Really great article. The direct link is here: www.speculativeinsight.com/from-the-vau...

The Space That Ships Are Built For — Speculative Insight

When I left high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Randomly, I spent a year in a harbor town, learning to become a ship's captain. The class continued after that year, but I didn...

speculativeinsight.com

Speculative Insight journal@speculativeinsight.bsky.social · 15h ago

This line has stuck with me, 2.5 years later. Nina Niskanen takes issue with some of the ways spaceships as cargo ships are poorly characterised. From the vault, for your reading pleasure: www.speculativeinsight.com/from-the-vault

I say this not to diminish the reality, but I can't get over how much this looks like a mediocre SF movie filmed with a model on invisible strings.

Jonathan McDowell@planet4589.bsky.social · 15h ago

Ship 42 landing

And the reaction to Harrison’s statements makes me think that SFF would benefit from a new New Wave movement. Questioning the boundaries and overall value of SFF as a defined genre should not be out of bounds for a SFF author.

Statement by Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute.

All this effort, and Foyle's is definitely out of stock. So is Daunt Books. Amazing.

Jim Waterson@jim.londoncentric.media · yesterday

My old friend Tom Rowley quit journalism to run a bookshop but has written a thing about how the Booker winner books are delivered to his bookshop and it’s better than a lot of newspaper journalism you’ll read today. tomrowley.substack.com/p/what-happe...

Here are the known unknowns.

All of the nation’s legal historians are trapped in Banff. None of us can get home. The poor regular tourists here: they have no idea

Might it be Apollo 13? Possibly? That would be fun.

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com · 2d ago

Everyone, be calm. This is not ANY OF THE FOLLOWING disasters: * 9/11 * Sinking of the Titanic * Hurricanes starting with letters C, K, R, F, H, or M * Cambrian Explosion * Chicxulub Event * Eruption of Krakatoa We have yet to rule out any other disasters at this time.

In case you missed the Discourse, people are now angry about: literary authors disdaining SF; literary authors writing SF; SF authors writing SF with literary pretensions; literary awards not recognizing SF novels; literary awards recognizing (the wrong) SF novels...

Oh God, I am reblogging everything today, but I agree with this too.

Abigail Nussbaum@abigailnussbaum.bsky.social · 4d ago

I don't think you can complain about the snobbishness of literary awards when the Hugo (and the Nebula too) has been growing increasingly insular and (small-c) conservative, preferring a narrowing array of authors and subjects even as more and more SF is published by mainstream publishers.

yes, this. and the reason this is so controversial, imo, is because "worldbuilding" as a term has become so invisibly ingrained in genre culture that many people use it as essentially a synonym for fantasy itself and are consequently offended by what seems like an attack on the imagination

Friendly Pumpkin@pumpkinpal.bsky.social · 4d ago

it's pretty obvious that what he's saying here is basically "write the story you want to write, and the world will build itself" which is obvious if you're interested in storytelling, and offensive if you want your world to come with an RPG sourcebook before you ever even write a story in it.

to answer the question of whether this was a lifetime achievement award: absolutely not. none of the judges were primarily sf readers, and I as an American hadn’t heard of harrison. sometimes someone is operating at such a high level for so long that their excellence is taken for granted

Interesting! (On the Booker prize award, for those not following the discussion...)

Tricia Lockwood@tricialockwood.bsky.social · 3d ago

to answer the question of whether this was a lifetime achievement award: absolutely not. none of the judges were primarily sf readers, and I as an American hadn’t heard of harrison. sometimes someone is operating at such a high level for so long that their excellence is taken for granted

I wrote this small and bony essay about it once, which contained my favorite (if unhelpful) formulation of the difference: “'literary' and 'genre' are not in the same genre, and to say so is a literary concern.” vajra.me/2023/04/12/m...

Make Your Bones

Naming only books with a bone in the title, some entirely non-bellicose thoughts on (groan) YA/adult/genre/literary fiction.

vajra.me

Incredibly proud to share a piece I spent the past few months working on with the amazing team at @fansplaining.bsky.social on this piece exploring the practices and experiences of fans of faith, all borne out of my habit of printing fanfiction to read on Shabbat. fansplaining.com/practicing-f...

