Having very grown up beverages at Eastercon. Might be more grown up later as I’m considering trying it with a shot of gin from the bar in.

Can’t believe I’m setting an alarm on holiday 45 minutes earlier than my work alarm.

Presenting: The Queersar Not An Award for 2021! 10 (+1) examples of top-quality queer SFF. Brilliant fantasy cities, some great SFF romance, anti-Brexit Epic Fantasy, dark fantasy mystery, space opera, gonzo slipstream, a great spin-off with a particular spotlight on a throwback of the best sort.

Book 58 💙📚: What a Fish Looks Like by Syr Hayati Beker. This is a very strange cli-fi novella that should probably be on your radar if you're a Hugo voter. Recommended by @chloroformtea.bsky.social.

Intergalactic Mixtape is live for the week! 🎉

Introducing In Your Spare Time: A Podcast of the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin! inyoursparetime.libsyn.com

Dental saga complete (I hope). I extremely unrecommend the sensation of the dentist popping a crown off a tooth, and even more so the dentist having a fight with my jaw to pop it back on.

This made me wonder what I think the best SF novel of 2025 was. When There Are Wolves Again is absolutely in the running, but this is my full list of options. (The OtCoV books are wibbly because different US/UK pub dates so some will be excluded depending who's asking)

Calls for Reviews & Essays: July 2026

Someone would like to come to Eastercon with us.

Book Review: Ode to the Half Broken by Suzanne Palmer. Traumatized but healing mechas and humans building community in a ‘cozy’ post-apocalyptic setting @klaxoncomms.com has the review at the NOAF blog for your Wednesday

📢 It's the final day to nominate titles for this year's Ursula K. Le Guin Prize! This is one of the most exciting prizes around - I've discovered new favourites while reading previous shortlists - so don't miss the opportunity to nominate your favourite 2025 releases that meet the criteria.

Official fundraiser announcement: it's kicking off April 8! Shares appreciated!

I read The Everlasting. I didn't like it. It made me cross. Behold my disgruntlement.

All hail the Maxi Egg

Talking about books is great fun, it's something I really enjoy doing despite having no formal training. Nobody should feel they can't because they don't have a degree. However it does feel like people think they can "Protestant personal relationship with God" their way through literary theory.

The problem with using "we" and "our" in non-fiction about books is that it's all great and hunky dory and community-y, right up until you start lumping the reader into a collective they don't actually agree with. Then they (me, I'm the reader) starts getting cross. /We/ don't believe, that you do!

So I was watching the 1993 Finish Made For TV adaptation of The Lord of The Rings, and thought everyone should see the moment where Gollum falls into Mount Doom.

Anime Review: Sentenced to Be a Hero An intriguing fantasy premise that would benefit from deeper character development says @annmichelleharris.bsky.social at the NOAF blog. Review here: www.nerds-feather.com/2026/03/anim...

Ok I have done all the other things that needed doing, sod it, I’m going to finish The Everlasting this evening and then I’m going to turn all these notes into something coherent. Exorcise those opinions and be Done.

Conclusions are haaaarddddd. Can I not just provide a collection of thoughts (fascinating ones, naturally) and leave the concluding as an exercise for the reader?

Project Hail Mary – I feel two contradictory feelings about this film I saw Project Hail Mary the week before Andy Weir told the world on a far right podcast how he doesn't do politics or even symbolism (thereby letting us know quite a lot about his politics and the symbols he thinks are normative…

"Notes From a Regicide" by Isaac Fellman, an incredibly intimate look at a family whose parents were at ground zero of a rebellion and the marks that living through (sometimes causing) those events left on them, through their son's eyes. Gorgeous in texture, not afraid to ask unanswerable questions.

