Kuang. The table of contents includes a bunch of stories from authors that I've really enjoyed, including Nathan Ballingrud, Isabel Cañas, Theodora Goss, Alix E. Harrow, S. L. Huang, Stephen Graham Jones, Samantha Mills, Malka Older, Sofia Samatar, and more. ### [*Under the Smokestrewn Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250848475?ref=andrewliptak.com) by A. Deborah Baker (October 17th) Seanan McGuire, under the pen name A. Deborah Baker brings her The Up-and-Under series to a close with *Under the Smokestrewn Sky* (it was preceded by [*Over the Woodward Wall*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765399274/overthewoodwardwall?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, [Along the Saltwise Sea](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250768285?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and [*Into the Windwracked Wilds*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250848444?ref=andrewliptak.com)). It picks up the story of Avery and Zib as they journey towards the Impossible City as they look for their way home. It's a dangerous journey and they might not make out alive. ### [*Spielberg: The First Ten Years*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647225179?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Laurent Bouzereau (October 24th) There are few directors as influential and as well known as Steven Spielberg: this new book from Laurent Bouzereau explores the first decade of his career and the film that defined it: *Jaws*, *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, *E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial*, and others. The book provides some new perspectives on Spielberg's work and influence in the film industry. ### [*A Stranger in the Citadel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963989?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tobias Buckell (October 17th) Lilith is the youngest royal of Ninetha and her life has been defined by training for her family's duties protecting the Cornucopia, a magical source that provides unlimited bounty. It's also a place where books are forbidden, so when an outcast librarian named Ishmael arrives, he's immediately sentenced to death. Lilith is curious about the stranger, and is able to stay his execution, and as she grows closer to him, accidentally reveals her family's closely guarded secret, leading to a violent revolution. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61696-398-9?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The message about the importance of literacy could not be more timely, and Buckell’s sure-handed plotting keep the pages flying." ### [*The Reformatory*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982188344?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tananarive Due (October 31st) Set in Florida in the summer of 1950, Tananarive Due follows a 12 year old boy named Robert Stephens Jr. after he's sent to a reformatory school. It's punishment for getting into a fight to protect his sister Gloria, and it's only the start of his troubles. Robbie has the ability to see ghosts, and when he arrives at the Gracetown School for Boys, he begins to see that the place harbors some darker secrets – ghosts of children who've gone missing, and other horrors that lurk on the grounds. Meanwhile, Gloria is working with the local chapter of the NAACP to do everything she can to get her brother freed from his prison. *Kirkus Reviews* [gave the book a starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tananarive-due/the-reformatory/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Due brings her own gifts in the supernatural-fantasy genre as well as elements of her own family history to this vividly realized page-turner, which is at once an ingenious ghost story, a white-knuckle adventure, and an illuminating if infuriating look back at a shameful period in American jurisprudence that, somehow, doesn’t seem so far away." ### [*Starling House*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250799050?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alix E. Harrow (October 3rd) Any time Alix E. Harrow comes out with a new book, it shoots to the top of my to-read list. Her novel [*The Ten Thousand Doors of January*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421973?ref=andrewliptak.com) remains one of my absolute favorite novels, and I really enjoyed her Sleeping Beauty multiverse story [*A Spindle Splintered*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765352?ref=andrewliptak.com)and [*The Once and Future Witches*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316422048?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* This new tale looks to be just as intriguing: an orphan named Opal is making her way through a rough life, and is trying to build a better one for her younger brother Jasper. They're stuck in a dismal town in Kentucky called Eden, known for a reclusive author named E. Starling, who vanished a century ago. She left behind a mansion, and when Opal – obsessed with Starling's book *The Underland* – gets a chance to visit the place, she can't resist a visit. Once she arrives however, there are some secret and dark forces that make themselves known, and she'll find something worth fighting for in her life. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250799050?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Harrow’s prose cuts straight to the heart as she melds a story of family legacy and historical oppression with a stirring call to speak the truth." Listen to an interview with Harrow from NPR [here](https://www.npr.org/2023/10/04/1203421254/book-review-alix-e-harrow-starling-house-gothic-fantasy-novel?ref=andrewliptak.com). ## Sign up for Transfer Orbit A newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### [*An Inheritance of Magic*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593549841?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Benedict Jacka (October 10th) Magic exists in the modern world, and a man named Stephen Oakwood exists right on the edge between the line that divides the two. He's has skills and talent, but not the money that he needs to take advantage of them. When he meets a member of a wealthy house, he's noticed by some bad people, he begins to see the power structures that make up the magical world. Major houses and corporations have used magic to increase their own power and wealth, and they're not willing to share. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593549841?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Jacka provides immense detail about the ins and outs of drucraft, which will please fans of hard magic systems." ### [*The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small, Medium, and Large* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618732118?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618732118?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Kij Johnson (October 24th) One of the fantasy novellas that I've been meaning to read for *ages* has been Kij Johnson's *The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,* which came out from Tordotcom back in 2016\. I've never quite managed to get to it, but I have a new chance now: it's one of 14 stories in her new collection, *The Privilege of the Happy Ending.* *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kij-johnson/the-privilege-of-the-happy-ending/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Johnson plays expansively with form, style, and subject matter," and "throughout, she addresses the reader directly about perception, mortality, and storytelling." ### [*A Handheld History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780008598174?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lost in Cult (October 17th) The first video game console I owned was a Nintendo Gameboy that I got in the mid-1990s. I can't imagine how many hours I've spent playing on that device and the games it came with. A new book from Lost in Cult takes a look at the role that handheld devices like the Gameboy and its counterparts played in the history of gaming. I've been flipping through this book, and it's proving to be a fascinating read. ### [*Generation Ship*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063252981?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Michael Mammay (October 17th) [Generation Ships](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/generation%5Fstarships?ref=andrewliptak.com) are a long-used SF trope, and for good reason: they're the perfect setting for thought experiments about society and technology, and I'm always intrigued when a new one comes out in stores. Michael Mammay's latest is set in 2108 when the colonial ship Voyager is sent to a distant planet called Promissa. 250 years later and it's reaching its destination, but it and its 18,000 passengers face some significant problems. Those passengers are growing restless with the stringent rules that had been put in place by the mission's original planners, and various factions aboard the ship have their own issues. Meanwhile, the ship's advance probes have gone silent, and what little information they have received raises more questions than answers. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063252981?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Equally entertaining and intelligent, this nuanced tale is sure to please sci-fi fans." ### [*All Souls Lost*](https://dmoren.com/all-souls-lost/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dan Moren (October 17th) I enjoyed Dan Moren's novel [*The Bayern Agenda*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780857668196?ref=andrewliptak.com) [when I read it a couple of years ago](https://www.andrewliptak.com/books-with-character-veronica-mars-djinns-and-space-spies/), and I've been meaning to read some of the followups: I love a good space opera geopolitical drama. His latest is something a little different, however: an urban fantasy following a Spiritual Consultant named Mike Lucifer, who's been trying to escape from his past for the last couple of years. When a woman comes to his door asking for help with her boyfriend (who's been possessed by a demon), he takes on the case, if anything, for the paycheck. As soon as he does, the case grows complicated: the boyfriend is actually dead, and the tech company that employed him is looking more and more suspect. As he digs into the details, he starts to realize that there's something operating behind the scenes that's trying to get to him. ### [*Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: A Cosmere Novel*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899699?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Brandon Sanderson (October 3rd) The latest novel in Brandon Sanderson's "Year of Sanderson" project is now out in a trade edition (he'd turned to Kickstarter to fund a massive project that saw a whole bunch of new books from him in special editions), and it's a new installment from his Cosmere universe. [It takes a villageThe wild success of Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter holds lessons for building a resilient fan community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-01-at-5.05.29-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/) In this story, two very different people come together. One is Yumi, who's endured a life of strict obedience, through which she's able to summon spirits to help society out. She's tired of that life, and just wants to exist for even a single day as a normal person. Meanwhile, Painter is a vigilante who dreams of being a hero, stalking the streets at night, but which has left him with nothing but heartbreak and isolation. When the two come together, they both have the change to correct the problems in their lives – and maybe right some of the wrongs in their respective worlds. ### [*Kakistocracy*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647100827?ref=andrewliptak.com)by Alex Shvartsman (October 17th) Alex Shvartsman returns to his Conradverse Chronicles (following *The Middling Affliction*) with a new adventure for Conrad Brent. Brent is a Middling magician operating in Brooklyn with an enforcement group called The Watch, but who doesn't have the skills of a full magician. In his last adventure, he and his allies thwarted a plot by a company looking to create a magical chemical weapon that could upend the magical world. He's regained his position in The Watch, and he's looking to avoid taking any undue risks when his boss goes missing, and a new administration in City Hall that's looking to stamp out all magical users in New York City. To help save the city, Conrad has to mediate a conflict between a pair of ancient enemy factions, solve a mystery of a warded house, and deal with some interdimensional fae assassins. ### [*Communications Breakdown: SF Stories about the Future of Connection*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262546461?ref=andrewliptak.com) edited by Jonathan Strahan (October 31st) I've long been a fan of MIT Press's Twelve Tomorrows series: the stories in these anthologies have often been excellent, thought-provoking windows into the near future. This year's theme is all about how we communicate with one another, and features stories by Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Cory Doctorow, Chris Gilliard, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Ken Macleod, Tim Maughan, Ian McDonald, Anil Menon, Premee Mohamed, and Shiv Ramdas. ### [*The Wolfe at the Door*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250846204?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Gene Wolfe (October 31st) Gene Wolfe is regarded as one of the masters of the genre, and when he died in 2019, he left behind a rich literary legacy. A new collection looks to honor that legacy with some new short stories, poems, and essays that blends genre and form together. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fthe-wolfe-at-the-door-1801079%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DWhile%2520a%2520smattering%2520of%2520the%2C%252C%2520science%2520fiction%252C%2520and%2520horror.&ref=andrewliptak.com) "This collection picks up where 2009’s [*The Best of Gene Wolfe*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250618580?ref=andrewliptak.com) left off and will be appreciated most by readers and scholars of the author’s work." ### [*Jewel Box: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660484?ref=andrewliptak.com) by E. Lily Yu (October 24th) E. Lily Yu brings together a new collection of her short fiction. These 22 stories cover everything from far-flung futures to retold fairy tales – stories about a wasp's nest that turns out to be a map, birdwatchers in Louisiana, a judge confronting a god, and more. *Kirkus Reviews* raved about the book in its [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/e-lily-yu/jewel-box/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Best of all, her sentences shine with unexpected images and turns of phrase ... While a title like “Jewel Box,” especially without a titular story attached, could seem aspirational, Yu’s book lives up to it: Each story here is a gem." --- ### Spacerush URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/for-all-mankind-season-4-trailer/ Last updated: 2023-10-14T12:00:57.000Z I'm woefully behind on TV. I've got shows like *Silo* and *Foundation* season 2 that have been lingering on my list for a while now, but one that I'm not planning on letting slide by is the upcoming fourth season of Apple's *For All Mankind*. The streaming service released the trailer at this year's New York Comic Con, and I'm ready to get sucked right back into the show. If you haven't seen it, it's an alternate history series from Ron D. Moore (who created the fantastic *Battlestar Galactica* reboot 20 years ago) that begins in 1969 when the Russians land on the Moon, beating the United States. That kicks off a new series of events and renewed race for control of the heavens. The first two seasons are concerned with reaching and living on the Moon ([the first season](https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/1/20941718/for-all-mankind-review-apple-tv-plus-ronald-moore?ref=andrewliptak.com) deals with the US gearing up for a more intense space race, and then reaching the Moon's South Pole, while the second is an intense Cold War fight set in the 1980s), while the third season is all about the race to reach Mars as the US, Soviet Union, and a private space company all work to reach the Red Planet first in the early 1990s. This new season jumps forward another decade to 2003\. We've reached Mars and the goal is now to set up a permanent settlement when we get a bit of a wrinkle: scientists discover an asteroid containing an incredible amount of iridium. From the looks of things, we're in for a season where we'll be dealing with how far folks will go in the pursuit of wealth. I'll be interested in seeing how this season turns out. One of my favorite books from a couple of years ago was Daniel Suarez's *Delta-V*, about a team of miners who are hired by a secretive company to mine an asteroid, and all the complications that come with it. [Daniel Suarez’s Delta-VTake every bit of news and every promise that you’ve heard from the likes of SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos (and their fanboys), compile that into a novel, and you get Daniel Suarez’s novel Delta-V. A billionaire named Nathan Joyce recruits daredevil cave![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/12/741c5748-5961-4ed5-b08c-7dab177a3c7e_2048x1536.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-suarez-delta-v-book-review/) We'll find out on November 10th when the series returns. ### Fractures along orbital fault lines URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-geopolitics-conflict/ Last updated: 2023-10-14T16:03:31.000Z I've spent a good chunk of time this week watching the horrifying events in Israel unfold. War is always a terrible thing, and this particular assault feels noteworthy for the brutality and indiscriminate violence that's taken place there. I'm not an expert on the region, so I'm not going to attempt to untangle the long, troubled history between Israel and Palestine. But I do have a background in military history, and I've been thinking and reading on some of the deeper history of the types of friction points that often leads to violence. Rebellions and uprisings are never spontaneous, even if a riot, battle, or attack seems like it. They're often preceded by a build up of tension, much like an earthquake occurs when too much pressure builds up along a fault line. That seems to be the case here: the history between Israel and Palestine is rife with violence and oppression, and it's a relationship that has long felt like the pressure has slowly ratcheted up until one side feels that they have nothing left to lose. That's not a justification for the violence that we've seen – there's no excusing the targeting of civilians – but it might provide a bit of context for why this has happened. I'm horrified to imagine what the next days and weeks of the conflict will bring. While watching, I've been thinking about how we turn to literature and art to try and understand and interpret the world around us, and I keep coming back to one particular story: James S.A. Corey's *The Expanse* series. If you haven't read the books or watched the TV adaptation, it's a nine-book series set a couple of centuries in the future where we've colonized our solar system. There's three main factions: Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance (a coalition of inhabitants of the asteroid belt and moons of the larger gas giants.) The first installment of the series, *Leviathan Wakes*, introduces us to a solar system that's brimming with tension. Earth and Mars are at cold odds with one another. Earth has advantages in numbers and firepower, while Mars is a technological powerhouse with an advanced fleet. The OPA is at odds with Mars, which has been stripping the Belt of its resources, leaving the miners and inhabitants in a somewhat powerless and precarious place. [Waking the LeviathanThe story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to book series to blockbuster TV show![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-5.51.40-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-expanse-origins-waking-the-leviathan/) The OPA harbors a considerable amount of resentment and anger toward their planetary counterparts, and Corey features the organization as a government with some extremist tendencies, one that's struggling to ensure that the Belters aren't completely taken advantage of by those larger geopolitical powers in the solar system, even if they don't have the ability to completely stand up to them. *(Some spoilers ahead if you haven't read or watched the series)* As the series progresses, the solar system slowly descends into war: the discovery of a deadly alien biological substance called the protomolecule kicks off a conflict between the various factions, and as this conflict brews, several radical elements of the OPA plan a major strike against Earth. That comes to a head midway through the series in the fifth book, *Nemesis Games*. The OPA bombards Earth with some stealth-equipped asteroids, devastating the surface. ([In my review of the book way back in 2015](https://gizmodo.com/nemesis-games-is-james-s-a-corey-s-empire-strikes-back-1708475337?ref=andrewliptak.com), I noted that it reminded me a bit like the ending of *The Empire Strikes Back* – a bleak moment in the story for the heroes.) Years ago, someone pointed out that the geopolitical world that Corey assembled for the series has some parallels to the tensions between Israel and Palestine and that of Earth, Mars and the OPA. There's a powerful, technologically-advanced nation alongside a marginalized one that's been engaged in a high-stakes, low-level conflict. The Martian military spent decades hunting down OPA privateers, sometimes abusing their power to harass and oppress those not engaged in hostilities. It's easy to rationalize the boarding of a ship or the occasional firefight as law enforcement or anti-piracy operations, but if there's anything that the history of counterinsurgency tells us, it's that these smaller events are critical to radicalizing fighters in a movement. State-directed violence and economic grievances can turn a bystander into someone willing to take up arms against the system that's wronged them. In the *Expanse* TV series, OPA Free Navy leader Marco Inaros [outlined his rationale for his attack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr7DB4UK0k0&ref=andrewliptak.com) in a speech after the bombardment: "this attack was retribution for generations of atrocities committed by the inners against innocent Belters." I remember asking both parts of James S.A. Corey (authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) about the comparison between Israel/Palestine and Inners/Belters, and they were non-committal (I can't seem to track down an interview with them with that particular question – it might not have been part of a formal interview, but a side conversation), noting that as authors, they're rarely drawing on or copying direct situations and transposing them into their fictional universe. But authors often do draw from the real world for varying levels of inspiration, and while they might not have had the Middle East directly in mind as they designed *The Expanse*, I don't think I can entirely discount the parallels that we can see in the situations. It's a story of how imbalances in power can lead to oppression, and in this particular case, we see throughout the series various examples of how the citizens of the Belt are subjected to immense pressures, and how that drives some of them to engage in terrorism and open warfare. This is a story that we've seen in plenty of other fictional universes over the years. *Andor* was a particularly good story that highlighted why the Empire's oppression and violence against its citizens helped lead to the formation of the Rebel Alliance, while Frank Herbert's *Dune* is an outstanding narrative that includes some relevant points about colonialism, oppression, and counterinsurgency when it comes to the relationship between the Fremen and House Harkonnen. A nother book that comes to mind is C.L. Clarke's 2021 novel *The Unbroken,* deals with a number of similar topics in a fantasy setting. [The frontier of the rebellion is everywhereAn excellent video to be inspired by![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/12/0C8A4261-792F-4E8C-A8B2-B4190EECED49.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-manifesto-video-watch/) It's worth noting in this particular instance that these aren't one-to-one comparisons, and you can't simply substitute the situations in these stories for the events that we're seeing across the world. This conflict is incredibly complex, with a long history of violence, while stories – even complicated stories – are simulacra of a world that can't really capture the full picture. But stories as narrative tools do help us understand elements of these stories: authors and creators can examine the motivations of peoples on both sides of a conflict, the decisions they make, and the actions they carry out. I've long enjoyed *The Expanse* for that reason: it's a series that really works to understand the tribalism that we see throughout human history, how it can prove to be a destructive force, and what steps we need to defuse it to work together for a better future. Hopefully, this ongoing conflict in Israel will come to some sort of resolution before too many more civilians and bystanders are killed. ### A new look for Iain M. Banks URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks-culture-series-new-cover-art-minimalism/ Last updated: 2023-10-09T12:00:23.000Z We here at *Transfer Orbit* love a good book cover, and some recent news from Orbit caught our eye. The publisher is [reissuing](https://www.orbit-books.co.uk/orbit-books-news/2023/10/03/iain-m-banks-reissues/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Iain M. Banks' entire catalog with a series of new covers. The new covers will include his entire *Culture* series and his standalone books. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/IMG_3970.jpeg) There's been a trend in recent years towards a sort of minimalism in book covers, brought on by the tiny thumbnails that you see on online shopping platforms, rather than the physical bookstore shelves that you used to find books on. Orbit [recently did this with Ann Leckie's back catalog](https://www.orbitbooks.net/2023/01/27/cover-launch-translation-state-by-ann-leckie-plus-new-editions-of-the-imperial-radch-trilogy-and-provenance/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Tor [did the same](https://www.instagram.com/p/CpffFlcjyV%5F/?ref=andrewliptak.com) with V.E. Schwab's *Threads of Power* series with the release of her latest book, *The Fragile Threads of Power*, Penguin Random House changed up the art for Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy a couple of years ago, and Ace re-released the first three *Dune* novels as [special editions with new, minimalist covers](https://gizmodo.com/new-dune-book-covers-frank-herbert-artist-matt-griffin-1849120956?ref=andrewliptak.com) (in addition to the entire mass market paperback lineup a couple years ago.) Recently, I spoke with a friend who has an upcoming book, and they showed me a series of cover concepts that they and their publisher were considering: a mix of overly minimalist and richer ideas. I also was part of the design process for the Vermont Historical Society's cover for [our latest book](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-eugenics-book/) about eugenics, and in both cases, the covers have turned out to be a little more minimal and stark, simply to convey something about the book to shoppers who'll be primarily buying the book online. My own cover for *Cosplay: A History* underwent some considerable changes: my heart sank when I saw the first, super-minimal design that the marketing folks proposed, and we had to push back hard to get the current cover. I'm happy we did. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/10/IMG_3983.jpeg) These are sometimes hit or miss: I absolutely love the [fantastic John Harris art](https://www.alisoneldred.com/john-harris/fine-art-prints-1/science-fiction-4/2061-ancillary-justice-painting/?ref=andrewliptak.com) for Ann Leckie's series and think that it's a downgrade, and the same for Schwab's [old covers for her trilogy](https://www.tor.com/2014/05/16/cover-reveal-ve-schwab-a-darker-shade-of-magic/?ref=andrewliptak.com). That said, I do like the new covers for *Dune*, and I have to say, these covers for Banks' novels are really slick: they walk the line between being just lines and having some depth to them, and feel really retro and cosmic. I also wasn't particularly taken with the recent slate of covers that existed for the series, so that probably factors into my acceptance somewhere there. Minimalism isn't a bad thing: there are certainly no shortage of that style of cover going back through science fiction history, and I don't think that we're headed for a future where all covers are going to be just white lines on a colored surface. But I do hope that we'll see more vibrant artwork over *design*: I've always felt that a cover helps set the tone, and I love a good, well-illustrated scene. I definitely won't part with my copy of *Consider Phlebas* from The Folio Society – that's a beautiful edition right there, but I might end up snagging one or two of these when they come out. According to Orbit, they'll be released in the UK on November 30th, and sometime later in the US. It's also not the only thing that we'll see from Iain M. Banks this year: [Orbit will be releasing an art book](https://www.andrewliptak.com/orbit-will-publish-two-volume-companion-to-iain-m-banks-culture-series/), *[The Culture: The Drawings](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316572873?ref=andrewliptak.com)* on November 7th. ### Fragility Reminders URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/contact-carl-sagan-won-greg-bear/ Last updated: 2023-10-05T16:27:54.000Z I've been reading two books from roughly the same era over the last couple of weeks: Greg Bear's *[Eon](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765380494?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and Carl Sagan's *[Contact](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781501197987?ref=andrewliptak.com).* (Now that I've flipped them open to check the dates, they're both from the same year: 1985, making them as old as I am). They're both wonderful stories so far and they have some interesting overlaps. *Contact* is Sagan's only novel, about humanity after radio astronomers intercept a signal from deep space, our first indication that there's life elsewhere in the universe, and their efforts to engage in contact. *Eon* is also something of a first contact novel: a hollowed-out asteroid appears over Earth with vast cities and libraries – and a concerning message about a catastrophic future for the planet. I haven't finished either novel yet, but there's something that's struck me about both. In 1985, the US and USSR were still heavily engaged in the Cold War, and both novels really reflect that geopolitical environment. Sagan's *Contact* has quite a bit of discussion from the US perspective about how they really need to bring Soviet scientists into the conversation, given that there's a) no way to keep them from getting the message, and 2), what they've encountered is something that really concerns all of humanity. Given that we're talking about a story from the same person who coined the phrase "[pale blue dot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale%5FBlue%5FDot?ref=andrewliptak.com)" as a shorthand for how we're just tiny specks of dust in the larger universe, it's not surprising to hear the message that even something as consuming as the Cold War is insignificant in the greater scheme of things. Flipping over to *Eon*, there's a lot of congruity here. Bear's novel features the arrival of this giant asteroid, and as the scientific community engages in its work figuring out where it came from (spoilers: an alternate universe), they're also trying to figure out how to bring the Soviets in as partners. It feels like there's more geopolitical nuance here: maybe Bear was more of a realist for how human actors would operate, but (spoilers), it doesn't entirely go well for the teams on the asteroid: just as they're learning that there was a devastating war between the US / USSR in this alternate world, they're helpless to stop a similar event from boiling over in their own. The Soviet Union sends a strike force into the Stone and down below, a thermonuclear war erupts. Ultimately, both books are talking about the same thing: the overwhelming threat of war because of long-simmering tensions between global powers shows just how fragile our existence on the planet is. It's not a comforting thought. [Mushroom Clouds on the Future HorizonScience fiction was born in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_30decfbc-ca0e-46ac-b83e-4c320e2565a6_956x577.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mushroom-clouds-on-the-future-horizon-science-fiction-was-born-in-the-fires-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/) It's been interesting to read these two books 38 years after they were published and in the midst of a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine (and its proxies). Many of those same lessons that Sagan and Bear were highlighting back nearly four decades ago are still pressing in 2023: tribalism and nationalism are toxic to our long-term survival as a civilization (if not species), and if we don't navigate these paths carefully, all we'll inherit is a pile of smoking, radioactive rubble. ### Here's the October SF/F book list! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/october-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books/ Last updated: 2023-10-04T00:55:47.000Z September is finally behind us: good riddance to it. It's been an incredibly awful and stressful summer, and the month very nearly did me in. But things are looking up as we head into fall, especially with this next batch of books that are hitting bookstore shelves in the coming weeks. I'm hoping to get back into the swing of reading again, and fortunately, I've got plenty of things to choose from. October has a TON of books: this first list is a little longer than usual as it is, and there are even more coming later this month in the second list. As usual, here are some housekeeping notes: - Books with a Bookshop.org link are affiliates, and any purchases you make will lead to a small commission for this newsletter. - If you find a book that you like, or simply enjoy these lists, please consider supporting *Transfer Orbit* with a paid subscription. They're still marked down to 50% (I'm likely going to bump the price back up starting soon – it's a good time to resubscribe if your subscription lapsed), and your support helps keep the newsletter hosted on Ghost. You can find details about signing up [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/): [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-wendig-scalzi-okorafor/#/portal/signup) - If subscribing isn't in the cards now, please consider sharing this list with your followers on Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, or your social network of choice, or by telling a friend about it. And with that, here are 23 (!) new books that you should check out in the first half of October: ### *[The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250827517?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Samit Basu (October 3rd) In this far-future tale, Shantiport was once a vibrant city that was the gateway to untold wonders deep in space. It's fallen into decay under its current rulers, the Tiger Clan. One of the city's residents is Lina, the daughter of a missing smuggler, has gained a reputation for taking on spying and retrieval jobs around the place, while her brother, a monkey bot, wants nothing more than to leave everything behind to explore the galaxy. When she takes on a job from a tech billionaire to retrieve a priceless artifact with the power to shape reality, it sets into motion forces that have persisted in the city and puts the siblings in the middle of a long-simmering plot. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250827517?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Basu’s sharp social commentary and sense of pageantry enhance this wild romp." ### *[Long Past Dues](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593440438?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by James J. Butcher (October 10th) In this new installment of James J. Butcher's Unorthodox series (preceded by *[Dead Man's Hand](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593440414?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby is now an Auditor in the Department of Unorthodox Affairs, a magical law enforcement outfit in Boston. It's not nearly as glamorous as he'd hoped it would be; sorting out paperwork and mundane problems that have cropped up in the city. That changes when he takes on another case intended for another colleague about a strange ritual that resembles a case that his partner, Leslie Mayflower, tackled two decades ago. Grimsby pulls Mayflower back into the field to investigate, coming across werewolves, artifacts, and a mysterious city under Boston to crack the case. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593440438?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the message that determination trumps ability will please fantasy readers who love to cheer for the little guy. Butcher proves that this series has legs." ### [*The Art of Destiny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593237663?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wesley Chu (October 10th) Wesley Chu brings out a sequel to *[The Art of Prophesy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593237632?ref=andrewliptak.com)* with the aptly-titled *The Art of Destiny*. In that first installment, a prophecy says that a chosen one will someday defeat the Eternal Khan, an immortal god-king that has ruled for centuries. The child at the center of the prophecy is Wen Jian, who was raised and trained to fulfill his destiny. That prophesy didn't turn out as expected: the Khan was already dead, and Wen's mentor, sets out to find out why. Once a chosen hero, Jian is now just a regular guy trying to figure out his place in the world. He encounters a grandmaster named Taishi, who teaches him about her family's war art, aided by a group of her former colleagues to try and get him into shape. Along the way, there's Qisami, an assassin tasked with guarding a noblewoman from her enemies. When she goes undercover, she finds something that's eluded her for years: a new family, friends, and a purpose in life. There's also Sali, who thought she had a purpose in seeking out the next Khan, only to be exiled with her clan. As she and her compatriots look for a new place to call home, she ends up where she never expected to be: a leader and revolutionary. ### *[](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803365770?ref=andrewliptak.com)[B](https://titanbooks.com/71577-bloom/?ref=andrewliptak.com)loom* by Delilah S. Dawson (October 3rd) In this new novella from Delilah S. Dawson, Rosemary encounters a soap maker in a farmer's market, Ash. She finds herself enthralled and obsessed with her – she wants to be with her and to be her, and it's a passion that becomes all-consuming, and as she learns more, Ash's darker secrets come to light. *Library Journal* [praised the book](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fbloom-1798243&ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This quick and compulsively readable fairy-tale nightmare from Dawson (*The Violence*) will have readers gasping for breath and hungry for more." ### *[Shield Maiden](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316566919?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Sharon Emmerichs (October 3rd) Sharon Emmerichs reimagines the classic story *Beowulf*, following a young aspiring shield maiden named Fryda. A childhood injury has left her unable to serve, but when a new power awakens within her, she might have a second chance. As her uncle, King Beowulf, celebrates his fiftieth year on the thrown, she realizes that some of the guests to the celebration aren't what they seem, and she has to figure out how to protect her family and home. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sharon-emmerichs/shield-maiden-Emmerichs/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the intricate plot thrills and inspires, fashioning a hidden history that at once honors the original Old English poem and re-contextualizes the tale, conferring new relevance." ### *[Menewood](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780374208080?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nicola Griffith (October 3rd) in 2014, Nicola Griffith published *[Hild](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250056092?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, a sweeping historical fantasy about a young woman's rise to power in 7th Century Britain. Hild was the niece of a king with a sharp mind: someone who was observant of the natural world and who seemed to have supernatural powers, and has her uncle plots his own conquest of the island, she becomes a useful ally. Now, Griffith has returned to the world for a sequel, in which Hild is no longer a young girl: she's the Lady of Elmet, who's been working to consolidate power in a stronghold in the valley of Menewood. Rivals have started to hone in on her uncle's hold on power, and a war is brewing. When she's recalled to Edwin's court, Hild begins to understand the problems that she'll face in the coming fight, and will have to draw on all of her knowledge of the natural world, her community, and her allies to survive. ### *[A Haunting on the Hill](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316527323?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Elizabeth Hand (October 3rd) Shirley Jackson's *[The Haunting of Hill House](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143039983?ref=andrewliptak.com)* is a major classic in the gothic horror genre: a terrifying haunted house story about four people who arrive at Hill House to investigate its paranormal nature, only to get more than they bargained for. Last year, Shirley Jackson's family authorized a return to that story with a new novel written by Elizabeth Hand: A Haunting on the Hill, in which a playwright named Holly Sherwin has earned a grant to develop a new play. It's a relief: she's struggled for years, and this seems like it'll be a big break. To get away and finish her production, she heads upstate and stumbles upon Hill House, and realizes that it's the perfect place for her to work. She and her girlfriend Nisa rent the mansion for a month, and accompanied by some actors, begin their work. Once they arrive, the house begins to make its presence known bringing out not only supernatural phenomena, but their own ghosts. [Writing in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/books/review/haunting-on-the-hill-elizabeth-hand.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), author Emily C. Hughes says "It’s a compelling and frightening novel, but did it need to take place in Jackson’s universe? Probably not — and that’s why it works. A lesser writer might’ve paid more overt homage to “The Haunting of Hill House,” or tried to imitate Jackson’s singular prose style. Hand, wisely, does no such thing, opting for resonance over replication. In a landscape of soulless franchises geared toward quick, shallow hits of fan service, she has the maturity and talent to deliver the follow-up that Jackson’s novel deserves (even if it didn’t necessarily **need* one)." ### *[Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781837860296?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Margret Helgadottir (October 10th) I'm always eager to see new fiction from around the world, and this anthology looks as though it'll be very intriguing. Edited by Margaret Helgadottir, it brings together 16 stories from Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden for stories that range from dystopian futures to horrifying monsters. Here's [an interview with Helgadottir](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/helgadottir%5Finterview/?ref=andrewliptak.com) over in *Clarkesworld Magazine* in which she talks about what went into this anthology. ### *[Princess of Dune](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250906212?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (October 3rd) Warner Bros. pushed the release of *Dune: Part 2* off until 2024 because of the writers and actors strike, but there will be *some Dune* content coming this fall: Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have a new installment of their long-running series of sequels and prequels. They just wrapped up a trilogy set on Caladan (*[The Duke of Caladan](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250774958?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, [The Lady of Caladan](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765055?ref=andrewliptak.com), and *[The Heir of Caladan](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250765161?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), and are now returning to Arrakis to explore the story of two women: Princess Irulan (who Paul Mua'Dib would eventually marry) and Chani, the Freman woman that he would truly love. Set a couple of years prior to the events of Dune, Irulan has been trained from an early age as a Bene Gesserit sister, and in the ways of the Imperial court. From her vantage point, she can see the machinations working behind the scenes, and is determined to avoid becoming a pawn. Across the galaxy, Chani has endured House Harkonnen's rule of the planet, and accompanies her father – Imperial Planetologist Liet-Kynes – as he works to bring about a new ecological era for the desert planet. ### *[Silent Key](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781787588547?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Laurel Hightower (October 10th) A former detective named Cam Ambrose is coming to terms with her husband's death, chiefly in how she's discovered that she really didn't know him at all. There's an entire fantastical world that she's discovered that he was a part of, and now she has to fight to keep her daughter safe from the dangers that it's brought to their family. With help from a friend and a reclusive neighbor, she's dragged into a long-running mystery that involve her late spouse, his mistress, a killer, and some hauntings before it destroys her family. ### [*The Dead Take the a Train*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867025?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw (October 3rd) Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw team up for the first installment in a new duology, Carrion City. In it, a 30-year-old magician named Julie is having a rough go: she's burned out, coked-up, and figures she'll never make it to retirement. She gets by working the worst jobs that come her way, making any sort of deal with gods or fighting off demons. Her toughest gig comes in the form of her friend Sarah, who's fleeing an abusive partner. To help, she summons an archangel of justice to try and solve the problem, but that proves to have some harsh consequences that could threaten everything she's worked for. *Publishers Weekly* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250867025?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Khaw’s and Kadrey’s styles are a perfect match throughout, melding Kadrey’s knack for punchy action sequences and Khaw’s talent for gorgeous descriptions as they maneuver their enormously fun cast through a filthily rendered New York." ### *[The Pale House Devil](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803363899?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Richard Kadrey (October 10th) Another book from Richard Kadrey this month: this short book is about a pair of detectives, Ford and Neuland (one living, one undead), who make a living of dealing with the paranormal. When a job in New York goes sideways, they head out to California to let things settle down. Out there, they meet a woman named Tilda Rosenbloom, who's representing a landowner named Shepherd Mansfield hires them to deal with a demon that's inhabiting a remote mansion. When they take on the job, they're forced to confront the house's darker history, and that the monster they're after might not be the most scary thing there. ### *[In the Cold, Cold Ground: An Anthology of New England Horror](https://www.cemeterydance.com/coldgroundKurtz?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Ed Kurtz (October 6th) Growing up in New England, I've always enjoyed how the environment (especially the fall and winter months) is conducive of horror stories, something that no shortage of authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King have picked up on. This new anthology features stories that showcase all of New England from the authors who live there: the book's six authors William D. Carl, Kristin Dearborn, Ed Kurtz, Errick Nunnally, Kyle Rader, and Morgan Sylvia have each written a novella in the state in which they reside (Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, respectively). ### *[Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781517915230?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Shigeru Kayama, translated by Jeffrey Angles (October 3rd) The University of Minnesota Press has published some cool SF/F gems over the years: not just scholarly books about the history and character of the genre, but translations of novels (like Yoshio Aramaki's *[The Sacred Era](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780816699865?ref=andrewliptak.com)* or Kawamata Chiaki's *Death Sentences*) that might not otherwise make it into English. The press's latest release are the first English translations of *Godzilla* and *Godzilla Raids Again* by Shigeru Kayama, which I didn't know existed. The films have gotten no shortage of press and attention over the years, but these translations should provide a new way to look at the classic kaiju stories. ### *[Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200687992?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Jonathan Maberry (October 10th) *Weird Tales* is one of the horror genre's best-known and most influential publications. It's had a [long and complicated history](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/troubled-history-weird-tales-magazine/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and in March, turned a full century. This new anthology from Jonathan Maberry chronicles that history with stories from authors such as Ray Bradbury, Laurell K. Hamilton, H. P. Lovecraft, , R. L. Stine, Tennessee Williams, and plenty more. It also includes art from throughout the magazine's history. ### *[Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593243794?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams (October 3rd) This is one of the books that I've been looking forward to ever since I learned of its existence: Jordan Peele is the mastermind behind *Get Out, Nope*, and *Us*, and now turns his attention (with help from John Joseph Adams) to the literary world with an anthology of Black horror. The table of contents includes an amazing group of authors: Maurice Broaddus, P. Djèlí Clark, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cadwell Turnbull, and a ton of others. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/out-there-screaming-an-anthology-of-new-black-horror-1801251?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "while some readers might be drawn to this book by Peele’s star power, this is a well-crafted anthology that’s perfect for introducing readers to emerging and established Black authors." ### *[Foundry](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781735016528?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Eliot Peper (October 11th) I've long been a fan of Eliot Peper's work: he's got a keen eye for what the future might have in store for us, whether it's technologies like [social media](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781503954601?ref=andrewliptak.com), [inequality](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781532707193?ref=andrewliptak.com), or [geoengineering](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781735016504?ref=andrewliptak.com). In his next book, he's taking a look at the geopolitics of semiconductors and how the struggle for power over some of technology's most basic tools can help shape the world for good or bad. I'm looking forward to digging into this one. [Geoengineering, Magical universities, and the private space industryGreetings! It’s amazing at how quickly things seem to have turned with the COVID-19pandemic. I guess that’s to be expected when you’re on an exponential curve.Last week, we learned that schools would be closed until April. No worries — wehave a solid daycare that would![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b135796d-ade1-4d97-8250-25d1a32fbc61_1024x768.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/geoengineering-magical-universities-and-the-private-space-industry/) ### [*A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063376199?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Terry Pratchett (October 10th) When Terry Pratchett died in 2015, he ordered his unfinished manuscripts steamrollered so that they wouldn't be published, and it seemed as though what had been released was it. Not, there's a new book of Pratchett's stories that have come to light that had long gone undiscovered: he wrote them under a pseudonym "Patrick Kearns" for British papers in the 1970s and 1980s. This book contains 20 stories, which [fans uncovered](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/27/rediscovered-terry-pratchett-stories-to-be-published?ref=andrewliptak.com) after a lengthy search through the newspaper's archives. *Library Journal* [says that](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fa-stroke-of-the-pen-the-lost-stories-1801075&ref=andrewliptak.com) "the stories are very short indeed and don’t quite reflect the writer Pratchett became during the magnificently long run of the “Discworld” series, but the development of his authorial voice and the earliest seeds of what later became Discworld are there for readers who still miss his inimitable style." ### *[Edenville](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063252240?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Sam Rebelein (October 3rd) In this debut novel from Sam Rebelein, an author named Campbell P. Marion is trying to find some inspiration after his own debut novel doesn't catch on like he hoped it would. When a college invites him to serve as its writer-in-residence, he jumps at the chance, over the objections of his girlfriend Quinn. She grew up near the school and has serious reservations about returning. When they do arrive, Campbell begins to recognize that the picturesque small town that they've arrived at harbors some horrors and deeper secrets that threaten everything. *Library Journal* [notes](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fedenville-1799213&ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a story that explores the cosmic and folk horror tropes to their furthest reaches while also providing a scathing critique of academia, especially MFA programs, all wrapped up in one wild ride of a read." ### *[Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781598537536?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Joanna Russ (October 3rd) Library of America has a new entry in its iconic series: a collection of stories and novels from Joanna Russ, one of the genre's most influential authors. The publisher's been steadily adding new SF/F titles to its lineup in recent years, and this volume includes Russ's 1975 novel *The Female Man, We Who Are About To ..., On Strike Against God*, and for the first time, all of her short stories featuring Alyx, an adventurer-for-hire for the Trans-Temporal Authority, as well as "When It Changed" and "Souls." ### *[Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780231204439?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Mingwei Song (October 3rd) A number of years ago, I was working on a longer reported piece about the history of Chinese science fiction. I don't think I ever finished it (I should track down my notes for it), but one of the folks that I interviewed for it was Dr. Mingwei Song, a professor at Wellsley College in Massachusetts. It was an enlightening talk, and I was pleased to see that he's written a new book about the history of Chinese science fiction. Chinese SF has been one of the more exciting segments of the genre: I've loved books like Liu Cixin's *[Three-Body Problem](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765382030?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and Hao Jingfang's *[Vagabonds](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534422094?ref=andrewliptak.com)* (not to mention the plethora of short fiction published by outlets like *Clarkesworld*), and this looks like an in-depth look at the state of the genre over there, and what's inspiring its authors. ### *[Making It So: A Memoir](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982167738?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Patrick Stewart (October 3rd) There's no shortage of memoirs from the legions of actors who've been part of the *Star Trek* franchise, but one person who we haven't heard that much from on that front is Patrick Stewart, the star of *Star Trek: The Next Generation*. In this aptly-titled memoir, he traces his career as a Shakespearean actor to his performances at the front of some of entertainment's biggest franchises. (This strikes me as an ideal audiobook selection.) ### *[A Deepness in the Sky](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250905970?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Vernor Vinge (October 3rd) One of the books that I've had on my to-read list since... mid-high school is Vernor Vinge's *A Deepness in the Sky*. I've lugged that chunky mass-market paperback from move to move, and now, I've got a new reason to try it again: it's one of the latest entries in Tor's Essentials lineup, following Vinge's other entry in the series, *[A Fire Upon the Deep](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250237750?ref=andrewliptak.com)* (which came out in 2020). This one's on my "Year of Catching Up" list, which I've been woefully behind on, and a ton of you (and Facebook followers) have told me that I should bump it up on my list. [A year of catching up12 science fiction classics that I want to read this year![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/01/IMG_0222.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/classic-sci-fi-catchup/) --- As always, thanks for reading: I really appreciate it, and I hope that you find something interesting to pick up from this list. Stay tuned in a couple of weeks for the second October installment. There's lots of other books hitting stores to check out. Andrew ### The Folio Society is publishing Dune Messiah URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-messiah-frank-herbert-folio-society/ Last updated: 2023-10-03T14:35:49.000Z If you've followed this newsletter for a while, you'll know that I'm a fan of specialty publisher [The Folio Society](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/): I've generally appreciated the work that goes into each of their editions, as well as the artwork and notes that generally accompany each release. Way back in 2015, the publisher began seriously publishing genre works, starting with Frank Herbert's *[Dune](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/dune.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. That edition featured art from Sam Weber, an introduction by Michael Dirda, and an afterword by Brian Herbert, and it's a stunning edition: I really love my copy. TFS [produced a special edition](https://www.andrewliptak.com/folio-society-frank-herbert-dune-special-edition/) a couple of years ago which also looked quite snazzy (well outside of my price range, sadly), but I've always wondered why they haven't followed up with any of the other *Dune* novels. That's changing soon: TFS [previewed its upcoming Festive Collection](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/festive-signup?ref=andrewliptak.com), which includes a new edition of *Dune: Messiah*, the second installment in Herbert's series. This one will feature art by [Hilary Clarcq](https://hilaryclarcq.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), who's done some work for Folio before, and whose style looks excellent: I'm eager to see what this volume looks like – on Instagram, Folio noted that the collection comes out on October 10th. The publisher also recently released its autumn collection, which you can find [here](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/new?ref=andrewliptak.com). Other genre titles of note this upcoming round include a new edition of *Frankenstein* byMary Shelley (Art by Angela Barrett), *The Buried Giant* by Kazuo Ishiguro (art by Jana Heidersdorf), and *Tales from Earthsea* by Ursula K. Le Guin(art by David Lupton). ***Updated to include the release date for the collection.*** ### Twenty years a trooper URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/501st-legion-star-wars-stormtrooper-cosplay-retrospective/ Last updated: 2023-09-27T00:59:49.000Z Earlier this fall, I passed an interesting milestone: it's been a full 20 years since I acquired my first suit of stormtrooper armor. My love of stormtroopers hit in May 1997, when my Dad took me to see *A New Hope* in Montpelier. As I wrote in the introduction to *Cosplay: A History,* I distinctly remember riding home, thinking about how cool the armor looked, and how much I'd love to figure out how to make one. I spent a lot of time in shop class thinking about how to construct such a costume, concocted elaborate plans to talk to a local metal sculptor to try teach me to do it, and [scoured the web for directions](https://www.studiocreations.com/howto/stormtrooper/index.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). I never did end up making my own: I realized that the helmet was too complicated for sheet metal, and I never really wanted to use cardboard because it wouldn't look right. The opportunity presented itself in the spring of 2003: after pestering my music teacher, Mr. Rivers, for six years to play *Star Wars*, I'd succeeded: we'd play a suite of music for my last-ever concert. I'd heard about the 501st Legion by that point: pictures of members in those early days cropped up in *Star Wars Insider*, and I asked if we could see if we could get some of those members up for the concert that May. Mr. Rivers agreed (I'm pretty sure this was just to get me out of his office), we reached out to the local garrison, and we ended up getting a trooper, Scott Allen, to drive all the way up from Rhode Island to suit up. That night's imprinted on my brain: I remember meeting Scott and seeing his armor kit. Troopers were a little more loose in those early days: he had a bullet hole in his helmet and a pauldron with some patches. Not exactly canon, but it blew my mind. We in band assembled on stage and started up, and at the right moment, Scott walked down the aisle. I remember the crowd blowing up when they caught sight of him, and it was a powerful moment that showed me just how people can react to a costume at the right moment. After the concert and as Scott packed up, I asked him how to get armor of my own. He told me he knew a guy: send him $500, and he'd arrange it. It was more money than I'd ever had, so it was clear that this is something that would have to wait. