The second book in a series is a different problem from the first. The first has to earn its world; the second has to make the case that the world was worth coming back to. Quietly the harder of the two.
Eddie Philips
@eddiephilips.bsky.social
Speculative fiction writer. Science fiction, comedy, and the occasional mystery. Working on the Shine Coal novels.
We promised you regular new reviews of older SFF - and here’s the first of many! Paul March-Russell on 1956’s Tiger! Tiger! (or The Stars My Destination, depending who you ask) by Alfred Bester: a picaresque, a revenge tragedy, a quest, a romance. Edited, of course, by @kateem.bsky.social.
The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester
It does not have a conventional linear narrative, but instead proceeds episodically, loops back almost to its starting-point, and finishes not on a revelation but a suspension.
strangehorizons.com
Most of a plot is bookkeeping: who knows what, and when they found it out. Get the ledger wrong and no amount of atmosphere will cover for it.
Meet Alabi, who's just left home and is about to discover the resistance. THE CITY OF FACTORIES, @naomieselojor.bsky.social's debut steampunk novella sent in an alternative Nigeria, is out in SIX DAYS. Direct pre-orders come with a cover art card: ⚙ links.ruadanbooks.com/TCOF #BookSky #TBR
Elise Tobler, editor of the fabled SHIMMER magazine and now THE DEADLANDS is hospitalized after cancer and an infection. She made SFF an inclusive, interesting place and broke out many authors. Help if u can gofund.me/6ea1bf7a4
Donate to Help Support Elise While She Recovers, organized by Sean Markey
hello. friends if you're reading this, you're likely a Friend of The Deadl… Sean Markey needs your support for Help Support Elise While She Recovers
gofund.me
The Great Tolkien Reread meets "The Uruk-Hai" today, our first close-up view of Orcs (and our first Merry and Pippin POV chapter). This is an opportunity to talk about how Tolkien humanizes his most problematic invention, and where he stops short. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-...
The Great Tolkien Reread: The Uruk-Hai
"Merry and Pippin Captured by Orcs" by Inger Edelfeldt Neither Pippin nor Merry remembered much of the later part of the journey. Evil dream...
wrongquestions.blogspot.com
My interview in the new issue of @orionsbeltmagazine.bsky.social is now free-to-read! I talk about my story "Brainstem Disco, 2191," how I write flash vs. poetry, and thinking in multiple languages. www.orions-belt.net/archives/int...
Interview with Angela Liu — Orion's Belt
by Linlang Zhao
orions-belt.net
Orion's Belt magazine@orionsbeltmagazine.bsky.social · last wk.Our summer issue #36 is now online and free to read on our website!! Please have a read of these incredible stories, poems & interviews and help us share them! To read: tinyurl.com/OB-issue36 To get the PDF/ebook: ko-fi.com/s/95de821dd4 To subscribe to OB 🧡: bit.ly/orionsbelt-p...
A weekend ritual on here: someone asks what everyone's reading, and a hundred answers come back, not one of them selling a thing. Easy to forget that's what the place is for.
"These are the first shoots of a future folklore emerging from an urban Britain that might look soulless and secular but under the surface remains very strange indeed, rippled with weird undercurrents." @garetherees.bsky.social
It all started on this day. Thank you for a wonderful twenty years.
A new magazine issue going live is one of the few things in this field that arrives as good news rather than a deadline. A whole contents page of people who finished the thing they said they would.
I really liked the long central section of this; a great character portrait in a grounded near future France. But there's also a short framing story that I didn't think was necessary. locusmag.com/review/the-h...
The Hunger of Those Who Built It by Wendy Waring: Review by Niall Harrison - Locus
The Hunger of Those Who Built It, Wendy Waring (Stelliform Press, 978-1-99846-605-4, $21.99, 376pp, tp) September 2026. Cover by Juliane Van Huizen. From a near future that tends towards the abstract ...
locusmag.com
I keep noticing that a mystery and a joke are built the same way: withhold one crucial thing, and the moment you hand it over everything the reader assumed rearranges itself. The only real difference is whether they gasp or laugh.
Karen Haber reviews URSULA K. LE GUIN’S BOOK OF CATS by Ursula K. Le Guin: “... this new bijou-sized volume celebrating the writer’s deep engagement with cats throughout her life is a delight that should interest readers”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats by Ursula K. Le Guin: Review by Karen Haber - Locus
Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats, Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America, 978-1-59853-829-8, $16.95, 95pp, hc) October 2025. Any new publication from Ursula K. Le Guin's estate demands attention, and this new bijou-sized volume celebrating the writer's deep engagement with cats throughout her life is a delight that should interest readers, even if you only like dogs. A special publication from the Library of America measuring 7 3/4 …Read More
locusmag.com
"Vanya and the Dog Witch" @walterwriter.bsky.social, BCS #447 "As the tale unfolds through its traditional three attempts, we realize the true importance of Vanya’s dog stories, and the true nature of the witch’s magic. Recommended" @mariahaskins.com Locus beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/vany...