Practicing Faith As Fans, or: Printing Fanfic for Shabbat

For religiously observant fans, balancing fandom and faith can be complicated.

fansplaining.com

Rupert Lower out here writing statements deliberately designed to drive British Studies scholars insane

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 4d ago

Rupert Lowe MP has tabled an Early Day Motion "to recognise and protect English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ethnicities as distinct historic identities". He has invited MPs across parties to support this. It is a motion which opposes the changes proposed by the LibDem MP Josh Babarinde

Related, by happenstance. This popped up in my timeline a few posts later... (I'm not criticising escapism per se, just reflecting on the push for likable characters etc) bsky.app/profile/cher...

James Bennett | Pre-order "Mother of Night"@jamesbennett.bsky.social · 4d ago

Has reading comprehension taken a nosedive? I'm so puzzled by a reader saying that they didn't warm to my characters because they stole some horses from hermits after the hermits were "nice to them". Do characters have to be nice to be likeable? I think not.

“oh, and that’s the last thing. you aren’t a reader any more. you’re a writer, so don’t try to get reader kicks from the act of writing. never tell yourself a story. that romantic relationship is over for you. from now on, the satisfactions will be elsewhere.” — mjh, wish I was here

Hey there, bookseller here: can confirm! It is *already* really bad and it is only going to get worse, unfortunately. If you want something for the holidays, you would do well to order it RIGHT NOW. Like, RIGHT NOW.

Alma Katsu (INCARNATE is out now!)@almakatsu.bsky.social · 5d ago

Hey, just saw American Booksellers Association warning member bookstores that supply chain issues are forecast to be terrible this holiday season, so my advice to you is BUY THE BOOK when you see it on the shelf and don't wait until later. Because you might never see it again.

My god, we’ve entered Jonathan Lethem’s utopia

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln.bsky.social · 6d ago

👍 www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/b...

For all my writer pals with savage ratings... I'm obviously not a booker winner but I did enjoy this post

Absolutely delighted that MJH has won the Booker, think it is absolutely deserved. Also delightful that there must be a part of him that is furious that life has turned out to have a clear and comprehensible narrative arc.

Would watch the near-silent three-hour French-language documentary about transporting this turbine blade through La France Profonde.

Octopus Energy@octopus.energy · 2w ago

🚨 BLADES ON THE MOVE 🚨 At one of our Octopus Energy Generation sites in rural France, we’re “repowering” old turbines by replacing them with more efficient, modern and bigger turbines. And huge blades = HUGE LOGISTICS to get these bad boys up and running. (🧵1/5)

Somehow doubly disappointing as a swashbuckling leather-jacketed middle aged billionaire to discover she’s not even with you for the money

you know what was in retrospect a huge story that the political media mostly missed? no kings. the savvy take was that the protests had no juice because so many of the protesters were old. seniors are by far the highest voting propensity age cohort.

Collecting interesting reviews of The Rouse as I start to read it. This one, obviously.

Jeff VanderMeer@jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I want to talk a bit more about this novel, The Rouse by China Mieville, because any review is kind of inadequate. You can more or less review one or two "types" of fiction it is without really even peeling away the surface. 1/?

Wow. Very curious whether a city of 165,000 will be able to sustain two romance bookshops. But if any place could...

Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · last wk.

Oxford is getting a second romance bookshop. Lara’s is set to open on North Parade next summer, selling “hardbacks, limited editions and first printings only… the books you’d take with you if you had to leave everything else behind”. Proprietor Kelly Curtis originally hails from Indianapolis.

I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty. And this pear.

I’ve often pondered curation bookstore: we can & will order anything, but what we have are twenty rotating deep weird book collections on random topics and genealogies of fiction, with intros to each; cetatian cognition—monsterfucking—omniscient narrators—sin—late Ming coinage—Communist posters

Jake Casella Brookins@casella.bsky.social · last wk.

sorry to be a hater but "new huge floorplan bookstore with exposed brick and a killer Insta and approximately 20 books, all from the bestseller list, all faced out" will never be something I'm excited about