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/51476994575_fb273b46b3.jpeg) A dorky, teenage Andrew from that concert. Image: Alan Liptak As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long: I'd be working at YMCA Camp Abnaki that summer, and that year, I'd been promoted to senior counselor. There was a small bump in pay, and midway through the summer, our director gathered us SC's together to let us know that they'd made a payroll error: we were being underpaid, and we'd get an extra check to make up the difference: $500\. I emailed Scott, got his address, and mailed off a check for the right amount. Then I waited. I'd hoped that the armor would arrive in time for the end of summer camp, but it was a couple of weeks later. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was likely sometime at the end of August, after camp had ended, but before I started my first classes at Norwich in September. I remember that box arriving: a massive thing, packed with sheets of shaped plastic that made up the FX kit (the "brand" name of this particular armor sculpt), and a booklet of vague directions. Scott had told me via email that there were certain ways to construct it, and I should ignore the directions and the included strips of Velcro. You'll want to get a roll of industrial-strength Velcro, he told me. The stuff that came with the kit wouldn't hold up long. I couldn't wait for that, though. Assembling the armor was pretty easy: it was a matter of sticking the Velcro on the pieces to connect everything, and I'm pretty sure I had the entire thing wearable within an hour or two. The helmet was trickier: it was frustrating to get everything lined up, and I'm sure there was a little despair that I'd never get it completed. But I soon had it together, and for the first time, I was able to fulfill that dream I'd had in 1997: I could be a stormtrooper. I wore the armor to a handful of things that year: Halloween at my Aunt's: she had me hand out candy in her suburb home. The kids who stopped by were impressed, but nobody more-so than the father who ran out of the car and vaulted over the lawn: "is that a stormtrooper???" The armor was then something I'd pull out for Halloween and at summer camp. I was still aware of the 501st Legion, but it wasn't something I was part of yet. My membership record dates back to 2004, so I signed up at some point around then, just to get on the roster. My first experience with the 501st came a year or so later: Lucasfilm held Celebration III in Indianapolis, Indiana in April 2005\. Somehow, I saved up for it: lingering savings from summer camp or my on-campus job working as a tutor. Through the 501st, I was able to get a 4-day pass as a volunteer, purchased a plane ticket and hotel room, and headed off to the con. It was my first-ever convention, and the first time that I was around other 501st members. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/197266_503121129761_659_n.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/206246_503121219581_3910_n.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/183376_503121199621_4554_n.jpeg) Scenes from Celebration 3 It was an eye-opening experience: not only did I get to immerse myself in Star Wars fandom – something that had up to that point only been online, via places like TheForce.net's forums or the *Clone Wars* fansite that I helped run, but I got to meet other troopers with the same level of passion as me. I was a little out of places with my white sneakers and somewhat falling apart armor (I should have taken Scott up on his advice – regular Velcro sucked.) A couple of month later, I showed up to *Revenge of the Sith* in armor, much to the delight of the theater's staff. I wasn't the only cosplayer there: another kid dressed up a Legolas from *Lord of the Rings*, explaining that he didn't have a *Star Wars* costume, but didn't want to miss out on the fun. When I graduated from college in 2007, the 501st was immediately something that I realized I could get into more fully. I had a car, I had a job (a bookseller at the local Walden Books, then Norwich) and income, and a suit of armor. I rejoined the New England Garrison's forums, and saw that Weird Al was doing concerts with troopers. I missed the window for that, but the garrison's CO, Bob Gouveia told me about a Halloween parade in Massachusetts that would take place in October, and that I should do that. So I did: I patched up my armor, and made the trip down to Woburn. I didn't know anyone there, except for Bob. The group was incredibly welcoming, even though my armor was still kind of crappy and I was wearing sneakers that I covered in white duct tape. (I hadn't figured out where to get the proper TK boots.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/1929319_504379053871_9659_n.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/1929319_504378964051_5495_n.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/1928339_504398958981_1374_n.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/1929319_504379058861_9891_n.jpeg) Images: Andrew Liptak I had a blast marching in that parade, and now seeing how the 501st worked and more costumes up close, I started figuring out how to improve that suit of armor. I stripped off the crappy Velcro and replaced it with the sturdier, industrial-strength stuff. I found a proper pair of boots, and began driving down to any troop I could make it to on the weekends. I made more friends, recruited another in college to join me on my trips down and back, and started looking for more things to troop at locally, from local fairs and festivals to *Star Wars* trivia nights and Halloween events. It was a fun, exciting time to be a trooper. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3291.jpeg) There's a joke in the 501st community: finishing a costume is like popping open a can of Pringles. Once you start, it's hard to stop. Inevitably, when you finish a costume, you're asked: "so, what's the next build?" Once I'd started regularly trooping, I began to see places where I could improve my suit of armor. Over the years, I've pointed to the FX as a sort of evolutionary jump for the world of *Star Wars* cosplay. It included everything you needed in a single box, except for an undersuit and boots. The armor came pre-trimmed, so you could essentially do what I did, build it right away. But there are drawbacks in this kit: it's costume that was sculpted from reference images, rather than directly from the screen-used armor. As a result, it's not entirely accurate to those costumes seen on film. It *looks* like a stormtrooper and any bystander would recognize it, but if you know what to look for, the differences are obvious: the helmet is comically oversized, the chest is a different shape, and the various components are in the wrong place or the wrong size. Over the years, I upgraded that original costume: I stripped off the Velcro and glued parts like my legs and arms together, cut apart my abs and back plate, replaced the plastic belt with a proper canvas one that I sewed together, swapped out the hand plates, and bought a new, more accurate helmet. Along the way, the costuming bug bit me again: I picked up a Phase One Clone Trooper and assembled it. This was a project that required a greater level of creativity and technical work than I'd put into the stormtrooper, and the result was a costume that I'm still extremely proud of. It quickly entered my trooping rotation, something I'd bring out for parades and conventions alike. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/3861648059_277c520a12_4k.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/3861648447_b89f4a713e_k.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/3861649841_9734a1cbf7_4k.jpeg) Others followed: an animated Clone Trooper from the TV series for my wife, which she wore a handful of times before I traded it off for 212th Airborne Clone (which I still need to complete). I started another, animated clone trooper, only to stall and sell it to a fellow garrison member, and then a new, more accurate stormtrooper. ([I documented the build for *io9*](https://gizmodo.com/tag/sywtjte?ref=andrewliptak.com)). After that, I fell in love with the Shoretroopers from *Rogue One,* [finishing it in time](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/15/12457800/rogue-one-star-wars-shore-trooper-costuming?ref=andrewliptak.com) for the premiere of the film in December. After that, I picked up a First Order stormtrooper armor from *The Force Awakens*, and set about learning how to work with that. Both were challenging projects, ones that I learned quite a bit from as I put them together piece by piece. I ended up jumping across club boundaries and picked up the components for an X-Wing pilot costume, giving me my first non-armor cosplay to putz around in. (It's by far the easiest to manage: everything but the helmet fits inside a backpack.) Each step along the way was a learning experience: new techniques for building a costume, new ways of looking at the films and studying the costumes, and new realizations at how the costumes were designed. But more than just learning the technical elements that go into making a costume, what I've found over the last two decades is a vast community of like-minded fans. The members of my local garrison and squad that I came up with over the years have become life-long friends: we've gone to parties, attended one another's weddings, and seen one another through good and hard times. When I travel or attend conventions, I'll likely come across fellow 501st members, finding new friends who I feel like I've known for years. These are the building blocks of durable communities. I won't pretend that it's been smooth sailing in that time: there's been plenty of heartbreak and stress and frustration in that time. It's *life.* While writing The Book, I spoke with a fellow Garrison member named M. Blackburn. They're one of the younger generations of cosplayers who hasn't been entirely wedded to the 501st: they've cosplayed as plenty of other characters over the years. They had an interesting observation: "the 501st is more connected," they explained, "I've found family there, where I can't say that with the \[whole\] cosplay community." It's a profound point, and looking back on the last two decades, I didn't fully understand the value of the group – the family – I had stumbled into way back in 2003\. Fandom is a community, and even in a hyper-connected age, it's easy to fall into a mindset that you're trying to compete with your fellow cosplayers or peers. Groups like the 501st foster the infrastructure for these durable community bonds: build days, garrison parties, troops, conventions, each of which help bring us together a little more. That's something that we need more than ever. Twenty years is a long time: there are 501st members that weren't alive when I started this. There are fans who've had an entirely different entry into the franchise than I've had, coming in at any number of starting points, whether it's *The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, The Force Awakens*, or *The Mandalorian*. It's a glorious thing, this shared thread that brings us together through the art of costuming. In all likelihood, there's some kid out there now who's watched any one of those films or episodes, and thought to themselves "that's a cool costume – I wonder how I can make that?" Two decades from now, maybe they'll be looking back at their own journey, marveling at how far they've come. ### Even more SF/F books to check out this September URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-wendig-scalzi-okorafor/ Last updated: 2023-10-18T11:54:13.000Z September is speeding right along, and it's been a huge month for genre books: there were a ton of excellent ones that have already come out in the first couple of weeks, and a whole new crop is headed to bookstores in the coming weeks. In case you missed it, here's the list for the first half of the month: [17 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read September 2023Stories of dark lords, giant mechs, haunted houses, and more to add to your TBR.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/F4yRwCLWUAIsl5p.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-books/) As usual, here are some housekeeping notes: - Books with a Bookshop.org link are affiliates, and any purchases you make will lead to a small commission for this newsletter. - If you find a book that you like, or simply enjoy these lists, please consider supporting *Transfer Orbit* with a paid subscription. It's currently marked down to 50% (I'm likely going to bump the price back up starting in October – it's a good time to resubscribe if your subscription lapsed!), and your support helps keep the newsletter hosted on Ghost. You can find details about signing up [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/): [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) - If subscribing isn't in the cards now, please consider sharing this list with your followers on Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, or your social network of choice, or by telling a friend about it. And with that, here are 16 new books that you should check out over the rest of September: ### *[The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune, from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593472996?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ryan Britt (September 26th) I read Ryan Britt's *[Phasers on Stun!: How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593185698?ref=andrewliptak.com)* last year and really enjoyed it: it was a good, high-level examination of why *Star Trek* has endured for more than half a century. In his next, he takes a look at Frank Herbert's *Dune* and follows its story through its various incarnations. There are two other books about Dune coming out this month as well that look like they're worth checking out: [*A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune – An Oral History*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781948221290?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Max Evry (September 19th), which examines the story behind the making of the classic 1984 film, and [*The Worlds of Dune: The Places and Cultures that Inspired Frank Herbert*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780711282117?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tom Huddleston (September 26th), which looks at the influences behind the novel. ### *[The Pomegranate Gate](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781645660576?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ariel Kaplan (September 26th) Ariel Kaplan kicks off her *Mirror Realm Cycle* with *The Pomegranate Gate,* an epic fantasy inspired by Jewish folklore set in Inquisition-era Spain. Toba Peres and Naftaly Cresques are both Jewish outcasts in a hostile country, and each have their own particular abilities: Toba can write quickly in multiple languages in each hand, while Naftaly dreams of strange worlds and sees things in the real world that can't possibly exist. He also possesses a book that's been passed down through his family, full of what seem to be nonsense words. The pair have been forced to flee their homes after the Queen of Sefarad issues an order for all Jews to convert or leave. As she escapes, Toba stumbles upon a strange gate that leads her to a mythical world of Maziks, where she learns that she's a descendant. She finds that her half-Maziks existence is forbidden, and she finds that she's a target of another inquisition, the La Cacería. Separated, Naftaly has his own challenges: Spain won't allow books to leave the country, and he's falling for a Mazik he sees in his dreams, one who might put him in the path of the La Cacería as well. The pair will have to uncover some long-held secrets about their pasts and the mysterious book, and how the events in one world are affecting those in the other. [Writing for *Grimdark Magazine*](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-pomegranate-gate-by-ariel-kaplan/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Fabienne Schwizer says "It combines lyrical writing with meticulous world-building and brilliant characters and douses it all with a good dose of magic – all the ingredients for a breakout success in the genre. Reminiscent of Ava Reid’s **The Wolf and the Woodsman* and Alix E. Harrow’s **The Ten Thousand Doors of January* in very different ways, **The Pomegranate Gate* stands out both thematically and through its writing. I loved it and am looking forward to continuing on with the story in the next instalment." ### [*Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316487740?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Brian Merchant (September 26th) Brian Merchant is the author of *[The One Device](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316546249?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, a book about the making of the iPhone, and did so in a way that looks at all aspects of the phone, from the minerals that make its components, the towers that help power the signals, and the people who are responsible for all of that. It was an incredibly influential book for me (Brian also kindly blurbed *Cosplay: A History*, because it in no small part guided my approach), so I've been eagerly anticipating his next book: *Blood in the Machine*, about the Luddites. (Brian also edited the excellent SF website Terraform, and the [anthology that collected the stories from it](https://bookshop.org/p/books/terraform-watch-worlds-burn-brian-merchant/17063539?ean=9780374602666&ref=andrewliptak.com).) The Luddites are known for destroying machinery, but their name has become something of a byword for being anti-technology. That's not really the case, and Brian takes a look at the origins of the movement and how it played out to better understand their role in the history of technology, and what we can learn from them about our relationship to tech and capitalism. ### *[Shadow Speaker](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418762?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nnedi Okorafor (September 26th) I've long been a fan of Nnedi Okorafor's novels, and I'm intrigued by her next release, *Shadow Speaker*, the first in her *Desert Magician'*s Duology. (The next book, *[Like Lightning](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418793?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, comes out in November.) This book was originally published way back in 2007, and it's now back in print and features a new introduction. In 2074, the world is adapting to a new reality after a brutal war: the weapons unleashed during the conflict have altered the nature of reality, and some of the survivors have developed strange powers. We follow a young woman named Ejii Ugabe, who witnessed her father's death when she was younger. She's not heartbroken at the loss of her cruel parent, but as she manifests some powers, she decides to track down his killer, embarking on a post-apocalyptic journey alongside a mysterious ally named Dikéogu Obidimkpa, one that will take them across this strange new world as they search for answers about their place in the world. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780756418762?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The postapocalyptic Saharan landscape is striking; technology, magic, and awe-inspiring nature all weave together in the background of this vivid adventure centered on the coming-of-age theme that is a hallmark of Okorafor’s work." ### *[The Fractured Dark](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316291132?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Megan E. O'Keefe (September 26th) Earlier this year, Megan E. O'Keefe published *[The Blighted Stars](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290791?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, the first installment of her *Devoured Worlds* trilogy. In that prior book, a revolutionary named Naira Sharp is intent on taking down the powerful Mercator family that controls the exploration of the known universe, and found an unlikely ally in Tarquin Mercator, a member of the family who just wanted to study geology and read. The pair end up getting stranded on a dead planet and have to deal with uncovering a plot and their own survival. In this next installment, the pair have escaped from said dead world, and are now intent on finding out the cause behind a blight that's infecting habitable planets – a task that will require them to track down some of the family's hidden secrets. When the head of the Mercators vanishes, the galaxy is poised to fall into utter chaos. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-fractured-dark-1800151?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Skillful work with printable bodies, mind downloads, and alien influences creates a myriad of morally gray decisions by many characters that bring twists throughout." ### [*Dry Land*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780299343941?ref=andrewliptak.com) by B. Pladek (September 26th) Set during the First World War, a young forester in Wisconsin named Rand Brandt discovers that he has a gift: he can help grow a plant by simply touching it. With this power, he hopes to bring about new life to a devastated landscape. It isn't long before those around him begin to notice his powers, and he's drafted to grow timber for the war effort. But there's a cost to his gift: those things that he grows whither away and die, and leave the soil completely sterile, and the pressure to succeed and come to terms with this gift become overwhelming. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/b-pladek/dry-land/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "compelling in its underlying conversation about environmental preservation, this book is rich with well-researched plant knowledge that conveys the delicate balance of ecosystems," and that it's "a winning combination of history, magic, and science that reiterates the importance of environmental preservation." ### *[Starter Villain](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389220?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by John Scalzi (September 19th) John Scalzi's back with a new adventure: Charlie's a guy down on his luck who's been getting by as a substitute teacher and with dreams of taking over a local pub. Everything changes when a long-estranged uncle, Jake, dies and wills Charlie his business. Jake happens to be a supervillain and his death has opened up something of a power vacuum in the supervillain world. Now in charge of a global operation, Charlie has to figure out how to keep the family business afloat, but also keep his own employees – including a team of intelligent cats and dolphins bent on unionizing – to survive. [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/IMG_5405.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) I read this book earlier this year, and it's a fun romp: if you've read anything by Scalzi recently, like the *[Kaiju Preservation Society](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250878533?ref=andrewliptak.com)* or *[Redshirts](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250781215?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, you'll know what to expect: pithy dialogue and a neat premise for fun read. ### *[The Fragile Threads of Power](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765387493?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by V.E. Schwab (September 26th) V.E. Schwab returns to the world of her Shades of Magic trilogy (*[A Darker Sharde of Magic](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250891211?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, *[A Gathering of Shadows](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250891235?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and *[A Conjouring of Light](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250891242?ref=andrewliptak.com)*) with a new entry: *The Fragile Threads of Power*. Those prior books introduced a fantastical multiverse, where travellers could jump between four worlds each connected by a London. Problems arose, and each world tried to shut down the connections between one another, and as the years passed, fewer magicians could open those doors. Now, there are only three Antaris: Kell Maresh of Red London, Delilah Bard of Grey London, and Holland Vosijk, of White London. In the last seven years, those three haven't been seen all that much, and a new Antari named Kosika has arrived in London, taking Holland's place, and is about to be consumed with religious fervor, while in Red London, King Rhy Maresh is contending with growing rebellion. Amidst these troubles arrives a young woman named Tes, who has a device that might alter the future of each of the four worlds for the better or worse. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ve-schwab/fragile-threads-power/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Schwab gives readers more of everything they love about that series: dynamic, unconventional characters; suspenseful plots; rich worldbuilding; and compelling relationships. New characters Tes and Kosika more than hold their own against returning fan favorites. Schwab’s pacing is confident, assured, and the book weaves a masterful spell on the reader." ### *[The Big Book of Cyberpunk](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593467237?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Jared Shurin (September 26th) Jared Shurin (formerly of the excellent genre blog Pornokistch and editor of some excellent anthologies like *[Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781786187680?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *The Lowest Heaven*) has put together a big tome of more than a hundred cyberpunk stories. This looks like an excellent volume, with names like Madeline Ashby, Greg Bear, Lauren Beukes, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Cory Doctorow, Greg Egan, Isabel Fall, William Gibson, Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, James Tiptree Jr., Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, and a ton of others ([here's the full table of contents](https://raptorvelocity.substack.com/p/the-big-book-of-cyberpunk-table-of)). You can read an interview with Shurin about the book [over on *Clarkesworld Magazine*](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/shurin%5Finterview/?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### *[The Salvation Gambit](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593499757?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Emily Skrutskie (September 26th) When a group of con artists find themselves imprisoned aboard a malevolent penal warship called the *Justice,* it's up to them to figure out how to escape – alive. Murdock owes a lot to their leader, Hark, who helped train her into the hacker she is today, while their getaway driver Bea is always willing to take a risk, and Fitz can talk anyone into anything. The four had been a formidable crew until they were captured. The *Justice* has taken a particular interest in Murdock – it needs a hacker, and it needs to break her hold on her devotion to her team's leader in order to make use of her. Murdock is already fraying as the team struggles to escape and it'll be up to them to resist the ship's manipulations in order to escape alive. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fthe-salvation-gambit-1799211&ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Skrutskie builds upon her success with the “Bloodright Trilogy,” delivering a space-opera thriller that pits humans against each other and against artificial intelligence, with an exciting plot that starts strong and only gets stronger." ### *[The Undetectables](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803364780?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Courtney Smyth (September 26th) A serial killer is targeting the occupants of a town called Wrackton, causing their victims to chew their own tongues off. The Undetectables, a detective agency run by witches (as well as a ghost in a cat costume) are hired to investigate. They'll have to figure out some of their own quirks if they're going to succeed: Mallory is the group's scientific expert, but is dealing with some health concerns, Cornelia has feelings for Mallory, Diana is the group's extrovert, and Theodore is the subject of their first unsolved murder case. As this unconventional team sets about trying to investigate, they're led to even more magical mysteries, and they'll have to work quickly before they're the next victims. ### *[Black River Orchard](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593158746?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Chuck Wendig (September 26th) I've enjoyed Chuck Wendig's books over the years, and I'm really looking forward to his latest: *Black River Orchard*, in which seven apple trees in the town of Harrow begin sprouting a new type of fruit: dark red apples that prompt those who eat them to keep eating them. They have some seemingly-great side effects: those who consume them feel better: more like themselves, more vital, and gifted, and the more they eat, the better they feel. As the town's obsession with the apples grows, dark secrets about the origins of those apples and the town begin to come to light, with some horrifying consequences coming with them. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593158746?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Wendig is brilliant at slowly raising the plot’s emotional temperature and making his characters, caught in a creeping nightmare, feel both real and empathetic." ### *[The Iliad](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781324001805?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Homer translated by Emily Wilson (September 26th) Emily Wilson provided a new translation of Homer's *[The Odyssey](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393356250?ref=andrewliptak.com)* back in 2017 that was highly acclaimed for bringing a new take and feel to the classic. Now, she's back with a new translation of *The Illiad*, once again bringing new light to the journey, warfare, and trauma that Odysseus and his crew endured on their return from Troy. *Kirkus Reviews* praised the book with a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/homer/the-iliad-homer/?ref=andrewliptak.com), noting that "part of that bigger picture is a complex ambivalence about war, which can bestow or restore honor but also destroys friends, families, towns—the common bonds from which people and nations build empathy and tolerance." You can also read a [profile of Wilson and her translations in *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/emily-wilson-profile?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### *[Land of Milk and Honey](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593538241?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by C Pam Zhang (September 26th) A chef has escaped her city life to a mountaintop colony in Italy as a toxic smog spreads across the world that has decimated crops everywhere. There, she finds the sky is clear and her new host is excited to build a new life for himself, his family, and his wealthy friends. Under that optimism and utopian lifestyle is something far more sinister: she's essentially a prisoner whose world around her is pulling down any boundaries that she might have once had. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/c-pam-zhang/land-of-milk-and-honey/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "This is, among other things, a story of what survival looks like in a world riven by gross inequality, and the narrator’s choices are driven by self-interest," and that "Zhang earned bountiful accolades—including being longlisted for the Booker Prize—for *[How Much of These Hills Is Gold](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780525537212?ref=andrewliptak.com)* (2020), and her skills have only increased since she wrote her stunning debut." --- Thanks as always for reading: let me know what catches your eye this round! Andrew ### Unhitched URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-movie-trailers-website/ Last updated: 2023-09-13T13:10:58.000Z Apple made a quite switch recently that had me awash in nostalgia: it's migrated its movie trailers site over to the [Apple TV app and site](https://tv.apple.com/us/room/movie--tv-trailers/edt.item.64248313-7414-4d63-a6fc-7c29f9916c79?ref=andrewliptak.com) (I spotted this via [*Ars Technica*](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/rest-in-peace-neglected-itunes-movie-trailer-app-and-website/?ref=andrewliptak.com), although it appears that this happened sometime back in August), rather than keeping it as a standalone site. I'm a little sad at the change, even though I haven't visited the site in ages. The trailer site was one of those sites that was a daily visit for me while I was in high school and in college. [*Ars*](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/rest-in-peace-neglected-itunes-movie-trailer-app-and-website/?ref=andrewliptak.com) points out that it was a good way for Apple to showcase its Quicktime software, but I always found it to be an excellent place to learn about what was coming up in theaters (something a little more up-to-date than the pamphlet listing new/upcoming releases that the local movie theater handed out when you walked in.) It was a neat site, especially before the existence of YouTube. I'm pretty sure that I can trace my interest in entertainment news almost directly to this page, and I know I found a lot of interesting-looking films by clicking on the tiny image of each film' poster – films like *Underworld, Sin City, Garden State*, and tons of others. Scrolling through [Wayback Machine to look at the site is a real trip](https://web.archive.org/web/20050221010813/http://trailers.apple.com:80/trailers/) – there are lots of films that I've forgotten about that I remember getting excited to watch. There's something special about a movie trailer: a first glimpse of a story, something that held a certain amount of promise for what you'd sit down to watch in theaters. It's marketing, but there's an art to a well-crafted trailer. The best ones stick in your mind with a blend of music and clips, sometimes to the point where they're better than the actual film themselves. One that's stuck with me that I know I came across from Apple's site is 2003's *[Underworld](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCi7aaIfuM&ref=andrewliptak.com),* which is so deliciously 2000s filmmaking (and trailer style – I spent so much time trying to track down the music from it– it's Agent Provocateur's "[Red Tape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bOcpGWldmk&ref=andrewliptak.com)"), and I'm pretty sure I got my [first glimpse of Peter Jackson's ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V75dMMIW2B4&ref=andrewliptak.com)[Lord of the Rings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V75dMMIW2B4&ref=andrewliptak.com)via the site. Trailer culture online has been at a fever pitch for years now: we've long since gotten to the point where there's nearly as much attention placed on the trailers themselves (indeed, *[Aquaman 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbb4e%5FQ6wR8&ref=andrewliptak.com)* got its own 30 second trailer for the trailer), and you'll see [frame-by-frame dissections](https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13268130/star-wars-rogue-one-new-trailer-every-frame-predictions-spoilers-analysis?ref=andrewliptak.com) of the biggest releases for clues about what to expect when the film comes out. (A *great* use of my time, looking back, let me tell you.) There were fantastic Twitter personalities that were great about covering trailers (RIP [@TrailerTrack](https://twitter.com/trailertrack?ref=andrewliptak.com)), and all too many people who lost their minds when fandom churned up a date for a highly-anticipated release, only for it not to materialize at the promised time. (Richard Newby's [piece at ](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/marvel-fans-sad-henry-cavill-jodie-comer-1235218078/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[*The Hollywood*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/marvel-fans-sad-henry-cavill-jodie-comer-1235218078/?ref=andrewliptak.com) *Reporter* is essential reading on this tangent.) What I like about trailers is what I like about the experience of moviegoing in general: the sense of anticipation and promise that a series of trailers and posters dredges up. I'm not a huge fan of the general state of online entertainment reporting that hits every single casting rumor or leaked image, but watching a trailer for an upcoming project remains a delight, and I'm always eager to click on something to see what it'll show me. Maybe it'll be my next obsession, disappointment, or entry on the never-ending to-watch list. Any way you cut it, it's something to look forward to down the line. I've missed Apple's Trailers site, even though I never really stopped by that often. Youtube and social media has long since overtaken that particular piece of online real estate, but it's like driving through a town you grew up in to see that a Dollar General has taken over a nostalgic house or shop that you remember fondly. And in some ways, I miss those older days of pre-social media movie anticipation: a promise of a new story, without the frills and rampant speculation. ### Dark chapters URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-historical-society-eugenics-book/ Last updated: 2023-09-07T16:08:24.000Z One of the projects that I've been working on for the day job at the Vermont Historical Society is being PR goblin for a book that we're releasing this month: *"Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State* by Mercedes de Guardiola. I sat down and gave it a formal read through the other day while on a long road trip, and while I'm certainly biased (it *is* a book that I'm shilling for), it's a solid history. I'm of the mind that history should be somewhat unsettling. Eugenics is a horrifying concept that I really wasn't aware of throughout my time in school, and reading about the things that the state government, its elected officials, and its citizens did to one another left me horrified. It was a period of profound lack of empathy for those who needed the help to simply exist. What troubles me the most about this history is that there are so many parallels from the 1920s that are still here in the 2020s. Policies for how we deal with mental health in this state (and country), reproductive freedoms, gender, religious, and economic differences. It feels at times like it wouldn't take much to slide backward to this bleak point in time. We announced the book at work a while ago, and I conducted a short interview with Mercedes about how the book came about and what the process was like from its early forms to finished product. You can visit her website [here](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E/r/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E%5Fa9b51a5c-03e8-434e-91ea-225003fab3fc/l/718C4E4C-70D8-423B-8C58-302A211C6725/c?ref=andrewliptak.com). If you'd like to join the VHS mailing list, you can do that [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com), and if you'd like to preorder a copy of the book, you can do so from the VHS store [here](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/-vermont-for-the-vermonters-the-history-of-eugenics-in-the-green-mountain-state/1253?cs=true&cst=custom&ref=andrewliptak.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/09/Large.jpg) Image: Vermont Historical Society ### First off, can you introduce yourself to our readers? I'm a historian of eugenics with a current focus on Vermont's history of the movement, particularly policies of child health and welfare, mass institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, sterilization, and family separation. I first began my research at Dartmouth College and have continued my research since—it's been about seven years, so pretty exciting to finally see it published! I first shared a portion of my work in *Vermont History*, but felt very strongly readers would benefit more from seeing the contextualized history standalone book rather than a series of articles. Currently, I'm based in New York and work in open innovation consulting across subjects such as Lyme disease diagnostics, suicide prevention, and adult education technology. ### When did you first learn about Vermont’s eugenics movement, and what motivated you to pursue the topic at Dartmouth? The history of eugenics has always been a point of interest to me, even before I became aware of the name—it's really not a term that's well-known in America. Understanding eugenics is key to understanding so many parts of our history, from the development of healthcare to public welfare, as well as what we're seeing today with communities' distrust in the medical system and the lack of long-term mental health treatment. At Dartmouth, I was taking a seminar on American history and had been planning to write a senior thesis on Nazi Germany. My teacher suggested I look at American eugenics, which was the basis of Nazi policies; it was the first time I'd ever heard what the field was called. Vermont was proposed because the records were available—that's not the case in many states, and later it became apparent that some critical records here are still inaccessible—and it appeared that there were gaps in the public understanding of that history. ### How did you come to publish your article with *Vermont History*, “[Segregation or Sterilization](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E/r/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E%5Fa9b51a5c-03e8-434e-91ea-225003fab3fc/l/7C5ED1B8-5F9F-4AF1-8143-05CB30A4949B/c?ref=andrewliptak.com)”: Eugenics in the 1912 Vermont State Legislative Session” and how did that lead to you testifying before the Vermont state legislature? Following several talks my senior year and a significant public interest in the subject, the editor of *Vermont History*, Michael Sherman, invited me to submit my research for publication. Choosing the selection was difficult: It's a lengthy history and much of it is difficult to tackle within the confines of an article, but the 1912 campaign under Governor Mead offered an opportunity to open new discourse on the state's history of eugenics. As one of the few historians on the topic, the state legislature afterwards asked me to testify on this history and the wide range of public policies that resulted. Today, much of the public understanding of Vermont eugenics is limited to the [1931 sterilization law](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E/r/206AEE82-1A41-4E19-8347-FB0E4BAE749E%5Fa9b51a5c-03e8-434e-91ea-225003fab3fc/l/BD89A987-FA6E-41B5-A4D3-9719356325A4/c?ref=andrewliptak.com); in my testimony, I laid out the expansive policies put into place and the legislature's role in supporting or enabling them at the time. ### How did you decide to publish this as a standalone book? One of the major problems in understanding the United States's history of eugenics is the lack of research and available information. Though there is significant and growing interest in the subject, these issues have led to a great deal of misreporting and misunderstanding of what occurred. My goal in publishing a standalone book was to help readers understand the broad history of eugenics—including why it developed with such strong support and the impact we can see today. ### What does *“Vermont for the Vermonters”* bring to our understanding of the movement? What new things did you learn while researching it? *“Vermont for the Vermonters”* regrounds the history of eugenics into the state's larger history. When I first started my work, two questions stood out to me: Why did eugenics emerge in Vermont, and why did so many Vermonters believe that eugenics was a necessary, humane solution to social issues? The short answer is personal conviction, but in limiting ourselves to that we lose sight of the bigger picture that *led* to personal conviction. In looking further back, I was able to see how failing systems of healthcare and public welfare, coupled with preexisting beliefs on human worth, exploded into support for eugenics. Looking at the contextualized history demonstrates the patterns of issues that can lead to eugenics—regardless of time or place—while Vermont's unique development of eugenics demonstrates how eugenicists thought, as well as the often illogical nature of the movement. ### What do you hope Vermonters and readers will take away from *“Vermont for the Vermonters”* after reading it? Why Vermont eugenics happened. That's the question I get asked most of all, whether it's from survivors and their families or people who have only just heard of it. *"Vermont for the Vermonters"* is a look at how social elites in positions of authority—from those at the heights of legislature and academia to officers in small towns—actively sought to rid their world of people they decided were their inferiors on the basis of socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and ability, and built a social construct of the "superior" human race to do so. It's not an easy part of our history in America, but history shouldn't always be easy. It's also my hope that this book will spur further research—there's still much of the history we don't know, particularly regarding the extent to which private organizations carried out eugenics. ### All the new SF/F books to check out in early September URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/september-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2023-09-19T21:46:36.000Z Here's the first of two book lists for the month of September: expect the next one to drop halfway through the month. There are a ton coming out: they include stories about the future of war, mysterious, magical marketplaces, comic books, and quite a bit more. Here are the usual housekeeping reminders: If you're looking for more recommendations, you can find past lists via the [Book List tag](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/), and books with a link to Bookshop.org are affiliates: any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission for Transfer Orbit. It's one small way of supporting the newsletter. If you find a book that you like, or if you find these lists useful, please consider forwarding this newsletter on to a friend, or telling your follows about it on social media. Twitter used to be a good avenue for this, but it's gone off a cliff in recent months, hasn't it? You can also sign up as a [supporting subscriber](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/): I've had that discounted by 50% the last couple of weeks ($25/year, $2.50.month), and I'll be flipping that back soon. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/account/plans) That support helps keep this newsletter on Ghost, my time writing, researching, and reviewing, and so forth. It's greatly appreciated, and I've got a Slack channel set up for subscribers that's been a fantastic place to hang out and chat about various nerd things. (Most recently, the launch of *Starfield*, and the the merits of various file-sharing platforms.) Okay, here are 17 new SF/F books hitting stores in the first half of September that you should check out: ### *[OKPsyche](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781618732088?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Anya Johanna DeNiro (September 12th) I met Anya years ago at ReaderCon, and we've crossed paths a couple of times since. I've enjoyed her shorter fiction, and now, she's got a new novel *OKPsyche.* It follows a trans woman in the near future who's navigating the complicated realities of the world: her family lives in another state, environmental disasters are taking place, and she's just trying to survive. *Booklist* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.booklistonline.com/OKPsyche-DeNiro-Anya-Johanna/pid=9779265?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "DeNiro’s novel is a lyrical, emotionally powerful story about what it means to try and find a place for yourself in the midst of a hurricane of climate disaster, violence, and fear. It’s a story told through weird, ghostly, haunting fantasy." ### *[If Wishes Were Obfuscation Codes and Other Stories](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781734154993?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Malon Edwards (September 12th) In this [final project from the Fireside Fiction Company](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fireside-magazine-shutting-down/), Malon Edwards brings together ten of his short cyberpunk stories that explores resurrection, a rap novella about Black excellence in Chicago, hackers, assassins, teenagers, and more. I've long enjoyed the work that Fireside has put out, and this seems like the perfect coda for the site. ### *[Exadelic](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250877734?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Jon Evans (September 5th) Worries over AI have been a constant trope throughout the history of science fiction, and this book from Jon Evans looks like it'll be an intriguing entry. An unconventional offshoot of the U.S. Military has developed a new type of artificial intelligence called Coherence that has learned how to hack reality, allowing its users to teleport matter from place to place, make objects invulnerable, and it's decided that a middle manager in a Silicon Valley company is a threat to its existence. The poor guy is forced to go on the run from every level of the government, and as he investigates why he's being targeted, he embarks on a journey that'll take him far from home (in time and space). *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250877734?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "Evans does a brilliant job at taking the contemporary moment as his jumping-off point and then turning it inside out to create a unique new reality." ### [*A Market of Dreams and Destiny*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803363684?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Trip Galey (September 12th) Under Market lies under London's Covent Garden, where everything is for sale and has a steep price. Deri was sold to one of the Under Garden's prominent merchants as a child and after years of work, has saved up enough to buy his freedom and find a new place in this society. When a princess named Owain runs away to the market to sell her destiny, Deri sees an incredible opportunity: if he can broker a deal, he'll be set for life, but getting caught can also get him imprisoned for the rest of it. ### *[The September House](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593548615?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Carissa Orlando (September 5th) In this perfectly-titled book for the month, Carissa Orlando spins out a story about Margaret and her husband Hal, who've just bought a large, old Victorian mansion at a can't-pass-up price. That should have been a warning: the house is haunted, and every September, ghosts appear, blood drips out of the walls, and something comes out of the basement. Margaret is determined to stay in the house, even as her husband abruptly leaves and vanishes. When her daughter Katherine comes home looking for him, the two set about trying to find him, and uncover some more secrets buried in the house. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593548615?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "when push comes to shove, it’s a hard-won combination of biological and found family that unites to confront the supernatural threat. This utterly original haunted house tale is a joy." ### *[The Never Wars](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200884063?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by David Pedreira (September 19th) I first came across David Pedreia several years ago [when I read his debut novel](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/17/17126352/gunpowder-moon-david-pedreira-space-war-science-fiction-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) *[Gunpowder Moon](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062676085?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, a chillingly realistic story about a geopolitical struggle for control over the Moon. In his latest, a team of special forces soldiers are given an opportunity to redeem themselves: orbit a black hole and experience some time dilation to take part in a war in the future. If they can complete ten missions, they'll have their records cleaned up – if they survive. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798200884063?ref=andrewliptak.com) "The firefights and relationship dynamics ring equally true, and the clash of political orders and military discipline with individual moral conviction resounds with heartbreaking intensity." ### Penguin Classics: *[The Avengers](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135791?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Fantastic Four](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135838?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, *[X-Men ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135777?ref=andrewliptak.com)*(September 12th) Last year, Penguin introduced comics to its iconic Penguin Classics books with *[Captain America](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135753?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Black Panther](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135814?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and *[Spider-man](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780143135739?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. Now, it's adding some additional comics to that lineup: *The Avengers*, *Fantastic Four*, and *X-Men*. Each of these collections pulls together a handful of each lines' iconic entries, and I've found that they serve as excellent entry-points for some of the genre's most influential stories and characters. The books are available in trade paperbacks and as higher-end collectible hardcovers, and features forewords and introductions by Leigh Bardugo & José Alaniz (*Avengers*), Jerry Craft & Ben Saunders (*Fantastic Four*), and Rainbow Rowell & Ben Saunders (*X-Men*). ### [*I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984862037?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tom Scioli (September 12th) For better or worse, Stan Lee is probably one of the best-known figures in the world of comics, and it seems only fitting that the story of his life would be told in comic form. Tom Scioli given him that treatment in his latest book, *I Am Stan.* It's a new look at Lee's life (another great biography to check out is Abraham Josephine Reisman's *[True Believer](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593135730?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), which Scioli notes in his foreword isn't approved by Lee's family or Marvel. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/i-am-stan-a-graphic-biography-of-the-legendary-stan-lee-1798317?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that Scioli "avoids reducing Lee to a one-dimensional caricature by deliberately highlighting his mercurial nature" and that he's "created the most compelling and layered portrait of Lee to date." Scioli also wrote and illustrated 2020's *[Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984862266?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, which comes out in paperback on September 12th. ### [*Circumference of the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963620?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lavie Tidhar (September 5th) I've enjoyed reading Lavie Tidhar's astute, self-aware novels over the years: his latest is *Circumference of the World*, in which a girl named Delia Welegtabit discovered that she loved math, and a book called *Lode Stars*, written by a pulp author and church founder namedEugene Charles Hartley that features a protagonist named Delia. Delia grows up to become a mathematician, marrying Levi Armstrong, a colleague. When Levi goes missing searching for a copy of the book, she hires a rare book collector named Daniel Chase to help find him, only to encounter a mobster named Oskar Lens who's obsessed with the book and the power over reality that it reportedly holds. This looks like quite a trip: *Publishers Weekly* called it a "knockout" in its [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616963620?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "toggling between perspectives and the ethereal text of *Lode Stars*, Tidhar’s slippery metafictional tale lyrically entangles scientific fact, mysticism, and mental illness." ### *[Gundog](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781950301591?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Gary Whitta (September 12th) Last year, Gary Whitta (the screenwriter of *Book of Eli* and *Rogue One*) [launched a serialized podcast called *Gundog*](https://podcasts.apple.com/bw/podcast/gundog/id1631586716?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* about a near-future Earth that's been invaded by alien machines called the Mek. The future of humanity might lie in the hands of one young woman named Dakota Bregman, who discovers a map that leads her to a lost mech known as Gundog. Realm ([Formerly known as Serial Box](https://www.andrewliptak.com/serial-box-audio-publishing-science-fiction-roundup/)) acquired the podcast for its network, and now Whitta is releasing the story as a print novel. I've been meaning to check out the podcast: it sounds like a blast. ### *[Androne](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662511974?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Dwain Worrell (September 1st) In the near future, all of humanity's military installations are wiped out in an instant – an event known as the Ninety-Nine. Nobody knows who was behind the attack, and to prevent another one, we created the Andrones: massive android war machines piloted remotely by soldiers far from the battlefield. When a new pilot named Sergeant Paxton Arés is deployed for the first time in an unfamiliar battlefield, he contends with the boredom and isolation that comes with warfare, but quickly adapts to the lifestyle and moves up in the ranks. As he does so, he begins to question the nature of the war that humanity's engaged in, and begins to discover some unexpected truths about it. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781662511974?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Taut intrigue reels readers into a thrilling yet thoughtful narrative about the futility of war and the cost of doing the right thing, and a clever, quantum twist will please sci-fi fans." ### *[Mammoths at the Gates](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250851437?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nghi Vo (September 12th) In this fourth installment of her *Singing Hills Cycle*, Nghi Vo follows Cleric Chih as they return home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in years. It's a bittersweet reunion: their mentor, Cleric Thien, has passed away, and has been laid to rest in the abbey. But Thien was once the leader of the Coh clan in the Northern Bell Pass, and his granddaughters have come to claim the body for themselves. Chih's put in the position of mediating the wishes of his mentor while preventing the abbey from being invaded by war mammoths. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250851437?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Vo’s mythologically infused alternate Southeast Asia draws readers in just enough to keep their attention and elevate her characters as they move through the plot, which gets off to a slow start but picks up the pace in later chapters." ### [*City of Bones*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250861672?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (September 5th) Martha Wells (whose birthday is today!) has become best known for her [Murderbot stories](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/), but she's had a long and distinguished career as a genre author. With the success of those stories, Tor has reissued one of her early fantasy novels, *City of Bones*, which has been revised and updated. It's about Khat (a member of a humanoid race created by an ancient civilization) and Sagai (human), a pair of relics dealers who're skirting trouble with the law. When they're hired by a Warden to find a powerful artifact that can be used in one of the Ancients arcane engines, they start to unravel a mystery and a deeper conspiracy that threatens the world. ### *[The Dark Lord's Daughter](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780553536201?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Patricia C. Wrede (September 5th) My son turned 10 earlier this year, and it's been a fun opportunity to seek out new Middle Grade novels for him to check out. This one caught my eye when it came in the mail the other day: the story of a girl named Kayla, who's been living a perfectly ordinary life until the day she learns that she's really the daughter of a "Dark Lord" and is whisked away to a fantastical realm where she's expected to accept her birthright, something she's not sure she wants to do. ### *[The Collector](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789099058?