Beneath Ceaseless Skies - Vanya and the Dog Witch by Walter J. Wiese
“My father forbid me to come to you, either with mushrooms or with the dog's collar,” Vanya told the dog witch. It had been early in spring when his father killed Mishka the three-legged dog. For sava...
beneath-ceaseless-skies.com
There's a particular pleasure in a second-hand book that falls open at someone else's favourite page. You inherit a stranger's attention, whether you asked for it or not.
Vanessa Fogg reviews new work by @genni.bsky.social: “CRIMSON IN QUIETUS depicts love and rela-tionships in a variety of forms, and depicts platonic love as not lesser than romantic.”
Crimson in Quietus by Eugen Bacon: Review by Vanessa Fogg - Locus
Crimson in Quietus, Eugen Bacon (Meerkat Press 978-1-96574-007-1, $18.95, 270pp, tp) September 2026. Cover by Tricia Reeks. Eugen Bacon's third novel, Crimson in Quietus, is set in the Sauútiverse, a shared science fiction / fantasy universe created by a collective of African and African diaspora writers. Crimson in Quietus is the first thing I've ever read in this setting. It won't be my last. First off – what a wonderful, …Read More
locusmag.com
The Great Tolkien Reread meets "The Riders of Rohan". Specifically, Éomer, the first of several characters who seem to have been designed to echo Boromir, and to reflect on his strengths and weaknesses. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-...
The Great Tolkien Reread: The Riders of Rohan
Illustration by jorahh , 2025 'What do you know of these horsemen, Aragorn?' [Gimli] said. 'Do we sit here waiting for sudden death?' 'I hav...
wrongquestions.blogspot.com
Kaleidotrope re-opens to fiction and poetry submissions for the last time this year in about a month (October 18-24). Will you be ready? Will any of us? kaleidotrope.net/guidelines/
Siap-siap, Gadis Cilik!
Alt: Get ready!
static.klipy.com
Most of writing comedy is withholding the fact that it's comedy. A line only lands if the reader was still taking you at your word half a second before it did. Tip your hand early and there's nothing left to give way.
See @NussbaumAbigail’s review of A TRADE OF BLOOD by Robert Jackson Bennett: “Bennett’s focus is also on the way that grotesque, even monstrous technologies are deployed for mundane ends.”
A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett: Review by Abigail Nussbaum - Locus
A Trade of Blood, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey 978-0-59372-385-2, $32.00, 400pp, hc) August 2026. A Trade of Blood is the third volume in Robert Jackson Bennett's Hugo-winning series of fantasy-world detective novels, starring the impishly grinning, cheerfully inappropriate genius detective Ana, and her earnest and somewhat emo assistant Din. Previous volumes in the series have taken this Holmes-and-Watson duo to the outer reaches of the Khanum empire, setting them …Read More
locusmag.com
China Miéville is back. And so are the dead. 💀 The Rouse is a 1,264-page epic of grief, war, ghosts and necromancy spanning the twentieth century. Fourteen years after his last solo novel, Miéville returns with something enormous, strange and unmistakably his own. gnofhorror.com/the-rouse-by...
Returning to a draft after time away is a strange sort of audit. Some of it reads like a stranger's confident guesswork; some was clearly written on a good day you can't reconstruct. Most of the work is telling the two apart before you reach for the red pen.
Goodnight from the last tram to Ashcourt’s terminus, where Nell Carlin’s shade is furious to find she can’t get off like the other passengers. Goodnight from Freya Braddock, inadvertently discovering the power of summoning through Fuzzy-Felt design. Goodnight from Hookland
Fair correction. Give him a Bugs to lecture and he'll happily hold forth as a super genius; it's only the Roadrunner that reduces him to silence and the mail-order catalogue. Says something about the company.
A book someone has clearly read twice has a quiet to it you can feel before you open it. The spine has stopped pretending to be new, which is usually when I like them best.
Could *you* handle caregiving for six rambunctious, destructive little drakelings? Another good story from @translunartl.bsky.social, this one from @gwenckatz.bsky.social (Love the names, Gwen!) translunartravelerslounge.com/2026/08/15/d...
Drakelings by Gwen Katz
At 4:48 on Monday, March 12, Theodosia touched the stove for the fifteenth time. Fifteenth time in Carly’s tenure. How many times before that she couldn’t guess. Hundreds . Or maybe the…
translunartravelerslounge.com