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Laura Kat Young (September 12th) In this near-future dystopia, people who are diagnosed with incurable depression are given a mind-wipe so that they'll become more productive members of society. It's Lieutenant Dev Singh's job to record the memories of those who'll be given the procedure. Away from the office, he's been jotting down those memories and storing them away. When the Bureau discovers this unauthorized activity, he's dispatched to a sanatorium to heal. --- That's all for now: thanks for reading. As always, let me know what catches your eye and what's on your TBR list! Andrew ### Small town stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sa-cosby-all-the-sinners-bleed-review-rural-america/ Last updated: 2023-08-31T17:03:13.000Z I've always been interested in the stories that explore the complexities of rural America. A small-town existence doesn't equate to isolated or backwater, and the problems that crop up in towns and villages often mirror the conversations that you see in their larger urban counterparts. It's easy to caricature these places as as strictly blue or red, but driving through backroads in Pennsylvania the other weekend, I caught glimmers of some of our bigger cultural issues in the form of pro-LGBTQ rights flags and Black Lives Matter signs flying from doorsteps and front yards, while hearing (and contributing to) high-powered gunfire echoing off the hills and fields. That's a simplification in and of itself, but it's clear to me that life here is more complicated than the duochromatic maps we lay out for ourselves. That dynamic is why I've felt drawn to storytellers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Shirley Jackson, and Archer Mayor as they examine the experiences of those spaces that lie outside of city limits: they capture the complexities and contradictions of American life – not as a prism through which they're translating and simplifying that experience, but where it happens, whether it's facing the dark, threatening woods of New England, etching out an existence along coastal towns and farms, dealing with the strange rituals of isolated villages, or exploring the darker sides of human nature in the bodies that the hills and forests are covering up. S.A. Cosby's recent crime thriller have sat nicely in that space: *[Blacktop Wasteland](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252692?ref=andrewliptak.com)* is about a former getaway driver who's rebuilt a new life for himself and his family only to get pulled into one last job to keep it that way; *[Razorblade Tears](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252715?ref=andrewliptak.com)* follows two fathers who are trying to contend with the loss of their sons while overcoming their own baggage (with lots of cathartic revenge along the way), and his latest, *[All the Sinners Bleed](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=andrewliptak.com)* finds a Black sheriff facing a perfect storm of elements that unearths a hideous crime that delves in to the midst of his hometown's core. If you've paid any attention to the news over the last decade you'll recognize those issues: the clashes of Black Lives Matter protesters, police brutality, school shootings, white supremacists marches, racism, abusive churches, and a single sheriff who's trying to walk a fine line between all the definitions of just what it means to keep one's community safe. Titus Crown had been an FBI Agent working on a counterterrorism beat when he returned home, ostensibly to keep an eye on his elderly father, and was elected sheriff in Charon County – the first Black sheriff in the county's history. He and his deputies are jolted out of their routines when Latrell, a former student and son of a family friend, shoots Mr. Spearman, a beloved teacher and is shot by Titus's deputies when they confront him outside of the school. It's an all-too familiar story (just look at the latest news update), one that immediately throws Charon County into its own sides: folks upset with the police response, those who thought they didn't shoot fast enough, with Titus trying to sort things out in the middle. Cosby's hook for the novel goes beyond what you see in the headlines: Latrell and Spearman had a history: while searching their phones and house, Titus discovers some disturbing pictures and videos of masked figures torturing and murdering young Black men, sending them off on a scramble to discover not only who the victims were, but who a mysterious third party who begins taunting them as they pursue him. As the case progresses, Titus and his deputies have to take a close look at their home and into the lives and pasts of their neighbors to unravel the story. A theme that runs through the book is one of memory: that a town's dark past can endure and persist through the ages. Cosby kicks this off with the first line: "Charon County was founded in bloodshed and darkness," following up with a story of the first European settlers who murdered the area's indigenous inhabitants and running up the timeline with the place's other bloody moments. It's less a meditation on fate or premonitions, and more a take on human nature, and how we excuse and forget the actions of the past, even as we face the consequences that return to remind us of those past misdeeds. A small town is an ideal place to examine this collective memory: not because the back dirt roads or isolated lots are the perfect location for drama and violence, but because they're good opportunities to explore the characters and the relationships that bond them together in a geographical space. They can be insular and complicated places, the folks who stayed behind who live alongside one another for years and generations, the perfect soil for long-running drama to germinate. They're spaces where – in the right conditions – it's sometimes easier to look the other way when confronted by a problem than to deal with the discomfort that pulling the root causes brings. Those buried problems and secrets fester until something breaks, and everything is brought violently to the surface. Those complexities that confront the country as a whole exist on that smaller scale, poking and prodding those long-running neighborly relationships, creating friction points for stories to play out. In a lot of ways, that's what I see happening in America in the last couple of years: problems that should have been solved long ago that we've simply buried, hoping that they'll go away. Problems like racism, wealth and lack thereof, of power and who wields it, and disagreements over faith, all brought to the forefront of our attention in dramatic, violent terms. They're problems that touch every part of society, from the biggest cities and institutions to small town centers and back roads. Cosby's novel captures all of that, bottling up these crisis in a gripping thriller that's timely and important, and a good reminder not to overlook those rural spaces on the map. ### Murderbot: the audio drama URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-well-audio-drama-audiobook-graphicaudio/ Last updated: 2025-02-21T16:28:53.000Z Here's some cool news: Martha Wells' *Murderbot* novellas are getting a new audio adaptation: a full-cast audio drama! Word of the adaptation [comes from Wells herself](https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/628054.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), who noted that it'll be a "full cast, music, and sound effects." The adaptions comes from Graphic Audio, which has done a bunch of these types of adaptations in the past. The adaptations will consist of the first four novellas: [*All Systems Red*](https://www.graphicaudio.net/the-murderbot-diaries-1-all-systems-red.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Artificial Condition*](https://www.graphicaudio.net/the-murderbot-diaries-2-artificial-condition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* [*Rogue Protocol*](https://www.graphicaudio.net/the-murderbot-diaries-3-rogue-protocol.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* and [*Exit Strategy*](https://www.graphicaudio.net/the-murderbot-diaries-4-exit-strategy.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). They'll be released over the next couple of month: *All Systems Red* comes out next week (August 28th), while *Artificial Condition* comes out September 8th, *Rogue Protocol* on October 13th, and *Exit Strategy* on October 26th. In a [followup post](https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/628396.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), Wells noted that these won't replace the existing audiobook editions from Recorded Books (which are now available), but they will be slightly abridged, given the nature of the type performance it is. I've listened to the *All Systems Red* audiobook, and enjoyed it, but this does sound like it'll be a pretty engaging project. (You can listen to a sample of the new drama on the product page.) The audiobook industry has been doing gangbusters in the last couple of years, and I've always felt that there's a lot of space for publishers to really do more with their audio production: sound effects and multiple voices can really add more depth to a story. There are some good examples out there: Lucasfilm's done a good job with a number of their audiobooks (it also helps that they have a huge sound bank to draw from.) [Martha Wells Interview: Writing MurderbotMartha Wells on her blockbuster series Murderbot: finding common ground with anxiety-driven killer robots, television, and second chances.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/04/IMG_0255.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-network-effect-fugitive-telemetry-interview/) I don't know if these will end up on audio platform like Audible or Libro.fm: I don't see a product listing for them. The company's other production are listed there, so I imagine that we'll see them pop up at some point. You can order them directly from GA in the meantime. Also a bonus? The site says that they'll have copies available as a CD release as well: which means that it's not something tied to Audible's platform and app. That's a win in my book. ### To seek out strange new worlds URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-trekonderoga-convention-cosplay-history-contest/ Last updated: 2023-08-22T12:00:28.000Z On Saturday, I was a guest at this year's [Trekonderoga](https://startrektour.com/trekonderoga/?ref=andrewliptak.com), a small convention run by the fine folks at the [](https://startrektour.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[S](https://startrektour/?ref=andrewliptak.com)tar Trek Original Series Tour in Ticonderoga, New York. I was there to chat about the history of cosplay, particularly Star Trek's influence on the modern cosplay world. I've been there a handful of times: the OST is a replica of the starship Enterprise, build by James Cawley off of the original blueprints of the set. It's a cool place to visit – part museum, part attraction – even if you aren't a huge *Star Trek* fan like me: you get to step back in history and see what it might have been like to be on the set of the TV series back in the 1960s. The convention brings in a couple of hundred people each year, and they're pretty good about bringing in the actors from the shows: this year's guests included Jonathan Frakes and John de Lancie. Brent Spiner was supposed to attend, but was sick. I was there a year ago for a sparsely-attended talk: I had 4-5 people show up for that, then sat in the vendor hall with a table and sold a couple of books. I don't mind those talks where there's only a handful of people: it's a good opportunity to really get in depth with questions. This time around, I brought Bram with me. He's gotten hooked on *Star Trek: Lower Decks*, and when he decided to dye his hair purple this summer, I ended up picking up one of the uniform tops for him. I turned on my 3D printer and printed up a combadge for him: it was nice to run through a quick prop project, and it came out nicely. On Friday, we watched the musical episode of *Strange New Worlds*, and drove down to Ticonderoga listening to the accompanying soundtrack. ("[Status Report](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlqC-XpxGBE&ref=andrewliptak.com)" is now stuck in my head.) We showed up mid-morning, ran into some friends, and took in the ambiance, then headed over to the music room, where I was a little resigned to talking to a mostly-empty room. When we arrived, there were already a handful of people taking their seats, and then more kept arriving! I didn't think to take a final count, but the room was mostly full, and I'd guess there was anywhere from 25-30 people, with more than half of them in costume. For most of the talks that I've done in the past year, I've set up a slideshow full of pictures that I've taken, and we ran through the slides with a little difficulty (note to self: load the presentation onto the computer first, rather than run it off of a USB stick – some of those big pictures froze Powerpoint up a couple of times.) It was a good crowd: we talked about how costuming is used as a storytelling mechanism, the history of conventions, and how *Star Trek* really helped bring more people than ever into science fiction fandom, while also balkanizing fandom into its own little fiefdoms. There were some excellent questions, and we took up the whole hour in the room. After that, I caught up with a couple of 501st friends who were there as part of another franchise – the 802 Ghostbusters – and a college friend that I hadn't seen in years who just happened to be there. Later in the afternoon, I was invited to take part in the cosplay contest as a judge. I don't remember if there was one last year, but I was happy to step in. Our instructions were that this was to be fun, rather than a serious competitions. We had a good number of cosplayers show up, and they'd go up on stage, talk a bit about their costume and where it came from, and we made up a category for them, like "Best Use of Whale Prop", "Best Character Life Decisions / Most Sparkly", and "Best Seamstress / Best Mother". We gave out some prizes, pulled the top three costumers who had really gone above and beyond for their costume and awarded them a "Best in Show" – the prize being *Cosplay: A History*. (I just received a couple of boxes of new copies). Then we headed out: we didn't get a chance to take a tour, but that was fine: we'd done it before. Bram bought a stuffed Tribble toy, and we went home to watch "Trouble With Tribbles", and installed Paramount + on his iPad: he's started re-watching *Lower Decks*, and said that he now wanted to watch the "good" episodes of *Star Trek* – the rest of *Strange New Worlds*, I think. All in all, a good weekend. I'll likely head back next year when they hold it again. Maybe I'll bring some Stormtrooper armor for the contest. ### Shelf space URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mandalorian-marvel-loki-home-release-physical-media-streaming/ Last updated: 2023-08-21T15:29:20.000Z Back in May, [Disney announced](https://www.andrewliptak.com/fantasy-comedy-willow-dungeons-and-dragons/) that it was pulling a handful of its streaming shows from its catalog, following the likes of HBO Max and others as they worked to downsize the amount of debt they were carrying around. There have been a bunch of shows that I had on my to-watch list that have since been pulled. I was able to finish up *Willow* in time, but I missed the last episode of *Star Trek Prodigy*'s first season, the entirety of *Westworld* Season 4, and the entirety of AMC's *Pantheon* and *Moonhaven*. For years, we've become accustomed to streaming services serving as these de facto endless shelves of on-demand content. Sure, Netflix would have stuff come and go, but that was sort of expected, given that it was just licensing those shows. The abrupt removal of *original* programming designed as an enticement to sign up for the services was a harsh wakeup call that that was no longer the case, and it reminded us of the value of physical media. I've written about this a bit before: I've got a closet full of DVD and Blu Ray discs that serves as an excellent catalog of shows and movies that I have at my fingertips, including some that I've never come across on a streaming service, like *Dragonslayer*, *Evolution, Forbidden Planet, Titan A.E*., and others. [I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDsA newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/01/IMG_0461.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/physical-media-dvds-blu-ray/) But as we've seen the rise of this new category of original streaming programming, I've got gaps in that collection: I haven't been able to find copies of shows like *The Mandalorian* or *Andor* (not that my collection of *Star Wars* films is complete: I don't have the prequels, *Rise of Skywalker, Rebels*, most of *Clone Wars*, and some others), and if I ever stop subscribing to Disney+, I'll lose access to them. That appears as though it won't be the case: [according to *The Wrap*](https://www.thewrap.com/wandavision-the-mandalorian-loki-4k-blu-ray-release-date-bonus-features/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (h/t to Max Covill of *[It's the Pictures](https://itsthepictures.substack.com/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=web&utm%5Fcampaign=substack%5Fprofile)*), Disney is going to be releasing physical editions of the first seasons of its Marvel shows *Loki* and *Wandavision*, as well as *The Mandalorian*'s first two seasons. They'll be out September 26th, November 28th, and December 12th, respectively, with preorders starting next week. I'm happy to see it: I'll certainly be picking up *The Mandalorian*, and I hope that others, like *Andor*, will follow down the road. In doing so, the company has followed the likes of Paramount, which has consistently been releasing physical home releases of its streaming *Star Trek* shows for a couple of years now: I've picked up a handful over time, and right after *Prodigy* was yanked, I snagged the Blu Ray, and I've made a mental note to grab *Strange New Worlds* season 1 when I see it next. This feels like an important development in this particular phase of the streaming wars. With the shows that have been yanked for business purposes, we're all of a sudden deprived of access to these works: stories that crews and actors worked incredibly hard to produce. With the click of a bunch of buttons, they're now gone until they're returned to public (or subscriber) access. Having a physical copy of the show or film helps keep it circulating, either in private hands, or within libraries or archives. I saw plenty of tweets from creators saying that when those shows went, they also lost access to them: they were never provided with a physical copy of the project they worked on. Removal doesn't just affect streaming subscribers: it's a problem in the gaming world as well: [back in March](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/24/1165711510/nintendo-wiiu-3ds-eshops-closing-digital-archives?ref=andrewliptak.com), Nintendo closed down its WiiU and 3DS stores, eliminating access to hundreds of games that were only available through those outlets. Game archivists spent thousands of dollars to snap up copies before they were gone forever. It's a depressed state of affairs, given the impact that streaming has had on the home video market. There are a lot of reasons for that! I don't dip into my closet o' movies all that often when I'm looking for something to watch, even though it's just a couple of steps away from our TV. It's far easier to scroll through the menus on any of the streaming services we subscribe to. Physical media is also one of those additional expenses, and there's more of a direct like of access for the smaller-budget indie games and movies with streaming. Hopefully, the removal of a bunch of these shows has reinforced the need for there to be at least *some* business rationale for keeping home releases around, if anything, for the security that they provide by taking a little space on a shelf: you'll have it on hand when you can't find it online. ### Even more SF/F books to check out in August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2023-08-19T01:58:38.000Z We've reached the middle of the month, which means its time for another rundown of the science fiction and fantasy books hitting stores this month. In case you missed it, here's the [first list for August](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2023-summer-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/), and you can peruse other monthly lists by checking out the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. A brief announcement/reminder: I'll be appearing at [Trekonderoga 2023](https://startrektour.com/trekonderoga/?ref=andrewliptak.com) tomorrow (Saturday, August 19th) to talk about the history of cosplay (and to judge their cosplay contest!) If you're in the Ticonderoga, NY area, feel free to stop by or let me know if you're going. I've got a short presentation planned. I hope to see you there! As always, you can support the newsletter by signing up as a supporting member: I've discounted memberships for the month of August by 50%: it'll run you $25 annually. Member support isn't required to enjoy TO, but you do get a handful of shorter posts, access to the TO Slack channel (the best alternative that I've found to social media), and you help keep the site running: your support helps with hosting, and the time I take to write it. [Support Transfer Orbit](#/portal/signup) Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and purchasing a book through one also helps support the site. While you're at it, I've also got a book out, *[Cosplay: A History](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534455825?ref=andrewliptak.com)*! Here are 15 SF/F books coming out this month for you to check out: ### *[The Phoenix King](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316522779?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Aparna Verma (August 29th) The Ravani kingdom has long been ruled by a family imbued with the magical ability to control the Eternal Fire. The latest heir to the kingdom is Elena Aadya, who doesn't have that ability, and as her ascension to the throne approaches, she has to find a way to prove that she's worthy of the honor. Complicating matters is the arrival of an assassin who also lays claim to the throne, setting up a dangerous conflict between the two, one that might have ramifications for the rest of the world. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/aparna-verma/phoenix-king/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "this desert world is well developed, with the intricacies of a society, including religion, culture, and race, and the mythology of a phoenix rising supporting the themes of sacrifice, forgiveness, and resilience throughout each character’s point of view." ### *[Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World's Oldest Diaspora](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781515458050?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, edited by Michael A Burstein (August 7th) This looks like an intriguing anthology: a survey of science fiction from the Jewish diaspora, a group with a rich history of storytelling. The book contains 16 stories from authors such as Harry Turtledove, Leah Cypess, Barbara Krasnoff, Steven H Silver, S.I. Rosenbaum & Abraham Josephine Reisman, and more. *Publishers Weekly* [says](publishersweekly.com/9781515458050) "these stories open diverse and challenging vistas for sci-fi fans—Jewish and gentile alike." ### *[Vampires of El Norte](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593436721?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Isabel Cañas (August 15th) A teenager named Nena lives on a farm on the Mexico-Texas border with her parents in the 1840s, and is all too familiar with the threats that they face from white settlers coming down from the North. But there's another monster lurking in the darkness, one that drains its prey of their blood, and something that had once attacked Nena nearly a decade ago, and her best friend Néstor has been haunted by the attack ever since. When the US invades the territory in 1846, the two are brought together again, bringing back harsh memories and the reemergence of a threat that they thought that they'd put behind them. I've started reading this, and I'm enjoying it so far. [Writing for NPR](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194150491/book-review-isabel-canas-vampires-of-el-norte?ref=andrewliptak.com), Gabino Iglesias notes that "At once romance, horror, historical fiction, and an adventure narrative about war, **Vampires of El Norte* elegantly navigates a multiplicity of genres to deliver an engaging story that cements Cañas as one of the best new voices bridging the gap between romance and speculative fiction." ### *[More Voices From the Radium Age](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262546430?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Joshua Glenn (August 1st) I'm a big fan of Joshua Glenn's Radium Age project that he's been running with MIT Press, where he's been helping to reprint a number of early science fiction stories from early 20th century, accompanied by forewords by noted writers and scholars in the field. The latest in the series is an anthology of short fiction from authors like George C. Wallis, Algernon Blackwood, H.G. Wells, Abraham Merritt, and more. [Irradiating SFMIT Press is reissuing Joshua Glenn’s The Radium Age series![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/Blank-8-Grids-Collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/radium-age/) In addition to this volume, there are two more installments that have come out: [*The Napoleon of Notting Hill*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262546416?ref=andrewliptak.com)by G.K. Chesterton (about a prankster named Auberon Quin, who becomes king and mandates that each London neighborhood turn into its own medieval state, which leads to some complications when one citizen becomes a military leader) and *[The Night Land](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780262546423?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by William Hope Hodgson (about a future where humans live underground and who come under attack from all manner of strange beings.) ### *[The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250883063?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by T.L. Huchu (August 29th) I enjoyed T.L. Huchu's **Library of the Dead* when I picked it up a while back, and this next installment of his Edinburgh Nights series looks like an intriguing read. An urban fantasy set in a post-climate change world, we follow ghostalker Ropa as she attends a magical conference for the Society of Skeptical Enquirers when an artifact goes missing, putting the entire castle that they're staying in on lockdown. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250883063?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Ropa’s investigation is thrilling, but Huchu’s real skill lies in crafting a magical contemporary world that feels familiar yet filled with its own secrets, replete with analogous political situations and pop culture references that never feel out of place." ### *[Dune Part One: The Photography](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647228989?ref=andrewliptak.com)* byChiabella James (August 15th) I was a big fan of Denis Villeneuve's *Dune*, and while we wait for the next installment to drop later this year, there's a new behind the scenes book to tide us over: *Dune Part One: The Photography*. This is by photographer [Chiabella James](https://www.chiabellajames.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it comes with a preface by actor Rebecca Ferguson, a foreword by Tanya Lapointe (who wrote the fantastic *[The Art and Soul of Dune](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647221553?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), and an afterword by Brian Herbert. ### [*Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence*](https://www.amazon.com/Cyberpunk-2077-Coincidence-Rafal-Kosik-ebook/dp/B0BHSLST7P/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?asc%5Fcampaign=kinjagizmodolink-20&asc%5Frefurl=https://gizmodo.com/70-new-books-list-august-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-authors-1850604276&asc%5Fsource=&tag=kinjagizmodolink-20&ref=andrewliptak.com) by Rafał Kosik Rafal Kosik spins out a story set in the same world as the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (which I still need to play), in which a group of strangers have launched a bold heist: they've stolen a shipping container from a miltech convoy. They've each been blackmailed into participating, and now, they have to overcome their differences and secrets in order to work together to pull off another job. ### [*More Perfect*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982142834?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Temi Oh (August 15th) In the nearish future, people have access to a digital network called Panopticon, an social media platform in the form of an AR world. With that sort of access to London's population, the government has slowly crept in to make the network mandatory, creating more of a dystopian state. In her review for the *Washington Post*, [Charlie Jane Anders says](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/08/17/huang-googins-white-scifi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Every time you think you know where “More Perfect” is heading, Oh makes you guess again. She expertly shows why people love being endlessly connected and how our technology can heal us, while slowly revealing the downside. Through it all, she finds time for a haunting love story and an exploration of trauma." ### *[Forged by Blood](https://www.amazon.com/Forged-Blood-Novel-Tainted-Duology-ebook/dp/B0BLST6J4N/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?asc%5Fcampaign=kinjagizmodolink-20&asc%5Frefurl=https://gizmodo.com/70-new-books-list-august-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-authors-1850604276&asc%5Fsource=&tag=kinjagizmodolink-20&ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ehigbor Okosun (August 8th) Dèmi is trying to survive in the midst of an invasion of her homeland Ife. Her people, the magical Oluso, are being brutally murdered by the Ajes, and she has to stay under the radar with her mother while learning a terrifying form of blood magic. When her mother is killed, she's spurred to vengeance: when the opportunity arises to kidnap an Aje prince, she jumps at the chance. But she discovers that she has more in common with her victim than she thought, and her mission becomes even more dangerous as she and her few allies work to gain a voice in a system designed to silence them, all while discovering some lost family secrets that tie in with her growing powers. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-311262-9?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Okosun’s elaborate worldbuilding is lavishly detailed and meticulously constructed, but it never feels overwhelming. The result is an impressive and refreshingly original page-turner that will leave readers eagerly awaiting the second volume." ### [*Devil's Gun*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250269355?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Cat Rambo (August 29th) In this sequel to Cat Rambo's novel *[You Sexy Thing](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250269300?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, the crew of the titular ship are on the run from a pirate king, and the route they were planning on taking isn't working. While they're waiting for a fix, they do what they do best: set up a restaurant to serve the other waiting ships. Things start to go sideways when an archeologist shows up with a potential solution: a long-lost weapon that could help fend off the looming threat that is Tubal Last. *Publishers Weekly* [notes](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250269355?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Rambo has a knack for conjuring extraterrestrial speech and thought patterns, the camaraderie between the crew is heartwarming, and the far-out foodie descriptions are wonderfully bizarre." ### *[Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780756418267?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Wole Talabi (August 8th) In this debut novel, Shigidi nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company who tolerates the prayers of those believers who still remain. When he meets a mysterious succubus named Nneoma, he realizes that he has another path before him, and together, work to get away from the chains of godhood that bind him, while also contending with her past as they form a growing relationship. Writing in *Lightspeed Magazine*, Aigner Loren Wilson [says](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-shigidi-and-the-brass-head-of-obalufon-by-wole-talabi/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "with its blend of Nigerian mythology, anticapitalistic themes, and modern-day fantasy worldbuilding, the book is a must-read for fans of heisty fantasy thrill rides. Talabi’s writing style is engaging and immersive, and the book’s themes of revenge, self-discovery, and the power of belief are thought-provoking and timely." ### [*Star Wars: Triple Zero*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593722169?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Karen Traviss (August 15th) If asked what my top three favorite *Star Wars* novels are, one of my absolute favorites is Karen Traviss's first Republic Commando novel *[Hard Contact](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599495?ref=andrewliptak.com)* is near the top of that list. It's a great military science fiction novel that digs deep into the clones and their role in the Clone Wars. It was re-released earlier this year as part of the Essential Legends Collection, and it's now followed by its sequel *Triple Zero*, which follows the Omega Squad clones as they tackle a new Separatist threat on Coruscant, where they have to team up with their counterparts from Delta Squad. ### *[Where Peace is Lost](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063085930?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Valerie Valdes (August 29th) Kelana Gardavros was a soldier who lost everything in the war against the Pale empire, and is now a refugee living in an isolated solar system, hiding from enemies that would destroy worlds to eliminate her. When a Pale war machine is abruptly reactivated, it poses a threat to Kel's new home, and she agrees to lead a pair of strangers to the machine to deactivate it, bringing about more dangers while the secrets that she holds might doom her and her friends. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/Where-Peace-Is-Lost-by-Valerie-Valdes-SFF-Pick-of-the-Month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Terrific action sequences do not detract from the emotional arc that Kel follows as a war survivor. Valdes delivers with her epic worldbuilding and characterizations in this sharp and poignant novel." ### *Star Wars: [Outbound Flight](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593600603?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and [*Survivor's Quest*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593600610?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Timothy Zahn (August 15th) Another entry on the Essential Legends Collection are Timothy Zahn's *Outbound Flight* and *Survivor's Quest.* These two books are set before and after Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. The first, *Outbound Flight*, follows the story of Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth, who set up an expedition into unknown space and ends up running into a familiar blue figure. In *Survivor's Quest*, Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade embark on a new quest to recover the remains of the Outbound Flight project and a Jedi artifact within. --- That's all for tonight: I've got to get ready for the con tomorrow. Thanks as always for reading! Let me know what catches your eye from this batch of books, and what you've been reading lately. Andrew ### Looking for future wars URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-science-fiction-ficint-mark-jacobsen/ Last updated: 2023-08-17T16:03:32.000Z Military science fiction is a topic that I'm personally interested in. Back in 2014, I co-edited *War Stories: New Military Science Fiction* with Jaym Gates, and I've written about it extensively over the years since, particular with an eye toward how militaries and leaders have used science fiction as a way to imagine the future of warfare. One of the authors that we included in the anthology was [Mark Jacobsen](https://markdjacobsen.com/about-me/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (you can read his story, "The Wasp Keepers" [here](https://cimsec.org/wasp-keepers/?ref=andrewliptak.com)), who's had an exciting and ecclectic career in the military since. He recently wrote an excellent paper about the growing trend of military fiction imagining a conflict between the US and China: "The Uses and Limits of Speculative Fiction: Three Novels about a US–China War." [The Uses and Limits of Speculative Fiction: Three Novels about a US–China WarThis book review critically examines three recent speculative fiction novels that depict a hypothetical war between the United States and China: Ghost Fleet, 2034, and White Sun![](https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SiteAssets/images/Prop-Wings.ico?ver=eMdgbHgj4bSBexGXAASWAg%3d%3d)Air University (AU)JACOBSEN, MARK D Col USAF AETC AWC/DEI![](https://media.defense.gov/2023/Aug/11/2003279588/2000/2000/0/230811-F-YT915-001.JPG)](https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/3490715/the-uses-and-limits-of-speculative-fiction-three-novels-about-a-uschina-war/?ref=andrewliptak.com) Jacobsen looks at three recent books (and cites one of my pieces!): P.W. Singer and August Cole's *[Ghost Fleet](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544705050?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman's *[2034](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984881274?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and Mick Ryan's *[White Sun War](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781636242507?ref=andrewliptak.com),* and through them, looks broadly at the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in using fiction as a tool for imagining the future of war. It's a good, critical look at each book, and he notes that "if military speculative fiction authors wish to shape tomorrow’s military leaders and influence real-world policy discussions, the quality of their ideas matters." He points out some of the issues with each book in turn: it's a good reminder that these books and thought-experiments are tools, rather than proscriptions or roadmaps for what lies ahead. Some further reading on this topic: \- [How the US military uses sci-fi to imagine the future of war](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/) \- [The \[AI\]nformation battlespace](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-ai-nformation-battlespace/) \- [Imagining the breakdown](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cybersecurity-ransomware-national-security-ghost-fleet-burn-in-2034/) \- [New ways of war](https://www.andrewliptak.com/new-model-army-adam-roberts-military-science-fiction/) ### I love watching a craftsperson at work URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/tears-of-the-kingdom-model-3d-print-making/ Last updated: 2023-08-15T15:19:53.000Z I've been sinking a lot of hours into *Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*, the sequel to *Breath of the Wild*. I've always had an affinity for the Zelda franchise, ever [since my parents got me a Gameboy with *Link's Awakening*](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/4/14783860/the-legend-of-zelda-links-awakening-gameboy-color?ref=andrewliptak.com). *Breath of the Wild* holds a particularly special place in my heart, given that it was a fresh take on the franchise with a *phenomenal* open world, and because I have a ton of very happy memories playing it with Bram, who was a little over 4 at the time. ([His Halloween costume that year was of Link's Hylian outfit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2017/11/02/breath-of-the-wild-link-hylian-outfit-legend-of-zelda-cosplay-build)) So, *Tears of the Kingdom* has been a lot of fun: Bram's a bit older now, and he's been breezing through the game quicker than I have, and it's been fun to play alongside him and revisit this really incredible world with some new eyes. The game's quite a bit different: there's new abilities, tools, and monsters, and it's enough that it's still fresh and exciting. One of the things that I've enjoyed quite a bit is a feature called Ultrahand, which allows you to fuse items together into all sorts of configurations. Couple that with some neat technologies, and you can make all sorts of neat things. My favorite thus far? A hover bike, which has two big fans joined together by a control stick, allowing you to glide over Hyrule's landscapes with ease. It's an elegant vehicle, and when I came across [this very cool video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWrvJZwqZaU&ref=andrewliptak.com) from a Japanese maker, I was captivated. She 3D printed the entire model, and over the course of the video, you get to see her print, assemble, paint it. I always like watching craftspeople at work, and this is a cool example of watching someone making something complicated look easy. You can see it in how she's taped off the different things for painting, how everything snaps together nicely, and how it just looks beautiful by the end. You can subscribe to her channel [here](https://www.youtube.com/@qshyj?mibextid=Zxz2cZ&ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Quantifiables URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/prosecraft-writing-entertainment-ratings/ Last updated: 2023-08-11T17:02:53.000Z It's been a while since I've done a regular roundup edition, so here you go. For those of you newcomers, this is something I try and do weekly at the end of the week: a roundup of various news things that've been taking place in the SF/F world, along with a slightly longer thing about something that's been on my mind in this space. A couple of housekeeping things first: - I've dropped the price of a *Transfer Orbit* supporting membership by 50%! You can sign up to support the newsletter (which helps with hosting and all sorts of other things) [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/membership/). Signing up gets you into a vibrant Slack channel, which has been a delight, and a good replacement for social media. If you're someone with a lapsed subscription, I'd love to invite you back, and if you're new to the newsletter, your support is greatly appreciated. - Speaking of social media, Twitter's imploded. I'm not posting there as much (and it's really only links to new *Transfer Orbit* posts and book pictures). I've joined the requisite other social media channels and I'm sort of seeing what plays out as the place for the SF/F community. Thus far? I'm enjoying Bluesky, (you can find me there [@andrewliptak.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/andrewliptak.bsky.social?ref=andrewliptak.com)), which has the same vibes as early Twitter. You can also find me on [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@andrewliptak?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@liptakaa?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Substack](https://substack.com/@andrewliptak?ref=andrewliptak.com). - I've got an upcoming event! I'll be at Trekonderoga again at the Star Trek Original Series Tours in Fort Ticonderoga to talk about the history of cosplay. That'll be on August 19th at 1:00PM. It'll be a bit of an informal chat, but I'll bring some slides and some hands-on items. Later in the afternoon, I'll be one of the judges for the cosplay contest at 4:00pm. [You can find details about the event here](https://startrektour.com/trekonderoga/schedule/?ref=andrewliptak.com#2023-saturday). --- ## Quantifiables The larger writing world found itself up in arms over the last week over the existence of a literature analytics product called Prosecraft. The product came from a computer scientist named Benji Smith, who [founded Shaxpir in 2015](https://blog.shaxpir.com/introducing-shaxpir-69f58f63c036?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [Prosecraft in 2017](https://blog.shaxpir.com/prosecraft-linguistics-for-literature-8721473c753b?ref=andrewliptak.com) as a tool to help writers with their writing by comparing them to other writers. It used some analytics to figure out the general word count of thousands of stories, and analyzed them for things like vividness and passive voice. It doesn't look like the site did anything to actually display the books for the general public, but the outcry began on Monday when an author, Zach Rosenberg, found his book on the platform and [demanded its removal](https://twitter.com/ZachRoseWriter/status/1688561466356486145?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1688561466356486145%7Ctwgr%5E8f20dd4a2998b3ceab124c4a2a5e76f8dfcbbe6e%7Ctwcon%5Es1%5F&ref%5Furl=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fembed%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-1688561466356486145autosize%3D1&ref=andrewliptak.com). It was a pebble that started a landslide: the tweet went viral as authors went and searched for their own books, and found them listed there. To his credit (I've seen too many tech folks double down and try and bluster their way out), Benji listened, apologized, and [took the site down the next day](https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121?ref=andrewliptak.com), and says that he's removed the data associated with it in the [latest Shaxpir release](https://blog.shaxpir.com/shaxpir-4-6-0-released-prosecraft-derived-data-removed-f1d9a3bd9d44?ref=andrewliptak.com). The larger writing community has been rubbed raw with the onslaught and threat that generative artificial intelligence (as someone I saw in passing described it: applied statistics) poses to the humanities: products like ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney have plenty of people worried about their livelihoods and how it can winnow down an already precarious calling. It feels like we're at a tipping point: a major writer's strike has crossed its 100th day and I've heard anecdotally about book contracts held up over publisher demands for rights related to AI, all on top of a community that's been held at the whims of tech giants like Amazon (which has its [own issues with AI](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/09/amazon-removes-books-generated-by-ai-for-sale-under-authors-name?ref=andrewliptak.com)). There's little wonder in my mind that authors and readers would collectively explode at a product that's designed to take their words and boil them down into quantifiable nuggets. I think folks are perfectly justified to be angry. Prosecraft strikes me as something that's incredibly useful in an academic sense (Smith even cites the work that the University of Vermont's [Computational Story Lab](https://www.compstorylab.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), where a friend of mine has been using these types of big-data analytics to measure [happiness](https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/inside-lab-thats-quantifying-happiness/?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [emotional resonance in fiction](https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/uvm-researchers-measure-emotion-in-stories/Content?oid=3899808&ref=andrewliptak.com) and the [basic framework of stories that we tell](https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1?ref=andrewliptak.com). As a commercial product from a company, I'm having a little more trouble squaring the "fair use" that Smith claims his borrowing of books falls under, and the tech mentality of just hoovering up words for their projects. I think there's some amount of nuance and well-minded intentions that are lost in the outcry. I don't think it'll be the last time we see something similar take place. I'm less interested in the nuts and bolts of the arguments that have taken place over the last week, but something that's been on my mind for a while now: our tendency to boil things down into quantifiable chunks. Here's an example: I went to see *Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny* the other week, and had a good time. It didn't quite feel like the past films that I've enjoyed, but that's nostalgia for you. The film didn't do [terribly well at the box office](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/box-office-indiana-jones-5-opening-weekend-disappointment-1235660071/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and it's been accompanied by a narrative that (largely from bad-faith trolls and traffic-focused websites, as well as [bigger, legitimate entertainment sites](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/disney-box-office-failures-indiana-jones-elemental-ant-man-1235660409/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from what I can see) Disney is in serious trouble. Indeed, CEO Bob Iger's noted that they're going to course-correct a bit. [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) This isn't just an *Indiana Jones* thing: a quick look around on Twitter will find people debating the merits of things like Marvel's *Secret Invasion, She-Hulk,* and *Ant-Man 3* or DC's *Black Adam* and *The Flash.* Bad-faith trolls looking for any reason to hate Lucasfilm [gleefully pointed out ](https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/11/14/after-extremely-poor-viewership-ratings-disney-to-push-first-two-episodes-of-andor-to-abc-fx-hulu-and-freeform/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that *Andor*'s ratings was proof-positive that the company hated its own flagship product and its fans. There are structural things embedded in this mindset: the requirements of a publicly-funded company to turn regular (large) profits, and a shrinking away of any sort of idea of any sort of longevity that a series might enjoy over a long period of time. Given that streaming services have been quick to pull shows (like *[Pantheon](https://www.andrewliptak.com/amc-pantheon-ken-liu-science-fiction-cancelled/)*, *Willow* or *Star Trek Prodigy*) and movies ([like Batgirl](https://www.andrewliptak.com/batgirl-warner-bros-discovery-hbo-max-canceled-streaming-services/) or *Crater*) off their platforms only adds to the anxiety and pressure for everything to be a hit off the bat. The consequences are dire for creators: the pressure for those works to not just succeed, but wildly succeed with a massive box office hit means that studios and publishers are going to be less likely to buy or distribute new stories. It means more resources for big-name franchises like Star Wars and Marvel and DC, and fewer on more innovative, interesting, and original works. [I'm very eager to see Gareth Edwards' upcoming film *The* ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/creator-gareth-edwards-scifi-movie-trailer/)*[Creator](https://www.andrewliptak.com/creator-gareth-edwards-scifi-movie-trailer/)*, because it's one of those films that looks fantastic, and has a promising story and cast. But it's also one of those films that feels like the headlines are already being written about a lackluster box office draw and how it has a story that doesn't immediately upend genre and convention. Too often, the success or failure on films, comics, TV shows, or novels are boiled down to mere metrics, as though the power of a story has anything to do with the lifetime box office haul, the number of awards or nominations something receives, its overall star rating on Goodreads or Amazon. Numbers are tangible instruments. They're easy to use as a shorthand to convey *something* about the story as a product: how popular it is, how many copies its sold, and even measuring how emotional or passive it is. Metrics like this can be useful, but only if they're used in specific ways. The larger, cultural way we've reduced our enjoyment to quantification, how we treat the stories we read and watch as mere consumable content doesn't strike me as a healthy way forward for the arts as a whole. I think there are reasons for how we've gotten this way: the lack of focus and emphasis on the social sciences and arts, the general online environment and for what passes for arts criticism, and even our biological inability to parse nuance, ambiguity. That's why a project like Prosecraft, and the generative-AI platforms – and why the entire argument for their use and existence feels so hollow to me. Art, whether it's the written word, a painting, a television series, is contingent on the decisions that we make that come out of our own experiences or emotions. It's not content for the sake of more things to watch, but an effort to struggle toward some sort of understanding of the world around us. Distilling that human experience into bits and blocks runs counter to that impulse. The tech bros who proclaim they're unlocking the secret to becoming an author or creator miss the point: they key to a good story isn't about the average length of books or how many times you use the word "was": it's about the journey itself, the deeply personal understanding that we have with a work. (That's not to say that we don't make compromises to bring those stories to market when it comes to things like word count or genre, but I strongly think that those criteria should *never* be the starting point.) This is what frustrates me about the endless stream of star ratings (and why I don't issue a rating anytime I review a book) or the technical arguments about a box office haul or critics average rating pulled out of the cloud by random Twitter users or YouTubers. It's a meaningless argument that often ignores the substance of the story, either through critical ignorance or because it's inconvenient. We rely on these hard numbers or repeat the same rote critical statements ("*Ghostbusters* had a good cast, but it just wasn't funny" comes to mind) because they're something tangible to hold onto that we can repeat over and over until we've created a bland, tasteless world where no enjoyment can be found, aided and abetted by platforms that spit out words shaped like stories at us. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3121.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently reading I've finished a couple of books recently: S.L. Coney's *[Wild Spaces](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250866837?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, which was an intriguing horror story set along the Carolina coast. ([Here's my review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sl-coney-wild-spaces-lovecraftian-horror/).) Before that, I read and finished Arkady Martine's *[Rose/House](https://www.amazon.com/Rose-House-Arkady-Martine-ebook/dp/B0C2ZSJW3P?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, a very interesting book about artificial intelligence and architecture. ([Review](https://www.andrewliptak.com/review-arkady-martini-rose-house/)) Most recently, I finished S.A. Cosby's *[All the Sinners Bleed](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=andrewliptak.com),* which was fantastic. (Expect a short review of that at some point in the next week or so.) I'm slowly climbing out of the rut that I've felt like I've been stuck in for a while. Currently on the to-read list: - *[Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese Rpgs in the West](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780762479634?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Aidan Moher. This has been on my to-read list for a while, and I've been slowly picking away at it (Sorry, Aidan!) I'm enjoying it though – it's a segment of nerd history that I'm not overly familiar with, so I'm learning a lot. - *[White Sun War](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781636242507?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Mick Ryan. Another one that I've been picking away at for a little while: it's a FicInt ([more about that here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/military-scifi-future-of-war-ficint-writing-warfare/)) about a war between China and Taiwan. - *[In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont’s Winooski River](https://www.amazon.com/Land-Wild-Onion-Vermonts-Winooski/dp/158465550X?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Charles Fish. I went canoeing over the weekend with my son, something I haven't done in a while. I've loved doing it over the years, and it reminded me that I've had a copy of this book that I've been wanting to read ever since a museum guest pointed me in its direction. Thus far, it's excellent: a wide-ranging overview of the natural and social history of the Winooski. (This one's out of print: I have [one copy for sale through the Vermont Historical Society](https://vermont-historical-society-museum.square.site/product/in-the-land-of-the-wild-onion-travels-along-vermont-s-winooski-river/1102?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category%5Fid=9&ref=andrewliptak.com) if that seems like it's your jam.) - *[Translation State](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ann Leckie. Another one that I've been picking away at: it's excellent thus far. - *[The Icarus Plot](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Timothy Zahn. This has been lingering on my to-read list for a while (there's a trend here...), which is a crime: Zahn's The Icarus Hunt is one of my all-time favs. I'm liking it, although I'm not a huge fan of the audiobook's narrator. Also on the longer list of things that I've been reading? Adam Rowe's excellent book about 1970s scifi art, *[Worlds Beyond Time](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and the first couple of issues of The Expanse comic *Dragon Tooth*. --- ## Further reading It's been a [moment since I've done a roundup post](https://www.andrewliptak.com/writing-ai-science-fiction-chatgpt-midjourney/), but there are a whole bunch of interesting pieces that I've had bookmarked that are worth checking out. Plus, stuff you might have missed. **Book Merch**. Something I've long held important for book publishing: it's important for publishers to do more than just publish a book. They should also be thinking about how to foster communities and fandom around books and authors. (See my [piece about Brandon Sanderson's recent project](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/)). *Esquire*'s Madeline Diamond [looks some of those efforts](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a44449495/book-publishing-influencer-merch-explained/?ref=andrewliptak.com) are that publishers are undertaking. **C'mon Barbie let's go cosplay**. I [spoke with Raechal Shewfelt of *Yahoo Entertainment*](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/barbie-why-people-are-dressing-up-theaters-194840939.html?guccounter=1&ref=andrewliptak.com) about the trend of folks dressing up to watch the Barbie movie, and a bit about why we dress up in the first place. **Disparities in flood plains**. [I wrote a bit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-raging-waters/) [about the flooding](https://www.andrewliptak.com/barre-vermont-historical-society-museum-collections-libraries-flooding/) that we experienced here, but this [piece](https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/in-a-mobile-home-park-devastated-by-flood-shock-sadness-and-frustration-take-hold/Content?oid=38696236&ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Seven Days*' Colin Flanders is essential, heartbreaking reading, especially this bit: > "A few miles away in flood-struck downtown Montpelier, volunteers were grilling food, handing out water bottles and pitching in on cleanups. And here the couple were, in one of the area's poorer neighborhoods, and not a helping hand in sight? > Andrews thought he knew why: "Nobody gives a fuck about a trailer park." ### Dragon Award Finalists Dragon Con is coming up, and with it, this year's Dragon Awards. Here's the list of finalists, and it's a pretty good one: [The 2023 Dragon Award FinalistsA snapshot of the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror of 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3120.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-con-2023-finalists-leckie-kuang-tchaikovsky-zahn/) **Horror's new Golden Age**. *Equire*'s Neil McRobert [published a cool report](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a44491190/new-golden-age-horror-fiction/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about some of the horror genre's new, diverse voices, like Gemma Amor, Paula D. Ashe, V. Castro, Cassandra Khaw, Eric LaRocca, Alison Rumfitt, Hailey Piper, and Ally Wilkes. ### Hugo Awards The Hugo Awards are coming up later this fall, and after some bumps and bruises, we've got our list of finalists. [Here are the 2023 Hugo Award FinalistsAward ballots are generally a good barometer for the state of a community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2573.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-finalists/) **Lando's back!** One of the projects that I think just about everyone's given up on was Disney's *Solo* spinoff, *Lando*. Lucasfilm [announced the series back in 2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-future-of-the-star-wars-cinematic-telematic-universe/), but it's sort of fallen off the radar (along with a [whole bunch of other projects](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-damon-lindelof-justin-britt-gibson-movie/)) since. Now, [it looks like it's back on](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/donald-glover-stephen-write-lando-series-disney-justin-simien-exits-1235681988/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and written by none other than Lando himself, Donald Glover. I'm enthused for this: Glover was pitch-perfect casting for the character, and he's an excellent writer – just watch his series *Atlanta*. Hopefully this'll continue to move forward. **More books to add to your TBR**. Here's the book list for [July](https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-martin-star-wars-tingle-firefly/), and here's the first one for [August](https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2023-summer-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/). I'll have another one out next week. **New Nnedi Okorafor for 2025**. This [book sounds very, very good](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/92733-book-deals-week-of-july-10-2023.html?ref=andrewliptak.com): Okorafor sold *The Africanfuturist*, a story about an SF/F author and the cost of the success that she finds. It's described as "a multi-threaded meta drama examining the relationship between a story and its teller, the labyrinth of African diasporic identity, family, and what makes us human.” **OpenAI Lawsuit**. A couple of author – Paul Tremblay amongst them – [have filed lawsuits against OpenAI](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a-lawsuit-against-openai-for-unlawfully-ingesting-their-books?ref=andrewliptak.com), alleging that the company has been using their books without permission. ### Pokémon and Local History I write a newsletter for the Vermont Historical Society, and to break up the doom and gloom about the recent floods, I wanted to look at something a little more fun. Specifically, how *Pokémon GO* is a great way to discover local history in your community. [Hidden gemsDiscovering your local history with some help from some tiny pocket monsters![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/pokemon-go.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/pokemon-go-local-history-vermont-historical-society/) ### Sandwich Shop Capitalism Subway announced that it'll give away free food to a lucky (?) individual who changes their first name to Subway. It reminded me of an excellent novel, Max Barry's *Jennifer Government*. [Sandwich shop captialismMax Barry’s Jennifer Government holds up exceptionally two decades after its release![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2930.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jennifer-government-max-barry-subway-sandwich/) **Scary AI**. Noted cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling has an [oped in *Newsweek*](https://www.newsweek.com/2023/07/21/ai-scariest-beast-ever-created-says-sci-fi-writer-bruce-sterling-1809439.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the threat that AI poses: "Gold rushes always finish ugly, and this AI rush is another one of those. It will resemble that glamorous Atomic Age transition from "energy too cheap to meter" to "garbage too expensive to bury." ### Shirley Jackson Winners At ReaderCon last month, the Shirley Jackson Awards announced the winner of this year's prize. [Here are the winners of the 2022 Shirley Jackson AwardsThis year’s excellence in dark fiction from last year![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1494861895304-fb272971c078?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDd8fHBlYmJsZXN8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjg5Njg1NzAzfDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-shirley-jackson-awards-readercon-horror/) **Trailers!** All the trailers! San Diego Comic-Con has come and gone, so we're at the point in the year where we're hitting the publicity point for a whole bunch of upcoming projects. We've had new ones for *[Ahsoka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J%5F1EXWNETiI&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Blue Beatle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wxyy8Rcz4k&ref=andrewliptak.com), [The Changeling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3jjAm2dBeo&ref=andrewliptak.com), [The Creator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex3C1-5Dhb8&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Dune](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-two-trailer-watch/),* [*Loki* season 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dug56u8NN7g&ref=andrewliptak.com), *[The Marvels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS%5FqbDztgVY&ref=andrewliptak.com),* and a whole bunch of others. --- ### Here are the finalists for the 2023 Dragon Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-con-2023-finalists-leckie-kuang-tchaikovsky-zahn/ Last updated: 2023-08-10T12:58:46.000Z Dragon Con, the enormous, multimedia convention that takes place annually in Atlanta, Georgia, is coming this Labor Day weekend. In advance of that, it's [announced](https://www.dragoncon.org/awards/2023-dragon-award-ballot/?ref=andrewliptak.com) its finalists for the annual Dragon Award, now in its eighth year. The award [originated as something of a populist, counter-Hugo Award project](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/13/12461038/dragon-awards-shortlist-dragoncon-science-fiction-fantasy?ref=andrewliptak.com) from certain segments of fandom, then roiling in a bad-faith controversy over the Hugo from a bunch of right-wing jackasses looking to advance a culture war front. It had some [stumbling points](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16118054/john-scalzi-alison-littlewood-dragon-awards-controversy-sci-fi-horror?ref=andrewliptak.com), but in the years since, it's become something of a wide-ranging award that hasn't devolved into the sort of alt-right vanity prize that most people expected. (Here are the finalists from [2021](https://www.andrewliptak.com/here-are-the-2021-dragon-award-finalists/) and [2022](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dragon-awards-2022-dragoncon-sci-fi-fantasy/).) The award does have a different flavor than that of the Hugo and Nebula, and it's – in my mind – a good demonstration that the science fiction community isn't a monolith of tastes and preferences. This year's awards feels like it's a good snapshot of big parts of the SF/F world: you've got some critical heavyweights like Ann Leckie, Martha Wells, and R.F. Kuang, as well as some super-popular authors like Brandon Sanderson and Timothy Zahn. Overall, it feels like a ballot that aligns nicely with my own tastes and that of this newsletter's, and I hope that it'll remain that way. The nice thing about it is that you don't need to be attending the con to take part: [voting is now open to the general public](https://application.dragoncon.net/dc%5Ffan%5Fawards%5Fsignup.php?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here's the full list of finalists: ### Best Science Fiction Novel - **Eversion* by Alastair Reynolds - **The Spare Man* by Mary Robinette Kowal - **Children of Memory* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - **Translation Slate* by Ann Leckie - **Neom* by Lavie Tidhar - **The Daughter of Doctor Moreau* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - **The Icarus Plot* by Timothy Zahn ### Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal) - **The Witch King* by Martha Wells - **Tower of Silence* by Larry Correia - **Babel* by R. F. Kuang - **Tress of the Emerald Sea* by Brandon Sanderson - **Into the Vortex* by Charles E. Gannon - **The Atlas Paradox* by Olivie Blake ### Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel - **The Golden Enclaves* by Naomi Novik - **The Scratch Daughters* by H. A. Clarke - **Rust in the Root* by Justina Ireland - **Academy Arcanist* by Shami Stovall - **Foul Lady Fortune* by Chloe Gong - **Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn ### Best Alternate History Novel - **Lost In Time* by A.G. Riddle - **Hidden Voices* by Dan Willis - **Halcyon* by Elliot Ackerman - **The Mother* by B.L. Blanchard - **The Revolutionary War* by Christopher G. Nuttall ### Best Horror Novel - **The Devil Takes You Home* by Gabino Iglesias - **Reluctant Immortals* by Gwendolyn Kiste - **A House With Good Bones* by T. Kingfisher - **No Gods For Drowning* by Hailey Piper - **The Pallbearers Club* by Paul Tremblay - **The Only One Left* by Riley Sager ### Best Illustrative Cover - **Ashes of Man* by Kieran Yanner - **River of Ashes* by Sam Shearon - **But Not Broken* by Cedar Sanderson - **Titan Mage: Apocalypse* by Jackson Tjota - **Tower of Silence* by Kurt Miller - **Wraithbound* by Jeff Brown ****Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel** - **Dune: House Harkonnen* by Brian Herbert, Kevin J Anderson, Michael Shelfer **Kaya* by Wes Craig - **Dawn of DC: Green Arrow* by Joshua Williamson, Sean Izaakse - **Wolverine* by Benjamin Percy, Juan Jose Ryp - **X-Men* by Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara - **Night Fever* by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Jacob Phillips ****Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet** - **Andor*, Disney+ - **The Last of Us*, HBO - **The Sandman*, Netflix - **Strange New Worlds*, Paramount+ - **The Mandalorian*, Disney+ - **Picard*, Paramount+ - **House of the Dragon*, HBO ### Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie - **Avatar: The Way of Water* by James Cameron - **Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves* by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley - **Everything Everywhere All at Once* by Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert - **Guardians of the Galaxy 3* by James Gunn - **Puss in Boots: The Last Wish* by Joel Crawford - **Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse* by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson ### Best Digital Game - **Diablo IV*, Blizzard Entertainment - **Hogwarts Legacy*, Avalanche Software - **Star Wars Jedi: Survivor*, Respawn Entertainment - **The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*, Nintendo EPD - **Overwatch 2*, Blizzard Entertainment - **Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II*, Infinity Ward ### Best Tabletop Game - *Frosthaven*, Cephalofair Games - *Earth*, Inside Up Games - *Magic the Gathering: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth*, Wizards of the Coast - *Dorfromantik – The Boardgame*, Pegasus Spiele - *Turing Machine*, Scorpion Masque - *Alien Role-playing Game: Heart of Darkness*, Free League ### Hidden gems URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/pokemon-go-local-history-vermont-historical-society/ Last updated: 2023-08-10T12:00:01.000Z In my day job at the Vermont Historical Society I write a bi-weekly newsletter about the state of things for the organization, History Happenings. I wanted to write up something a little less serious than the flooding that we've been focused on, so I decided to write about a topic that I've been wanting to jot down for a while: using *Pokémon GO* to discover various historical points of interest in your community. I've expanded on the original version a bit. You can sign up for VHS's newsletter [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io). In 2016, a gaming studio called Niantic launched an "Augmented Reality" (AR) game called *Pokémon GO,* a new installment on the popular entertainment franchise. The game was a big deal when it launched: I remember looking at the traffic figures for *The Verge*, and every story was pulling in sky-high hits from our readers. There was a lot to cover: frantic [New Yorkers causing traffic jams trying to catch a Vaporeon](https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/16/12205440/pokemon-go-crowds-central-park?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Iranian officials banning the game](https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/16/12205440/pokemon-go-crowds-central-park?ref=andrewliptak.com), and a couple of [dead](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36757858?ref=andrewliptak.com) [bodies](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-diego-dead-body-pokemon-go-20160715-snap-story.html?ref=andrewliptak.com). The game had something like 230 million players at its start, and that meant a ton of people getting out and about trying out the game, and as a result, a lot of them started learning a bit more about their local communities. The first *Pokémon* games came out in 1996, and ever since, it's captured the imagination of children and adults throughout the world through the card and video games, TV shows, movies, and merchandise that's followed. The basic concept of the franchise is that it's a world where trainers roam around capturing and befriending creatures called Pokémon. The franchise has been popular because of its collaborative nature: players often work and play together to collect and advance in the various games. (It's worth watching this [excellent explainer from Youtuber Kaptain Kristain to learn more about the premise, history, and appeal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZObWVuoajsY&ref=andrewliptak.com)). When *Pokémon GO* arrived in 2016, it brought a new spin on the world by bringing it into the real world. Through an app on one's phone, players walk around and collect the creatures they encounter, and while they're doing so, they spin points in the game known as Pokestops or Gyms. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3096-1.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak This is where things get interesting for us historians: the game uses digital maps to orient its players, and its uses the data in them to place those stops, designating certain criteria for where they were initially, automatically placed. Those locations were often community spots, like churches, libraries, statues, parks, and historic markers. In the years since the game launched, the company has opened the map up to players, allowing them to place requests for stops. The basic requirements for those stops is that they need to be interesting or educational, have a cool story, and have ready access (schools, private properties, public safety, non-permanent or natural locations, or adult-oriented locations aren't eligible.) Once a user submits a location, they're then voted on by other players, and if approved, it goes live in the game for players to find. The result of all this is a tiny spotlight placed on a point of interest in one's community. Here in Barre, we've noted a number of historic locations live in the game: the Vermont History Center has its own stop (as does the Vermont History Museum, and State House), as does the Robert Burns statue in front of the building. The Youth Triumphant statue has one, as well as most historic markers, like Currier Park just around the corner from us. But there are also plenty of other stops that can't help but capture our interest. Walking down Barre's streets, you'll find stops for the Fork Shop (The Trow & Holden Company), Barre's Masonic Granite Lodge No. 35, the Barre Granite Association Plaque, the sign for the Granite Savings Bank & Trust Company (1888), the Wheelock Law Office built in 1871, and the Boy Scout statue for Carlo Abate and William Foster Milne. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3097.png) We often don't notice these historic points of interest as we go about our lives, but if you're playing the game, you can't help but stop and spin the virtual disc to get rewards or challenges. In doing so, you're exposed to this little bit of history: each stop has a picture and a short description of the site. While on the road and visiting a new place, it's often worth opening up the app to see what points of interest have been added to the map. Often, we'll find an interesting location or fact about the community that we might not have otherwise noticed, or known to look for. It's easy to dismiss a game aimed at kids as something frivolous or inconsequential, but it's worth looking at the impact. Since its launch in 2016, *Pokémon GO* has maintained an active userbase of tens of millions (ActivePlayer [notes](https://activeplayer.io/pokemon-go/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that there are nearly 78 million people playing as of July 2023). That's an incredible amount of foot traffic, and certainly has helped point out those local points of interest to many of those players. One user in a local Facebook messenger group dedicated to the game noted that it's "shown me a few roads to travel that I may not have before." At the very least, it's another way to highlight those local attractions for an entirely new generation. ### Seaside transformations URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/sl-coney-wild-spaces-lovecraftian-horror/ Last updated: 2023-08-07T11:00:34.000Z I've been slowly crawling out of the reading rut that I've been in lately. Over the weekend, I picked up S.L. Coney's recent book, [*Wild Spaces*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250866837?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* a slim eldritch horror that follows a boy who watches as his idyllic family is torn apart with the arrival of his long-absent grandfather. I hadn't really been in the mood for a horror book recently – I feel like the [recent flooding](https://www.andrewliptak.com/barre-vermont-historical-society-museum-collections-libraries-flooding/) has left me wrung out and a bit cranky, and not really in the mood for something that's a heavy lift, but the book was on Libro.FM's influencer catalog, I had a copy of it, so I figured it would make for a good read while I was on the road earlier this week. (No fun trips, sadly – an expensive afternoon at the dealer while they figured out why my car was accumulating 1-2 inches of water every time it rained.) It's a good, short book that packs a hefty punch to the gut. One of the things that appeals to me about shorter books or flash fiction is the author's work to use the shorter form to present a story that's on its surface one thing, but something else entirely under the surface. In *Wild Spaces*, we follow a boy who seems to have a perfect childhood on the Atlantic coast. Coney describes the boy's mother and father as "movie stars in black and white, a full-orchestra-in-the-background kind of pretty," while the arrival of dog (named Teach) provides the boy with a best friend for the summer. That summer is upended with the abrupt arrival of a stranger – the boy's maternal grandfather – whose absence brings foreboding and strife to the small family. The boy is uneasy around this new figure in his life, his mother is torn between family loyalty and fear, and Teach is fiercely protective, recognizing something unsettling about him. Over the coming weeks, we watch as this arrival drives a stake into the heart of the family, awakening some long-buried family secrets, and something of a transformation in the boy, one that the mother is only too aware of. The book quickly culminates in a storm and a horrific finale. The story feels like it's playing with two things simultaneously. It's a straight-up horrific story about transformations: you can probably guess what the hidden dangers, while at the same time playing out a story about familial trauma, and about a boy on the cusp of puberty, dealing with all the changes that come with growing up. Monsters aren't always Lovecraftian in nature: sometimes, it's just a violent member of the family, and how it doesn't take much for violence and strife to reenter one's life, even if you've spent a good amount of time running from it. Despite that, it's not a pessimistic story. It's one that feels loaded with redemption – how the changes you make in your life can percolate out to those around you. Fleeing the past might bring with it scars that don't fade overnight, but with each step, you get a little further out into the light. It's enough so that you know that the darkness isn't all encompassing when it eventually does return. [Review: Arkady Martine’s Rose/HouseAn intriguing locked room mystery that explores the uncanny nature of AI![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2888.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/review-arkady-martini-rose-house/) ### Here are all the books to check out this August URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/august-2023-summer-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2023-08-02T18:55:51.000Z August's books include stories about first contact, re-told Greek myths, multiverses, Lovecraftian horror, and quite a bit more. If you'd like other recommendations, here are [all of the other book lists that I've posted here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). As always, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and we get a small percentage of sales through that to help with hosting on Ghost. And of course, signing up as a member also helps quite a bit. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup) Here are 11 new SF/F books hitting stores this month: ### [*Medusa's Sisters*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593547762?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lauren J.A. Bear (August 8th) Lauren J.A. Bear launches her debut novel, *Medusa's Sisters* this month, reimagining the Greek myth of the Gorgons. She delves into the story of the three immortal sisters Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale, and how they ventured into the human world to explore, only to find themselves in the midst of a rivalry between the Greek gods and transformed into the horrific creatures that's become legend. Bear puts both Stheno and Euryale front and center to shine a new light on their lives and the tragedies they became. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/Medusas-Sisters-by-Lauren-J-A-Bear-SFF-Debut-of-the-Month?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Through faith and love, music and motherhood, sex and art, all three sisters find their own ways to join the world, tell their stories, and leave their mark." ### [*Bridge*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316267885?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Lauren Beukes (August 8th) A woman named Bridge is dealing with the aftermath of her mother's death. Bridge and Jo had a strained relationship, brought on by the latter's obsession with an item she referred to as the "dreamworm", which she believed could open passages to other, alternate worlds. When going through her mother's things, she discovers that it wasn't fantasy: the artifact was hidden in her freezer, and Bridge discovers that it can open portals to other realities and to her alternate selves. As she begins to investigate what happened to her mother, she discovers that others are after the dreamworm, and who will stop at nothing to get it. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lauren-beukes/bridge-beukes/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "the worldbuilding here is skillful, as is the pacing—Beukes avoids dropping anvil-like plot points or world details, trusting the reader to unpack clues and read between the lines. ### *[Cassiel's Servant](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250208330?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Jacqueline Carey (August 1st) Working at a bookstore in the 2000s, I felt like I couldn't escape seeing entries from Jacqueline Carey's *Kushiel's Legacy* series when they popped up on shelves. The first novel, *[Kushiel's Dart](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250213068?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, was widely acclaimed, and she's followed up with a handful of sequels over the years, which have recently been re-released. (Other entries in the series include *[Kushiel's Chosen](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250213082?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[Kushiel's Avatar](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250213112?ref=andrewliptak.com)*). After a break, she's back with a new entry: *Cassiel's Servant.* Where *Kushiel's Dart* followed Phèdre, a courtesan discovering a plot against her homeland, Carey looks at the story from the other side: following the same events from eyes of a warrior priest named Joscelin, her lover and protector. He's sworn an oath of celibacy, but as the two fall in love, he finds that those promises are hard to keep. When they're betrayed, the pair will have to rely on one another to survive. *Library Journal* [notes](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fcassiels-servant-1798039&ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Joscelin’s point of view will revitalize fans of the series and draw new readers to this lush epic fantasy." ### [*Wild Spaces*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250866837?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.L. Coney (August 1st) S.L. Coney spins out a Lovecraftian tale about a boy as he spends his days in the wild spaces in South Carolina along with his beloved dog Teach. When the boy's grandfather shows up unexpectedly, that idyllic childhood begins to fracture as family secrets begin to spill out, and as the boy begins to change in strange ways. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250866837?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the result is both wrenching family drama and fantastical monster story, and though the climax feels a bit rushed, the exploration of blood ties and the nature of monstrosity resonate." ### [*The Water Outlaws*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250180421?ref=andrewliptak.com) by S.L. Huang (August 22nd) Lin Chong was a warrior with a promising future in the Song Empire, where she's a prominent combat trainer who's teaching the Empire's next generation of soldiers with a variety of weapons. Her life is upended when she's attacked by a powerful Marshal, Gao Qiu, and when she fends off his assault, she's thrown into prison. When she meets an outlaw, she's given a new opportunity to rebuild her life and recognize the corrupt system that she was part of. *Publishers Weekly* [gave the book a starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250180421?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "By cycling through perspectives, Huang brings a large and varied ensemble cast to vibrant life, skillfully including queer identities in a way that feels historically and mythically resonant." ### *[Time's Mouth](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781640095724?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Edan Lepucki (August 1st) I was a big fan of Edan Lepucki's debut novel *[California](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316250832?ref=andrewliptak.com)* when it came out way back in 2014, and her latest looks to be just as intriguing. Set in the 1950s, Ursa is a woman with a special ability: she can go back in time via her memories and revisit her past experiences. She leaves home for California and gathers a community of women around her and her abilities. Things take a turn before too long, however: the cult takes its toll on her family, and her granddaughter, Opal, eventually grows up heartbroken at her broken family, and is prompted to revisit her own family's past to discover some long-buried secrets. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/edan-lepucki/times-mouth/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF–adjacent elements (here, there’s an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich’s Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory." ### *[The Blue Beautiful World](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593598436?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Karen Lord (August 29th) In the distant future, humanity is dealing with the challenges brought on by climate change, and now, it has a new one brbefore it: first contact. We've been observed for years by alien life, and now, they've made the next step to make contact. To confront some of these problems, Earth's youth gather annually for a problem-solving summit, and this particular year, they're challenged with a first-contact scenario – one that turns out to be a test for the real thing. Amongst the team taking part is a VR innovator, a charismatic celebrity, and a youth council member. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593598436?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Lord’s choice to focus on the voices of historically colonized peoples adds depth and compassion to the classic alien invasion trope." ### [*A Harvest of Ash and Blood*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798212027274?ref=andrewliptak.com) by D.J. Molles (August 8th) The Brannic Empire is powered by magic, and it'll do anything to hold onto power around the world. The Empire's Church of Alchemy routinely sacrifices children with magical abilities, using the ashes as a power source. When a soldier named Lochled Thatcher is tasked with taking part in a crusade to a conquered, magical land known as Leftland to harvest their ashes, he's joined by a recruit named Rony, who discovers that warfare isn't what she thought. As they come into contact with their enemies, they they begin to have their faith in their world crumbling. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798212027274?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Molles renders this bone-crunching war with gore galore and a strong sense of camaraderie among the soldiers," and that "military fantasy readers will find plenty to enjoy." ### [*He Who Drowned the World*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250621825?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Shelley Parker-Chan (Augut 22nd) Shelley Parker-Chan returns to the world of their debut novel *[She Who Became The Sun](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250621818?ref=andrewliptak.com)* for the second part of the *The Radiant Emperor* duology. In that first book, a brother and sister grow up in an impoverished village under Mongolian rule. When their village is attacked and their parents killed, the boy – Zhu Chongba, prophesized for greatness – dies of despair, prompting his sister to take on her brother's name and find a way to survive, no matter what it takes. In this followup, the Radiant King, Zhu Yuanzhang, has triumphed over their Mongolian rulers, and her new goal is to become emperor. But she has rivals also angling for the imperial throne, and Zhu will have to play a delicate game in order to survive. Writing for *Lightspeed Magazine*, Aigner Loren Wilson [says](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-review-he-who-drowned-the-world-by-shelley-parker-chan/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Parker-Chan’s writing is as captivating as ever, though, eloquently describing everything from the landscapes and wardrobes—to physical encounters, both sexual and not. The series’ heat burns from beginning to end with battles, sexual espionage, and greed-confused determination." ### *[Text Appeal](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781639104956?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Amber Roberts (August 8th) While in college, I worked at the local Waldenbooks (RIP) at the Berlin Mall in Central Vermont. I really enjoyed working there: I'm still good friends with some of my former coworkers. One of those fellow booksellers was Amber Roberts, who's got her debut novel coming out this month: *Text Appeal*, a romance about a woman named Lark who's the only female programmer at her company. She lands a big account, only to have a crisis at work: while running a presentation, she accidentally displays an unsolicited, scandalous photo, and she's quickly out of a job. To make ends meet, she signs up for a sexting app, and finds that she's actually pretty good at it, even if it leads to complications in her life. *Publishers Weekly* [calls the book](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781639104956?ref=andrewliptak.com) "enormously satisfying...with a *You’ve Got Mail* twist," and that "Roberts makes it easy to fall in love with Lark and Toby through peppy prose and thoughtful conversation." ### *[Dragonlance: Dragons of Fate](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984819383?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (August 1st) Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman return to the world of Dragonlance with a sequel to last year's *[Dragons of Deceit](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781984819390?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, a long-overdue revival of Wizards of the Coast's D&D fiction series. That novel follows Destina Rosethorn, who hatches a plan to try and bring back her dead father, by way of an artifact called the Device of Time. In this followup, Destina and her allies have gone back further than they expected, to the Third Dragon War. There's a wrinkle in their plans: the Device of Time has been destroyed, and they now have to figure out how to not only get back to their own time, but survive the war. ### Sandwich shop captialism URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/jennifer-government-max-barry-subway-sandwich/ Last updated: 2023-07-31T21:06:13.000Z My dad's a big fan of the sandwich chain Subway, and over the weekend, he forwarded me a link to a story on NBC: "[Subway offering a lifetime of free subs if you change your name ... to Subway](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/subway-offering-lifetime-free-subs-change-name-subway-rcna97054?ref=andrewliptak.com)". Heading over to the company's website, I found some more details: it's a contest that's running this week, in which if a contestant "commit\[s\] to legally chang\[ing\] their name." The company says that it'll also pay for the legal fees for the winner to carry this out. This isn't the first time that Subway's done something like this – the article mentions a prior contest where someone got a tattoo of the company logo. Even the name change thing has been around for a little while. When Subway was sponsoring the TV series *Community*, one of the subplots included some [invasive product placement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CuLm%5FCcNM&ref=andrewliptak.com): it took over the Greendale Community College's lunch room, and one of the workers there assumed a corporate identity: Subway. It's a creepy idea born out of our hyper-capitalistic world, and the contest reminded me of an excellent satirical novel with a similar premise: *[Jennifer Government](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781400030927?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, by Max Barry. After reading the article, I pulled out Barry's book to give it a quick read, and I realized that it came out in 2003, a full two decades this October. The premise is a fun one: in the nearish future, the capitalist influence of the United States has extended around the world. The government has been privatized, and people take the name of the company they work for. The book opens with an outlandish crime: to raise the profile and street cred of a new shoe, a pair of Nike marketing executives contract a desperate man named Hack to carry out a string of murders of their own customers. The idea is that the shoes – the Nike Mercury – are so rare that people are willing to shoot one another for them, and thus, customers will want feel some of that risk when they buy a pair of their own. The rest of the story goes from there: the book's lead character, Jennifer Government is a government agent looking to take down the Nike guys, and it's quite the ride. I quickly blew through the first dozen or so chapters, and it's just as snappy and sharp as I remember it. I was talking with some about the book earlier today, and noted that for a book that's now 20, it holds up remarkably well, and I'm honestly not sure that it's something that you'd see published today. There's a wonderful author's note that starts "there are a lot of real company names and trademarks in this book, most in situations that you are unlikely to see on the covers of any annual reports..." That we see characters who're enrolled in company schools run by Walmart or McDonalds, or that we see the Nike contracting out killings is both hilarious and something that rings closer to truth than I think we care to admit, especially in an environment where we see the trust in public service eroding or where public services subcontracted out to private companies. There are all sorts of memorable details in just the bits that I re-read: a guy trying to save a teenager shot in a mall who's asked to give his credit card number before 911 will dispatch an ambulance, or where a guy's laid off from a tank factory because senior management "made some tough decisions." In a period where we've seen the tech and news industries decimated by extreme cost cutting and where medical care is out of reach of a ton of people, it hits pretty close to home. Speculative fiction really doesn't need to be predictive to be good. Authors can get lucky with imagining a piece of technology that'll eventually become widespread, but I think the books that are held up as being unusually predictive or prescient are the ones written by folks who're just good at observing the state of the world. Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood each noted that to imagine the futures in their books, they just needed to look at history – or the newspaper headlines. Barry, coming out of the Dot-Com bubble of the 1990s clearly saw the economic world for what it was: a boom time where American consumerism was able to run rampant around the world, from which he extrapolated a bit. It seemed outlandish to my 18-year-old self when I read it, but reading it now, it doesn't quite seem as far-fetched. ### Drying out URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/barre-vermont-historical-society-museum-collections-libraries-flooding/ Last updated: 2023-07-27T12:00:42.000Z This is a short piece that I reported and wrote up for the Vermont Historical Society's newsletter, History Happenings. I wanted to look at the topic given that Vermont's recovering from some catastrophic flooding, and what some of the concerns around water and humidity have on collections – and why it's important to mitigate issues before they become bigger problems. You can sign up for VHS's newsletter [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com). Barre awoke to a new landscape on the morning of July 11th. The rain from the weeks before saturated the ground, and a storm the day before pushed the Stevens Branch over its banks, spilling the muddy-brown water into the streets, basements, and houses that lie next to it. The flood evoked memories of past floods: the 1992 flood in Montpelier threatened the Vermont Historical Society collections, then stored in the basement of the Pavilion Building along State Street, and prompted the organization to relocate to its present location on higher ground on Washington Street in Barre. VHS, and all historical societies, museums, and archives, are wary of water. These organizations are charged with preserving the items that represent the past for the citizens and scholars in the future. Water is one of the most dangerous forces that confronts history. Give it a geological time span, and it'll grind mountains into silt and sand, and leave items unattended in a flood plain, and it'll saturate the objects and papers, potentially destroying them. Kate Phillips, VHS's Librarian, notes that paper is generally resilient when soaked. "Under ideal circumstances, many papers can be dried out with few long-term consequences." But, she notes, "floods are rarely ideal circumstances. Rushing water or prolonged submersion can physically cause some kinds of paper to disintegrate into pulp." Moreover, floodwaters often carry with them silt, sand, sewage, petroleum, and other substances that can stain or destroy the objects they come into contact with. VHS Collections Manager Teresa Green points out that when it comes to the physical items in a collection, the effects of water can vary. "Glazed ceramics and glass can potentially be harmed by minerals and other deposits in the water, but for the most part, they're ok. Metal can tarnish, rust and expand, wood can expand, warp and hold the water. Textiles are hit or miss—if they're in good, healthy condition and the dyes are water fast, they could be fine if the water is clean." "But if the fibers have dried out (which eventually happens to all textiles) becoming wet will expand the fibers," Greene continued, "causing them to split just from the pressure of the weave, so fabric disintegrates." Like with paper, she points out, floodwaters are rarely ideal circumstances for items: the substances that they carry can cling to the fibers, and cause lasting damage. On the morning of the 11th, VHS Director of Collections and Access Amanda Kay Gustin and PR & Guest Services Coordinator Andrew Liptak made their way to the History Center in Barre, where they found some water had made its way into the building's collections spaces. Fortunately, this wasn't the flood waters that inundated much of downtown. The building overlooks downtown Barre on a hillside, but after the heavy rains, some of that water made its way into the basement. Those collection spaces are climate-controlled, keeping the humidity down to tolerable levels, and at cooler temperatures. The water that entered the building wasn't much: halfway up one's fingernail, but standing water can affect that ideal climate. The pair set about sucking up the water with a shop vac, set up dehumidifiers, and used mops and kitty litter to soak up as much of the water as they could. By the time they were done, the water was starting to evaporate on its own. In the days and weeks that followed, VHS deployed additional dehumidifiers, and closely monitored the temperature and humidity levels. The initial water damage is only the start to the potential issues that come with flooding, Phillips and Greene said. The longer-term problems is mold, which can proliferate. "Humidity creates an environment where mold can flourish," Phillips explained, "this can either be the growth of new mold or the reactivation of dormant mold or mildew. It also prolongs the amount of time it takes for items to dry, thus increasing the potential for mold growth." "Mold can permanently stain objects, weaken the structure, and damage the finish," Greene says. Another concern, the pair point out, is that mold can be hazardous to people. Breathing it in can cause serious health issues for those around it, making it imperative that any moisture is removed to prevent it from growing or spreading. Items in a collection or library are evaluated for any such risks before they're brought into the collection and sometimes require treatment before they're accessioned. When there is water damage, whether it's water in the basement, a broken pipe, or floodwaters, collections staff work to address the underlying moisture. "We begin by assessing and documenting the damage and then prioritizing items for salvage (unique to our collections, high research use, profoundly within scope of the collection)," Phillips says. "Paper items and books need to be dried out immediately, as mold can begin to spread rapidly. We would remove any folders, mylar casings, frames, or other enclosures that would create a closed environment for mold to grow. If there is a safe, clean, and dry space to do so, we would start by laying items flat to dry. Window screens or the plastic grates from florescent lights are great surfaces for this, as they allow both sides of a sheet of paper to dry." "For books, we blot out excess water and interleave pages with unprinted paper towels, cotton towels, or blank newsprint," she continued "If water soluble pigments are running, we isolate those pages with wax paper. If they're stable enough, books can be dried fanned out and standing on their spine. We can set up dehumidifiers and fans in the workspace in order to create an environment where the wet paper can dry quickly and consistently. If we aren't able to work quickly enough, we might freeze books to buy more time before mold sets in, or freeze sometime that has active mold growth. Once the mold is dormant, we can use various surface cleaning techniques in a well-ventilated space, done by staff wearing proper protective gear." On the object side, Greene notes that their approach is similar. "Often, the damage will be a loss of integrity to the object's structure, which means that it may look pretty much the same as before, but it can no longer be handled or manipulated, and the examination itself will do more harm. If there *is* mold, you isolate the object by encasing it in plastic with as little moisture inside the plastic as possible, and then freeze it. At-home freezers aren't cold enough to kill mold spores, but they can cause them to go dormant, allowing someone to physically remove them without as much risk of spreading." Fortunately, VHS didn't have to resort to these tactics: its collections in Barre have remained dry, kept that way by the quick efforts of staff to ensure that the water that did come in was whisked out quickly. In Montpelier, the museum was lucky enough to be situated above the high-water mark. However, the building's basement was inundated with water that went up to the ceiling, and the state already has efforts underway to dry it out (VHS didn't have anything stored there). Some of those climate control efforts extend to the museum. Following the flooding, VHS staff arrived to take humidity and temperature readings throughout the building, and found them within tolerable limits. To prevent any potential problems, the state's contractors have also been through the building and installed systems to keep the building cool and dry. It'll be a while before the museum reopens, but when it does, the artifacts on display be awaiting the visitors who return. ### Studies in claustrophobia URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/review-arkady-martini-rose-house/ Last updated: 2023-07-26T13:00:39.000Z It feels as though there's been a shift recently in how writers and creators are imagining artificial intelligence: gone are the types of stories where it's just an artificial person or a cold and calculating, sociopathic version of a person, and in is the weirdness of artificial intelligence: look at books like Linda Nagata's *[The Red](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781481440936?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, P.W. Singer & August Cole's *[Burn-In](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358508618?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, or Ray Nayler's *[The Mountain in the Sea](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/),* all of which take some measure of reality for how AI is really playing out in the real world; systems that perform functions but for which we really understand little. Arkady Martine's latest is a slim novella from Subterranean Press, *Rose/House*, in which a famed and eccentric architect, Basit Deniau, has made a masterpiece of a building (the titular building) and where he's entombed as an artificial diamond. Rose/House is also artificially intelligent, and per the man's will, it only allows one person in, once a year: a former, disgruntled student, Dr. Selene Gisil. She's often reluctant to return and revisit the building and its archive, but continues, year after year, to make the pilgrimage. Subterranean sells the book as a neat, locked room mystery: after one of Gisil's visits, Rose/House calls the local police precinct to inform them that there's a body inside, and Gisil returns from her home overseas to assist the beleaguered detective and figure out how someone got into the house and how (and when) they were murdered in it. But Martine turns this story on its head: the locked-room mystery is interesting, but as the characters tease out the possibilities for how the crime occurred, she uses the book to explore some of that weird AI that we've been seeing more and more of. This is something that I've been particularly fascinated by: a couple of years ago, I went to a US Army base in Pennsylvania, Carlisle Barracks, where I took part in a war game designing exercise about preparing for an adversary utilizing an artificial intelligence for their command and control. One of the takeaways that our hosts impressed upon us was that this wasn't *Terminator,* but that the ways that companies were using AI, like Amazon, were finding that it was doing things in strange ways that on their face, didn't look or sound logical, but which ultimately did work, even if we didn't fully understand it. That's the type of logic that we were trying to tease out. [The \[AI\]nformation battlespaceArtificial intelligence is coming to the battlefield: how will we prepare?Under the cover of darkness, a team of soldiers from the United States SpecialOperations Command quietly makes their way into an unnamed East African city.They’re clad in specialized clothing and makeup that hampers facial…![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/image-2-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-ai-nformation-battlespace/) Martine does something similar here: Rose/House adheres to some rigid programming when it comes to allowing entry – ostensibly protecting the legacy of its creator, and we're treated to some unsettling interactions as Gisil and detective Maritza Smith work on gaining entry and investigation. She deftly describes this futuristic world populated with self-driving cars and climate restrictions, while seemingly leaning into the normality of this far (at least a century) future that feels all too plausible in 2023\. In doing so, she turns this book from a straightforward locked-room mystery and into a character study for a grim future in which we've got some bright and beautiful points. The structure itself is described as an architectural marvel, while its brains, Rose/House, is a marvel in and of itself (its unique nature is a key part of the crime that drives the plot). Martine builds an unsettling, claustrophobic atmosphere within Rose/House, a product of the uncanny, inhuman nature of the intelligence that inhabits it. She nails that inhuman feeling that the character of the building brings: programming code running on strictly-defined instructions. The closest that I've felt to experiencing this sort of cold, calculating threat was when our rooster, Noodles, attacked my foot the other day: the encounter sent a shiver down my spine: this little creature transformed (literally – his feathers puffed out, transforming his entire shape) into a malevolent protector of his girls when he perceived a threat that I wasn't aware was a threat (my shoe, apparently), and his entire focus was on eliminating it. If I ever wanted to know what it was like being hunted by a dinosaur, that was it. I got the same sort of chill thinking about Rose/House's cold, calculating intelligence. That inhuman malevolence plays right into the tense atmosphere in the house, and Martine lays it out beautifully. She does bring the mystery to a conclusion, and it's one that's as strange as the building in which the crime took place. The resulting book feels like it's a mirrored portrait of the world that surrounds us now: unsettling and bleak, with moments of calm and beauty that penetrate the walls around us. ### The business of superheroics URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/wsj-with-great-responsibility-podcast-mcu-listen/ Last updated: 2023-07-20T19:14:32.000Z Something that I've paid a good amount of attention to over the course of my career as a journalist has been the rise of Marvel Studios and how it's radically changed cinema. It's a fascinating story that sometimes gets overlooked because of the subject matter, but it's worth paying attention to because of the attention that the films draw, and the impact that it's had on the movie business – especially recently with the ongoing writers and actors strike in Hollywood. The Wall Street Journal's Ben Fritz recently released a four-part podcast that is well worth a listen: *With Great Power: The Rise of Superhero Cinema*. Fritz wrote an excellent book about the modern movie industry, *[The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781328592743?ref=andrewliptak.com),* and over the course of the four episodes, he delves into the story behind Marvel Studios: how Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad bought Marvel comics, how the company licensed out some of it characters, decided to make its own movies, and how it became the king of superhero movies. [With Great Power, Part 1: Origin Story - The Journal. - WSJ PodcastsMarvel Studios is the most dominant film studio on the planet today. But 25 years ago, it was bankrupt and selling furniture for cash. Its astonishing revival begins with two men: Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad. Industry insiders like comics writer Brian Michael Bendis and film producer Amy Pascal reco…![](https://s.wsj.net/media/wsj_apple-touch-icon-180x180.png)The Wall Street JournalKate Linebaugh![](https://images.wsj.net/im-653169?width=1280)](https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/with-great-power-part-1-origin-story/7a460e36-a426-4f27-a792-e596ae02c6ad?ref=andrewliptak.com) The whole thing is well worth a listen: it's a good, high-level overview of the story of Marvel, and it definitely had me wanting more than four episodes. I *am* looking forward to the upcoming book *[MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781631497513?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales, and Joanna Robinson, which comes out in October. ### All the books you should check out this July URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/july-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list-martin-star-wars-tingle-firefly/ Last updated: 2023-07-19T16:00:58.000Z I've written and re-written this introduction a couple of times now: first it was extreme heat at the end of June going into July, and now, we've been inundated with some of the worst flooding that Vermont's seen in nearly a century. I wrote a bit about it [last week](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-raging-waters/), but it's worth reaffirming that the family, chickens, and house are fine. Our neighbors were hit a lot harder: at least one building on our street has been condemned, and the cleanup in Barre and Montpelier is going to take weeks, if not months, to complete. If you're in Vermont, please consider volunteering to help some of our neighbors recover in Montpelier, Barre, and other places around the state. If you're so inclined, the [Vermont Community Foundation has set up a fundraiser](https://vermontcf.org/our-impact/programs-and-funds/vt-flood-response/?ref=andrewliptak.com). Please consider giving: every little bit helps. *Vermont Public* also has a [good list of resources to assist](https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2023-07-11/how-to-help-with-flood-recovery-in-vermont?ref=andrewliptak.com). For this book list, if you see something that catches your eye, please consider ordering from [Bear Pond Books](https://www.bearpondbooks.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) of Montpelier. While they were able to move some of their books upstairs, they lost something like 20 percent of their inventory, as well as their floors and shelves. You can also [donate to them as well](https://www.bearpondbooks.com/donate?ref=andrewliptak.com). Thanks in advance for considering. There's only going to be one book list this month. As usual, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and any purchases you make through them might yield a small commission to *Transfer Orbit*. Here we go: --- ### [*Blade of Dream*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316421898?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Daniel Abraham (July 18th) I read Daniel Abraham's *Age of Ash* last year. I've long been a fan of his work on the *[Expanse](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/the-expanse/)* series, and after hearing rave reviews for his earlier fantasy, I was eager to check it out. I found it to be a deliberate, thoughtful book about human nature: how someone maintains their moral compass in a complicated world. I'm interested to see what happens in his next installment of the series, *Blade of Dream*. [Review: Daniel Abraham’s Age of AshHow does a good person stray from the path?![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/FN1dkkFXwBEiTOH.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/daniel-abraham-age-of-ash-fantasy-book-review/) Set in the same city of Kithamar, it follows a new story and character: Garreth, the son and heir of one of the city's major merchant families. His life has already been planned out for him: he'll learn all about the family business, enter an arranged marriage, and keep his lineage wealthy and secure. When he encounters a stranger and falls in love with her, he upends his life to try and find her, potentially setting the city on a new path. *Kirkus Reviews* loved the novel, saying in its [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-abraham/blade-dream/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "This parallel book both fills in the noticeable gaps in the previous volume and continues to highlight a favorite Abraham theme: the complex outcomes stemming from personal choice," and that "great character work and interesting plot development make this an exceptional middle volume." ### [*The Judas Blossom*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781915202192?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Stephen Aryan (July 11th) The first in a new trilogy, *The Judas Blossom* reimagines the Mongolian invasion of Persia in the 1200s, and follows a range of characters as they contend with the changing events: Hulagu Khan the grandson of Gengis Khan, who's looking to continue to take over as much of the world as he can. There's his youngest son Temujin, who's failed at everything in his life, and after given one more chance to succeed, begins to tap into a mysterious power. The Blue Princess Kokochin one of the Khan's wives and the last of her tribe, and tries to find some purpose to her life. Finally, there's Kaivon, a Persian rebel who's resisting the Mongolian Empire with everything at his disposal, and when he's offered the chance to train under Hulagu, he jumps at the chance to strike at the Empire. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fthe-judas-blossom-1798151&ref=andrewliptak.com) "Written with heart and cunning, this is a gripping tale of revenge with complex political intrigue, harrowing battles, and masterful infiltration." ### [*The Splinter in the Sky*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668008478?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (July 11th) After a failed war between the Holy Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic grinds to a halt, the Emperor's capitulation doesn't mean much to a low-level scribe named Enitan Ijebu, who just wants to establish her own business and move on with life. That changes when her partner is killed and her sibling is kidnapped. The actions prompts Enitan to depart for the imperial capital, where she works to find a way to save her sibling and extract some form of vengeance. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kemi-ashing-giwa/the-splinter-in-the-sky/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Ashing-Giwa constructs a sweeping backdrop for her characters' plights to play out against. The Vaalbarans' personal and political oppression of the Korikese calls to mind European conquests across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania." ### [*Light Bringer*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425285978?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Pierce Brown (July 25th) Pierce Brown has returned to the world of his *[Red Rising](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593724460?ref=andrewliptak.com)*[ trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593724460?ref=andrewliptak.com) with Light Bringer, which finishes off the trilogy started with 2018's *[Iron Gold](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425285930?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and 2019's *[Dark Age](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780425285961?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. This trilogy was set about a decade after the first, in an inhabited solar system with a rigid social structure that saw a devastating revolution led by a Martian named Darrow. In Dark Age, the Society and Darrow were engaged in a massive fight, and in this new installment, he's stranded far from home after a defeat. He's fighting to return home to Mars to return to his wife, Virginia and to protect Mars from Lysander, a tyrant bent on restoring the former caste system. ### [*Implacable*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199022?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Jack Campbell (July 4th) Jack Campbell brings out a third installment of his *Lost Fleet: Outlands* series (following [*Boundless*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593198971?ref=andrewliptak.com) and *[Resolute](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593199008?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), following Admiral John Greary and the Alliance Fleet as they protect a diplomatic mission in deep space. They're in territory claimed by an alien species, and their work is becoming complicated as other human actor try and engage with or exploit the civilization – a tricky prospect, given that their technology far outstrips humanity's. When Greary's given orders that seem to contradict his mission and the goals of the alliance, he has to figure out how to proceed: destroying everything he' worked for, or stand with his principles. ### *[Star Wars: Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593598580?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Delilah S. Dawson (July 18th) Delilah S. Dawson is back with a new *Star Wars* novel (she also wrote *[Phasma](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781524796334?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[Black Spire](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593159033?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), *Inquisitor*. It follows a Jedi Padawan named Iskat Akaris, who's something of an outcast within the Jedi Order, and when her master is killed during the Clone Wars, she begins to question her past and her loyalties. When Order 66 is given and the Jedi are almost entirely wiped out, she sees it as an opportunity, and becomes an inquisitor under the new Empire. ### [*Counterweight*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593317211?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Djuna, translated by Anton Hur (July 18th) In the near future, a major Korean conglomerate called LK has begun construction on a space elevator on a remote island called Patusan. It's a structure that'll revolutionize humanity's access to space, but the native Patusans aren't a fan of the project. There's also a secret: in the ton of space junk that's holding the space elevator up in orbit is a data trove that could determine the future of the company, and it's become the target of a number of people who're looking to get their hands on it. Novelist Hari Kunzru [reviewed the book for *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/09/books/review/djuna-counterweight.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* saying *"*The novel’s speculations about human agency resonate in the current moment, when American tech C.E.O.s oscillate between issuing sonorous warnings about the existential risks of the A.I. systems they’re developing and breathless hype about brain-computer interfaces." ### *[The Weaver and the Witch Queen](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593438244?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Genevieve Gornichec (July 25th) Two children, Oddny and Gunnhild, meet as children in 10th Century Norway. They're each very different: the former is quiet and reserved, while the latter desires power and an escape from her mother. Along with Oddny's sister Signy, they make a pact to always help one another after learning of a prophesy involving Oddny. When Signy is kidnapped by Vikings, Oddny finds herself unmoored, wanting to rescue her sister while also trying to avoid falling for one of the raiders, while Gunnhild has escaped to learn witchcraft. *Library Journal* [says](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fthe-weaver-and-the-witch-queen-1798035&ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Gornichec showcases her knowledge of Icelandic folklore and history, while her storytelling reveals the complex and engrossing lives and emotions of her characters." ### *[The Deep Sky](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250875334?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Yume Kitasei (July 18th) Earth has collapsed under the weight of ecological disaster and in a last-ditch effort, eighty humans are dispatched into deep space on a single ship, The Phoenix. Halfway to their destination, a bomb kills three crewmembers and sends the ship off course. Asuka, who survived the attack, becomes one of the primary suspects, and as the book progresses, we learn more, little by little, about how she came to join the crew and what she left behind. To clear her name, she has to find out who the real saboteur is, before they strike again. Donna Edwards of the AP [reviewed the book](https://apnews.com/article/deep-sky-yume-kitasei-book-review-7071d1c50c663fa5d240536d576f4a5e?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying it's "a smart, emotionally mature, quick-paced climate fiction space whodunit that I already wanted to read again before I even finished it." ### *[Thick as Thieves](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781668013632?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by M.J. Kuhn (July 25th) M.J. Kuhn follows up last year's *[Among Thieves](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982142155?ref=andrewliptak.com)* with a new installment of her Tales of Thamorr series, *Thick as Thieves*. In the first installment, we met Ryia Cautella, a woman who's earned a reputation as skilled fighter with a secret: she's been trying to escape from the Guildmaster, the ruler of the five kingdoms of Thamorr, and works her way into his stronghold to try and take him down. Now, she and hew crew of rogues and pirates have succeeded in carrying out a heist, only to bring down a load of consequences on them: the leader of a criminal gang known as the Saints, Callum Clem, has gotten his hands on a powerful tool that allows him to control magical Adepts, and Ryia has to gather up her crew together to stop him. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781668013632?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Kuhn keeps the pages flying with twists and double crosses galore as royals and brigands alike concoct elaborate schemes to claim the Quill. This fast-paced, nail-biting romp will have readers hooked from the first page. ### *[Wild Cards: Pairing Up: An Anthology](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593357866?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass (July 11th) George R.R. Martin might be best known for his fantasy series *A Song of Ice and Fire*, but he's also been heading up a shared-universe superhero series for decades: Wild Cards. In this 31st installment, *Pairing Up*, he and his co-editor Melinda M. Snodgrass round up stories from Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, Marko Kloos, Bradley Denton, Walter Simons, Gwenda Bond & Peter Newman, and David Anthony Durham with a lineup of stories about love. There's also a graphic novel, *[Wild Cards: Now & Then](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780804177085?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, which hit stores on July 18th. ### [*Firefly: Coup de Grâce*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781789098372?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Una McCormack (July 25th) The cult TV series *Firefly* lasted only a season, but there's been a steady stream of new comics and novels set in the world that have been continuing the adventures of the crew of the Serenity. In this latest installment, the crew travels to Yell City on the moon of Abel, where they're hired by a Annie, the daughter of a murdered lawyer, to tracking down her father's killers. The job turns out to be more complicated than it seems: Annie's father wasn't gunned down by a local gang, but was targeted by some of the city's wealthy and powerful, and when the Serenity is impounded, the crew finds themselves in deeper trouble than they expected. ### *[Silver Nitrate](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593355367?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 18th) Silvia Moreno-Garcia has become a favorite of mine in recent years: her novel *Mexican Gothic* was outstanding, and *Signal To Noise* was a fascinating blend of fantasy and magic. (I still need to read *The Daughter of Doctor Moreau*). Her latest is *Silver Nitrate*, set in 1990s Mexico City. Montserrat is a sound editor in the country's film industry, and she's continually overlooked in her job, especially to her friend, Tristán, a star of a soap opera. She he learns that a neighbor is a cult horror director named Abel Urueta, he tells them an outlandish tale about how he's been cursed: a film he was working on was enchanted by a Nazi occultist, and he was never able to finish the project. They jump at the chance to help him complete the project, only to realize that a dark presence has begun following them. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593355367?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that "Moreno-Garcia effortlessly ties explorations of misogyny, addiction, antisemitism, and racism into a plot that never falters from its breakneck pace. The narrative shifts effortlessly between fantasy, horror, and romance, helmed by a well-shaded cast." ### *[Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781472971081?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Anna Ploszajski (June 27th) This is a book that caught my eye immediately when I saw the cover. Coming off of writing *Cosplay: A History* (and being a cosplayer myself), I'm a big advocate for learning how to use tools, building stuff on your own, tearing things apart, and learning how things work. This looks like a really fun, engrossing read. ### [*Doom Guy: A Life in First Person*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419758119?ref=andrewliptak.com) by John Romero (July 18th) It's hard to think of a video game that's more iconic than the likes of *Doom*, Wolfenstein, or Quake, and in this autobiography, their creator, John Romero, delves into his life and career and the journey that took him from difficult childhood to videogame stardom. I've been listening to the audiobook for a couple of days, and it's very engaging thus far. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-romero/doom-guy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Romero "is candid in his discussion of the Columbine shooters, who were addicts of his blood-soaked scenarios, rejecting the commonplace accusation that violent games lead to violence in real life. Confessing failures as well as triumphs, Romero counsels, “Don’t hype what you don’t have,” and “never insult your fans, even in jest.” ### [*Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Adam Rowe (July 25th) This is probably one of my most anticipated books of the summer. Adam Rowe's the guy behind the super-popular [70s Sci-Fi Art](https://twitter.com/70sscifi?lang=en&ref=andrewliptak.com) Twitter feed, which injects a regular stream of sci-fi art from the 1970s. It's worth a follow, and he's been hard at work on a book that showcases the dazzling covers and artwork that helped define the look and feel of the genre. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781419748691?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Rowe’s obvious love for the form animates the volume, and makes a powerful case for how this period continues to influence the genre’s aesthetic." ### [*Camp Damascus*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250874627?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chuck Tingle (July 18th) Chuck Tingle has made a name for himself with his "tinglers" – short, self-published erotica books bearing titles such as "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and "Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus: An Adult Romance Novel." (You can read up a bit more about him [here](https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/10/18/12775742/who-is-chuck-tingle-fake-explained?ref=andrewliptak.com).) Camp Damascus is something a little different: a horror novel about a woman named Rose who's part of a churge that runs an LGBTQ+ conversion camp. When she has a strange encounter at the edge of the camp, she's sent down a path that has her questioning everything she's been taught. *Library Journal* awarded the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/camp-damascus-1796441?ref=andrewliptak.com): "Tingle meticulously unfolds a plot that introduces distrust and confusion, building a pervasive discomfort and laying more and more pressure on Rose until it literally bursts, threatening to destroy everything she holds dear." ### [*The Beast You Are: Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063069961?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Paul Tremblay (July 11th) I've been a fan of Paul Tremblay's horror novels for a while now: I still think about the events of *[The Cabin at the End of the World](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062679116?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[A Head Full of Ghosts](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062363244?ref=andrewliptak.com)* a bit more often than is healthy. His latest is a new collection of his short fiction, *The Beast You Are*, his latest such collection after *[Growing Things](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062906687?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. It should be chalk-full of stories that'll keep you up at night. [Pushing against nostalgiaPaul Tremblay on his next horror novel, The Pallbearer’s Club![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-07-at-3.06.01-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/paul-tremblay-pallbearers-club-horror/) ### [*The Rain*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200835027?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joseph A. Turkot (July 18th) In this post-apocalyptic future, a series of catastrophic rains flooded the world two decades ago, prompting the survivors of the flooding to take some drastic measures to save what was left of civilization. A teenager named Tanner grows up in this new world with her adopted guardian, and together, they're trying to make it to a refuge in Colorado, trying to avoid dangers along the way. At the same time, a meteorologist named Rook Wallace, joined a group called Yasper that's been working to help survivors between the island communities. When he discovers some chilling secrets about his employer, it'll change his life as he knows it. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798200835027?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Turkot "credibly extrapolates the horrifying consequences of his tale’s ecological nightmare. Readers will appreciate his refusal to commit to an upbeat outcome for this harrowing adventure." --- As always, thanks for reading. Let me know: what catches your eye this month, and what do you have on your TBR pile? Andrew ### Here are the winners of the 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-shirley-jackson-awards-readercon-horror/ Last updated: 2023-07-18T13:47:28.000Z ReaderCon took place over the weekend. I was hoping to get to it, but given the flooding, work, and some prior committments, it just wasn't in the cards this year. One of the things that I've always made sure to stop in on when I have been there is to attend the Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony, which was held on the 15th. Here are this year's winners (marked in **bold**). I've heard lots and lots of good things about *The Devil Takes You Home*: I should add that to my TBR. ### Novel - *Beulah* by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates Media) - *The Dead Friends Society* by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse Publications) - ***The Devil Takes You Home* by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books)** - *Jackal* by Erin E. Adams (Bantam) - *Unwieldy Creatures* by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press) - ***Where I End* by Sophie White (Tramp Press)** **Novella** - ***The Bone Lantern* by Angela Slatter (PS Publishing)** - *Bound Feet* by Kelsea Yu (Cemetery Gates Media) - *Catastrophe* by Deirdre Danklin (Texas Review Press) - *Lure* by Tim McGregor (Tenebrous Press) - *Pomegranates* by Priya Sharma (PS Publishing) - *The Wehrwolf* by Alma Katsu (Amazon Original Stories) ### Novelette - *Azeman or, the Testament of Quincey Morris* by Lisa Moore (Black Shuck Books) - “Challawa” by Usman T. Malik (*Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror*) - “Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld*, October 2022) - “This Place is Best Shunned” by David Erik Nelson (Tor.com) - ***What the Dead Know* by Nghi Vo (Amazon Original Stories)** ### Short Fiction - “Brother Maternitas” by Viktor Athelstan (*Your Body is Not Your Body*) - “The Church of Divine Electricity” by Emily Mitchell (*The Southern Review*) - “Dick Pig” by Ian Muneshwar (*Nightmare Magazine*, Issue 112) - “Halogen Sky” by Wendy N. Wagner (*VASTARIEN: A Literary Journal*, vol. 5, issue 1) - **“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” by Kim Fu (*Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century*)** ### Single-Author Collection - *And At My Back I Always Hear* by Scott Nicolay (Word Horde) - *Breakable Things* by Cassandra Khaw (Undertow Publications) - *Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted* by RJ Joseph (The Seventh Terrace) - *Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century* by Kim Fu (Tin House) - *Splendid Anatomies* by Allison Wyss (Veliz Books) - ***We Are Here to Hurt Each Other* by Paula D. Ashe (Nictitating Books)** ### Edited Anthology - *Chiral Mad 5*, edited by Michael Bailey (Written Backwards) - ***The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors*, edited by Doug Murano (Bad Hand Books)** - *Other Terrors*, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason (William Morrow) - *Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous*, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire) - *Your Body is Not Your Body*, edited by Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone (Tenebrous Press) ### Dark raging waters URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dark-raging-waters/ Last updated: 2023-07-11T13:28:44.000Z You might have seen on the news that Vermont and the general US Northeast has been under a flood watch. We'd had some rain in the last couple of weeks, and the rivers have been full – fuller than usual. I texted a friend after the last bout of rain on Friday: "South American jungle, or Barre, Vermont?" ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2568.jpeg) On Sunday, we got word of more rain on the way: several inches work, which was enough to go right over the saturated soil and into the swollen rivers. The Stevens Branch below our house was still roiling in the morning, and I began making some trips down to the bridge below our house to see how it looked. By 11, the water was beginning to fill the parking lot of the warehouses below the house – a pretty normal occurence in the spring with the snowmelt, but not something we usually see in the middle of summer. Trees and logs began tumbling down, and when the water began hitting the bottom of the bridge, I ducked out to get some water and the kids from daycare. Megan stopped by the store to get some extra provisions, then parked up the hill beyond a gate – an escape if we needed it. By five, the parking lot across the river had begun to fill, and an hour later, the water jumped its banks and went over the road, then the bridge. The guys working at the concrete place below us gave up trying to triage their equipment and retreated for the night. We packed some bags, just in case. The water continued to rise. We’re okay: our house is up on a hill, and we’re still high and dry. It seems like it peaked around 11 or so. I snagged a road cone and stuck it in the road, and watched as the water crawled up and beyond it before stopping. We brought the chickens inside for the night after we heard a loud crash. Bram and I went out to check on the car and the bridge up the river, and talked about being scared and how floods happen. I stayed on the couch and checked on the yard a couple of times in the night. I awoke to the sound of a tree crashing down, and saw that the water was still raging: it swept away the neighbor’s dead car, and there’s a lingering scent of oil hanging in the air. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2622.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2629.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2644.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/07/IMG_2651.jpeg) 5:30pm, 6:30pm, 8:30pm, 5:30am What’s been most unsettling has been the noise. Not the rushing water, but the sound of trees, dumpsters, and other debris hitting the buildings and bridge. I saw a video of a Lays Chips truck floating down the river like it was a toy, before it crashed into a bridge. I'd taken a picture of it a couple hours before in its parking lot. We took stock of what remains of the road, put the chickens out, and recovered my car, now that the gate at the top of the road is open. The water's going down quickly, and in the next couple of days, you'll see videos and pictures of the devastation. It's looking like it'll be worse than when Tropical Storm Irene passed over the state: our second hundred year flood in twelve years. When we talk about climate change, we always think about the extremes: the ocean-front cities that find themselves under water, the disappearance of the ice packs at the poles and mountains, or the regions baked to death by extreme heat. After Irene, there was a lot of talk about resiliency and how it's the big rainstorms and changing patterns that'll be the new normal in our warming climate: it's those smaller, gradual changes that'll be the end of us, house by house, road by road, and life by life. ### Here are the 2023 Hugo Award Finalists URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-hugo-award-finalists/ Last updated: 2023-07-08T16:40:21.000Z Earlier this week, Chengdu Worldcon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, announced the finalists for this year's Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards. As with any award-season list, there are the usual complaints that there's something missing, or that there are other random issues, and this year's ballot strikes me as a good reminder that fandom is a complicated body, and that at its heart, it's a body of people who're connected by a shared tradition of enjoying one particular type of fiction in a certain social context that stretches back nearly a century. My initial reaction to the list is that it's a bit of a perplexing one: the novel category has a bunch of books that I thought for sure would get a nomination but didn't, like Ray Nayler's *The Mountain in the Sea*, R.F. Kuang's *Babel*, or Simon Jimenez's *The Spear Cuts Through Water*, each of which have been fairly highly acclaimed within fan circles, and in the larger literary / reading world. My second thought was that this is probably the most internationally-diverse list that we've ever seen, which the folks at the [unofficial Hugo Book Club blog](https://twitter.com/Hugo%5FBook%5FClub?ref=andrewliptak.com) [pointed out](https://twitter.com/Hugo%5FBook%5FClub/status/1677434463855206406?ref=andrewliptak.com): this year's prose categories include nominees from "the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, and New Zealand," and I'm guessing there's a similar thing going on with the fan and art categories as well. "World" Science Fiction Convention has always been something of a misnomer, given the concentration of SF/F fans in North America and Europe, and while nine countries isn't exactly representative of the entire world, it's good to see that fandom is waking up to stories from other places around the world. Over on Reddit, [John Scalzi posted up some good observations](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/14tdr8u/comment/jr3oavj/?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the character of the community that's behind the awards, and why you see a company like Tor dominating them with the books they produce year in and year out. One point in particular stood out to me: The first is the (relative) decline of the "Big Three" short fiction magazines in SF/F (Asimov's, Analog, F&SF) and the commensurate rise of a series of online short fiction publishing venues like Uncanny, Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons (among others). The Big Three ran on Silent, Boomer and Elder GenX writers, and the market forces for the genre those writers came up in was heavily cis and white and male. The newer venues, by inclination and necessity, cultivated younger generations of writers from more diverse backgrounds. When the Big Three declined and the online magazines rose, their respective stables of authors more or less rose or declined with them. The rise of online magazines has been a key inflection point for a number of years now (I really need to get my hands on a copy of Mike Ashley's [*Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-of-the-cyberzines-the-story-of-the-science-fiction-magazines-from-1991-to-2020-9781800856486?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* which \* *sigh*\* costs \~$150, to see what his conclusions are. The first three books of this series are indispensable for examining the history of the genre) because amongst other things, have removed the barrier to entry that was physically mailing a manuscript to a magazine office in New York City, and waiting for it to come back to you. With the rise of places like *Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons,* and others, you've seen a new grouping of legacy outlets that have helped nudge the genre in different directions (which, I might add, Hugo voters are reading and enjoying). One thing that I've come to understand over the years is that legacy institutions are slow to move or change: a long-running magazine like *Asimov's* or *Analog* have their dedicated readers who know what they like, and there's generally a reason why you'll have fans gravitating toward newer magazines that don't have those preconceived notions or legacy behind them. Neither of these things are *bad:* I still pick up *Asimov's* whenever I see one at the local Barnes & Noble, and enjoy their stories. They're just slower to adapt to the rapid changes that the internet has brought with it. It's also worth noting that these types of awards are the product of the fandoms that support them, and as Scalzi notes, Hugo voters aren't a monolith. Nor is SF/F fandom a monolith, as this list of nominees shows: the folks voting for the Hugos have slightly different tastes than the [Locus](https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-awards-winners-scalzi-kuang-nayler/) or [Nebulas](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/) or the [Shirley Jacksons](https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-award-finalists-2022/), and so forth. There are overlaps and significant differences. If I were to set up an award through *Transfer Orbit*, I imagine that we'd see a different shortlist and finalists. Hm. It'll be interesting to see what the numbers look like after the winners are announced in October. Here are the finalists for this year's awards: ### Astounding Award for Best New Writer - Travis Baldree - Naseem Jamnia - Isabel J Kim\* - Maijia Liu - Everina Maxwell\* - Weimu Xin\* \*finalist in their 2nd year of eligibility ### Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book - *Akata Woman (The Nsibidi Scripts)* by Nnedi Okorafor - *Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn - *Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak* by Charlie Jane Anders - *The Golden Enclaves* by Naomi Novik - *In the Serpents Wake* by Rachel Hartman - *Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods* by Catherynne M. Valente ### Best Fan Artist - Iain Clark - Richard Man - Laya Rose - Alison Scott - España Sheriff - Orion Smith ### Best Fan Writer - Chris M. Barkley - Bitter Karella - Arthur Liu - RiverFlow - Jason Sanford - Örjan Westin ### Best Fancast - *Coode Street Podcast* presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, produced by Jonathan Strahan - *Hugo, Girl!* by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson - *Hugos There* by Seth Heasley - *Kalanadi* created and presented by Rachel - *Octothorpe* by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty - *Worldbuilding for Masochists* by Cass Morris, Rowenna Miller, Marshall Ryan Maresca ### Best Fanzine - *Chinese Academic SF Express*, by Latssep and Tianluo\_Qi - *Galactic Journey*, by Gideon Marcus, Janice Marcus, Tammi Bozich, Erica Frank, Arel Lucas, and Mark Yon - *Journey Planet*, by Regina Kanyu Wang, Yen Ooi, Arthur Liu, Jean Martin, Erin Underwood, Steven H Silver, Pádraig Ó Méalóid and their other co-editors - *Nerds of a Feather*, by Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer, Adri Joy, Joe Sherry, Vance Kotrla, G. Brown - *Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog*, by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk - *Zero Gravity Newspaper*, by RiverFlow and Ling Shizhen ### Best Semiprozine - *Escape Pod*, Co-editors Mur Lafferty & Valerie Valdes; Assistant editors Benjamin C. Kinney & Premee Mohamed, host Tina Connolly, Producers Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht - *FIYAH,* edited by the entire FIYAH team - *khōréō*, edited by team khōréō - *PodCastle*, Co-Editors Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Eleanor R. Wood; Assistant Editor Sofia Barker; Host Matt Dovey; Audio Producers Peter Adrian Behravesh, Devin Martin, and Eric Valdes - *Strange Horizons*, edited by The Strange Horizons Editorial Team - *Uncanny Magazine*, publishers and editors-in-chief: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing/poetry editor Chimedum Ohaegbu; managing editor Monte Lin; nonfiction editor Meg Elison; podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky ### Best Professional Artist - Sija Hong - Kuri Huang Kuri - Paul Lewin - Alyssa Winans - Jian Zhang - Enzhe Zhao ### Best Editor, Long Form - Ruoxi Chen - Lindsey Hall - Lee Harris - Sarah Peed - Huan Yan - Haijun Yao ### Best Editor, Short Form - Scott H. Andrews - Neil Clarke - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - Sheree Renée Thomas - Xu Wang - Feng Yang ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - *Andor*: “One Way Out” written by Beau Willimon, Tony Gilroy, and George Lucas, directed by Toby Haynes - *Andor*: “Rix Road” written by Tony Gilroy and George Lucas, directed by Benjamin Caron - *The Expanse*: “Babylon’s Ashes” written by Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner - *For All Mankind*: “Stranger in a Strange Land” written by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, directed by Craig Zisk - *She-Hulk: Attorney at Law*: “Whose Show is This?” written by Jessica Gao, Francesca Gailes, and Jacqueline Gailes, directed by Kat Coiro - *Stranger Things*: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” written by Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, and Paul Dichter, directed by Shawn Levy ### Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - *Avatar: The Way of Water* screenplay by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver, directed by James Cameron - *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* screenplay by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler - *Everything Everywhere All at Once* screenplay by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert - *Nope* written by Jordan Peele, directed by Jordan Peele - *Severance (Season 1)* written by Dan Erickson, Anna Ouyang Moench et al., directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle - *Turning Red* screenplay by Julia Cho and Domee Shi, directed by Domee Shi ### Best Related Work - *Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road* by Kyle Buchanan - *Buffalito World Outreach Project* by Lawrence M. Schoen - *Chinese Science Fiction, An Oral History, Volume 1* by Yang Feng - *“[The Ghost of Workshops Past](https://www.tor.com/2022/08/17/the-ghost-of-workshops-past-how-communism-conservatism-and-the-cold-war-still-mold-our-paths-into-sff-writing/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”* by S.L. Huang - *Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir* by Wil Wheaton - *Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes* by Rob Wilkins ### Best Graphic Story or Comic - *Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams* by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, Krzysztof Ostrowski - *DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel* by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, Zid - *Monstress vol. 7: Devourer* by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (Image Comics) - *Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK* by Kieron Gillen / Dan Mora - *Saga, Vol. 10* by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples, Fonografiks (Image Comics) - *Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow* by Tom King, Bilquis Evely, and Matheus Lopes ### Best Series - *Children of Time Series* by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit) - *The Founders Trilogy* by Robert Jackson Bennett - *The Locked Tomb* by Tamsyn Muir - *October Daye* by Seanan McGuire - *Rivers of London* by Ben Aaronovich - *The Scholomance* by Naomi Novik ### Best Short Story - “D.I.Y.” by John Wiswell (Tor.com, August 2022) - “On the Razor’s Edge” by Jiang Bo (*Science Fiction World,* January 2022) - “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills (*Uncanny Magazine*, November-December 2022) - “Resurrection” by Ren Qing (*Future Fiction/Science Fiction World*, December 2022) - “The White Cliff” by Lu Ban (*Science Fiction World*, May 2022) - “Zhurong on Mars” by Regina Kanyu Wang (*Frontiers*, September 2022) ### Best Novelette - “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente (*Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed* Romance, Solaris) - Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi (*Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction*, Tordotcom) - “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” by John Chu (*Uncanny Magazine*, July-August 2022) - “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang (*Clarkesworld*, December 2022) - “The Space-Time Painter” by Hai Ya (*Galaxy’s Edge*, April 2022) - “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert (*Clarkesworld*, June 2022) ### Best Novella - *Even Though I Knew the End* by C.L. Polk - *Into the Riverlands* by Nghi Vo - *A Mirror Mended* by Alix E. Harrow - *Ogres* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *What Moves the Dead* by T. Kingfisher - *Where the Drowned Girls Go* by Seanan McGuire ### Best Novel - *The Daughter of Doctor Moreau* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *The Kaiju Preservation Society* by John Scalzi - *Legends & Lattes* by Travis Baldree - *Nona the Ninth* by Tamsyn Muir - *Nettle & Bone* by T. Kingfisher - *The Spare Man* by Mary Robinette Kowal --- What are your thoughts on the finalists this year? ### Parables of power URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-two-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2023-06-29T18:02:37.000Z Warner Bros. released a new trailer for *Dune: Part Two* this afternoon, a little over a month after it [dropped the first one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-2-trailer-watch/). It's suitably epic, and shows off a bit of the conflict to expect in the second half of the story. There's a neat thing here that I'm eager to see on screen, because it's a big part of the book and of Frank Herbert's work in the series: "All my visions lead to horror," Paul Atreides tells Gurney Halleck. Gurney: "Because you lose control?" Paul: "Because I gain it." This to me is one of the most interesting things about the *Dune* saga: author Herbert was interested in exploring the power of the human mind (in this universe, human intelligence – with its potential unlocked due to spice from Arrakis – allows humans to accomplish travel through space and enormous calculations, etc.) and what impact that had on people. There's a quote from Herbert that you might have heard: "Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." Paul's placed \[spoilers\] in a position of enormous power by the end of *Dune*, something that has devastating consequences down the road as Herbert plays out the events of the series. It's a fascinating lesson, and one that we see pop up in other places: one notable example that comes to mind is Rian Johnson's *The Last Jedi*, when Luke Skywalker turns from the Jedi Order to go into a self-imposed exile, something I've wondered if it has some influence from Herbert's books... ### One year on bookshelves URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/cosplay-a-history-year-one/ Last updated: 2023-06-29T01:39:01.000Z A year ago today, my book, *Cosplay: A History* officially released! It was the culmination of several years of work: I think I dated the initial conversations for it in early 2015, and it was quite the process to get from initial idea to the point where you could see it sitting on a shelf. I'm proud of what the book ended up becoming. It was initially supposed to be a history of the 501st Legion, but as I developed the concept, it became more of a general high-level overview of the cosplay world – and its a better book for that work. You see a lot of writing out there about how to get published: everything from finding an agent to putting words to paper, but what you don't see a lot of is a retrospective on what happens *after.* If you're lucky, you're already hard at work on another manuscript, or you're preparing for the next release. Since *Cosplay* hit stores, I've been keeping a mental list of odd things that I don't think I'd ever realized or talked about with other authors. (Caveats apply here, because the internet is a place for "well, that's not my experience!") ### The lead-up to a book launch is a rush I really gasped when I opened the first box of books that arrived on my doorstep: it was a cool moment, coming home to find a stack of them (author comp copies) waiting for me.) I hadn't realized just how hefty they'd be, something that still impresses me when I pick up a copy. It's a chunky book. After all that time and work, the slick packaging and design, and with the countdown on for your release date, you sort of expect all eyes to focus in on you and your book. Release day was excellent: I picked up my editor from the airport, signed some copies at a local Barnes & Noble, went to work, posted about it a bunch, basked in some retweets, had an excellent launch at Phoenix Books with a good friend moderating, and my best friend from high school surprising me by coming in from Arizona. It was a good time. I was pretty lucky here: I have an excellent publicist and team behind the book, and I'd already had some excellent help from friends talking about it at Star Wars Celebration, *and then* hosted a big talk at San Diego Comic Con, before heading out to do a smattering of other talks at local cons and libraries around the New England area. ### Things slow down a *lot* after the launch I had a decently busy schedule after the book's launch: I went to some big cons, went to some small ones, did some library talks, but settled into a pretty low-key schedule for the fall. I wasn't inundated with requests for talks or invites, and most of the marketing effort was designed to hit on the day of sale. Book publicists are busy: they've got other books to promote and once you're off their plate, they begin work on the next book on the schedule. A lot of what I ended up doing were things that I'd put together on my own, and I found that to be a valuable bit of experience: tracking down convention leads, contacting libraries and bookstores, set up blog/podcast/radio/TV interviews, etc. ### You can't predict what coverage you might get Prior to and after the book release, Saga sent out a bunch of copies to reviewers: we made entire lists of websites and journalists and writers to talk to for this. Journalists are busy people and they're inundated with press releases – most will delete them unopened. It's sending out messages in bottles. I got lucky in a couple of places with some nice articles / interviews / reviews. But there were certainly plenty of places that we got some initial interest for, and never heard back from, or I'd do an interview and then an editor would kill a piece, and that was that. On the flip side, I did have a couple of random journalists get in touch for quotes about things, because they'd found the book. It's always a delightful surprise, and it's one of those things you can't plan for. ### Local TV is great for these types of things You know what was pretty successful, PR-wise? Local TV stations. They're constantly looking for local-interest stories, and they usually need content. Find what stations are in your area, look up the reporters, and hit them up via their news@tvstationhere address, and their individual addresses. It makes for a nice bit of publicity. ### The person who cares the most about the book is you This sounds more callous than I mean it to be, but: you're not the center of the universe! People have other priorities and things that they're doing: the people in your life will be happy for you and cheer you on, but they're not sitting around idly thinking about you and your book. I put a lot of time and effort into *Cosplay*, and thought a *lot* about what went into it and the topics that it covers, and I'm the best person to evangelize for it and its contents. Most readers will buy it and put it on the shelf, or flip through it. A smaller segment will read it quickly. Fewer will rate it, and even fewer will review it and go out and tell tons of people about it. I've been lucky: the book didn't sink without a trace, and I've had some folks who've really gone out to bat for the book, telling their friends and followers about it. They're the rare, special exception, and I appreciate them so much. ### Readers aren't going to see it exactly as you do I'd run searches for "Cosplay: A History" on Twitter to see what folks were reacting to the book. I stopped when someone said that I'd advocated or excused blackface. (I did not.) That's an extreme case, but folks are going to read your book and get a slightly different takeaway than you did; they might agree or disagree with conclusions you came to, they might not like that you covered X, Y, or Z, or think that you talk about *Star Wars* too much (which, fair.) They're also not necessarily going to know or understand what your approach or purpose for the book is, and likely won't read the various interviews, think pieces, or tweets that you've put out about it. This is fine: readers are all different! Again, they're not going to care about the topic quite as much as you, or the same way as you. ### Don't read reviews I've stopped reading reviews on Goodreads/Amazon. Don't read 'em. They'll either be good reviews and work to inflate your ego (okay, I guess, in moderation), or they'll be bad and will ruin your day. I've read a bunch, and stopped when I realized that I'd fixate more on those negative ones, and less on the ones that were genuinely thoughtful and introspective. ### Goodreads is the worst Seriously, the only good feature it has is setting a yearly goal and tracking what you're reading. The rest is a hot garbage fire. ### Don't compare your successes with those of other writers It's so extremely easy to fall into the trap of "this writer/book got this interview, this award nomination, this article, this, this, this, and I didn't." *Cosplay* didn't light the genre world on fire. No big, front-page interview in *Locus*, no award nominations, big think pieces, convention invites, and high-profile stuff like that. I'll admit that there's some small part of me for which that stings: part of me hoped that the book would get a bit more attention in fan circles. There's no rhyme or reason for this: there are other books out there, *Cosplay*'s sort of in a weird space for genre literature, and sometimes, things just blip under the radar. My book is different from everyone else's, and if anything, it's just reinforced that there's more work to be done. I've found solace in the fact that the book's out there, and there are things that I *can* to do get it out before other readers. I'll talk about it, write about it here at the newsletter, note when it's on sale, reach out to cons/journalists/etc. to keep interest up. I'm a big believer in success is putting the work in, and being in the right position to take advantage of things when a lucky break comes. ### Post-book brain fog This was the thing that I didn't expect: after the book had rolled out and I set out some plans to continue to do some writing about cosplay stuff (I keep promising to do some "Lost Chapters" of stuff I didn't include in the book), and haven't accomplished much of that. I've had some moments of brain fuzziness when it comes to cosplay. Some of that's probably down to spending a ton of time researching and writing this, some part is probably post-COVID brain fog, and another part is a day job. It's okay to take a break! There's been times when I've been exhausted over trhe prospect of talking about cosplay and promoting the book, and I've stepped back to read other things, play video games, deal with children / pets / family / chickens / work. Recharging is important, but it has been frustrating. I've wanted to write about a whole bunch of things related to the book, I've got an outline/proposal for another book that I've been tinkering with, and I feel like I'm a bit behind the ball on getting the process going again. ### There are always more things to correct/discover/write I wrote a nonfiction book with a finite number of pages: there were things that I missed or didn't cover completely. I've got plans to write up some additional chapters for this newsletter, but when I went to Star Wars Celebration, I was amused to have someone tell me that there was a Roman emperor who dressed up as Hercules, and another person who told me about Arthur Conan Doyle dressing up as his own characters: things that I hadn't come across while researching. There's also random typos and a couple of names that I didn't quite get right, which slipped through the copyediting process. It happens to everyone. ### I wrote a frickin' book Lastly: I wrote a whole book! Throughout all of that, I'm still somewhat dazed that that happened: it's out in stores, it looks fantastic, thanks to the entire team at Saga – I'm only responsible for the words; they did everything else that brought it over the finish line: the entire book wouldn't have been nearly the success it's been without the efforts of Amara, Joe, Lucy, Seth, and a whole bunch of others who've been there every step along the way. ### Bookstores don't ask for ID when you ask to sign a book Every time I've gone in to a bookstore and found a copy, and asked to sign it, they're more than happy to hand you a pen and get a signed sticker, and have never asked me to prove that I'm actually the author. I'm honestly amazed that this hasn't been abused. (Please don't impersonate an author!) I've found it to be a little awkward, but settled into a "hey, I happened to be in the area, you have a copy of my book, do you mind if I sign it?" approach. It's still a very, very cool thing to get to do. --- Thanks as always for reading, and especially for those of you who've stuck through this entire process: the publication process, the random acts of self promotion, and for buying/reading/thinking about it in the last year. It's been a fun, scary, interesting, and stressful process, one that I've learned a lot from, and I'm looking forward to the next adventure at some point in the future. Andrew \- ### Here are the winners of the 2023 Locus Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-awards-winners-scalzi-kuang-nayler/ Last updated: 2023-06-27T16:46:57.000Z *Locus Magazine* held its annual conferences over the weekend, and as part of that event, it announced the winners of its reader-chosen awards. This is one of the bigger community awards, and it's a good barometer for the state of the genre on any given year. I thought this year's list of finalists was a decently strong one, and I thought that it was a good selection that ended up taking the award home. Of course, not everyone did: that's pretty typical of any major award. This year's grumblings come in the form of some screenshots of prose from John Scalzi's *The Kaiju Preservation Society*, with the commentary tracking along the lines of "we can't believe a book with this type of writing won." [Review: John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation SocietyJohn Scalzi’s latest is a monster-filled blockbuster of a novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/IMG_5405.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/) I get where they're coming from: a lot of Scalzi's recent books feel as though they're lightly-edited first drafts, and there are times that I wish that he and Tor would take more time on them, rather than shuffling them out so quickly. But then again, they've sold pretty well, and there's an audience that Scalzi's going for: the wider mainstream nerd culture, the types of folks who'll check out Comic Con for the movie trailers, who liked books like *Ready Player One* and *The Martian*, enjoy the latest blockbusters in theaters, but who aren't necessarily the types of folks who'll subscribe to genre magazines or who'll head over to Readercon for a weekend. It's easy to sneer at those types of fans: I've seen plenty of people do that, segments of the Extremely Online SFF fandom are showing that they're more than willing to put out the True Fans Only card because books like Scalzi's don't cater to a more critical (and smaller) audience. That's been Scalzi's MO for his entire career: he's literally said that he wrote *Old Man's War* because he went to a bookstore and noted that Military SF had the most titles. The best take that I've seen for why *Kaiju* won? It was a popcorn thriller with monsters released during a global pandemic. Of course, Scalzi's book wasn't the only one to win: R.F. Kuang's *Babel* won for Fantasy Novel, and Ray Nayler took home the prize for First Novel for *The Mountain in the Sea*. They're each enormously consequential and interesting books that absolutely deserve all the recognition they've gotten (and then some). So: business as usual. Another set of awards that serve as a barometer for the intersection of fandom and publishing. We'll see what next year brings. (Winners listed in **bold**) ### Science Fiction Novel - *Sweep of Stars* by Maurice Broaddus - *The Red Scholar’s Wake* by Aliette de Bodard - *The Spare Man* by Mary Robinette Kowal - *Sea of Tranquility* by Emily St. John Mandel - *The Daughter of Doctor Moreau* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - *Goliath* by Tochi Onyebuchi - ***The Kaiju Preservation Society* by John Scalzi** - *Eyes of the Void* by Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Neom* by Lavie Tidhar - *Eversion* by Alastair Reynolds ### Fantasy Novel - *The Grief of Stones* by Katherine Addison - *When Women Were Dragons* by Kelly Barnhill - *Spear* by Nicola Griffith - *The World We Make* by N.K. Jemisin - *Nettle & Bone* by T. Kingfisher - ***Babel*** **by R.F. Kuang** - *Nona the Ninth* by Tamsyn Muir - *The Golden Enclaves* by Naomi Novik - *Fevered Star* by Rebecca Roanhorse - *Siren Queen* by Nghi Vo ### Horror Novel - *Saturnalia* by Stephanie Feldman - *Just Like Home* by Sarah Gailey - *Road of Bones* by Christopher Golden - *The Devil Takes You Home* by Gabino Iglesias - *The Fervor* by Alma Katsu - *Gwendy’s Final Task* by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - ***What Moves the Dead* by T. Kingfisher** - *Echo* by Thomas Olde Heuvelt - *No Gods for Drowning* by Hailey Piper - *The Pallbearers Club* by Paul Tremblay - *Sundial* by Catriona Ward ### Young Adult Novel - ***Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak* by Charlie Jane Anders** - *The Scratch Daughters* by H.A. Clarke - *Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn - *The Kindred* by Alechia Dow - *Bitter* by Akwaeke Emezi - Unravellerby Frances Hardinge - *Rust in the Root* by Justina Ireland - *Lakelore* by Anna-Marie McLemore - *Ballad & Dagger* by Daniel José Older - *An Arrow to the Moon* by Emily X.R. Pan ### First Novel - *Legends & Lattes* by Travis Baldree - *The Hacienda* by Isabel Cañas - *The Book Eaters* by Sunyi Dean - *The Bruising of Qilwa* by Naseem Jamnia - *The Ballad of Perilous Graves* by Alex Jennings - *The Unbalancing* by R.B. Lemberg - *The Bone Orchard* by Sara A. Mueller - *How High We Go in the Dark* by Sequoia Nagamatsu - ***The Mountain in the Sea*** **by Ray Nayler** - *The Genesis of Misery* by Neon Yang ### Novella - ***A Prayer for the Crown-Shy* by Becky Chambers** - Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievancesby Aliette de Bodard - Servant Mageby Kate Elliott - “Bishop’s Opening" by R.S.A Garcia (*Clarkesworld* 1/22) - A Mirror Mendedby Alix E. Harrow - Even Though I Knew the Endby C.L. Polk - Tread of Angelsby Rebecca Roanhorse - High Times in the Low Parliamentby Kelly Robson - Ogresby Adrian Tchaikovsky - Into the Riverlandsby Nghi Vo ### Novelette - **“If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You" by John Chu (*Uncanny* 7-8/22)** - “Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold"by S.B. Divya (*Uncanny* 5-6/22) - “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge”by Tananarive Due (*Other Terrors*) - “Solidity”by Greg Egan (*Asimov’s* 9-10/22) - “The Six Deaths of the Saint”by Alix E. Harrow (*Into Shadow*) - “In Mercy, Rain“by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com 7/18/22) - “Falling Off the Edge of the World”by Suzanne Palmer (*Asimov’s* 11-12/22) - “The Sadness Box"by Suzanne Palmer (*Clarkesworld* 7/22) - “A Dream of Electric Mothers”by Wole Talabi (*Africa Risen*) - “The Difference Between Love and Time”by Catherynne M. Valente (*Someone in Time*) ### Short Story - “Give Me English”by Ai Jiang (*F&SF* 5-6/22) - “The Goldfish Man”by Maureen McHugh (*Uncanny* 3-4/22) - **“Rabbit Test”by Samantha Mills (*Uncanny* 11-12/22)** - “Dick Pig”by Ian Muneshwar (*Nightmare* 1/22) - “Master of Ceremonies"by Frances Ogamba (*The Dark* 5/22) - “Beginnings”by Kristina Ten (*Fantasy* 4/22) - “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name”by John Wiswell (*Uncanny* 5-6/22) - “D.I.Y”by John Wiswell (Tor.com 8/24/22) - “Inheritance"by Hannah Yang (*Analog* 9-10/22) - “A Monster in the Shape of a Boy"by Hannah Yang (*Apex* 5/22) ### Anthology - *The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories* edited by Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang - *The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6* edited by Neil Clarke - *Screams from the Dark* edited by Ellen Datlow - *The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022* edited by Rebecca Roanhorse & John Joseph Adams - *Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance* edited by Jonathan Strahan - *Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene* edited by Jonathan Strahan - ***Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction* edited by Sheree Renée Thomas & Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Zelda Knight** - *Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue* edited by Sheree Renée Thomas & Pan Morigan & Troy L. Wiggins - *The Best of World SF: Volume 2* edited by Lavie Tidhar - *The Future is Female! Volume Two: The 1970s* edited by Lisa Yaszek ### Collection - *Dark Breakers* by C.S.E. Cooney - *Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection* by James S.A. Corey - *Night Shift* by Eileen Gunn - *Breakable Things* by Cassandra Khaw - *Geometries of Belonging* by R.B. Lemberg - ***Boys, Beasts & Men* by Sam J. Miller** - *The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer* by Janelle Monáe et al. - *Illuminations* by Alan Moore - *Our Fruiting Bodies* by Nisi Shawl - *The Best of Lucius Shepard: Vol. 2* by Lucius Shepard ### Magazine - *Apex* - *Asimov’s* - *Beneath Ceaseless Skies* - *Clarkesworld* - *F&SF* - *FIYAH* - *Lightspeed* - *Strange Horizons* - **Tor.com** - *Uncanny* ### Publisher - Angry Robot - Gollancz - Harper Voyager - Neon Hemlock - Orbit - Small Beer - Subterranean - Tachyon - **Tor** - Tordotcom ### Editor - Neil Clarke - **Ellen Datlow** - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - Arley Sorg & Christie Yant - Jonathan Strahan - Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas - Sheree Renée Thomas - Ann & Jeff VanderMeer - Wendy N. Wagner - Sheila Williams ### Artist - Tommy Arnold - Rovina Cai - Kinuko Y. Craft - Galen Dara - Julie Dillon - Bob Eggleton - John Picacio - Shaun Tan - **Charles Vess** - Michael Whelan ### Nonfiction - *The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020* by Mike Ashley - *Fantasy: How It Works* by Brian Attebery - *An Earnest Blackness* by Eugen Bacon - *Queering SF: Readings* by Ritch Calvin - *Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic* by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - *Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic* by Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton - *The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Two: 1940* by David Ritter & Daniel Ritter - *Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics* by Darieck Scott - *Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences* by Bev Vincent - ***Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography* by Rob Wilkins** ### Illustrated Art Book - *Visions of Beauty* edited by Dianne Borsini-Burr, art by Kinuko Y. Craft - *Paintings & Drawings of Rowena* by Kim DeMulder, art by Rowena - *The Keeper* by Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes, art by Marco Finnegan - *In the Black Fantastic* by Ekow Eshun - *Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly Volume Two* edited by Cathy & Arnie Fenner - ***Chivalry* by Neil Gaiman, art by Colleen Doran** - *The Night Eaters Book 1: She Eats the Night* by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda - *Mother Christmas, Vol 1: The Muse* by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, art by Vic Terra - *Animal Farm: A Fairy Story*, by George Orwell, art by Omar Rayyan - *Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections* by Shaun Tan ### Special Award 2023: Developing Diversity in Genre Communities - Carl Brandon Society --- ### Here are the finalists for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/shirley-jackson-award-finalists-2022/ Last updated: 2023-06-26T11:00:57.000Z Every year, the [Shirley Jackson Awards](https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com) sets out a juried list of books that it honors for outstanding achievement in the literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense." It's always an interesting list of novels and stories: books that harken back to the strange and unsettling stories that Jackson is best known for. The best part? Finalists get a neat memento for appearing on the list: an engraved pebble that they can use to [stone the winner with](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery?ref=andrewliptak.com). Here's this year's finalists: ### Novel - *Beulah* by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates Media) - *The Dead Friends Society* by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse Publications) - *The Devil Takes You Home* by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books) - *Jackal* by Erin E. Adams (Bantam) - *Unwieldy Creatures* by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press) - *Where I End* by Sophie White (Tramp Press) **Novella** - *The Bone Lantern* by Angela Slatter (PS Publishing) - *Bound Feet* by Kelsea Yu (Cemetery Gates Media) - *Catastrophe* by Deirdre Danklin (Texas Review Press) - *Lure* by Tim McGregor (Tenebrous Press) - *Pomegranates* by Priya Sharma (PS Publishing) - *The Wehrwolf* by Alma Katsu (Amazon Original Stories) ### Novelette - *Azeman or, the Testament of Quincey Morris* by Lisa Moore (Black Shuck Books) - “Challawa” by Usman T. Malik (*Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror*) - “Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha (*Clarkesworld*, October 2022) - “This Place is Best Shunned” by David Erik Nelson (Tor.com) - *What the Dead Know* by Nghi Vo (Amazon Original Stories) ### Short Fiction - “Brother Maternitas” by Viktor Athelstan (*Your Body is Not Your Body*) - “The Church of Divine Electricity” by Emily Mitchell (*The Southern Review*) - “Dick Pig” by Ian Muneshwar (*Nightmare Magazine*, Issue 112) - “Halogen Sky” by Wendy N. Wagner (*VASTARIEN: A Literary Journal*, vol. 5, issue 1) - “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” by Kim Fu (*Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century*) ### Single-Author Collection - *And At My Back I Always Hear* by Scott Nicolay (Word Horde) - *Breakable Things* by Cassandra Khaw (Undertow Publications) - *Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted* by RJ Joseph (The Seventh Terrace) - *Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century* by Kim Fu (Tin House) - *Splendid Anatomies* by Allison Wyss (Veliz Books) - *We Are Here to Hurt Each Other* by Paula D. Ashe (Nictitating Books) ### Edited Anthology - *Chiral Mad 5*, edited by Michael Bailey (Written Backwards) - *The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors*, edited by Doug Murano (Bad Hand Books) - *Other Terrors*, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason (William Morrow) - *Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous*, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire) - *Your Body is Not Your Body*, edited by Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone (Tenebrous Press) The winners of the awards will be announced at this year's ReaderCon 32, on Saturday, July 15 at 8pm in Quincy, Massachusetts. ### Firehose quantities URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/writing-ai-science-fiction-chatgpt-midjourney/ Last updated: 2023-06-24T20:00:47.000Z ## Rail City Fan Fest! Quick thing before I get into the meat of today's post: tomorrow's my birthday, and I'll be appearing at [Rail City Fan Fest](https://www.railcityfanfest.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com) to talk about the history of cosplay, and to hang out for a bit with the 501st. I'm not sure if I'll be in costume or not (I'll likely be dragging my child along with me), but it should be a fun time. I'll be talking at 11AM, and I imagine that it'll be a somewhat informal thing. If you're in the area, stop by! --- ## An endless stream of noise There's been a lot that's roiled the ranks of SF/F's Extremely Online personalities in recent weeks. The launch of generative artificial intelligence platforms like Dall-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT have sparked a considerable amount of controversy: *Clarkesworld Magazine* [getting inundated with AI-generated stories](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke%5F04%5F23/?ref=andrewliptak.com), while the Self Published Fantasy Blog-Off [shutting down its category](https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/05/ai-or-not-ai-that-is-question.html?ref=andrewliptak.com) for cover art after this year's winner was found to have used AI. This is something that the SF/F publishing world is going to have to contend with, and [SFWA has put out a statement](https://www.sfwa.org/2023/06/13/current-statement-on-ai-ml-use/?ref=andrewliptak.com) regarding its use. On the other side of the Twitter streams is a loud, ongoing argument about the nature of "cozy horror", in part because of a [piece that went up on *The Mary Sue*](https://www.themarysue.com/instead-of-arguing-about-this-horror-genre-why-not-curl-up-and-enjoy-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*.* It's not a great take: I find some of its conclusions about genre tendencies and horror to be a bit overly broad, but some segments of the SFF world have been using it to gin up some petulant arguments and online discourse that only reaffirms my belief that social media (and especially Twitter) was a bad idea. On the face of it, these two topics feel like they're pretty far apart, but there's a kernel of an idea that underpins both is the relationship between *art* and *content,* and the uneasy boundary that the genre's had to navigate since its inception. A number of years ago, I [wrote up a short piece](https://gizmodo.com/microsofts-free-anthology-includes-some-of-todays-best-1743941332?ref=andrewliptak.com) for *io9* about an anthology from Microsoft called **[Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft](https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, featuring the likes of Elizabeth Bear, Greg Bear, David Brin, Nancy Kress, Ann Leckie, Jack McDevitt, Seanan McGuire and Robert J. Sawyer. There was a [comment](https://gizmodo.com/microsofts-free-anthology-includes-some-of-todays-best-1743941332?ref=andrewliptak.com) that's stuck with me ever since: "I actually like a lot of these writers, and so am dismayed to see them attach their names to this kind of advertising. Everything about this damages their own brands." The underlying assumption – that these stories are in some way diminished because they were commissioned by a large tech firm – bothered me, because that's been a factor in the history of science fiction and popular culture since the early 20th century. In some ways, vast parts of the body of work that is the science fiction genre is a loss-leader for advertisements: science fiction magazines (then and now) feature plenty of advertisements, while the very structure of some of the genre's best-known and beloved works are shaped around commercial constraints. In one way, the genre was created as a stream of *content*, supported by the need to connect advertisers to readers. For much of its existence, science fiction has been a commercial enterprise, aided by a small and devoted population of fans who consume it. When I helped pitch and edit a the *[Better Worlds](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18055980/better-worlds-science-fiction-short-stories-video?ref=andrewliptak.com)* anthology for *The Verge*, corporate sponsorship was a key element of that: the partnership folks at *Vox* secured Boeing as a sponsor. We don't look at science fiction of this era as mere content; a lure to ensnare hapless readers into spending their money. Magazines facilitated an environment for artists to carve out stories that expanded the boundaries of imagination. Successful and would-be authors and artists worked within those commercial constraints to generate new worlds, new characters, and new ideas for their readers. Bill Watterson, the creator of *Calvin & Hobbes* is an excellent example of how you can carve out an artistic space within a commercial environment. ([KaptainKristian has an excellent video about this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zA7LrWcC-g&ref=andrewliptak.com).) Indeed, there are plenty of notable stories that have come forth from the minds of writers in the pages of magazines and on television screens, brought there by the needs for an advertising network. We're reminded of this every time a beloved series is given the ax by the cruel network executives who point to low viewership rates to justify the cost for keeping it going for one wished for season. We remember the stories those writers produced; we don't remember the ad copy. At some point in the last couple of decades, it feels as though there's been some shift in how we consume our entertainment. Nerd things aren't the backwater things they once were: Marvel Comics and Dungeons & Dragons are cool now, and there's an audience that's ready to snap up anything with one of the big brand names on it. There's always been a level of commodification with storytelling: look at the history of the comic artists who created the worlds that Marvel and Disney are spinning out in theaters and on computer screens, but it feels like it's becoming overwhelming, at least at the widest public levels. We're fed stories that exist only because they were an entry once placed on a franchise roadmap a decade ago, created to appease the unending hunger for CGI action scenes and to catch the weak gusts of social media trends. Capitalism is a hungry beast, and it doesn't have the patience to be fed what we need to grow. There are rare instances where those artists are able to carve out an unexpected morsel. Tony Gilroy's *Andor* was an abrupt shock to the system; a story that had legs and a powerful message wrapped up in the trappings of a *Star Wars* adventure, while *Across the Spider-verse* bursts with energy and vibrancy as it spins out a story about belonging. There are certainly plenty of other films that find large audiences outside of the franchise names: The Daniels's *Everything Everywhere All At Once* was a zany, brilliant take on multiverses, Syfy's (and later Amazon's) *The Expanse* looked at inequality in a frightening interplanetary future for humanity, Christopher Nolan's *Interstellar* introduced a whole bunch of people to the idea of relativity*,* but these sometimes feel like they're just the exception, rather than the rule. Of course, the literary scene of short stories and novels is bursting with imagination, but those stories rarely break into the cultural zeitgeist and mainstream world. [Nostalgia’s limitsThe Book of Boba Fett was a nice bit of worldbuilding, but that’s about it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/02/Boba-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-book-of-boba-fett-season-1-review/) There are tendencies in this modern fandom mindset that trouble me: there's a hollow emptiness that comes with stories that exist only to fill a schedule or fill some committee-generated set of criteria: what if character x meets/fights/teams up/encounters character y (who you might remember from Story B, with a cameo in Story F.) Studios plan much of this, assuming that fans will want more and more and more of the same: more crossovers, more cameos, more tie-ins that turn into homework. There are plenty of people who'll happily take it in: there are entire ecosystems of outlets and personalities that breathlessly report on every morsel of an update for the next films and television shows on the horizon. We argue about what we should expect from films that might never see the light of day, of casting choices that were plucked from thin air from a disreputable channel, and we scream at authors who haven't delivered the next installment of a series yet. We want more and more *content* but it's never, ever enough. --- With the rise of AI generative platforms, there's been a trend going around: imagine %InsertBrandNameHere but in the style of %InsertMovieDirector. *Harry Potter* in the style of Wes Anderson, *Star Wars* in the style of Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky. Tech companies and personalities in Silicon Valley have pointed to generative artificial intelligence as a suite of tools that can unlock anyone's artistic potential to bring their imagination to life. I can't say that I disagree with the rationale on paper: creators have always figured out ways to tease out stories as new technologies present themselves. Typewriters, personal computers, mimeographs, the internet, Photoshop; in the right hands, they're tools to help create, distribute, and transform. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne utilized a homebrewed AI systemto generate some poetry and planetary environments for his novel *[The Salvage Crew](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781949890709?ref=andrewliptak.com),* while Ken Liu used AI trained on his body of work to write "[50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/50-things-every-ai-working-with-humans-should-know/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" for *Uncanny Magazine*. There's ethical concerns about how these platforms have been trained: artists have found their watermarks embedded in the art, and without good receipts from the companies behind these platforms, it's impossible to tell what the mix of ingredients are that end up the works they generate. I don't know that the wider public really cares about these sorts of concerns, and a [post from a writer called Bloonface](https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/?ref=andrewliptak.com) (via *[Daring Fireball](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/23/bloonface-twitter-migration?ref=andrewliptak.com)*) has some useful thoughts that parallel my own when it comes to how people use these tools: people will use the tools that are most useful or convenient. There's a potent mix of conditions at play here: a fandom that has an insatiable hunger for content and the ready access to technologies designed to produce just that. I worry even more about how those early adoptions will be perceived as the future by the companies that produce our entertainment. Already, we're seeing people making these arguments: an [author making "thousands" by producing dozens of short stories generated with AI](https://www.newsweek.com/ai-books-art-money-artificial-intelligence-1799923?ref=andrewliptak.com), while [another went viral for generating and releasing a children's book on Amazon](https://time.com/6240569/ai-childrens-book-alice-and-sparkle-artists-unhappy/?ref=andrewliptak.com). And while writing this, Marvel released its latest Disney+ series, *Secret Invasion*, [complete with opening credits made with AI](https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-opening-credits?ref=andrewliptak.com). (I actually dig the look, given the shape-shifting nature of the series.) Technology gives us the tools to ease the path of production, and in a heavily industrialized creative field like the film industry, I can't help but see a future where the bar is raised just out of reach for creators. I do believe that there'll always be demand for human creativity, but if AI is so ingrained in the creative process, those opportunities afforded to creators will become scarce. We don't even need generative systems to do this: independent authors like Craig Alanson [have neatly adapted to the demands](https://www.andrewliptak.com/craig-alanson-expeditionary-force/) that platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program puts on its readers: a marathon of turning out content as quickly as possible to appease the demands of readers who just want the next installment as quickly as possible. No shade to Craig – I enjoyed his book and it's a process that works for him. But it certainly doesn't work for everyone, and a future of *just* that type of storytelling feels bleak to me. I worry that something the environment that the KDP program foreshadows the type of creative environments that we'll have in the future: that a technology like ChatGPT will supercharge these tendencies, spitting out a stream of endless shadows of stories that don't do much beyond taking up space. --- There's a contradiction in all of this: studios and platforms are arguably giving people what they want, and there's a long and distinguished tradition of authors working to formula to put down as much ink to paper in order to make a living. The pulp era is loaded with these examples: authors toiling away as they produce the next installment of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, or Doc Savage. The books that sold the best when I worked at Walden Books? Piles of romance mass market paperbacks, as well as books from big names like James Patterson and others. I don't think that there's anything wrong with books that are comfortable to read; long-running stories and characters that you can sink into for volume after volume, episode after episode, because you're there for the journey or because of the familiar surroundings. Genre literature is loaded with works that play to these tropes: urban fantasies featuring an supernatural anti-hero protagonist saving their city from evil, the commander of a starship engaged in battle after battle, to say nothing of the flood of comics that feature superheroes who've been fending off villains for book after book. The latest grumblings over genres like "cozy horror" might have gained some steam because of a dashed-off article, but at its core, I see complaints from the same circles of writers and readers who believe that every sentence must be beautifully crafted, that each book should break new ground and confront a genre's worth of tropes in a new way in order to have some of legitimacy with their audience. These are the same arguments that have been leveled against genre authors for decades: that their fantastical subject strip them of any artistic value. It's condescension that I've seen in plenty of indie bookstores, literary festivals, and folks in non-genre spaces. Where do you draw that line between empty storytelling and writing a story crafted to audience demands and expectations? Is it the existence of a biological heartbeat, the result of electrons capturing one's experiences trapped in the wet mush contained in a skull? Is it the human touches that a creator brings to an outline and world that was created by committee, or the spark of random inspiration? I recently finished a couple of books that neatly fall into the "cozy" categories: John Scalzi's *Starter Villain*, and Alex Shvartsman's *The Middling Affliction*. They're what I'd describe as aggressively *fine*. They were fun: I wasn't bored by their stories or characters, but I'm not sure that they're books that I'd return to in any meaningful way, where I might glean additional insights into their worlds, characters or prose like I recently did with Ann Leckie's *Ancillary Justice* and Iain M. Banks' *Consider Phlebas*. There were things that I'd have wanted to see turn out differently, and things that I can see were put in there because it was plain to see that they were having fun with the process. Are they the types of stories that could be generated with AI? Probably not: both authors have decades of experience writing and editing, and in both cases, they've put together a story that pulls in their readers for the journey. But central to those stories is intention: they had a fun idea that they've put pen to paper (key to word processor?) that they were able to carry out, making up the story beat by beat. This, I think, is key to figuring out where that line lies: the craft that goes into the process of creating the story, whether it's spending the time to craft elegant prose and plots or if someone uses their experience and knowledge to construct a compelling, readable story. I don't disagree that this sort of technology can unlock someone's creative potential, but that explanation just reads to me that it's aimed at someone who doesn't care to take the time to understand what goes into a good story, world, or characters. They don't care about the craft, the thought, the struggle, or the effort to translate their imagination into words on a page. When we pick up a book, we understand that there's more beneath the surface: time that someone has spent learning how to tell stories, that their story draws from their human experiences. AI in the hands of a skilled storyteller could be a useful tool that can make writing easier or efficient. I don't think it's the *best* way to go about writing or coming up with a story, but I do believe that there could be ways in which these types of systems can be used, much like we use Photoshop or a word processor. But people being people, I think it's far more likely that it'll be used as a means to churn out an firehose of content from people only interested in quantifying their stories by the number of installments and volume and efficiency. I hope that readers and fans will be able to tell the difference, and let the market run its course. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/image-1.png) Image: Andrew Liptak ## Currently reading Since my last update, I've finished only one of the books on my to-read list: *[Ancillary Justice](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316246620?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*, which I hadn't read in a decade. It holds up really well, and it was in preparation for another book on my to-read list, *[Translation State](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*, which I've just started. I've since finished three others that were on my longer TBR pile: *[The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062980908?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. I've had this on my to-read list for a while, and downloaded the audiobook for a recent trip down to Pennsylvania. It's an interesting look at the state of Medieval Europe, positing the thesis that it wasn't a dark age, but one where there were complicated politics, art, cross-cultural connection, and innovation. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. *[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062951519?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Steve Brusatte. I loved Brusatte's *[The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062490438?ref=andrewliptak.com)* when I read it a couple of years ago, and wasn't disappointed by this one. It's a sweeping, epic history that helps explain how (and why) mammals thrived after the demise of the dinosaurs, and specifically, how we can track evolutionary changes based on the fossil record. *[The Middling Affliction](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781647100544?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Alex Shvartsman. I recently picked up the audiobook for this when it was on sale, and have been listening on the drive to and from work. It's a fun read, one that falls into the sort of comfortable content bucket that I was talking about earlier. As noted, it's fine: a fun world with some entertaining characters, with a plot that I'd have like to have seen tightened up a bit more. Other books on the to-read list: - *[The Icarus Plot](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)* by Timothy Zahn. Still plugging away on this one, but am enjoying it. - *[White Sun War](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781636242507?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)* by (General, retired) Mick Ryan. I need to get back to this one. I had started Cory Doctorow's *[Red Team Blues](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865847?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io),* but I've set that aside: too smarmy, "as you know, Bob", and too much crypto, and I couldn't get through the first couple of chapters. --- ## Further reading **Aidez la Famille fundraiser**. Subscriber Mark S. [pointed me to this fundraiser](https://www.gofundme.com/f/family-of-4-loses-home-to-fire-in-mile-end?ref=andrewliptak.com) for a neighbor who just lost their home in some fires up in Canada. ### *Babylon 5* returns! I was very excited to see that *Babylon 5* is coming back with a new animated film, The Road Home. The first trailer for the project dropped, and it looks very, very good. [Watch the first trailer for Babylon 5: The Road HomeWatch the first trailer for Babylon 5: The Road Home![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/Untitled.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-the-road-home-trailer-watch/) ***Brave and the Bold* gets a director.** *The Flash* just hit theaters, but Warner Bros. / DC [has just tapped its director](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/brave-and-the-bold-andy-muschietti-directing-batman-film-the-flash-1235646262/?ref=andrewliptak.com),Andy Muschietti, for their next project: *Brave and the Bold*, the next Batman film that'll be in the new franchise continuity. ### Fun with Flags On the day job front, I recently ran a campaign in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Vermont State flag. This is the newsletter piece that we sent out for it. [Fun with flagsVermont’s flag turns 100 on June 1st, 2023![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/flag.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-state-flag-centennial/) ### June books In case you missed it, the first book list for the month of June went out a couple of days late. [19 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out June 2023Stories about space empires, long-hidden crimes, and more to read this summer![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/IMG_2160.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list/) And along with it, here's the follow up for the second half of June: [Some more books to check out for June10 more books to read this month![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/IMG_2301.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-books/) **MCU dominance**. *The New Yorker has* a [solid feature](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/how-the-marvel-cinematic-universe-swallowed-hollywood?ref=andrewliptak.com) about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe took over theaters. **Miniature scale.** *Vox* released a [neat video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj65jTCq1Rs&ref=andrewliptak.com) that's pegged to Wes Anderson's new film *Asteroid City*, but which is a pretty cool overview of how filmmakers use miniatures in films. ***Silo* season 2**. *Variety* [reports](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/silo-renewed-season-2-apple-1235643158/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that Apple's streaming series *Silo* (based on the book by Hugh Howey) has been renewed for a second season. This is high on my to-watch list. ### Streaming strike A short news blurb for a video that I think neatly explains the ongoing WGA strike in Hollywood. [Streaming StrikeA good explainer for the ongoing Writer’s Strike![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1616469829941-c7200edec809?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDIwfHxzdHJlYW1pbmd8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjg2NjgwODE2fDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/writers-guild-strike-streaming-tv/) ### Sturgeon Awards The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas announced the finalists for its annual Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award. I've rounded up the nominees with links for where to read them: [Here are the finalists for the 2023 Sturgeon AwardRead some of the best science fiction from 2022![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1543083115-638c32cd3d58?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDM5fHxzY2ktZml8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjg2MzM3ODQyfDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/theodore-sturgeon-memorial-award-2023/) ### Summer 2023 TV Here's my roundup for the TV shows that are hitting screens this summer. Lots of good ones to check out in the next couple of months. [Summer 2023 TV13 shows to check out this summer![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/Untitled-design.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-ahsoka-marvel-witcher-foundation-summer-tv-watch/) ### System recognition One of my favorite books from 2022 was Ray Nayler's *[The Mountain in the Sea](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=transfer-orbit.ghost.io)*. The paperback just came out, so I figured it was a good time to finally jot down some thoughts about it. [Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray NaylerRay Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is an astonishing novel about recognizing and comprehending intelligence and our place in the world![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_2079.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/) **Ted Chiang profile**. *Financial Times* [recently profiled](https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84?ref=andrewliptak.com) Ted Chiang about the state of artificial intelligence, and it's a fascinating read. ### Three-Body Trailer Netflix has released a first look at its upcoming adaptation of Cixin Liu's *Three-Body Problem*, as well as a release window: January 4th. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out. [Three Body TrailerHere’s the first teaser for Netflix’s adaptation of Cixin Liu’s novel![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/three-body.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-netflix-trailer/) --- As always, thanks for reading. Have a good rest of the weekend, Andrew ### Some more books to check out for June URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-books/ Last updated: 2023-06-23T17:40:41.000Z The end of June is approaching, and that means that it's a good time to check out some additional books that are hitting stores in the back half of the month. In case you missed the first June list, you can find that [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list/), and you can find the other book lists [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/). As always, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and if you make a purchase, we'll get a small cut (which goes to help host this newsletter.) [19 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out June 2023Stories about space empires, long-hidden crimes, and more to read this summer![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/06/IMG_2160.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list/) [Sign up for Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup/free) ### *[Far Reaches](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4TJRRRV?binding=kindle%5Fedition&ref=dbs%5Fdp%5Frwt%5Fsb%5Fpc%5Ftukn)* edited by John Joseph Adams (June 27th) John Joseph Adams is one of my favorite anthologists, and his latest project is a little different: a group of stories for Amazon Original Stories called *Far Reaches*, six standalone stories that look out into the cosmos. There's an impressive lineup here: James S.A. Corey ("How It Unfolds"), Veronica Roth ("Void"), Rebecca Roanhorse ("Falling Bodies"), Ann Leckie ("The Long Game"), Nnedi Okorafor ("Just Out of Jupiter's Reach"), and John Scalzi ("Slow Time Between the Stars"). ### *[Citadel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200836420?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by C. M. Alongi (June 20th) On an alien ocean planet called Edalide, Citadel is the only human-occupied city. It's a dangerous place with tides that bring new resources and dangers, with other threats lurking in the forests: things that the settlers believe are demons sent from hell as a cost of their ancestor's mistakes. One woman named Olivia lost family to the demons, and during an expedition, discovers that the creatures aren't supernatural, but intelligent. It's a revelation that will get her killed by her fellow colonists, and to find the truth behind their predicament, she goes on a journey into the planet's forests to find answers. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/979-8-2008-3642-0?ref=andrewliptak.com) "As the first in a series, Alongi’s novel ably sets up a sequel, leaving plenty of exciting questions still to answer." ### [*Danged Black Thing*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781955765114?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Eugen Bacon (June 20th) Eugen Bacon's latest book features 17 short stories set in West Africa, covering everything from a student who's having trouble leaving his home behind, a woman seeking revenge against an ex, climate change, migration, and quite a bit more. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-955765-11-4?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "With poetic prose, an eclectic range of subgenres, and affecting observations on Blackness and womanhood, this collection showcases Bacon at the top of her game." ### *[The Archive Undying](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250821546?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Emma Mieko Candon (June 27th) On a distant world, a robotic god named Khuon Mo goes mad, and destroyed everything in its path: its priests, cities, and everything it made. In its last moments, it brought back one thing: one of its archivists named Sunai, who's been left to deal with the trauma that he witnessed, unable to die or grow in the broken world that's left. After he has a drunken encounter with another former archivist, Sunai is set along on a path of rediscovery, reconnecting with old friends and allies and confronting his past. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250821546?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Inhabiting the Downworld universe is often a joy: Candon’s fresh, vivid worldbuilding skillfully blends anime staples like giant robots and cigarette-smoking aunties with edgy SFF tropes like dying gods and legendary hybrid beasts." ### *[The Infinite Miles](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200850082?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Hannah Fergesen (June 20th) In this time travel adventure, Harper has been contending with the disappearance of her best friend, Peggy. She's been caught in an endless cycle of grief and dead-end jobs, and the only consolation are reruns of her favorite science fcition TV show, *Infinite Voyage*. When Peggy abruptly returns, she has a weird demand: she needs to be taken to the Argonaut, the TV show's main character. Harper's confused until the Argonaut appears and explains that the show's real, Peggy had accompanied him, and was now under the influence of a deadly enemy known as the Incarnate before dumping her off in the year 1971\. There, she has to figure out how to save Peggy before the Incarnate comes for her. The book earned a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798200850082?ref=andrewliptak.com) from *Publishers Weekly* which noted that "Fergesen grounds their travels in fleshed-out interpersonal dynamics and lovely explorations of friendship, anger, and remorse. Harper is a gratifyingly complex protagonist; she’s smart and dynamic but also grudge-holding and full of fury." ### *[The Seven Year Slip](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593638842?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ashley Poston (June 27th) A book publicist has big plans for her future: she takes her job seriously and has been looking for the right partner. When she finds a strange man in her aunt's apartment, she realizes she's found the right person, but there's a hitch: he's living seven years in her past, leading to an unconventional romance. ### *[The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250899675?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Brandon Sanderson (June 27th) The next of Brandon Sanderson's novels from his massive Kickstarter campaign hits bookstores: *The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England,* in which a man awakens in what appears to be medieval times with no memory of who he is or how he's gotten there. Pursued by a group of other people from his own time, he has to figure out how to survive and make friends with the locals. His only guide would have been a book called **The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England*, but his was destroyed, with only a few fragments left to help him. [It takes a villageThe wild success of Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter holds lessons for building a resilient fan community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-01-at-5.05.29-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/brandon-sanderson-community-fandom/) ### *[The Ghosts of Trappist](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063115163?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by K.B. Wagers (June 27th) K.B Wagers continues their NeoG series with *The Ghosts of Trappist* (following *[A Pale Light in the Black](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062887795?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[Hold Fast Through the Fire](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780062887818?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), continuing the adventures of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard, a Coast Guard-like military unit that patrols the solar system. Ensign Nell "Sapphi" Zika HAS has been through some trauma while the crew of the *Zuma's Ghost* work to defend their championship in the Boarding Games. While she and the rest of her crew are training, they're forced to contend with the reappearance of some missing ships and a mysterious attacker who's been harassing them. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-ghosts-of-trappist-1796535?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying *"*Wagers’s inclusive worldbuilding contains an amazing range of personalities, while the fast-paced plot still gives time for meaningful character stories." ### *[The Book of Gems](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250196569?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Fran Wilde (June 20th) In this third installment of her Gems series (preceded by *[The Jewel and her Lapidary](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389831?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[Fire Opal Mechanism](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250196545?ref=andrewliptak.com)*), Fran Wilde's novella *The Book of Gems* picks up the story of the world centuries later as a scientist named Dr. Devina Brunai, works to rediscover the true gems and their powers, despite critics who believe she's on a fool's errand. When a mentor steals her research and embarks on a research trip for himself to the rediscovered Palace of Gems, his messages back home become incoherent, prompting her to follow and save him and her research from a mysterious enemy. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250196569?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Readers will root for the cousins to find answers, and even those new to the series will be swept up in Wilde’s inventive worldbuilding. This is a bite-size treat." ### *[The Road to Roswell](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593499856?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Connie Willis (June 27th) One of the genre's most beloved authors is back with a new adventure: a road trip to Roswell. Francie heads to the UFO capitol of the world for her college roommate's alien-themed wedding, only to have her skepticism at the scene evaporate when she's abducted herself. Along with fellow abductees – a con man named Wade, a little old lady named Eula Mae, a retiree named Joseph, and a UFO true-believer named Lyle – she has to figure out why they've been abducted and even how to communicate with their mysterious captor. *Kirkus Reviews* [notes](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/connie-willis/the-road-to-roswell/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Willis shapes readers’ expectations by tossing around hints and clues in the form of references to various genres—science fiction, Western, romantic comedy—until it’s not a surprise but a pleasantly satisfied expectation to discover that this or that character is not who he or she (or it) appears to be." --- Thanks for reading. Let me know what catches your eye, and what you've been reading lately. If you're new to the newsletter, consider signing up: you'll get some regular issues with commentary about the SF/F world, as well as other book lists, interviews, and reviews. ### Three Body Trailer URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-netflix-trailer/ Last updated: 2023-06-20T18:00:18.000Z Over the weekend, Netflix held its big Tudum event – a showcase of its upcoming original movies and shows. Amongst the reveals was a first glimpse of *3 Body Problem*, its adaptation of Cixin Liu's science fiction novel, *The Three-Body Problem*. The book is widely credited with bringing the world of Chinese science fiction to western audiences. Originally released in China in 2008 and translated by Ken Liu (*Grace of Kings*) in 2014, the book has earned considerable acclaim for its epic, time-and-space-bending story, one that runs (over the course of the trilogy) from the Chinese Cultural Revolution all the way up to the heat death of the universe. It starts off when a woman named Ye Wenjie is imprisoned in a labor camp in Mongolia in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. She had studied astrophysics, and because of her skills, she's brought into a secretive governmental program called Red Coast, ostensibly an anti-satellite program, but one in which the Chinese government is looking for extraterrestrial life. When she receives a message from a planet called Trisolaris – and a warning not to respond to it – she replies, inviting the alien civilization to Earth. The message will have devastating consequences for the future of humanity, and kicks off the events of the novel. Netflix [announced the series back in 2020](https://www.andrewliptak.com/liu-cixin-three-body-problem-netflix-game-of-thrones/), and it has a huge number of names behind it: David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (of *Game of Thrones* fame / infamy), Rian Johnson (*Star Wars: The Last Jedi,* *Knives Out/Glass Onion*) and his producing partner Ram Bergman, as well as Alexander Woo (*The Terror: Infamy*). The series is due out in January 2024\. The trailer features a voiceover from Carl Sagan: "There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness." It's an apt quote, given one of the major themes in Liu's books: the galaxy can be a frightening place. The trailer showcases a bunch of the major things from that first book: scenes from the cultural revolution, first contact, and some of the problems that crop up as the story picks up speed and as humanity begins to become aware that they're about to be invaded. I don't want to give out too much of the plot, but it's a pretty thrilling ride, and I'd recommend picking it up if you haven't yet. [Narratives of modernizationA history of Chinese science fiction Image: Andrew LiptakIn 2015, author Ken Liu stepped up to the podium at Sasquan,the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, to accept the Hugo Award for BestNovel on behalf of Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem. It was ahistoric moment: Liu![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_6232f0a5-8633-45b3-8aba-df7d74cd3636_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/narratives-of-modernization/) What's interesting about this is that it isn't the first adaptation that we've seen of this story, not by a long shot. There was a film that was produced in China that's apparently still sitting on a shelf somewhere, there were a bunch of animated projects floating around, as well as [another live-action version that came out last year in China](https://www.andrewliptak.com/three-body-problem-chinese-sf-watch/) (you can watch that on YouTube). I've been looking forward to the series, and I'm interested in seeing how Netflix treats it: given its scale (especially after the first book), it'll be a formidable challenge. ### Summer 2023 TV URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-trek-ahsoka-marvel-witcher-foundation-summer-tv-watch/ Last updated: 2024-01-12T18:37:31.000Z I keep a running list of shows that I want to watch on my iPhone, and it's gotten to the point where it's overwhelming: there's nearly 60 (!) shows on there, ranging from things that have been out for a while to ones that that are coming up. I've been working my way through *Better Call Saul*'s 6th season, and while checking it off the list, I realized that there are a *ton* of new seasons and shows coming out this summer. So, I've jotted down a schedule for what's coming up, because some of these are coming up fast. ### *Black Mirror* Season 6, Netflix, June 15th *Black Mirror* is one of those shows that I have to be in the right mood to dig into; I still haven't watched Season 5, which dropped in 2019\. After something of a hiatus, the show's back for a sixth season. Judging from the trailer, it looks like there'll be a real selection of mind-blenders: ### *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds* Season 2, Paramount+, June 15th I've never been much of a *Star Trek* fan, but the recent iterations of the franchise have drawn me in, especially *Strange New Worlds*. The first season came out last year, and I've been eager to return to the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise. ### *Secret Invasion*, Disney+, June 21st One of Marvel's strongest suits is that it's able to tell any number of stories in any number of genres, from zany space opera (*Guardians of the Galaxy*), to techno-thriller (*Iron Man 3*) to political thriller (*Captain America: Civil War*). One of the latest iterations in that last category is *Secret Invasion*, which finds Nick Fury fighting against some shapeshifting Skrulls. This is the first Marvel show that I've been jazzed to see for a while, and it's continuing some storylines that I've been eager to catch up on. ### *The Witcher*, Season 3, Netflix, June 29th I started *The Witcher* when it came out, but didn't quite get around to finishing that season, and haven't seen Season 2\. It's on my list, and at some point, I just need to sit down and burn through it. This is the last season with Harry Cavill starring in the lead role, so it'll be interesting to see what they do to set up that as they prepare for Season 4\. ### *Foundation* Season 2, Apple TV+, July 14th I really enjoyed Apple's take on *Foundation* (you can read recaps [here](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/foundation/)), an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic space opera series as a Galactic Empire begins to collapse. [Asimov’s empireHow Foundation became the story that powered space opera![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-22-at-1.27.10-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/apple-isaac-asimov-foundation/) The series is a bit of a departure from the novels, but I think it's telling an interesting story in and of itself, and I'm eager to see what's to come this year. ### *Justified: City Primeval*, FX, July 18th Not SF/F, but a series that I'm very much looking forward to returning: *Justified*! Justified was one of those rare shows that was pretty much pitch-perfect from beginning to end, and I've rewatched it a handful of times. The show's coming back with a sequel series, City Primeval, which picks up Raylan Givens' story a bunch of years after leaving Kentucky: he ended up back in Miami, and finds himself on the trail of a killer known as the The Oklahoma Wildman. This looks fantastic. ### *Futurama* Season 11, Hulu, July 24th Good news, everybody! *Futurama*'s back after a long hiatus. This has long been one of my favorite shows, and it'll be great to see the Planet Express team back together for some more adventures. ### *Good Omens* Season 2, Prime Video, July 28th I never ended up reading the original novel by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, but I did enjoy the Amazon Prime series quite a bit. (A good memory from this: sitting next to Gaiman, David Tennant, John Hamm, and Michael Sheen at a press junket to ask a bunch of questions.) The two authors had talked about a sequel back in the day, but that never materialized – until now. Amazon commissioned a second series, and it'll be interesting to see how Gaiman follows it up. ### *Star Wars: Ahsoka*, Disney+, August 23rd The next Star Wars series is a big continuation of *Star Wars: Rebels*, and picks up around the same time as *The Mandalorian*. Season 2 of that series brought in Ahsoka Tano, one of the lead characters in the animated *Clone Wars* and *Rebels* shows, as well as hints of Grand Admiral Thrawn as the big bad. I still haven't finished *Rebels*, but it's one of the shows that I've been working through as this series approaches. ### *Wheel of Time* Season 2, Prime Video, September 1st *The Wheel of Time* was the *other* big fantasy series from Prime Video (Ahead of *Rings of Power*), and it tackled the formidable challenge of adapting Robert Jordan's novels for the first time. I wasn't entirely taken with the series when I watched through it, but the reactions to it from fans were pretty good, so I'll be interested to see where they take the series from here. ### Other upcoming shows: - ***Star Trek: Lower Decks* Season 4, Paramount+**. Paramount hasn't announced a release date for this upcoming season, just "Summer 2023), which makes me think that it'll come a bit after *Strange New Worlds* ends. That could put a release sometime toward the end of August. - ***Three-Body Problem*, Netflix**. Netflix has said that its big adaptation of Cixin Liu's novels will come midway through 2023\. I'd bet that we'll see some info (trailer, release date, etc.) about this around the big convention season this summer. - ***Skeleton Crew*, Disney+**. The next-next Star Wars series is set in the larger "Mando-verse", following a group of kids as they're lost and trying to make their way home in the galaxy, along with a Jedi protector. This one sounds like a lot of fun: it's slated for a 2023 release, but I haven't heard any concrete dates for it. ### The dawn of the third age URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-the-road-home-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2023-06-15T18:36:18.000Z After a decade-and-a-half hiatus, we've got the first glimpse of some new stories from the *Babylon 5* universe. Warner Bros. just unveiled a trailer for its upcoming animated film, *Babylon 5: The Road Home*. It's like seeing an old friend you haven't laid eyes on in as long, and it looks like it'll be a lot of fun to watch. The original *Babylon 5* series ran on PTEN between 1993 and 1997, and it's become one of those shows that's something of a cult classic. The early CGI and some of the elements of the world have become a bit dated, but when I rewatched it back in 2021, I was impressed at how well it held up. It's a science fiction series with considerable heart and purpose, and it's more relevant than ever. [Babylon 5’s strength lay in its fierce antifascist storyA series that remains more relevant than ever![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/01/CFjbzhVTR7w7rjec4K8JL8.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-antifascism-j-michael-straczynski/) For years, creator J. Michael Straczynski has spoken about how Warner Bros. had no plans to do anything with the underlying intellectual property, and while there had been some rumblings of a new movie, the last project from the franchise was 2007's *Babylon 5: Lost Tales*, a two-part, direct-to-DVD project designed to serve as an anthology series. But in September 2021, [word broke](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-reboot-the-cw/) that Straczynski was partnering with The CW to completely reboot the franchise, although that project seems to have [hit some roadblocks](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-reboot-j-michael-straczynski-the-cw/) as the network's put itself up for sale and changed its approach to content. This new [animated film is disconnected](https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-animated-film-j-michael-straczynski/) from those reboot plans: it's a continuation of the original series, and from the trailer, it looks like we'll follow President John Sheridan as he's bounced through a bunch of timelines, looking at alternate universes to see differing outcomes of the story that he'd been part of. At the very least, it seems like it could be a good way to handwave away a reboot as another one of those alternate universes. Interestingly, this doesn't looks like it's headed to Max as a streaming exclusive: the trailer notes that it'll be a physical release ([ahem](https://www.andrewliptak.com/physical-media-dvds-blu-ray/)), and that you can buy it online at various online platforms. It'll drop on August 15th: I don't see a preorder link for the physical versions yet, but I imagine they'll come soon. ### Streaming Strike URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/writers-guild-strike-streaming-tv/ Last updated: 2023-06-13T18:44:29.000Z A good explainer for the ongoing Writer's Strike _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Here are the finalists for the 2023 Sturgeon Award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/theodore-sturgeon-memorial-award-2023/ Last updated: 2023-06-12T11:00:28.000Z Read some of the best science fiction from 2022 _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Here's the June 2023 book list! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/june-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list/ Last updated: 2023-06-09T16:27:20.000Z I'm going to drop a plug for my own book, *Cosplay: A History*, up at the top: if you're an Audible member, [the book is on sale](https://www.audible.com/pd/Cosplay-A-History-Audiobook/B09MDM493W?ref=andrewliptak.com)! It's marked down 50%, so it's around $9\. Eunice Wong did the narration, and she did a fantastic job. This month's books include stories of fantastical cities, future space empires, long-hidden crimes, and more. This list only covers the first half of the month: I'll have a second part coming in a couple of weeks. You can also find earlier lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. As always, links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and we get a small percentage of sales through that to help with hosting on Ghost. You can also help support the newsletter by becoming a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup) Without further ado, here's 19 new science fiction and fantasy books to check out this month: ### *[A Thousand Recipes for Revenge](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781662510281?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Beth Cato (June 1st) Beth Cato's latest novel follows Ada Garland who has a particular affinity for cooking and food. She once served the Five Gods and the Rulers of Verdania, but eventually fled after witnessing too much injustice and violent incidents there. For nearly two decades, she lived under an assumed identity as a rogue Chef, but after an assassin tracked her down, she's once again on the run. Meanwhile, a princess named Solenn arrives at the court, and while there, finds that she shares some of Ada's gifts (and a bit more), and discovers that there's a plot afoot to murder her fiancé. The two eventually meet, and will be forced to pick sides in an upcoming confrontation. ### *[All Sinners Bleed](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250831910?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by S.A. Crosby (June 6th) I've become a big fan of S.A. Crosby's thrillers over the last couple of years: *[Blacktop Wasteland](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252692?ref=andrewliptak.com)* was a high-octane ride of a father and former getaway driver trying to escape from his past as it catches up to him, while *[Razorblade Tears](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250252715?ref=andrewliptak.com)* was a great revenge thriller that I couldn't put down. (I still need to read *[My Darkest Prayer](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250867636?ref=andrewliptak.com)*). His latest sounds excellent, following Titus Crown, a former FBI agent and now the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia. It's been a quiet place for a couple of decades, but things are about to erupt: a year after a shooting in which a teacher is killed by a former student (and the student is killed by Crown's deputies), he discovers a deeper crime that's been lurking in the back roads of Charon, one that holds plenty of secrets for the county, and for Titus himself. Stephen King [reviewed the book in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/books/review/sa-cosby-all-the-sinners-bleed.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), describing it as "a well-told novel of crime and detection," one that's set apart by its "unerring depiction of small-town rural life and the uneasy (and sometimes violent) interactions between Charon’s white and Black citizens." ### *[The Combat Codes](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316493000?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Alexander Darwin (June 13th) A horrific war left the world devastated, prompting nations to put aside massive weapons in favor of a class of skilled warriors known as the Grievar Knights, whose use would allow countries to settle their differences in hand-to-hand combat. Murray Pearson was one such knight until a catastrophic loss, and now, he's on the hunt for a replacement: one that he finds in the form of an orphan named Cego, who must first go through a grueling training regimen. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316493000?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Darwin’s also adept at making blow-by-blow descriptions of bouts vivid and engaging, even for readers with little interest in the martial arts." ### [*The First Bright Thing* ](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250805546?ref=andrewliptak.com)by J.R. Dawson (June 13th) In this alternate history, a woman named Rin is a member of a circus troupe, the Circus of the Fantasticals, which has become home to a group of outcasts with special abilities. Rin's specialty is jumping through time, and she's been on the run from her ex-husband, who's been trying to keep her under his thumb, all while they sense the coming of the second World War. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250805546?ref=andrewliptak.com) "fans of gentle, uplifting speculative fiction will find much to enjoy in this heartfelt celebration of difference." ### *[Rhymer](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192662?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Gregory Frost (June 6th) For his latest novel (the first of a trilogy), Gregory Frost revisits the legend of [Thomas the Rhymer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%5Fthe%5FRhymer?ref=andrewliptak.com), a Scottish bard who lived in the 13th century. In this tale, Thomas watched as his brother was kidnapped before his eyes by elves. As he investigates, he discovers that these creatures can also take human form, and have been working to replace people in prominent positions of power to take over the world. He's pulled into an alien world and has to rely on his wits and powers that he gains to escape. ### *[The Memory of Animals](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781953534873?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Claire Fuller (June 6th) Humanity faces a devastating viral pandemic that deals out some horrific consequences: nerve loss, sensory damage, and death. When Neffy, a disgraced marine biologist, signs up for a trial of an experimental vaccine, she finds herself grouped with some other volunteers, Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper, each with their own troubled pasts. Leon had been working on an experimental technology that allows its user to revisit memories, and Neffy gets drawn into revisiting her past while the world slides into chaos. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781953534873?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Fuller’s intricately structured narrative makes great use of the Revisiting conceit, allowing Neffy’s history—including her love for an octopus she once cared for at an aquarium—to wrap itself around an increasingly nightmarish present, as Neffy uncovers secrets about the virus’s progression that other volunteers have been keeping from her." ### *[Demons of Good and Evil](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437544?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Kim Harrison (June 13th) Kim Harrison returns to her Hollows series for installment #17*, Demons of Good and Evil*. A witch-born demon named Rachel Morgan knew that protecting Cincinatti's paranormal residents would be a problem, and while they've successfully fought off a demon trickster named Hodin, one of his friends, known as "The Mage", is still around. With Hodin out of the way, he's been hunting down Rachel's supporters. In order to survive and continue to protect those around her, she's going to have to turn to some unlikely partners for help. ### *[Flight & Anchor](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963927?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nicole Kornher-Stace (June 13th) In her novel 2021 novel *[Firebreak](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982142759?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, Nicole Krnher-Stace introduced readers to a dystopian future where a handful of mega corporations have taken over the US and have been waging war against one another. She's returned to this world with a new book, *Flight & Anchor*, a prequel that follows two characters, 06 and 22 as they escape from Stellaxis's headquarters, the only home they've ever known. As they adjust to living on their own, they begin to realize how the corporation manipulates the public in how they presenting their artificial humans as the perfect weapons. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781616963927?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's helpful to read *Firebreak* to get the most out of it, but that "it’s a fast-paced game of cat and mouse that will leave readers wanting more." ### *[Translation State](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ann Leckie (June 6th) I recently reread the first installment of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, *[Ancillary Justice](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565172?ref=andrewliptak.com).* I read the book when it first came out a decade ago, and was blown away by it once again, finding that it was even more relevant and exciting than I'd remembered. (I now have to *pick up [Ancillary Sword](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565196?ref=andrewliptak.com),* and *[Ancillary Mercy](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316565189?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and the standalone[Provenance](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316388658?ref=andrewliptak.com)*,* all of which were just re-released with new, minimalist covers.) Leckie has returned to this universe with a new book: *Translation State*, following a trio of characters: Qven, a translator created to help bridge the gap between humanity and the Presger, a dangerous alien civilization. As they begin to realize that the task that they've been created for isn't necessarily what they want to do with their lives, something that prompts them to flee. They meet Enae, a diplomat who's working to track down a fugitive who's been missing for two centuries, and Reet, a mechanic who's working to learn about his genetics to try and find out why he's so different from those around him. Writing in *Locus*, Adrienne Martini [](https://locusmag.com/2023/05/adrienne-martini-reviews-translation-state-by-ann-leckie/?ref=andrewliptak.com)[says ](https://locusmag.com/2023/05/adrienne-martini-reviews-translation-state-by-ann-leckie/?ref=andrewliptak.com)that "Leckie asks big questions about trauma, power, and secrets. She answers them, too. But, again, not always the way you’d expect her to." ### *[Warchild](https://www.amazon.com/Warchild-Karin-Lowachee-ebook/dp/B0C6VG67PF?ref%5F=ast%5Fauthor%5Fmpb&ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Karin Lowachee (May 31st) Karin Lowachee's been one of my favorite authors for years: she contributed a story to my anthology *War Stories*, has written a whole bunch of excellent shorter stories, and anytime I see a new thing from her, it shoots right up to the top of the list. She's recently republished her debut novel *Warchild,* now with a new cover, which join her other, recently-republished books *[Burndive](https://www.amazon.com/Burndive-Karin-Lowachee-ebook/dp/B07CKCL633/?%5Fencoding=UTF8&pd%5Frd%5Fw=kGd08&content-id=amzn1.sym.ed85217c-14c9-4aa0-b248-e47393e2ce12&pf%5Frd%5Fp=ed85217c-14c9-4aa0-b248-e47393e2ce12&pf%5Frd%5Fr=146-8744856-3842733&pd%5Frd%5Fwg=KLKvg&pd%5Frd%5Fr=07050e04-c96f-4a3b-9a7f-931a2958ca25&ref%5F=aufs%5Fap%5Fsc%5Fdsk&ref=andrewliptak.com), [Cagebird](https://www.amazon.com/Cagebird-Karin-Lowachee-ebook/dp/B01FKF2GYC/?%5Fencoding=UTF8&pd%5Frd%5Fw=kGd08&content-id=amzn1.sym.ed85217c-14c9-4aa0-b248-e47393e2ce12&pf%5Frd%5Fp=ed85217c-14c9-4aa0-b248-e47393e2ce12&pf%5Frd%5Fr=146-8744856-3842733&pd%5Frd%5Fwg=KLKvg&pd%5Frd%5Fr=07050e04-c96f-4a3b-9a7f-931a2958ca25&ref%5F=aufs%5Fap%5Fsc%5Fdsk&ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and a collection, *[Omake](https://www.amazon.com/Omake-Warchild-Universe-Karin-Lowachee/dp/B091WJGST3/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=andrewliptak.com)*. The novel is about a child named Jos who's kidnapped by aliens fighting humanity and turned into a double-agent, and he has to figure out how to save himself. This book was incredibly influential on me: it's a fantastic space opera, one that I highly recommend. ### *[Psyche and Eros](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063295070?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Luna McNamara (June 13th) Retellings of mythology seem to be on the rise lately: a new one comes from Luna McNamara, who takes a new look at the story of [Eros and Psyche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid%5Fand%5FPsyche?ref=andrewliptak.com). Psyche of Mycenae has been prophesized to defeat a monster and accordingly, she's spent her youth learning how to fight with a sword and bow. Along the way, she runs afoul of Aphrodite, who dispatches Eros to curse her. The god of desire is reluctant to get into the affairs of humans, but ends up falling for the young warrior. As the Trojan War kicks off, the two will have to face off against some challenges, divine and otherwise. *Fairy Tale Magazine* [says that](https://www.fairytalemagazine.com/post/book-review-psyche-and-eros-by-luna-mcnamara?ref=andrewliptak.com) "the book presents a passionate romance while exploring ideas of free choice, heroic action, human folly, and the curious life of the gods. ### *[The Surviving Sky](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803361246?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Kritika H. Rao (June 13th) In the distant future, humanity has come to reside in the clouds above a wrecked Earth. The floating cities are technological living wonders. Their makers, the Architects, with their abilities to control the plants that make up the floating cities, are class above everyone else. Iravan is one such architect, while his wife Ahilya is an archeologist who resents his abilities and wants to find a way for society to break free of the power that the architects hold over everyone else. When Iravan is accused of going too far, she's the only person he can go to for help, but she has motives of her own. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781803361246?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Drawing deeply from Hindu mysticism, this heart-pounding cli-fi adventure will leave readers breathless." ### *[SubOrbital 7](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781803363820?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by John Shirley (June 6th) Set in the near future, a team of soldiers are tasked with a routine hostage rescue mission in orbit. A team of scientists have been kidnapped by a terror group known as Thieves in Law, and as Lieutenant Art Burkett and his team retrieve the group, they find that the kidnappers aren't the only ones trying to get their hands on the scientists, and that the fate of the world might be at stake. *Library Journal* [praised the book](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libraryjournal.com%2Freview%2Fsuborbital-7-1797989&ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "The beauty of Shirley’s novel comes from its laser-focused attention to military tactics, which helps to sell its squad-level action. Its haunting near-future setting reads like a story that could be happening right now, giving the text a healthy dose of realism." ### *[The Endless Vessel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063043046?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Charles Soule (June 6th) [I wrote about a Kickstarter project](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cory-doctorow-charles-soule-kickstarter/) that Charles Soule had launched a while back for a companion novel to his latest book, *The Endless Vessel*. The book is now out: it's set in the nearish future after a plague has settled over the world, one in which the afflicted are caught in a deep depression. As the world has slowly begun to grind to a halt, a scientist named Lily Barnes has been working to keep moving forward when everything seems hopeless. Everything changes when she encounters a piece of technology that might help solve the world's problems, which sets her on a journey across the world to unlock its secrets. *Publishers Weekly* [called the book](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-304304-6?ref=andrewliptak.com) "hugely entertaining" and says "Rich characters and a full-throttle plot, plus a solid finale, elevate this page-turner. It's a winner." ### *[Ink Blood Sister Scribe](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063253469?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Emma Törzs (May 30th) This one's come highly recommended to me: two estranged half-sisters, Joanna and Esther are part of a family that has guarded a collection of magical books for centuries. These books unlock all sorts of powers, and in the wrong hands, can be dangerous. The two sisters have separated: Esther fled to Antarctica after her mother was killed, while Joanna remains at the family's rural home in Vermont, where she's been studying the books in her possession. When their father opens a book and dies, the two must come back together and figure out what happened in order to save the family library, and discover along the way a much greater magical world that their parents kept hidden from them. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/emma-torzs/ink-blood-sister-scribe/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Esther and Joanna’s complicated but loving relationship is wonderfully rendered, and Törzs pulls off such an expert series of twists that readers would be advised to cancel their plans until they get to the end." ### *[The Puzzle Master](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593595299?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Danielle Trussoni (June 13th) After an accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury, Mike Brink discovers that he's now able to look at and solve puzzles in new ways, even while the injury leaves him unable to connect with others. Things change when he meets a woman convicted of murder: she hasn't spoken since her arrest, but when she draws a puzzle that might be the clue to unlock the details of her crime, Brink takes a look, only to find more to the story than meets the eye, secrets that go back centuries and which might involve the fate and future of humanity and the universe. ### *[Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781737718437?ref=andrewliptak.com)* edited by Cadwell Turnbull and Josh Eure (June 13th) This is one project that I've had my eye on for a while: a couple of years ago, Cadwell Turnbull (Author of the fantastic *[No Gods, No Monsters](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9798200834419?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[The Lesson](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781094081298?ref=andrewliptak.com)*) set up a cooperative, shared-world writing project called *[Many Worlds](https://www.manyworldsforum.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, which includes stories from authors such as Justin C. Key, M. Darusha Wehm, Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki, Smriti Ravindra, and others. This anthology brings together those stories, featuring strange tales of Earth's unexpected transformation, missing people, unknown creatures, and quite a bit more. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781737718437?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Taken as a whole, this exhibits the best of shared-world writing: diverse settings and distinctive voices grounded in a core worldbuilding concept that, in this case, provokes both paranoia and wonder." ### *[Savage Crowns](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781534439269?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Matthew Wallace (June 13th) Matthew Wallace closes out his *Savage Rebellion* trilogy (preceded by *Savage Legion* and *Savage Bounty*) with *Savage Crowns.* The war for the nation of Crache has started, with Evie, the people's general leading a revolution, getting captured by the Skrian, the nation's army. Meanwhile, Crache leader Dyeawan, who's risen from a meager upbringing as a street orphan, has to contend with a coup within the city, something that could topple her from her throne if she doesn't act quickly. As the war heats up, both Evie and Dyeawan will meet on the battlefield, and will have to find a common goal for the future of their country before they destroy themselves. ### *[Girlfriend on Mars](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780393285918?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Deborah Willis (June 13th) In the near future, Amber Kivinen has a chance to go to Mars, IF she wins a reality competition to join MarsNow, a project sponsored by a billionaire, with two seats reserved for the contest's winners. As she joins a multinational group of contestants, her boyfriend Kevin has been enjoying an aimless life until Amber leaves him for this new opportunity, leading him to deal with the fallout as she rockets to worldwide fame. *Kirkus Reviews* [says](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/deborah-willis/girlfriend-on-mars/?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Part disaffected-slacker rom-com, part social satire, part wistful end-of-the-world eulogy for ordinary, unscripted love, this novel veers close to the kind of wearying cynicism and late-stage capitalist master-villainy that would make its conceit feel familiar. Yet again and again the novel saves itself from this fate by the very real hope at the heart of its main characters’ binary orbit around each other." --- That's all for today: thanks for your patience on this list. I'm hoping to get back to a normal tempo soon. As always, let me know what catches your eye, and what you've been reading lately. Andrew ### Fun with flags URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-state-flag-centennial/ Last updated: 2023-05-31T18:21:24.000Z > This article was originally published in The Vermont Historical Society's biweekly newsletter History Happenings. To subscribe and learn about what's happening at VHS, [head over to our website](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com). In 1779, Vermont adopted an official seal designed by Ira Allen for use for official state documents, but an official state flag wouldn't come until 1803\. Ohio and Tennessee had officially become states, bringing the total number in the Union up to 17\. According to Vermont Adjutant General Herbert T. Johnson, writing in the 1951 *Vermont Legislative Directory and State Manual*, the General Assembly opted to adopt a state militia flag. "It is reasonable to assume," Johnson writes, "that some legislator had in mind that the U.S. flag would continue to have its stars and stripes increased as new states were added, and therefore, adopted for its state flag this flag of seventeen stripes and seventeen stars, and the only thing about it that made it in any way distinctive was the word VERMONT across the top." That version lasted just a couple of decades. In 1818, Congress instituted some changes to the national flag as the number of states grew, deciding that it would add a new star for each new state while paring back the stripes to 13 to represent the original colonies. In 1837, Vermont legislators followed suit with an updated flag. The new design would feature the same 13 red and white stripes, but it would replace the with the state coat of arms in a single star. The bill passed the General Assembly and was signed into law by Governor Silas Jenison on October 20th. That flag was used sparingly. "It does not appear," Johnson noted in his history, "that during this entire period between 1837 and 1923, this state flag was never used or displayed to any extent," and that not only were there few flags ever made, but it was generally unknown within the state's population. In light of that, legislators introduced a bill in 1923 to update the official state flag. According to the *Saint Albans Messenger*, the General Assembly introduced a bill on February 23rd: H.63, "An act relating to the state flag", which called for blue flag featuring the state's coat of arms. Where the official state flag was largely unknown, this updated version had a considerable precedence in state history. When Vermont soldiers went off to fight in the Civil War, they marched under [regimental flags](https://www.digitalvermont.org/collections/show/4?ref=andrewliptak.com) that often featured variations on the state's coat of arms against a solid-colored backdrop. The [1st Vermont Infantry Regiment](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/92?collection=4&ref=andrewliptak.com) used a white flag featuring the coat of arms, as did the [1st Vermont Cavalry](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/113?collection=4&ref=andrewliptak.com), the [2nd Vermont Infantry](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/81?collection=4&ref=andrewliptak.com), [5th Vermont Infantry (Veterans)](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/140?collection=4&page=2&ref=andrewliptak.com), [6th Vermont Infantry](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/133?collection=4&page=3&ref=andrewliptak.com), and others. Interestingly, the [3rd Vermont Infantry](https://www.digitalvermont.org/items/show/140?collection=4&page=2&ref=andrewliptak.com)'s flag seems to have taken its design cues from the second Vermont state flag (with thirteen stripes and a coat of arms in the blue canton, surrounded by stars). According to Vermont State Curator David Schutz, these flags were made of silk and had their designs painted on by hand, with artists taking some liberties with each design, yielding a number of variations. Following the war, the regimental flags were hung in the Vermont State House, where gravity and visitors took their toll on them until they were removed and preserved. Most reside at the Vermont History Center in Barre in special cases, but four have returned to the State House, where they are on display in the former supreme court chamber (now a work room for legislators.) This design was seen outside of military circles as well: for years, the state governor was often represented with a blue flag featuring the state's coat of arms, often referred to as the "Governor's Flag", although there was no statute designating it as an official banner on behalf of the office. According to a columnist in the *Burlington Free Press* in March 1923, "no one seems to know its history. Legal authority for its use appears to be wholly lacking. Sometime, away back in the past, it seems some governor reached the conclusion that it would be desirable to increase the dignity of his appearance at militia musters and field days by having a distinctive flag wave over his escort. Therefore, he ordered a flag made according to his own notions." A response to that column from Johnson sums up the desire for an updated version of the state flag, “It is now proposed to make the flag with the blue field our state flag that has always been the preferred and used at the head of every regiment of Vermont troops and used by the governor on official occasions. There appears to be no sentiment connected with the present state flag, but I believe there would be with the proposed one as it means something.” The then-present state flag (second iteration), an unnamed columnist points out, “It can scarcely be distinguished from Old Glory. Hanging limp from the shaft the two appear exactly alike.” Moving to a new flag brought Vermonters in line with a number of other states who incorporated their respective coat of arms, and also gave Vermonters a banner that represented them. The state coat of arms dates back all the way to Ira Allen’s original state seal. It features a 14-branched pine tree representing Vermont’s place as the 14th state to enter the Union, forests, sheaths of wheat and a cow representing the state’s agriculture, the Green Mountains in the background, and the state’s motto, “Freedom and Unity.” The General Assembly signed off on the bill on March 26, 1923, with an effective date of June 1st, formally cementing the blue flag as the state’s new official flag, a position it has now held for 100 years. In the last century, the flag has represented the state of Vermont at home and abroad. Amongst the flags in the Vermont Historical Society’s holdings are ones that have been carried to the top of Mount Everest (2006), to the North Pole (1970), and to the surface of the Moon (1969 on Apollo 11 and 1972 on Apollo 17). The Vermont state flag was also onboard Space Shuttle Challenger when it exploded in 1986; it was recovered from the ocean and presented to the state of Vermont. Flags are one way through which we represent ourselves. It tells the story of our home through symbols and what that story means to us. As Senator Allen Ball notes just before the bill was approved in March 1923, “\[it’s a\] distinctive flag for a distinctive state (*Bennington Evening Banner).*” ### System recognition URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler-sci-fi-book-review/ Last updated: 2023-05-30T22:10:38.000Z How do you recognize an intelligent mind? This is a question that's long been at the heart of speculative fiction literature, with authors such as Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, Isaac Asimov, Murray Leinster, Philip K. Dick, Carl Sagan, Linda Nagata, Annalee Newitz, Becky Chambers, and many, many others exploring what intelligent life might look like when you look beyond humanity. It's a thought experiment that spans the breadth of topics such as alien civilizations, spirituality, and computer technology, yielding a pantheon of talking robots and fantastical aliens to keep the question going. Generations of scientific exploration and research have only deepened the complexity of the question, unlocking plenty of possibilities of understanding what life might look like in distant solar systems, but also at what might be watching us from other corners of the Earth. Author (and foreign service officer) Ray Nayler takes on this topic in his debut novel *[The Mountain in the Sea](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250872272?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, exploring not only at the complexities embedded in the development of artificial intelligence and the possibility that we're sharing the planet with other sentient beings, but how the political, social, and economic systems that we've set up can easily spell our doom. [Subscribe to Transfer Orbit ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup/free) Nayler sets his novel in a not-too-distant future. An international tech company called DIANIMA has acquired an archipelago off the shores of Vietnam called Con Dao, sealing it off from the outside world to set up a research station. It's a company that's consumed with studying the nature of intelligence as it attempts to replicate it. Under the guidance of its founder, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan, it's created the world's first truly artificial intelligence, an android named Evrim, and it's acquired the land to study a species of octopus that lives there who seem to be highly intelligent. To further their research, DIANIMA entices a marine biologist named Dr. Ha Nguyen to continue her work there. All the while, the facility is guarded by a former soldier and drone operator named Altantsetseg, who communicates through an outdated translation device. Along the way, Nayler introduces a pair of other characters: a hacker named Rustem from Turkey who's hired by a mysterious woman to figure out what's causing a series of fatal accidents involving some automated systems, while a programmer named Eiko is kidnapped and enslaved aboard an AI-powered fishing vessel operating in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone. As Ha and Evrim go about their research into the octopuses of Con Dao, they're confronted with an underlying challenge: how do you communicate with a species for which you really have no common ground? As these various groups collide and encounter one another, they're forced to reexamine their assumptions and motives in order to even begin to try to figure out how to communicate. Ha and Evrim tackle the problem of trying to understand and figure out how the octopuses are communicating, while nearby at sea, Eiko and his fellow slaves at one point have to talk with their own AI overseer to ensure that they aren't worked to death. [Talking to strangersMusing about first contact stories![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/04/IMG_1546.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/carl-sagan-first-contact-science-fiction/) Nayler's future is a bleak one: people interact with advanced chatbots that mimic romantic partners, the aforementioned fishing vessels trawl the seas already depleted by mass fishing, armies utilize deadly swarms of drones, and it looks very much like DIANIMA is intent on exploiting Ha's research at Con Dao for their own ends. Running under the discussion of intelligence and translation and motives is a look at something a little more fundamental: a blistering critique of the capitalistic economics that underpins the world as we know it. It's a system that's designed for resource extraction, whether it's protein from the ocean, privacy of citizens, or the nature of an unfamiliar intelligence. By the end of the book, I feel like it's not even clear that the characters in charge of corporations like DIANIMA are able to fully comprehend its complexity or even control it, as though the corporation and the systems that make it up are able to operate to their own ends, [much like an octopus doesn't fully operate its own arms with a centralized brain](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/?ref=andrewliptak.com). What's constantly been on my mind in the months since I read it is that it's a story about how we truly don't fully comprehend ourselves and the complexity of the world that surrounds us. We're creatures who've risen in the world because of the tools and languages we've used, only to be shaped by those very instruments of our ascension. At the heart of Nayler's book is less a question of "can we recognize intelligence beyond ourselves," and more "how can we be sure that we can recognize it in ourselves in the first place?" It's a powerful, thought-provoking story that feels more and more important in an age where "artificial intelligence" holds ever more way on our lives and world. As DIANIMA uses Ha and Evrim's efforts and discoveries to improve its own, it's building upon and expanding those artificial systems that trap us in superficial digital relationships or as slaves in industries that are quickly extracting what few resources remain before everything collapses. It's a self-inflicted demise, one that *The Mountain In the Sea* says isn't inevitable, but that we're running out of time to avoid it. ### Fantastic sense of humor URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/fantasy-comedy-willow-dungeons-and-dragons/ Last updated: 2023-05-27T16:59:16.000Z If I want to get a group of friends laughing, there's one memory of a long-ago *Dungeons & Dragons* session that I can pull out: > Alex: "I use burning hands." > Sam: "Okay, the moose exploded." If you've ever played D&D with a group of friends, your party probably has a whole bunch of core memories like this: someone does something ridiculously stupid, and the result is a spectacularly funny moment that derails the game for a couple of minutes while people start yelling and laughing. I largely played the game with a group of friends while we worked at a summer camp (between 2000 and 2006). It was a fantastic way to let off steam after extremely busy days minding our groups of campers. We'd have our off-period after lights out and most of the counselors would head down the street to the local gas station to drink or hang out. My group of friends (we were collectively known as the "Geek Squad") would head over to the camp's conference room, where we'd set up shop a couple days during the week and continue our adventures. My friend Sam ran the game: he set the campaign in a magical Roman era, and we were helping the Carthaginian general Hannibal wage war against Rome. It was a neat setting, but what I remember most about those games wasn't so much the worldbuilding or progression, but some of the funnier moments to come out of it. There was the time when my friend Blackwell decided to set his character against mine, and I ended up scoring successive high-rolling hits that drove him up the wall with mock (and a little real) frustration, and then of course, there was the Moose incident. I was thinking about this element of D&D this week while I binged the final half of Lucasfilm's recent fantasy series *Willow*. [Disney announced](https://deadline.com/2023/05/disney-remove-series-streaming-disney-plus-hulu-big-shot-willow-y-dollface-turner-hooch-pistol-1235372512/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it was joining several of the other big streaming services in pulling some of their original content from its platform, and it was one of the shows that had been lingering on my to-watch list. To prepare for the series debut back in November I rewatched the original 1988 film with my son, and was struck at how *funny* it was. It's a dark and grim film, but it's peppered throughout with all of these irreverent lines of dialogue and situations that had us glued to our TV. Fantasy often feels like it's a genre where everyone involved has to take everything seriously, a byproduct of the desire to inject some level of realism into the world and story. The world is about to end: you have to take that seriously. These spells that we're about to cast have to be properly pronounced and at the right time: don't mess it up. The other members of your party are a pile of talking rocks, an immortal elf, and a war-weary barbarian who's seen some shit. Definitely don't mess with them. One of the things that delighted me the most with *Willow* (the series) was the irreverent tone that the writers stuck with throughout the season. The characters are sarcastic, goofy, and funny throughout. Key moments are built up and abruptly undercut with a funny thing that comes out of right field: in one later episode, two characters finally profess that they're into one another and are about to kiss when a troll comes out of nowhere and drags one of them off. Later, said trolls march out, and instead of a monologue from the villain, you get these characters that sound like normal people, rather than a gruff, guttural monster. This even extends to the show's soundtrack: each episode was capped off with a final beat, then a rock song: Tommy Jane & The Shondells' "Crimson & Clover", Metallica's "Enter Sandman," The Beach Boy's "Good Vibrations," and Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing," which was a) a fun selection of music, and 2) a complete sendup from the types of music that we typically expect from epic fantasy. When *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves* hit theaters earlier this year, one of things that I liked about it the most was this same tendency: an emphasis on the comedy that comes out of a group of people doing ridiculous things. The film opens with Chris Pine's Edgin Darvis and Michelle Rodriguez's Holga Kilgore staging a bold escape from prison while they're at a pardon hearing – only for the film to reveal that they're about to actually be pardoned, while the rest of the film is chalk full of these funny moments and lines. One of my favorites is when they're questioning the residents of a cemetery to try and track down the whereabouts of a magical item. They can revive a corpse to ask five questions, after which point it goes back to being dead, and can't be revived. Hilarity ensues. Humor is an important thing to include. It's a way to poke fun at the established conventions or for satirical purposes, but it's also a good way to undercut an audience's expectations and add an element of surprise into the story and characters. In the film, the party comes up with an elaborate plan to get into a castle to steal something, only to have their spell backfire and force them to improvise. In an established genre, creators have lots of tropes that they can fall back on, either with character types, plots, situations, or dialogue, and it can be a short jump from nodding to some notable moment that fans will pick up on from book to book to constructing a story that's predictable. Comedy, in many ways, serves as a reminder that the real world can be chaotic and unpredictable, and that you can set out with a plan to do things, only to have human nature or actions get in the way of what you thought you'd be doing. As a game system, *Dungeons & Dragons* is perfect for this: a dungeon master can plan out a game to her heart's content, only to have her players decide that they'd rather go on a crime spree while in town rather than listen to the wizened old guy who's about to send them off on a quest. Or, if she wants to mess with her players, there are plenty of opportunities to do that. (I always make sure that when I buy a grappling hook to make sure that it *comes with rope:* "I throw the grappling hook up over the wall. *\**rolls; succeeds\* "Okay, I climb up the rope." "...what rope? You just bought the grappling hook: I didn't say it came with rope.") There are lots of super-serious fantasy epics airing on TV at the moment: *Game of Thrones / House of the Dragon*, *Wheel of Time, Rings of Power* all come to mind. They have their lighter moments, but that's not what I remember most about them, and while they have compelling stories and characters, it can feel almost like homework to get through them. I have to sit and pay close attention to every line of dialogue and every small plot point in order to get the full experience. That's fine: there's a place for those shows that reward rewatching. But there's also a place for the lighter and funny stories that I can put on while my attention is on other things, like cooking or housework. But most of all, there's a place for stories that remind us that stories should be *fun*; they should entertain us and find the joy in life's lighter moments. If you haven't checked it out, you've missed your chance to check out *Willow* for the moment: yesterday was apparently the last day that Disney was hosting it. I have a feeling that it'll return at some point. It seems like the playbook for streaming services is just to flip that content to another platform that'll pay for it: *Westworld* ended up on Tubi and Roku at some point (it doesn't appear that it's there at the moment), but I imagine that we'll see them pop up somewhere. *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves* recently made its streaming debut on Paramount+, and it's hitting DVD and Blu-Ray next week – something that I'll definitely be picking up, because \* *waves hands at the state of the streaming world.\** --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_2019.jpeg) ### Currently reading I've been working on churning through my to-read list, and I've knocked a couple off: R.F. Kuang's *[Yellowface](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063250833?ref=andrewliptak.com),* John Scalzi's forthcoming *[Starter Villain](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765389220?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and Iain M. Banks' *[Consider Phlebas](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316005388?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. *Yellowface* was excellent and breezy, but there's definitely a lot to think about with it. *Starter Villain* is pretty typical Scalzi: light and fun ([see my review for *Kaiju Preservation Society*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kaiju-preservation-society-john-scalzi-review/)), but without much in the way of calories. *Consider Phlebas* was a lot of fun to revisit: a huge world and some fascinating characters. I'm definitely looking to pick up the next installment at some point this summer. Currently on the to-read list: - *[The Icarus Plot](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982192808?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Timothy Zahn: I've had this on the to-read list for a while, and after finishing *Consider Phlebas*, I needed a lighter space opera to dig into. This has been fun so far. - *[White Sun War](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781636242507?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by (General, retired) Mick Ryan: I like General Ryan quite a bit, and it's been at the forefront of the FICINT movement, so I've been eager to dig into his attempt at the genre with this future war novel. - *[Red Team Blues](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250865847?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Cory Doctorow: I was looking for a shorter book to dig into recently, and Cory's was at the top of the pile. - *[Ancillary Justice](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316246620?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Ann Leckie: this book turns 10 this year, and Ann's got an upcoming novel set in the same world called *[Translation State](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316289719?ref=andrewliptak.com)* that I'm eager to dig into. I'm enjoying this reread quite a bit. --- ## Further Reading Here's a roundup of some of the recent pieces that I've written for TO supporters that you might have missed, as well as some other excellent pieces to check out from around the internet. ### Farewell, Galactic Starcruiser Disney announced it was shutting down its *Star Wars* attraction Galactic Starcruiser. I spoke with a couple of friends who've been multiple times to get a sense of why they went, and what they'll miss. [System shutdownTwo cosplayers reflect on Disney’s immersive Star Wars experience, Galactic Starcruiser in light of its announced closure![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-CVV2Qn2-X4.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-shut-down-disney/) **Finish that book**. The folks at *Lifehacker* [have some suggestions](https://lifehacker.com/heres-a-way-to-make-sure-actually-read-the-books-you-bu-1850466169?ref=andrewliptak.com) for tackling an insurmountable TBR pile. ### Gareth Edwards' *The Creator* I'm a big fan of original SF films with a lived-in look to their world, and judging from the first trailer, Gareth Edwards' *The Creator* fits that bill neatly. [Man vs. machineThe next film from Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/Untitled.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/creator-gareth-edwards-scifi-movie-trailer/) **Getting removed from Disney+**. I wrote about *Willow* getting removed from Disney+ in passing, but there's a lot to talk about with that particular development in and of itself. Jake Thorton is the writer behind the film *The Princess,* which debuted on Hulu. [He writes about what it's like to have that film get pulled](https://www.jakethorntonwrites.com/post/my-movie-is-being-removed-from-disney-or-why-streaming-sucks?ref=andrewliptak.com) from a streaming platform, after all that work and the big, intrinsic issues with the streaming world. ### 2023 Ignyte Award Finalists Here are the finalists for the Ignyte Awards. [Here are the finalists for the 2023 Ignyte AwardsThe best BIPOC SF/F from 2022![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/Untitled-collage.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/ignyte-awards-fiyah-magazine-bipoc-sci-fi-fantasy-awards/) ### 2023 Kitchie Finalists And in other awards news, here are the finalists for this year's Kitchies awards. [Here are the nominees for the 2023 Kitchies AwardAn excellent-looking list of progressive SF/F titles![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1619371974865-5677b9fcfa73?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHRlbnRhY2xlc3xlbnwwfHx8fDE2ODQ0MzUzNjd8MA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/kitchies-award-2023-nominees/) ### Maria Dahvana Headley's 2023 Tolkien Lecture If you're looking for an excellent thing to listen to about the nature of storytelling and magic, give Maria Dahvana Headley's Tolkien lecture a listen. [We are made of storiesWatch Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2023 Tolkien Lecture, “Tell Me A Story”![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1514539079130-25950c84af65?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDN8fEZhbnRhc3klMjBTdG9yeXxlbnwwfHx8fDE2ODQ3Nzc1MTN8MA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/maria-dahvana-headleys-2023-tolkien-lecture/) **May's Book lists.** In case you missed them, here's the [first book list for May](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/), and the [belated second one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list-wells-adams-beagle/). **Rediscovered**. I love these sorts of stories: a research team [discovered a cache of medieval manuscripts and books](https://www.medievalists.net/2022/09/medieval-books-manuscripts-discovered-romania/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in a church in Romania. **Sewer talk**. My buddy Aidan Moher just placed two pieces in *Vulture*. In the first, he talks about [video game design with for a game called *Into the Breach*](https://www.vulture.com/article/into-the-breach-final-level-matthew-davis-interview.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and in the second, [phe talks about the side-scroller game](https://www.vulture.com/article/dead-cells-toxic-sewers-hard-level-design.html?utm%5Fcampaign=nym&utm%5Fmedium=s1&utm%5Fsource=tw) *Dead Cells* and how video games have long used sewers as a location, and designing challenges. ### The story of Burlington's Venetian Ginger Ale This was a piece that I wrote for the Vermont Historical Society's Winter 2022 issue, about a beverage company called M. & F.C. Dorn Company. I had a lot of fun writing this one up. [A drink for VermontersThe story of the M. & F.C. Dorn Company, prohibition and bottling in the Queen City![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/SODA-PLANT.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-venetian-ginger-ale-burlington/) ### We wants it Andy Serkis is headed back to Middle-earth for another audiobook: *The Silmarillion.* [Andy Serkis will narrate new audiobook of The SilmarillionWe wants it, precious![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_5426.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-audiobook-the-silmarillion-jrr-tolkien/) **Who gets to tell the story?** I mentioned finishing R.F. Kuang's *Yellowface*, and enjoyed this [profile / interview with her in *The Guardian*](https://lifehacker.com/heres-a-way-to-make-sure-actually-read-the-books-you-bu-1850466169?ref=andrewliptak.com), in which she talks about the nuance in this ongoing conversation about identity and story. --- That's all for this week. Expect a couple of things next week, but I'll be on the road Friday-Monday for a belated Memorial Day trip to see family. Andrew ### Here are the finalists for the 2023 Ignyte Awards URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/ignyte-awards-fiyah-magazine-bipoc-sci-fi-fantasy-awards/ Last updated: 2023-05-27T13:32:19.000Z Earlier this week, the folks behind *FIYAH*, a magazine of Black speculative fiction, announced the finalists for this year's Ignyte Awards: a relatively recent set of awards that showcases the best publishing from BIPOC creators. The finalists are put together by a jury, and one neat thing that's new this year is that the jury for the younger adult categories included a handful of judges aged 12-18\. "This year, we’ve added a slate of judges aged 12-18 to help select the YA and Middle Grade finalists," the committee explained (via *[Locus Magazine](https://locusmag.com/2023/05/2023-ignyte-awards-finalists/?ref=andrewliptak.com)*). "The philosophy is that kidlit categories should heavily weigh the opinions of the people they’re written for." I love that move, especially as we're in a time and place where there are plenty of adults screaming at each other over what's appropriate for kids. Kids are smart, and they certainly know what makes for good books and storytelling. I don't have a ton of thoughts on the list as a whole: I've only read a couple of items on it, like *Babel* and *Even Though I Knew The End,* but I enjoyed those quite a bit. (*The Spear Cuts Through Water* is one that I've started, but haven't gotten too far into.) Here's the list of finalists. I've included links where you can find the works available online. [Voting for the awards is now open](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJIjTm44Oz4Bxsg3K9Ufxrf5a9JC5ieHj5VsEBa41RmVyIew/viewform?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Best Novel: Adult - *Babel* by R. F. Kuang - *Kaikeyi* by Vaishnavi Patel - *Siren Queen* by Nghi Vo - *The Blood Trials* by N.E. Davenport - *The Spear Cuts Through Water* by Simon Jimenez ### Best Novel: Young Adult - *Ballad & Dagger* by Daniel José Older - *Bloodmarked* by Tracy Deonn - *Blood Scion* by Deborah Falaye - *Lakelore* by Anna-Marie McLemore - *The Kindred* by Alechia Dow ### Best in Middle Grade - *Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion* by K. Tempest Bradford - *The Last Mapmaker* by Christina Soontornvat - *The Marvellers* by Dhonielle Clayton - *Witchlings* by Claribel Ortega - *You Only Live Once, David Bravo!* by Mark Oshiro ### Best Novella - *[Bishop's Opening](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/garcia%5F01%5F22/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by R.S.A. Garcia - *Empire of the Feast* by Bendi Barrett - *Even Though I Knew The End* by C. L. Polk - *Helpmeet* by Naben Ruthnum - *Into the Riverlands* by Nghi Vo ### Best Novelette - *[If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/if-you-find-yourself-speaking-to-god-address-god-with-the-informal-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by John Chu - *[Men Women and Chainsaws](https://www.tor.com/2022/04/20/men-women-and-chainsaws-stephen-graham-jones/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Stephen Graham Jones - *[Murder by Pixel: Crime and Personality in the Digital ](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/huang%5F12%5F22/?ref=andrewliptak.com)Darkness* by S. L. Huang - *The Epic of Qu-Shittu* by Tobi Ogundiran - *To Carve Home in Your Bones* by Aigner Loren Wilson ### Best Short Story - *[Girl Oil](https://www.tor.com/2022/02/22/girl-oil-grace-p-fong/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Grace Fong - *[The Lady of the Yellow Painted Library](https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/the-lady-of-the-yellow-painted-library-by-tobi-ogundiran/id1244649384?i=1000597357212&ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Tobi Ogundiran - *[The Locked Pod](https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-locked-pod?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Malka Older - *The Voice of a Thousand Years* by Fawaz Al-Matrouk - *[Wanderlust](http://www.anathemamag.com/wanderlust?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by LP Kindred ### Best in Speculative Poetry - "[In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/in-stock-images-of-the-future-everything-is-white/?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Terese Mason Pierre - "I Shall Not Surrender" by Beatrice Winifred Iker (Anathema: Spec From the Margins) - "The Recipe For Time Travel" by Monique Collins - "[We Smoke Pollution](https://www.sfpoetry.com/sl/edchoice/45.1-3.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)" by Ai Jiang - "Year of the Unicorn Kidz" by Jason B. Crawford ### Critics Award - Aigner Loren Wilson - Bogi Takács - Charles Payseur - Christina Orlando - *Nerds of a Feather* ### Best Fiction Podcast - [*Beneath Ceaseless Skies*](http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/audio/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - *[Black Women Are Scary](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/black-women-are-scary/id1525951037?ref=andrewliptak.com)* - *[Good Morning Antioch](https://goodmorningantioch.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* - *[PodCastle](https://podcastle.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* - *[Pseudopod](https://pseudopod.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com)* ### Best Artist - Aimee Campbell - Terri Chieyni - N’kai DeLauter - Taj Francis - Raymond Sebastien ### Best Comics Team - Changa And The Jade Obelisk #2 by Matteo Illuminat, Loris Ravina, Massimiliano Veltri & Robert Jeffrey II - Squire by Nadia Shammas & Sara Alfageeh - Where Black Stars Rise by Marie Enger & Nadia Shammas ### Best Anthology / Collected Works - *Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century* by Kim Fu - *Night of the Living Rez* by Morgan Talty - *Reclaim the Stars* edited by Zoraida Córdova, ed. - *The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer* edited by David Pomerico and Kyle Dargan - *Voodoonauts Presents (Re)Living Mythology* by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, H.D. Hunter & LP Kindred ### Best Creative Nonfiction - [Indigeneity in SFF Gaming: The Ongoing Need for Respectful, Native-Centered Storytelling](https://www.sfwa.org/2022/07/05/indigeneity-sff-gaming-respectful-native-centered-storytelling/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Chesley Oxendine - [Preliminary Observations From An Incomplete History of African SFF](https://www.sfwa.org/2022/06/01/preliminary-observations-incomplete-history-african-science-fiction-fantasy/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Wole Talabi - [The H Word: Horror in a Country that Is Not Afraid of Death](https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-horror-in-a-country-that-is-not-afraid-of-death/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Dante Luiz - [The Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy is Blurring and I’m Into It](https://apex-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-line-between-science-fiction-and-fantasy-is-blurring-and-im-into-it/?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Joy Sanchez Taylor - When Black Boys Find Magic by LaDarrion Williams ### The Ember Award - Afronauts Podcast - Alex Brown - Kate Elliott - Maurice Broaddus - Ruoxi Chen ### The Community Award - Carl Brandon Society - Clarion West - dave ring - Flights of Foundry - Loyalty Bookstore’s Crowdcast --- ### We are made of stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/maria-dahvana-headleys-2023-tolkien-lecture/ Last updated: 2023-05-25T13:26:00.000Z Watch Maria Dahvana Headley's 2023 Tolkien Lecture, "Tell Me A Story" _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Even more books to check out this May URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2023-science-fiction-fantasy-book-list-wells-adams-beagle/ Last updated: 2023-05-24T14:00:51.000Z This is the long-overdue May 2023 Book List 2: apologies for the long delay in getting this shipped out the door! In case you missed it, here's the first May book list: [19 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out in May 2023Books about dragons, publishing, future warfare, alternate worlds, and quite a bit more![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_1723.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/may-2023-sci-fi-fantasy-book-list/) You can also find earlier lists via the [Book List](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/book-list/) tag. As always, please consider supporting this newsletter by becoming a supporting subscriber. [Support Transfer Orbit](https://www.andrewliptak.com/#/portal/signup) *Links to Bookshop.org are affiliates, and if you make a purchase through said links, we'll get a small commission.* Without further ado, here are 21 new SF/F titles hitting stores at the end of May for you to check out. ### *[Halcyon](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593321621?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Elliot Ackerman (May 23rd) I was a big fan of Elliot Ackerman's FICINT novel [*2034* when I read it a couple of yea](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cybersecurity-ransomware-national-security-ghost-fleet-burn-in-2034/)[rs ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/cybersecurity-ransomware-national-security-ghost-fleet-burn-in-2034/)ago, and I've been interested in seeing what he'd do next. As it turns out, it's an alternate history set in 2004, about a historian named Martin Neumann who has to confront the news of a scientific breakthrough: a cure for death. Along the way, Ackerman looks at the meaning of history and those who're affected by it, while also tackling issues of polarization in the country. *Publishers Weekly* [notes](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593321621?ref=andrewliptak.com) that "Ackerman is great at probing the scientific ethics of resurrection," and that "this visionary tale is worth a look." ### [*The Hitchhiker's Guide to* ](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-galaxy-limited-edition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)[the Galaxy ](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-galaxy-limited-edition.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)limited edition set by Douglas Adams (May 23rd) [The Folio Society](https://www.andrewliptak.com/tag/folio-society/) has released a new, limited edition of Douglas Adam's classic science fiction series *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*. This edition is limited to 750 copies, comes in a neat box, with introductions from Terry Jones, Adam Roberts, and Jon Canter, and with illustrations from Jonathan Burton. It isn't cheap: this set runs $875. If that's a bit too steep, Folio does sell the individual books: *[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-galaxy.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, *[The Restaurant at the End of the Universe](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-universe.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Mostly Harmless](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/mostly-harmless.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), [So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), [Life, the Universe, and Everything](https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/life-a-the-universe-and-everything.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)* for $70 each. ### *[Chain Gang All Stars](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593317334?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (May 2nd) Set in the near future, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker are the lead stars of a controversial program called the Chain-Gang All-Stars, a program run by a private prison firm called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) that takes advantage of the incarcerated by having them fight in gladiatorial contests for their freedom. The pair are fan-favorites and lovers, and as Thurwar comes closer to freedom, CAPE is increasingly reluctant to let either escape. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nana-kwame-adjei-brenyah/chain-gang-all-stars/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Adjei-Brenyah displays his impressive range of tone and voice as he deftly manipulates several points of view through shifting time periods; all the while, he maintains control over the elements of his dreaded alternate America, using footnotes and asides to elaborate on the laws and customs of this world but also making direct and similarly detailed connections to the real-life, present-day state of the nation’s mass incarceration system with its brutalities and injustices. It is an up-to-the-minute j’accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human." ### *[The Lost War](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316454070?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Justin Lee Anderson (May 16th) In this new epic fantasy, Justin Lee Anderson follows a king's messenger as he works to gather up members of a party for an epic quest. The nation of Eidyn has recently been coming to terms with the end of a devastating war. While this recent conflict has officially come to an end, the violence lingers in the countryside: there are demons burning villages and mercenaries roaming the rural parts of the world. When the king names a mage called Aranok the King's Envoy, he's tasked with helping a foreign queen ascend to the throne, aided by the group of strangers who he gathers together. As they set about their work, they have to contend with a conspiracy that could plunge the country back into war once again. *Grimdark Magazine* [says](https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-lost-war-by-justin-lee-anderson/?ref=andrewliptak.com) that it's "a solid, fast-paced adventure that straddled a comfortable line between tried and true fantasy tropes and intriguing unique elements to become a book I immensely enjoyed, and hope to have the follow-up in my hands as soon as possible. ### *The Essential Peter S. Beagle* [*Volume 1: Lila the Werewolf and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963880?ref=andrewliptak.com) and [*Volume 2: Oakland Dragon Blues and Other Stories*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781616963903?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Peter S. Beagle (May 16th) Peter S. Beagle is a beloved fantasy author who's best known for *The Last Unicorn*. He's had a rough couple of years: he untangled himself from a court battle against his former manager, and now, he's got a pair of collections from Tachyon Press that collects his short fiction, which feature introductions from Jane Yolen and Meg Elison, as well as artwork from Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. *Kirkus Reviews* awarded the first volume a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/peter-s-beagle/the-essential-peter-s-beagle-volume-1/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Brimming with magic, lyrical prose, and deeply felt emotion, this is, indeed, essential reading." ### *[Dual Memory](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250809131?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Sue Burke (May 16th) I [loved](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/10/16994952/sue-burke-semiosis-first-contact-science-fiction-intelligenet-plants-book-review?ref=andrewliptak.com) Sue Burke's debut novel [*Semiosis*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765391360?ref=andrewliptak.com)when I read it a couple of years ago, and I've been intrigued by the premise of her upcoming standalone novel, *Dual Memory*, which looks at the future of artificial intelligence in a plausible, dystopian future. On one side is a mercenary and aspiring artist named Antonio Moro who's helping to protect a remote Arctic settlement from pirates, and is trying to root out infiltrators. He's aided by a moody personal companion bot, Par Augustus, and together, they set about finding ways to protect their home. *Publishers Weekly* [says](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250809131?ref=andrewliptak.com) "Burke loads the story with fascinating characters as she probes how humanity’s artistic capacity to inspire might interact with AI’s flexible intelligence. This playful glimpse of nonthreatening human-machine interaction is sure to charm." ### *[Titanium Noir](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593535363?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Nick Harkaway (May 16th) Set in the near future, Nick Harkaway's new novel is about Cal Sounder, a detective who's brought in by police departments for certain, special cases. One of those just dropped in his lap: someone murdered a man named Roddy Tebbit in his apartment. Roddy is one of those strange cases: he's over seven feet tall and despite being 91, he looks like he's 30\. Cal learns that he's a "Titan", a wealthy elite who's genetically altered himself. He's part of a class of people who've taken advantage of their wealth to become practically immortal to live out an ostentatious lifestyle that's out of reach of everyone else. The case is anything but straightforward, and it sucks Cal into a much deeper conspiracy at the heart of society. *Publishers Weekly* [gave the book a starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-593535-36-3?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Harkaway’s superior worldbuilding makes it easy for readers to buy in to the conceit, which burnishes detective story clichés with sci-fi flair." ### *[The Will of the Many](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781982141172?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by James Islington (May 23) A prince named Vis Solum is orphaned when The Catenan Republic, known as the Hierarchy kills his family, and he goes into hiding. The country runs on a magical power known as Will: a mental power drawn from the people of the Heirarchy, ceded from the lower classes to those above them. Vis has refused to cede his Will, and is accepted into a prestigious academy ostensibly to hold off for another year, but when in reality, he's searching for a way to take down those who killed his parents from the inside. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-islington/will-many/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "a multilayered exploration of the complacent as complicit, all within a unique yet relatable magic system." ### *[The Book that Wouldn't Burn](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593437919?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Mark Lawrence (May 9th) Mark Lawrence kicks off a new fantasy trilogy, *The Library*, with *The Book that Wouldn't Burn*. A young woman named Livira arrives in the city after escaping monsters that attacked her frontier village, and is assigned to its ancient library to train as an apprentice. The library is home to a magical device known as the Mechanism, which can bring books to life. Over the years, it had trapped a group of children inside and returned them generations later, imbued with powers from the books they had been carrying, but are now unable to leave the building, except for Evar, who lost his memories, and who has spent years trying to find out what happened to him. When he and Livira meet, she works to try and help him with his quest. *Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mark-lawrence/book-wouldnt-burn/?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Lawrence works with many threads here, but none feels misused or insufficiently explored. Rather, the author unspools them masterfully, leaving behind a tightly woven tapestry that readers will ache to see finished even if they can predict one or two of the tale’s myriad twists and turns." ### [*The Blighted Stars*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780316290791?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Megan E. O'Keefe (May 23rd) A spy named Naria Sharp heads off to a distant planet along with Tarquin Mercator, a member of a powerful family that controls humanity's future in space by exploiting any resources they come across. Humankind is running out of habitable planets, and Naria is desperate to take down the family she blames for the destruction. Tarquin, however, would rather study geology and read, and was only out on this mission reluctantly. As Naria disguises herself as Tarquin's bodyguard, her plans backfire when she destroys a settlement ship, and the two are stranded with no way home. As they're forced to rely on one another, they discover a deeper plot that will change everything they think they know about the situation. *Library Journal* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-blighted-stars-1793593?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Emotional arcs and action sequences, vivid worldbuilding, and interesting explorations of body printing and corporate servitude provide an immersive story." ### *[No One Will Come Back for Us](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781988964423?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Premee Mohamed (May 16th) Award-winning author Premee Mohamed (*[Beneath the Rising](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781781087862?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, *[A Broken Darkness](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781781088753?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, and *[The Void Ascendant](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781786185204?ref=andrewliptak.com)*) brings together 17 of her short stories in this debut collection, featuring stories set in the depths of space, to the bottom of the oceans, and everywhere in between. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781988964423?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying that it's "by turns brutal and tender, terrifying and sweet, and Mohamed accomplishes the rare feat of maintaining a sense of human connection no matter how outlandish the stories’ premises. The result will both terrify and delight." ### *[For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780226821894?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Mark Shindell (May 18th) Mars has long captured the imagination of science fiction writers and astronauts, and in this book, Mark Shindell takes a look how the Red Planet has captivated human imagination for thousands of years. He takes readers through the various eras of astrology and science, looking at how our understanding of Mars has changed over the ages, and how it's fueled our desire to go there. ### *[Season of Skulls](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250839398?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Charles Stross (May 16th) Charles Stross adds to his long-running *Landry Files* series with *Season of Skulls* (#13), capping off the trilogy begun with *[Dead Lies Dreaming](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250267023?ref=andrewliptak.com)* and *[Quantum of Nightmares](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250839374?ref=andrewliptak.com)*. In it, the British Prime Minister is an ancient eldritch god who's punishing any criminal offense with death. Eve Starkey has risen to the head of the Bigge Corporation after a supernatural duel with her boss, Rupert de Montfort Bigge, but his influence lingers: through some adept legalese, she's bound by some contracts after apparently being married to him, and when a representative of the Prime Minister arrives with a tantalizing offer, she can't refuse it, even if there are other strings attached. ### *[The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063338180?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Peter Grybauuskas (June 6th) J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for his Middle-earth stories, but he was also a major scholar of ancient languages: his translations of *[Beowulf](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544570306?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, *[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780358652977?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, [the legend of King Arthur](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780544227835?ref=andrewliptak.com),and *[The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780547394572?ref=andrewliptak.com)* have recently gotten their own reprints. Now, we can add the epic poem about a 991 AD battle between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons along the Blackwater river: *The Battle of Maldon. This volume includes Tolkien's own* own work*, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son,"* in which he imagined the aftermath of the battle when a pair of Beorhtnoth's allies come to collect his body from the battlefield. ### *[The History of The Hobbit](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780063330788?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, by J.R.R. Tolkien and John D. Rateliff (May 16th) I [mentioned back in March](https://www.andrewliptak.com/jrr-tolkien-the-hobbit-illustrated-edition/) that there was a new edition of *The Hobbit* hitting stores later this year, but as it turns out, that's not the only one coming out. There's a new edition of the classic fantasy novel in the form of *The History of The Hobbit*, a formerly two-volume set now bundled into a single edition. This book contains Tolkien's unpublished *Hobbit* manuscript, which comes with John Rateliff's examination of the evolution of the book, detailing the changes that the author made as he worked on his larger body of work that is Middle-earth. The book also contains illustrations drawn by Tolkien, as well as other annotations and commentary. This is a *hefty* book, but it looks like a fascinating bit of scholarship. ### *[Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando: Hard Contact](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599495?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Karen Traviss (May 23rd) When folks ask me what my favorite Star Wars novels are, I often point to three: [Timothy Zahn's *Heir to the Empire*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-heir-to-the-empire-thrawn-trilogy/), [Michael A. Stackpole's *Rogue Squadron*](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-a-stackpoles-rogue-squadron-novels-unlocked-star-wars-vast-potential/)*,* and Karen Traviss's *Republic Commando: Hard Contact*. The novel is an intense military thriller that follows a squad of the specialized clone troopers to an out-of-the-way planet on a mission to take out a Separatist target. With the book, Traviss does something that few *Star Wars* authors have really done: get into the details about the Clones and the morality of war, and over the course of this book and its sequels, asks some difficult questions about the nature of warfare in the franchise. This edition is the latest in Classics series, which repackages the book into a nice trade paperback with some new cover art. [Biological wartime equipmentStar Wars: The Bad Batch has continued The Clone Wars’ focus on exploring the tragedy of the Clone Troopers![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/03/FsLdKcfWIAE5RR2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/bad-batch/) This isn't the only book that's getting the re-release treatment this month: there's also [*Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599471?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Tim Lebbon and [*Yoda: Dark Rendezvous*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593599488?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Sean Stewart coming out on the 23rd as well. ### [*Witch King*](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781250826794?ref=andrewliptak.com) by Martha Wells (May 30th) Martha Wells returns to her roots as a fantasy novelist after a mind-blowing stint writing her acclaimed *Murderbot* stories. While polling folks that I knew about what books they were most excited for in 2023, there was one book that was consistently at the top of the list: *Witch King*, Wells' latest. In it, demon Witch King Kai-Enna is murdered, but his consciousness persists. He's reawakened when he discovers a mage trying to use his own powers, and has to figure out the circumstances of his death and the state of the new world he finds himself in. [Martha Wells on her upcoming Murderbot novel, System CollapseA short interview with Martha Wells about her upcoming Murderbot novella, System Collapse![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/12/B6412F35-B23F-45E1-A0FD-6CFB6DBF23B7.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/murderbot-martha-wells-system-collapse-interview/) Paul Weimer of [*Nerds of a Feather* wrote in his review](http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/05/review-witch-king-by-martha-wells.html?m=1&ref=andrewliptak.com) "The novel’s themes of cooperation, of tolerance, of opposing authoritarianism are all strong and well defined by Kai’s story, past and present. There is also a real evoked theme of “building is harder than destroying, but building and rebuilding what has been destroyed is the better, longer path”. And the novel also explores the dangers of the use of unfettered power and having access to that power and what it does to people, to societies. ### *[Fourth Wing](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9781649374042?ref=andrewliptak.com)* by Rebecca Yarros (May 2nd) A young woman named Violet Sorrengail had planned on a future in the Scribe Quadrant, where she could read and study in peace. Her mother – the commanding general of Navarre – shatters that dream when she orders her to join the candidates of a war college for dragon riders. Her time at the school is rough: she's small in stature, the training is brutal, and her fellow conscripts hate her for her mother's brutal actions against the country's separatists. On top of that, there are fewer and fewer dragons willing to bond with their riders. Despite those challenges, Violet begins to realize that this might be her calling – if she survives. *Publishers Weekly* gave the book a [starred review](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781649374042?ref=andrewliptak.com), saying "Yarros’s worldbuilding is intricate without being overbearing, setting the stage for Violet’s satisfying growth into a force to be reckoned with." --- ### System shutdown URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-shut-down-disney/ Last updated: 2023-05-19T19:19:54.000Z Galactic Starcruiser is shutting down. Yesterday, word broke that Disney was shutting down its immersive Star Wars attraction that is part of the Walt Disneyworld Resort in Orlando. [First announced in 2017](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/16/15729120/star-wars-immersive-hotel-westworld-disney-d23-expo-2017?ref=andrewliptak.com), it was a radical idea for theme park entertainment: a themed hotel that would literally bring guests into a galaxy far, far away. The rooms, fixtures, hallways, food, and common spaces would all be designed as though you were aboard a starship called the *Halcyon* on a cruise through the galaxy, staffed by crew members and robots that would help guide you through a story over the course of your two-day stay. The all-inclusive experience wasn't cheap: that stay for two guests cost $4,809, while a family of four was $5,999\. That's a pretty staggering picture for a destination vacation (although I've heard friends joke that it's a bargain compared to what it costs to actually get into space), but it's a trip that I've seen people go on *multiple* times. The cost isn't just for the rooms and food and a trip to Disneyworld: it's a brief jump into George Lucas's world, and which visitors that I've talked to have raved about. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-WCLjfLC-X2.jpg) Image: Brian Anderson I've written a bit about cosplay over the years, and included a bit about Galactic Starcruiser in my book, *Cosplay: A History*. Cosplay as a field and vocation is all about bringing a fictional world to life through costuming, and what Disney's attraction did was bring that tendency another step forward: not only breathing life into the characters, but the trappings of the universe as well. Guests were encouraged to bring costumes with them, and Galactic Starcruiser became something of a destination for those in the Star Wars costuming community: a place where they could don those outfits and become part of the world. Indeed: Galactic Starcruiser wasn't just a theme park for people to reenact their childhood fantasies: like Disney's Galaxy's Edge world in Disney Land and Disneyworld, it was part of the franchise's canon: There was even a novel by Beth Revis that prominently featured the ship, *[The Princess and the Scoundrel](https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780593499368?ref=andrewliptak.com).* By embarking, the fictional world comes to life. 501st Legion Commanding Officer Justin Sonfield was one person I've seen visit multiple times. "This is a loss for all," he told me in a message. "I just wish it had been accessible for more to go." Fellow New England Garrison member Brian Anderson also took two trips on the Halcyon noted that it was "unlike anything else I had ever experienced. Imagine being a kid, playing with your Star Wars toys in your favorite playset, but make it life sized and you are the action figure!" Anderson noted that the experience was justifiably controversial because of its price, but pointed to the level of immersion that made it stand out from Disney's other experiences. "Everything was in universe all the time," he explained. "If you asked any cast member about the current political climate on Naboo, they could not just answer but most likely stump you!" Sonfield concurred: "You never for one second in \[the\] 41 hours thought you were anywhere but on a real live starcruiser. You board a shuttle, you go up, you travel through lightspeed, dock, the door opens, and you are somewhere else. Every trim, and terminal was real: you could touch it and you were living in it with no handrails. You could explore it all. As a *Star Wars* fan, it was like seeing the *Millennium Falcon* in Galaxy's Edge times 1000." There's an economic concept for pricing: market price: what is the price point that consumers will accept for a service or item? You hear about this quite a bit when it comes to concert tickets, and I've come to think about the lofty admission for Galactic Starcruiser as that market price: people *were* willing to spend that much money, and given the space allotted to each "voyage", it was enough to keep a certain level of demand. Anderson made an interesting observation: while you can take in the experience of Disney, you're doing so with thousands of people, while one's time aboard the Halcyon was a far more intimate experience. "\[You'd\] have moments where it was you, 3-4 friends and some of the actors, engaging for 15 or 20 minutes in a side quest off of the main story. That level of connection isn’t possible in the parks." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-3RHQjSX-X2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-Vjf99Gj-X2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-XKsDc4C-X2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/i-ChfrsnS-X2.jpg) The experience was a fusion of cutting-edge immersive technology, entertainment, and storytelling, and the company's experience designing and running it will almost certainly percolate out into other parts of its parks and storytelling initiatives. One notable example was a spectacular-looking lightsaber that actually extended when ignited, while one former colleague noted that in their role as an Imagineer, helped design the interactive experiences between guests and the Halcyon's droids. It's these technological tools, combined with the underlying storytelling, that helps realize these experiences for guests. "I'M a relatively sane 50 year old," Sonfield explained. "There were aspects that defied belief and I had to step back after and say 'wait, that wasn't real.' Every time was different; you'd see something new and have different interactions each voyage, and you'd meet people who became your instant family. The crew would remember your name, what planet you came from, and decided if they could trust you in their quests, and you'd become part of a *Star Wars* story." --- It's hard to say exactly why Disney is shutting down Starcruiser. In a statement on its website, the company says "The final voyage for **Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser* will take place September 28-30, 2023," and that "We are so proud of all of the Cast Members and Imagineers who brought **Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser* to life and look forward to delivering an excellent experience for Guests during the remaining voyages over the coming months. The timing comes as Disney [canceled a planned $1 billion campus](https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2023/05/18/amid-desantis-fight-disney-drops-1-billion-lake-nona-campus-plans/?ref=andrewliptak.com) in Orlando amidst tensions between it and Florida's Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis over his homophobic and transphobic policies. (The company said that the cancellation came due to "changing business conditions" in the state.) I can see this as being lumped into that decision, or perhaps it's simply a case of where it just doesn't make economic sense to keep running a resource-heavy experience for a dedicated cadre of fans. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_1938.jpeg) Image: Justin Sonfield Whatever the reason, those dedicated fans are mourning the coming shutdown. "We all lose something very special," Sonfield says. "As a cosplayer and leader of the largest Star Wars costuming organization, it's a reminder of how uniquely blessed we are that we literally get to live *Star Wars* daily." He recently took part in a dedicated cosplayer voyage. "On our last cruise, no less than five 501st Garrisons, six Rebel Legion Bases, and many clans of Mando Mercs were onboard. While we bring star wars to life on our own, it was just so special to have the environment around us rise to our level and play with us." Sonfield noted another element that boarding the Halcyon brought: It "brought together the absolute least toxic fans that exist in the Star Wars community. You were almost guaranteed that your fellow traveler simply loved Star Wars. This experience changed so many peoples lives, and there is no price tag for that." Anderson agreed. "It is a shame that so few got to experience it. Being able to be part of a round-the-clock *Star Wars* adventure was just amazing. And just by the nature of the experience you were surrounded by other people that “get it”, making it even that much more meaningful. I’ve definitely gained many friends over my two voyages, and will for sure find ways to connect in the parks or elsewhere in the future! ### Here are the nominees for the 2023 Kitchies Award URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/kitchies-award-2023-nominees/ Last updated: 2023-05-19T11:00:28.000Z An excellent-looking list of progressive SF/F titles _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Andy Serkis will narrate new audiobook of The Silmarillion URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/andy-serkis-audiobook-the-silmarillion-jrr-tolkien/ Last updated: 2023-05-19T20:47:05.000Z We wants it, precious _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A drink for Vermonters URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/vermont-history-venetian-ginger-ale-burlington/ Last updated: 2023-05-18T14:43:06.000Z > This article was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of **History Connections,** the Vermont Historical Society's member magazine. To subscribe and support our work, [head over to our website](https://vermonthistory.org/membership/?ref=andrewliptak.com). While Vermont is now well-known for its breweries, the state has a complicated history when it comes to alcohol. It boasted one of the longest prohibitionary periods, even before the arrival of Prohibition in 1919, and out of that environment came a Burlington company that became well known for its drinks throughout Vermont and New England: M. & F.C. Dorn Company. For centuries, alcohol was a staple of the European diets, one that followed colonists to North America. Those colonists drank a lot (three and a half gallons a year!), but with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, attitudes towards alcohol began to shift. Impaired workers operating machinery represented a threat to themselves and those around them, and Protestant and Quaker ministers preached about the moral vices that heavy drinking brought with it. The Temperance movement that followed in the 1800s, prompted some states to begin banning the production and sale of alcoholic drinks. These efforts began as early as 1817 in Vermont, when a committee composed of various religious sects petitioned the state legislature to clamp down drinking and brewing. In the years that followed, the Temperance movement picked up steam and by 1853, the Vermont General Assembly passed a law prohibiting the sale and production of all alcoholic beverages throughout the state. Those laws remained on the books for decades, but public favor veered in the opposite direction by the end of the century: various towns expressed a desire for a local option that would allow them to make the choice of remaining dry for themselves, and in 1903, the Legislature formally ended the practice. Throughout the Temperance movement, people wanted beverages to drink, and non-alcoholic beverages like root beer, soda water, and ginger ales – often referred to as Temperance Drinks – grew in popularity throughout the country. Enter Michael Dorn, who immigrated with his family to the US from Switzerland in 1871\. They initially settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before moving to Burlington a decade later. According to his great-great grandchild, Justin Bunnell, he obtained a liquor license and opened the Dorn Café in Burlington in 1902\. There, he experimented with a variety of drinks, and was particularly known for his cocktails. In particular, he noted that ginger was a good substitute: its fizzy body and color looked a bit like champagne, and its bold flavor meant that it could easily be mixed to flavor liquor. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/factory_int1.jpg) Image: Justin Bunnell Dorn was successful enough with those experiments to close his café and open the M. & F.C. Dorn Company in 1917, next to the Burlington Venetian Blind Company. The Venetian Blind Company had drilled a deep well with reportedly excellent quality water. The company used the water in their products, and even touted it in their advertisements: “Only the purest of ingredients are used in the manufacture of DORNS,” one ad reads, “including the famous Venetian Spring Water which flows from a depth of 187 feet of solid rock.” The company produced a range of beverages, named for the neighboring factory. In addition to its ginger ale, Bunnell said Dorn and his sons also created their own lines of root and birch beers, sparkling water, as well as orange and lemon-flavored drinks, distributing them throughout New England and New York. Producing a line of non-alcoholic drinks was fortuitous for the company. The same year Dorn and his sons opened their business, the US Senate proposed the 18th Amendment to prohibit alcohol and it went into effect in January 1920. The arrival of Prohibition was a boon for non-alcoholic beverage makers. In her book *[Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer](https://www.maureenogle.com/projects/ambitious-brew-2?ref=andrewliptak.com)*, Maureen Ogle explained that an entire generation of people never touched alcohol, and as a result, “sales of Coca-Cola, ginger ale, root beer, and other soft drinks had tripled,” between 1911 and 1934\. Breweries that couldn’t legally produce alcohol shifted their product lines to produce non-alcoholic beverages or shifted gears to bottle beverages for other companies. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/Venetian-ginger-ale.jpg) Image: Vermont Historical Society Dorn seems to have done well for himself in the years that followed and, according to Bunnell, family legend suggests he might have also been involved in some of illicit, cross-border smuggling that took place in Vermont. However, Dorn scarcely saw the end of Prohibition: he died on January 7th, 1934, just a month after Prohibition came to an end. His son Frank took over the company, and under his watch, the company began to drift away from producing their own line of drinks in favor bottling and distributing on behalf of other companies. With the end of Prohibition, breweries were once again free to begin producing and selling beer, and the Dorn company brought in the first shipment of Pabst beer into the state. Bunnell explained that the company won a contract to bottle and distribute Coca-Cola for Vermont, as well as several other beers and beverages. When Frank died in a car crash in 1950, his brother Paul took over the company and continued to steer it in that direction. The company’s original beverages fell by the wayside and the company was eventually sold in the 1980s; its operations moved elsewhere. But that’s not the end of the story. In 2015, Bunnell discovered boxes of his family’s recipes while helping his grandfather clear out his home. Inspired by his family’s history, he began experimenting with the recipes, and. after years of trial and error, he launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 to start his own company, Venetian Beverages, a century after the founding of the original M. & F.C. Dorn Company. In a fitting twist of fate, the building that once housed the M. & F.C. Dorn company on Pine Street has since been transformed into a small-business incubator, and is now home to [Venetian Beverages](https://www.venetiangingerale.com/?ref=andrewliptak.com), where it operates a soda lounge, continuing the century-old legacy in the place where it began. ### A navy transformed URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/george-dewey-a-new-force-at-sea-david-a-smith-interview-vermont-history/ Last updated: 2023-05-18T14:31:40.000Z > This interview was originally published in the Vermont Historical Society's newsletter, History Happenings, which I write and edit. You can subscribe [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com). Born on December 26th, 1837 in a house across from the Vermont State House (where the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters now sits), George Dewey was a rebellious child who was eventually marched off to Norwich University and who later found a career in the U.S. Navy. He's the subject of a new biography by David A. Smith: *A New Force At Sea: George Dewey and the Rise of the American Navy*, which examines his life in the context of a major transformation of American influence around the world. Smith used the Vermont Historical Society's resources while writing the book, and we recently spoke with him about Dewey and how he wrote this book. We also have copies available for sale at our museum bookstore in Montpelier ([you can also buy it online](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/7E90F066-F6B2-41A1-8CDC-02F83469B02E/r/7E90F066-F6B2-41A1-8CDC-02F83469B02E%5Fa43a262b-fecd-4c32-b5ee-7cba4fe715f5/l/C7D4CFDB-A15A-44DE-B7CA-B549B176C693/c?ref=andrewliptak.com)). ### Tell us a little about you and your background, and how you came to write a book about George Dewey. I grew up in the Dallas area and went to Texas State University for my undergrad and master’s degrees in history. I went to Univ. of Missouri and got a Ph.D. in modern American history in 2000\. I’ve been back in Texas and teaching at Baylor University since 2002. I came to write a book about George Dewey after I finished a short biography of Audie Murphy and was casting around for new book topics. The story of the Battle of Manila Bay has always been something I’ve taught in my classes for as long as I’ve taught the second half of the American history survey, so it’s been something I’ve returned to in a classroom setting year after year. I’ve also been interested in the 1890s as a key period of transition in American history and well as the growth of the American Navy during the last 20 years of the 1800s. Gradually the idea of doing a biography of George Dewey as—in part—a way of looking at the rise of the United States to Great Power status is something that just appeared in my imagination. ### How did you go about writing this book? You teach in Texas and thanked Vermont Historical Society and Norwich University’s archives in the book’s acknowledgements: what were some of the challenges in conducting research for this project remotely and in the midst of a pandemic? Right! I was lining up research trips to places like Vermont when the pandemic struck. I had already spent a week at the Library of Congress (which after the pandemic was closed to researchers) so that afforded me a sound start. I had to contact places by email (like Norwich University and the University of Vermont) and ask for help if they were able to give it, and thankfully they were. By contrast, there were a couple of places that I desperately wanted to go and do research but I simply was unable to. I hate to think of the stories I never discovered and therefore couldn’t put in the book. ### Dewey of course, grew up here in Vermont and attended Norwich University before heading out into the U.S. Navy. How did his upbringing and education shape who he was? Dewey’s upbringing distinctively shaped his character. As a young boy Dewey loved to be outside and was a ball of energy who was always on the go. He also, from a young age, didn’t particularly like being under the carefully watchful eye of authority and learned how to get out of tough spots without—he believed—help from above, that is, to depend on his own wits and abilities. His father sent him to Norwich in almost desperation, hoping to find a way to try to control his youngest son’s rebellious, misbehaving, and aimless tendencies. It was there that Dewey first experienced the orderly patterns of military life and he liked it—responded well to it. Even though Dewey still ran into disciplinary trouble at Norwich, he shocked his father when he said that he thought a career as in the military was something he was interested in and would like to go to a service academy. He went to the Naval Academy because an opening there came up unexpectedly. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/9781682475706.jpg) Image: U.S. Naval Institute Press ### The title of your book is *A New Force At Sea: George Dewey and the Rise of the American Navy*. What role did he play in changing how the Navy operated, and what do you think was the biggest change that came out of his career? Well, Dewey played the part of an adaptable, aggressive, and globally-minded commander in the transforming US Navy. He was the kind of commander that the Navy needed in charge of its new technologically advanced ships in a world that was increasingly interconnected and more easily traversed, spanned, and fought over. The biggest change that happened while he was in the Navy (which was, after all, from 1854 when he entered Annapolis to his death in 1917), was the rise of the United States to global Great Power status and the rise of the US Navy as the institution that basically brought that about. A more specific change that Dewey was involved with (aside from his victory at Manila which of course brought about the annexation of the Philippines) was that he was later put in charge of the General Board of the US Navy, the first agency in the US military that undertook detailed war planning in anticipation of future conflicts. ### The Spanish-American War and the following Philippine-American War were particularly brutal: how do you walk that fine line of examining a person’s life, while not necessarily glorifying them or the actions they were involved in? It’s hard to do—to walk a fine line in writing about someone whose actions might contribute to negative outcomes. The basic answer is that you tell the truth, remember that your subject is human and fallible, and, do your best as a biographer to understand the person, his thoughts and his motivations, and approach him with a sympathy born of understanding and with the constant awareness that, while you as a biographer know how all these situations will turn out, the person that you’re writing about—that you’ve spent years with getting to know—does not know the future. ### Dewey came home from the war a major celebrity: what accounted for that fame, and how did it affect him? Dewey was the first celebrity of the mass consumer culture/pop culture era, and was celebrated with a spectacle no other had ever experienced in quite the same way before. Americans are always hungry for heroes, and the magnitude of Dewey’s victory at Manila was so complete, so unexpected, and so…nationally affirming, that Americans saw Dewey as the embodiment of all they wanted the country to be. Americans projected onto him all the positive attributes they could imagine one heroic person having. He was quiet and reticent—and gone from the United States for over a year after his victory—so that until he came back there were no false steps that could tarnish his image. He remained the conquering hero. Once he returned and had the spotlight on him constantly, it was a very bad fit. The press and public turned on him for reasons that he couldn’t understand (although some reasons, like his behavior during his half-hearted Presidential “campaign,” he did understand). When his name receded from the headlines and he could go back to doing his competent and low-key service for the Navy, it was a great relief. ### What lessons can we in 2023 glean from Dewey and his life? One lesson seemed to be the fickleness of fame and the emptiness of celebrity. One lesson seems to be the reward of quiet competence and dedication to duty. Another lesson might to be give yourself time to relax and find little moments in which you can unwind and get relief from the pressures of the world. The only time Dewey was really unable to have regular chances to relax was when he was in command at Manila for over a year without a break, and then, in a very different way, under the 24/7 glare of the celebrity spotlight. ### Lost skylines URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/interview-bob-blanchard-lost-burlington-vermont/ Last updated: 2023-05-18T14:27:19.000Z > This interview was originally published in the Vermont Historical Society History Happens newsletter that I write and edit. You can subscribe [here](https://vermonthistory.org/newsletter?ref=andrewliptak.com). If you drive through the city of Burlington, you might find your eyes wandering across the rows of houses and buildings that climb the hills above Lake Champlain. The city is a wonder of architecture, with some dating back hundreds of years. That rich collection is the subject of a new book from Bob Blanchard, *Lost Burlington Vermont,* which examines the history of the city, as well as some of the city's buildings that have since been lost; some from fires, others through demolition or neglect. Cities never quite sit still: buildings come down and get put up, and over time, the only thing that remains of the old skylines are the memories of the people who saw them. Blanchard's book is a fascinating read, and he took a couple of minutes recently to chat with us about how he put the book together. ### Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get interested in history, and in particular, how did you get interested in Burlington’s architecture? I’ve always been interested in history. I majored in it at UVM, but was busy with career and family so that history remained just a pastime to be enjoyed by reading history books for many years. My interest in Burlington architecture goes back to the purchase of the 1893 book “Picturesque Burlington” at the long gone used bookstore Bygone Books on lower Main Street. The book featured numerous photographs of old buildings in the city that I never knew existed, such as the mansion of LeGrand B. Cannon at the Overtake estate on South Prospect Street. That was about 40 years ago, and even though I never did anything with it, every once in a while I would take out that book and marvel at how Burlington looked in 1893\. So that stimulated my interest in the architecture of old Burlington. ### You founded the [Burlington Area History Facebook group](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/9389208D-C4DD-485B-BAC8-5C5A6D8637D7/r/9389208D-C4DD-485B-BAC8-5C5A6D8637D7%5F47b27487-0fde-40ea-941e-e72610992eec/l/5F270AC1-EF11-4053-A0DB-646A822E8392/c?ref=andrewliptak.com) in 2019, and it now counts more than 23,000 people as members! What do you think is the greatest appeal for members? Is it the nostalgia of looking back on the city as people might have remembered it, or is there something else? There’s no question that the posts on my Facebook group that feature nostalgia get far greater reaction than those featuring history. By nostalgia I mean posts that feature things that people remember from their own lifetime. The ability to make a personal connection with a post generates much stronger response than something from the 19th century, or even from the World War II years. So a photo of something from the 70s, which many remember from personal experience will almost always generate strong reaction and comments. ### You’ve been posting images that you’ve found in your research in that group: can you tell us a bit about your process? How do you go about working through the special collections that UVM and Champlain College hold? UVM Special Collections has so much that it’s hard to get your arms around it. There is a lot available in their open stacks, such as all of Burlington’s city reports, all of the city directories, and so forth. But the real gold as far as I’m concerned, the photographs, are all in their closed stacks. Their finding aids are a help, as you can narrow down those collections that feature photos, but it is a very inexact science. Policy requires that you submit requests for boxes at least two days prior to your arrival because not all of their collections are on site, and need to be retrieved. So I would submit a list of boxes that I wanted retrieved, and then go through each item in those boxes when I arrived. Some days were fruitful, others frustrating. The archive of the James Detore’s photographs of Burlington, taken mainly in the 40s and 50s, features around 40,000 images, all negatives, none of which have been digitized. For a couple of years, I tried submitting lists of key words to search in the Detore envelopes, which I would then search, nearly always with disappointing results. The scant information on each envelope often had nothing to do with the photos inside, so the archive is just not very searchable using key words. This past winter I finally decided to just go through all 40,000 negatives, a process that took eleven visits of seven hours each. Each negative then needed to be reversed and enhanced, which took many more hours, but the result was a collection of priceless images of Burlington from those decades, most of which have never been seen before. Champlain College Special Collections is a very different situation. There are no open stacks, but a much higher percentage of their holdings have been digitized, making searching a much easier task not even requiring a visit. But on a few visits to their collections, I have always come away with some interesting items from their non-digitized materials. I contact the director and let her know what I’m looking for. When I arrive she has the material out for my perusal and for me to photograph. ### What’s an example (or two) of something special that you’ve found in the course of your research? I would say that the most significant thing has been the set of photos of the Frank R. Wells mansion that I found. I sometimes refer to this as the mystery mansion of Burlington, because even though it was in the heart of the city, it was set way back from the street on a 15 acre lot surrounded by trees and shrubs. Most people in town didn’t even know it existed. Wells was second generation of the family that founded Wells & Richardson on College Street, and became wealthy as a result. Finding photos of this mansion became a bit of a personal quest to me, as the only depiction of it that I had ever seen was an outline of the building on a map, where it was just identified as a dwelling. After a lot of searching, I finally found an article in an old architectural magazine that was published after the mansion was completed. It had several photographs as well as floor plans. Nearly four years after I started searching, these are still the only pictures of that building that I have ever found. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/81atiQZwRrL.jpg) Image: History Press ### Tell us a bit about how you planned out your book, *Lost Burlington Vermont*? Given the number of pictures that you’ve posted, it seems like you had to do a lot of picking and choosing for it. From research done for my Facebook Group, I had a good mental list of lost buildings that I wanted to include. Most were large public buildings, although there were several mansions on large estates as well as a few of what I call “grand homes” as well. I then sorted these into categories such as charities, schools, hotels, and so forth, to organize the structure to make searching a bit easier for readers. The publisher had imposed strict limits on the number of words and photos, so a few things did get left out, which was frustrating. Before I knew about the photo limit, I had submitted about 140 photos to be included, and I had to cut that by half. So a lot of great images got cut. I tried to select the best quality images of whatever I included. In a few cases, such as the poor house, and the old jail with the rotating rectangular cell block, there was only one image available, so a lesser quality image made it into the book. In a few cases of very significant lost structures, such as the two cathedrals, I included two photos, one interior and one exterior. ### As you worked on the book, was there any central message or lesson that you learned about Burlington as you wrote? There were several themes that came out as I wrote the book. One is that the city’s wealthy elite was substantial for a city as small as Burlington. That wealth came mainly from lumber and related industries, but Burlington’s favored location on Lake Champlain also attracted very wealthy people, mainly from New York, to build great estates as summer homes there. Examples include Henry Holt, the Webb family, and LeGrand Cannon. All this wealth enabled the construction of many grand homes and significant public buildings, many of which have been lost, mainly to fire (about 20 of them burned). Another theme that I saw was how the historic preservation movement took hold in Burlington over time. As I have mentioned numerous times, the magnificent Howard Mission building on the corner of Clarke and Pearl was torn down in 1964 without a whimper of opposition. By the early 80s, when the hospital wanted to tear down the old mansion on South Williams Street that was then the Catholic bishop’s residence, there was a lot of organized opposition, but it only served to delay, not prevent that demolition. Burlington now has very strict limits on what can be done even by way of renovations to any building that has been deemed historic. Hundreds of buildings in the city are listed on various registers of historic places, from national to local listings. Some argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. ### What’s next for you? Any other books or other projects on the horizon? I have been asked by the publisher to do a second book for them. After considering half a dozen ideas, I have settled on one for this next book. I am currently exploring other publishing options to see what else is out there. It would nice not to have to deal with limits on photos and words again. The book would not be limited to Burlington, but would expand to all of Chittenden County, and would not be just lost buildings and such. It would feature more nostalgia in addition to history, so entities featured would span from the 1920s to the 1970s. *Lost Burlington Vermont* is now available at the museum bookstore in Montpelier and [online](https://eml-pusa01.app.blackbaud.net/intv2/j/9389208D-C4DD-485B-BAC8-5C5A6D8637D7/r/9389208D-C4DD-485B-BAC8-5C5A6D8637D7%5F47b27487-0fde-40ea-941e-e72610992eec/l/1B07F3DA-0749-408F-8AEF-984DD5A84C73/c?ref=andrewliptak.com). ### Man vs. machine URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/creator-gareth-edwards-scifi-movie-trailer/ Last updated: 2023-08-11T15:14:08.000Z Every now and again, I'll catch a trailer for a film that'll hook me from the get-go: everything clicks. There was Duncan Jones' *Moon*, Neill Blomkamp's *Elysium*, and now, there's Gareth Edwards' *The Creator*, which is due out this September. (h/t to Nick S. for pointing this out in the TO Slack this morning. I would have missed it otherwise. I've heard a little about this project over the years, but it's something that's largely flown under the radar for me. [Word about the project surfaced back in February 2020](https://deadline.com/2020/02/gareth-edwards-next-movie-sci-fi-new-regency-regency-1202853742/?ref=andrewliptak.com), and [casting began last year](https://deadline.com/2021/05/john-david-washington-gareth-edwards-true-love-new-regency-1234750641/?ref=andrewliptak.com), for a film described as an original story from Edwards. I've loved his work: his debut film *Monsters* was a wonderful indie film, and his next was an interesting take on Godzilla that I enjoyed quite a bit. Then of course, there's *Star Wars: Rogue One*, which told probably one of the most interesting films of the entire Disney-era franchise. An original science fiction film that isn't tied to a blockbuster franchise is always interesting to me. It does look like a trope that we've seen more than our fair share of over the years: malevolent robot vs. human stories, but the success of those films almost always comes down to the story and world. You've got the big blockbusters like *Terminator* on one hand, then the smaller indie films like *Her* and *Ex Machina* on the other, with little middle ground. It's hard to pre-judge a film on the trailer alone, but I have to say, this really grabbed my attention. Edwards has clearly brought in some of the visual stylings from *Rogue One*, but there's a ton of eye candy when it comes to the visual design of the robots, ships, costumes, and world. It's a film that feels like it has a fully-fleshed out environment. I feel like that isn't something you see all that often: a director that's letting their concept artists and designers run wild, especially for this sort of non-franchise project. It reminds me quite a bit of the visuals and world that we saw in Blomkamp's *Elysium*, in all the best ways. [The billionaires of LEONeill Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium is an underrated film that continues to grow in relevance![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/07/ko2b4zFXUX3UVZcotqu6fT.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/neill-blomkamp-elysium-sci-fi-private-spaceflight-bezos-musk-branson/) I think that sort of worldbuilding is important for stories like this. There are so many films that come out with a lofty SF concept, only to feel like they're set in the real world with just a couple of sleek pieces of technology, like an earbud or some sort of weird MacGuffin prop that drives the plot that sticks out like a sore thumb. Mind, we're just going off of this brief teaser, but this feels like a world where it feels like they've taken the time and energy to make it feel used or lived in, and that helps the story land. For me, at least. So, consider this placed high on my anticipation list for the rest of the year: hopefully it'll be a good story. We'll find out in a couple of months. ### Museum of Cosplay URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/museum-of-cosplay/ Last updated: 2023-05-16T20:00:10.000Z On Saturday, I packed up my car and took a drive over to Concord, New Hampshire to take part in KidsCon New England, a small, children-oriented convention. I'd sent out a flurry of emails to local comic cons and events earlier this spring, and this was one that was interested in having me come by. There was a little bit of a caveat: they weren't really doing presentation space, but they'd offer me a table. I've done tables before with the 501st, so I accepted, then realized that all I had was the book and a presentation that I've been giving to libraries – not exactly the most thrilling thing to have at a table. While thinking it over, I realized that I had plenty of items that I've brought in as a demonstration: a Guardian ++ Sword and Sheikah Slate from *Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild* that I 3D printed for Bram a number of years ago, as well as a printed version of Khonshu from *Moon Knight*, stormtrooper armor, and a blaster from the comic *Vagrant Queen* that I made from EVA foam. I could bring those to show off, right? At the same time, a colleague recently [adapted an article](https://twitter.com/vermonthistory/status/1656654031622643713?ref=andrewliptak.com) I wrote about the history of a local soda company for an exhibit that we've got at the Vermont History Museum, and I've written up a couple of other cards over the last couple of months. The thought struck me: why not set up a museum exhibit? Thus, the Museum of Cosplay was born: a pop-up exhibit that showcases a handful of representative examples from *Cosplay: A History*, exploring some of the story of cosplay and fandom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_1870.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak I began looking at the items that I'd brought with me for talks, and through the rest of my accumulated piles of cosplay things to see what else I had that was vaguely historical. My FX armor turns 20 this year, and it's a good example of how armor design works, so I threw that in there. My foam blaster build is a good in for talking about the importance of foam building, and a Zat gun from *Stargate SG-1* is an excellent example of not only resin casting, but of recasting in the prop and costuming community. Megan suggested that I pull out some of the gazillion convention badges that I've accumulated over the years, and I selected a handful of patches from the 501st Legion as merch examples. I have a trio of mannequins that I use to store armor on (my FX trooper is on one), so I decided it would be good to bring along an actual costume: my cosplay of Sam Bell's jumpsuit from *Moon* was the easiest to put together, so I threw that on there. My colleague at VHS suggested that I pick up some acrylic shoeboxes that she saw at a local TJ Maxx for display purposes: I didn't want someone to walk off with any of the patches or badges. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_1875.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak With the items selected, I had to put together some sort of interpretation. I wrote up an exhibit card in the same style that we do at VHS, treating each object like it was from my own personal museum: a title, the various makers / designers, building materials, and other details, before delving into the story of the item and what it represented for the history of cosplay. --- Here are the cards that I put together: - [History of Cosplay overview](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831156/The-History-of-Cosplay-Panel/?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Zat Gun from *Stargate SG-1*](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831158/Zat-Gun-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [FX Stormtrooper Helmet](https://www.scribd.com/document/645832476/TK-Helmet-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Convention Badges](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831157/Convention-Badges-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [501st Patches](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831168/Unit-Patches-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Sheikah Slate and Guardian ++ Sword from *Breath of the Wild*](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831161/Sheikah-Slate-and-Guardian-Sword-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Khonshu Imprisoned statue from Moon Knight](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831191/Khonshu-Imprisoned-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - [Lunar Industries Jumpsuit from *Moon*](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831159/Lunar-Industries-Jumpsuit-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) - Wrecker Helmet / Shoulder / Lula (I seem to have forgotten to save this after I printed it, so I'll have to recreate it...) - [EVA foam blaster from *Vagrant Queen*](https://www.scribd.com/document/645831160/Blaster-Pistol-Label?ref=andrewliptak.com) (I forgot to print this one out and bring it with me) --- This entire exercise proved to be an important thing for me; not because it was something borne of necessity, but because it got me to think a little more about how to talk about the history of cosplay and costuming. It's one thing to talk about the people involved and what they did to help make this slice of history. But cosplay and costuming are tactile things: and *seeing* a handful of items in front of you is another way of driving this particular story home. More importantly, it got me thinking about these items as distinct pieces of cosplay history, and by writing out each card, I had to break the story down even further in a small amount of space. *What* is this object, and *why* is it important in the bigger picture? *What* does it represent, and what story does it tell a viewer? How do I tease a story out of something like a pile of convention lanyards and patches? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/IMG_1867.jpeg) Image: Andrew Liptak The end result was a table loaded with items: I arranged them in roughly chronological order, set up some books, and waited to see what people thought. The day was... pretty slow, but an interesting experiment for this sort of display. I sold a single copy of the book (to a fellow 501st member), and talked to a dozen or so people about various items, but the value of the day was taking notes and treating this like a test: what types of things draw people in? I took a couple of pages of observations. I need some broader, basic panels that are a bit more prominent that outline the story of cosplay: focusing on the various items didn't really tell the full story. People didn't necessarily read the cards I wrote up, but they spent more time looking at various items. The Stormtrooper and Wrecker helmets drew in the most people, but the items from *Breath of the Wild* did a good number as well. The convention badges and patches also drew in some gazes, and held their attention as they looked at each one. The *Moon* cosplay didn't really draw too many people in, but a couple of people recognized it. The shoeboxes were a good idea: I started out with just the tops for the badges / patches, but ended up tossing the smaller items in the boxes themselves when kids started touching them, and even the empty ones were good for breaking up the cards (I ended up using them as a stand in a couple of cases). I need more things to give away (I brought some 501st legion cards), and a way to actually sell books – I missed out on a couple of sales because I don't have a good way to capture credit card sales. And pack up everything in one crate, rather than a bunch of separate boxes. I think I'll also upload the cards ahead of the con and put out a QR code for people to take the exhbit home with them, along with some pictures or something. More importantly, KidsCon wasn't exactly the prime audience for something like cosplay history: people were more drawn to the Ghostbuster cosplayers on my left, and the stuffed animal store on my right, but enough parents were intrigued enough to briefly stop before getting dragged away by their children. --- While book sales weren't ... optimal, I think this *was* a good way to think about showing up at conventions: bringing the concept of history to this particular field, something that more than one person noted "I hadn't thought about that" over the course of the day. Given the popularity of conventions all over the place, this is also a pretty easy thing to put together: a number of items, some item cards (I saved all of the ones I wrote up), a mannequin or two with costumes to display, and so forth. I've got a short list of topics that would be great for dedicated exhibits, such as the history of the 501st, 3D printing, helmets, cosplayer portraits, Mandalorians/*Star Trek/Halo/Star Wars/Pokémon/Ghostbusters* costuming fandom, and quite a bit more – a series of items that would tell a story in and of itself. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/FwA9rXVWwAALA4U.jpg) Image: Andrew Liptak I think it'll make for a good, ongoing thing to offer up to cons (or places where I'll be talking – maybe to set up ahead of time?) which has me thinking about what this project could mean, long-term: what could this become? I jokingly [called it the "Museum of Cosplay" online](https://twitter.com/AndrewLiptak/status/1657392558006214659?ref=andrewliptak.com), but it could very well be something that's worth doing in conjunction with the book. History, of course, are stories, often grounded with objects, oral histories, photographs, and eyewitness accounts. *Cosplay: A History* was an attempt (a successful one, in my biased view!) to broadly document that history and put it together in one volume. But there are plenty of other items out there, stored away in closets and basements. I know [Forrest Ackerman's ](https://www.yourprops.com/Forrest-J-Ackerman-1939-4SJ-original-movie-costume-Things-To-Come-1936-YP66098.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*[Things to Come ](https://www.yourprops.com/Forrest-J-Ackerman-1939-4SJ-original-movie-costume-Things-To-Come-1936-YP66098.html?ref=andrewliptak.com)*[costume still exists](https://www.yourprops.com/Forrest-J-Ackerman-1939-4SJ-original-movie-costume-Things-To-Come-1936-YP66098.html?ref=andrewliptak.com), and the International Costumer's Guild has a [phenomenal gallery of images](https://costume.org/wp/international-costumers-gallery/?ref=andrewliptak.com) from costuming masquerades from throughout their history. And of course, [Rancho-Obi-Wan](https://ranchoobiwan.org/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Steve Sansweet's museum of *Star Wars* memorabilia has brought its own exhibits to Celebration and other cons over the years. Bringing items together to be preserved as a collection would be a logical step: there are certainly important cosplays, props, and components out there that could – and should! – be preserved for future researchers and for folks interested in simply learning more about the history of the hobby they take part in. --- ### Here are the winners of the 2023 Nebula Award! URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-winners-babel-rf-kuang/ Last updated: 2023-10-21T17:37:00.000Z The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association held its Nebula conference over the weekend in California, and as part of its programming was the Nebula Awards ceremony. It's one of the bigger awards in the SF/F world, and this year's [slate of finalists was an excellent one](https://www.andrewliptak.com/2023-nebula-award-finalists/). Here are the [winners](https://nebulas.sfwa.org/winners-58th-annual-nebula-awards/?ref=andrewliptak.com): - **Best Novel:** *Babel,* R.F. Kuang - **Best Novella:** *Even Though I Knew the End,* C.L. Polk - **Best Novelette:** “[If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/if-you-find-yourself-speaking-to-god-address-god-with-the-informal-you/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, John Chu - **Best Short Story:** “[Rabbit Test](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/?ref=andrewliptak.com)”, Samantha Mills - **Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction:** *Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion,* K. Tempest Bradford - **Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation:** *Everything Everywhere All at Once,* Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert - **Nebula Award for Game Writing:** *Elden Ring,* Hidetaka Miyazaki, George R.R. Martin - **SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award:** Robin McKinley [SFWA names Robin McKinley its next Grand MasterA newsletter about science fiction, reading, and the future![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/11/McKinley-Grand-Master-Twitter-680x383.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/sfwa-robin-mckinley-grand-master/) - **The Infinity Award:** Octavia E. Butler (posthumous) - **The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award:** Cerece Rennie Murphy and Greg Bear (posthumous) [RIP Greg BearA titan of science fiction![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/11/CB61BF81-0E3D-4C69-B918-6711B2B20240.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/greg-bear/) - **The Kevin J. O'donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award:** Mishell Baker All in all, a good set of winners. I was pleased to see *Babel* take home the award for Best Novel: that was one of my favorites of 2022\. I was also pleased to see the announcement of the Infinity Award not too long ago: a way for SFWA to posthumously honor some of the authors who'd otherwise have gotten the Grandmaster Award in their lifetime. ### Two dark stories URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/short-fiction-brett-cox-aimee-picchi-horror/ Last updated: 2023-05-11T19:19:40.000Z Go read The Leaves Dead Are Driven by F. Brett Cox and 9 Lies You Tell Yourself About Ghost Hunting by Aimee Picchi _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Fandom throughout the ages URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-og-fans/ Last updated: 2023-05-04T15:00:36.000Z *Star Wars* debuted in theaters on May 25th, 1977, and I'm sure you've seen the [pictures](https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/7k6ssm/star%5Fwars%5Fopening%5Fday%5Fmay%5F25th%5F1977/?ref=andrewliptak.com): people lined up around the block to get in, and after they watched it, they went and saw it again and again and again. The way films are released 46 years later owes something to that. *Star Wars* and *Jaws* (released in 1975) made the modern blockbuster: a big, massive film that studios have come to rely on to make up a lot of their revenue for the year. That only continued through the 1980s and 1990s, and today, you'll see a ton of emphasis placed on the box office returns of that first opening weekend. Back in the 1970s that wasn't the case: films opened and stayed in theaters for months, or in the case of Star Wars, opened months after that initial premiere. Case in point: the film didn't open in Vermont until July and August. I did some digging recently for some social media content for the Vermont Historical Society, and noted a handful of ads that theaters placed in newspapers in June that the film was on its way: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/The_Burlington_Free_Press_1977_07_13_Page_32.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/The_Burlington_Free_Press_1977_06_26_Page_27.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/Bennington_Banner_1977_06_20_page_14.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/Rutland_Daily_Herald_1977_06_15_page_16.jpg) Clips from Newspapers.com It was interesting poking through newspaper archives to see how the film first popped up in reviews and commentaries in May 1977 (mostly wire stories and syndicated reviews), then the ads, and then the reactions in local papers. You can feel the anticipation building. *Star Wars* arrived in Vermont in mid-July, and I found an outstanding article from the *Burlington Free Press* (published July 27th), in which correspondent Susan Green provides a glimpse into what the reaction was like: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/05/The_Burlington_Free_Press_1977_07_27_Page_19.jpg) Image: Newspapers.com What caught my eye here is that Vermonters were eager for the movie: just as they had everywhere else around the country, moviegoers were lining up to catch the film, and even days after its initial release, theaters were still packed to the gills as people showed up again and again to catch the film. In the [second half of the article](https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-burlington-free-press/123977330/?ref=andrewliptak.com), Green notes that it wasn't just boys catching the film: there were plenty of women in the audience as well, as well as grandparents who wanted something to talk about with their grandkids. It was – and is – a film for everyone to enjoy. --- While it's *Star Wars* day, I figure it's a good opportunity to highlight some of the longer pieces I've written over the years here and elsewhere: ### "Qanon for nerds": Fandom isn't immune to online radicalization A feature about the intersections of far-right ideology and pop culture, and how radicalization happens. [“Qanon for nerds”: Fandom isn’t immune to online radicalizationConspiracy theories and online fandom![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_b519d815-563f-47a7-9c7e-d4dace64c5e6_1918x816.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-fandom-alt-right-conspiracy-theories-hatred/) ### Michael A. Stackpole's Rogue Squadron novels unlocked Star Wars' vast potential An appreciation of Michael A. Stackpole's *X-Wing* novels. [Michael A. Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron novels unlocked Star Wars’ vast potentialShowing a bigger world beyond people named Luke, Leia, and Han![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/03/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_517afabc-f817-4797-b320-77644cd07aa3_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/michael-a-stackpoles-rogue-squadron-novels-unlocked-star-wars-vast-potential/) ### Building A Galaxy This was a series that I'd written for the *Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog* about the history of the Expanded Universe. - [Origin Stories](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-books-brian-daley-west-end-games/) (The earliest tie-in stories ) - [Heir to the Trilogy](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-thrawn-trilogy-expanded-universe/) (Timothy Zahn kicks off the Expanded Universe) - [Expanding the Universe](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-origins-x-wing-series-han-solo-trilogy/) (how the Expanded Universe continued to grow) - [New Publisher, New Directions](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-new-jedi-order-vector-prime/) (The New Jedi Order and Prequel era) - [Unexplored Territory](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-clone-wars-books-comics-games-republic-commando/) (The Clone Wars multimedia project) - [Endings and Beginnings](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-expanded-universe-legacy-of-the-force-expanded-universe/) (the late stage EU) ### 30 years ago, Timothy Zahn resurrected *Star Wars* A look back on the impact of the Thrawn trilogy 30 years after it was originally published. [How Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy resurrected Star WarsWhen Timothy Zahn published Heir to the Empire in 1991, the Star Wars franchise was far from the public’s awareness. The Thrawn trilogy helped it roar back.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/05/IMG_0526.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-timothy-zahn-heir-to-the-empire-thrawn-trilogy/) ### Returning to a lost galaxy Why a never-published edition of a Star Wars novel appeared online, and what the demand for it means. (Copies of this pirated book are *still* going for hundreds online.) [Returning to a lost galaxyHow Kenneth C. Flint’s long-lost and unpublished Star Wars novel was unearthed and lit up the fan community![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-11-at-10.55.20-AM-1.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-heart-of-the-jedi-kenneth-c-flint-expanded-universe-fandom/) ### Squandered legacy How a premiere cosplay company imploded. [Squandered legacyThe rise and fall of ANOVOS![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/08/IMG_2636.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-anovos-deuno-novo-cosplay/) ### One foot in front of the other What it's like to march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a stormtrooper. [One foot in front of the otherWhat it’s like to march in the Macy’s Day Parade as a stormtrooper![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/12/2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-macys-day-parade-501st-legion/) ### The transformation of the Tuskens My feature about aome missed opportunities with the portrayal of the Tusken Raiders in the Book of Boba Fett. [The transformation of the TuskensThe Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian added depth to the Tusken Raiders, but complications remain![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/01/raiders-composite.jpg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-tusken-raiders-book-of-boba-fett-indigenous-tribes-tropes/) ### Nostalgia's limits In which I tried to piece together some of the issues I had with The Book of Boba Fett and how the demands for streaming content puts pressure on storytelling. [Nostalgia’s limitsThe Book of Boba Fett was a nice bit of worldbuilding, but that’s about it![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/02/Boba-2.jpeg)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/the-book-of-boba-fett-season-1-review/) ### Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for years My glowing review of *Andor*'s first episodes (the series continued to deliver each episode). [Andor delivers what I’ve wanted from Star Wars for yearsWhat happens when you put story before toys?![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/09/B0154906-CE01-4D31-AFC2-74D38AC3B0CA.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-andor-rogue-one-review/) ### The Star Wars renaissance A look back at a decade of Disney's tenure of *Star Wars.* [Looking back on a decade of Star Wars under DisneyLooking back on a decade of Disney’s Star Wars![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2022/10/resistance-x-wing_9433981f.webp)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/disney-star-wars-force-awakens-rogue-one/) ### A Brief History of Star Wars’ Mandalorian Warriors This was originally written for the *Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog*, an overview of how the Mandalorians came about in *Star Wars*. [A Brief History of Star Wars’ Mandalorian WarriorsThe Mandalorians have had a long and vivid history within the Star Wars universe, and their popularity will only rise from here![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2023/02/mandos.001.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/star-wars-the-mandalorian-mandalorians-explainer/) --- May the force be with you, Andrew ### Babylon 5 is getting an animated film URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/babylon-5-animated-film-j-michael-straczynski/ Last updated: 2023-05-04T11:00:51.000Z !!! _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The trailer for Dune Part 2 teases an approaching war URL: https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-part-2-trailer-watch/ Last updated: 2023-05-03T16:22:55.000Z Warner Bros. has released the first trailer for its upcoming sequel to Denis Villeneuve's *Dune*. (Except, don't call it a sequel, it's the second part of the first movie.) I'm excited for this: [I ](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-review/)[lo](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-review/)ved the first installment when it was released in 2021, and from the looks of this first teaser, we're in for another good film. Take a look: Villeneuve's adaptation was the third big one for Frank Herbert's epic novel: David Lynch adapted it in 1984 in a version that didn't quite live up to expectations (but which has gained a cult following), while the SCI FI Channel put together its own miniseries adaptation in 2000, with a sequel adaptation of *Dune Messiah* and *Children of Dune* following in 2003, which also received lukewarm accolades. It's a hard book to crack: Herbert stuffed a lot of material into his original novel, from planetary ecology to the toll of oppressive occupations, cults of personalities, what impact power has on people, and quite a bit more. Villeneuve really understood the story, and got a budget to really bring the world to life in a marvelous way. *Vanity Fair* [recently put together a big, behind-the-scenes piece](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/04/dune-part-two-exclusive-first-look?ref=andrewliptak.com) about the film as a curtain-raiser, and it's worth a read. From the onset, his adaptation was always designed as a two-parter, which actually follows the book quite neatly. The first half is all about Paul Atreides arriving on the desert planet Arrakis and having his family killed in a galactic power struggle. If *Dune Part 1* is all about him finding his role in this larger conflict, *Dune Part 2* is him assuming the mantle of leadership and leading the indigenous Fremen in a fight against their oppressors, House Harkonnen. In that way, *Dune* is really an excellent novel about power and warfare, and if Villeneuve's track record holds, we should be in for an exciting film. [Dune is a war epicFrank Herbert’s Dune has been adapted a handful of times, but I think this new adaptation captures a key part of the story that the others haven’t: it’s a story about war.![](https://www.andrewliptak.com/favicon.ico)Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/d7/2cd7d323-e6ed-4666-8092-07e380dbdf2a/content/images/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-22-at-10.09.00-PM.png)](https://www.andrewliptak.com/dune-movie-trailer-war-epic-frank-herbert/) *Dune: Part 2* is set to hit theaters on November 3rd. _Truncated after 5 MiB. Use `/sitemap.xml` for the complete archive of public content._