Less than 24 hours to nominate for the Hugos! A reminder that you can save & edit your nominations up until closing time, so: better to get in a rough list and clean it up later than to wait until the very last minute! Thread of some recs from ARB contributors & friends:

I know a lot of people with this same belief, and I am amused how the opposite I am. I think it's a UK cover design chronology thing - by the time I was fully into reading adult fantasy, this style of cover was old (derogatory) and they tended to contain books that were not my thing at allllll.

If in doubt, there’s always TLT.

Behold! A new issue of Intergalactic Mixtape, full of fan commentary.

sorry I'm like this y'all but you have FIVE MORE DAYS, is all, and because I have totally forgotten to mention it, let me just add that one lucky nominator will win a whole pile of books, which is to say the entire 2025 shortlist! could be yours! go forth and nominate!

I read the fine print and now I can post "Fine Print"! Follow this link for the text of both of my Hugo-eligible poems. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/brij7...

My "I'll do it before Eastercon" deadline I've been applying to a bunch of things willy nilly is starting to struggle under the realisation that Eastercon is VERY FUCKING SOON.

How often do the Nebula and Hugo finalists overlap? And how similar are the Hugo lists to non-US SFF awards? Editor @casella.bsky.social takes a look, with the help of CHARTS:

New blog post: I planned to spend March catching up on potential Hugo nominees, but then *gestures at world". So my final Hugo ballot is more a provisional one, but there's still a lot of worhty stuff here. Check it out and see if you feel inspired. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...

Nice to see two of the best bits of recent climate fiction I've had the pleasure of reading are available in the US now. Do check them out, you won't be disappointed.

Ok you know what maybe we can have one more LoTR film.

Wanting to do more cross-stitched bookmarks of quotations is somewhat scuppered by not being the sort of person who remembers quotations from books.

The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley: Review by Ian Mond locusmag.com/review/...

Not long now! The Recollections is out next week. Pre-order from our website, including an option to collect at @easterconuk.bsky.social if you're going to be there (and if you are, we have a launch event at 19.30 on Sunday evening!) briardenebooks.uk/product/the-...

What A Fish Looks Like out of @stelliform.press is an @otherwiseaward.org honor list!!! Along with some really incredible books. I feel so very honored to be on this list!

#HugoAwards nominations are closing soon, so this is my last-minute eligibility announcement that I have two things eligible in Best Fancast: the Stitch & Bitch liveshow series and my BookTube channel The Fancy Hat Lady Reads!

Arturo is always great on film, but I found this review of Project Hail Mary particularly useful, especially as it is a noticeable counterpoint to most of the coverage I've seen.

Another Hugo nomination-time thread! And in this one, I'll be talking about novellas. (this thread will probably go long, sorry-not-sorry)

As it's Hugo time, I wanted to talk about a category I care about, and which I think could do with a bit of extra love when it comes to nomination time - it's best fan writer! (this is gonna be a thread of me doing hype, which I'm bad at, but that is much deserved by all here linked, pls be nice)

This was SUCH a good book

The Great Tolkien Reread is a double-chapter post today, discussing "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" and "Strider", a rare glimpse into how the war of the ring, and its attendant crises of refugeeism and displacement, are affecting ordinary people. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...

Also, as ever, makes some of the conversations over the Hugos, as a solidly American dominated award in terms of discourse and voters, just weird to read even living in what is absolutely the second most privileged Hugo country.

Preorder post! I’ve not preordered as many things this year because *gestures at pile of unread books*, but this one was always going to be an exception.

Book Microreview: The Blossoming of the Big Tree by Dilman Dila A hopeful tale of a fight against hopeless odds @carturo222.bsky.social has our review at the NOAF blog for your Tuesday www.nerds-feather.com/2026/03/book...

Can’t sleep and just had to read the four word horror story “the uwuification of Odysseus”. I’ve offended the gods somehow. Only explanation.

This is a really neat way of summing up... tbh a lot of how I think texts ought to be approached from @vandroidhelsing.bsky.social's Tolkien reread (specifically A Journey in the Dark), and much better than my vague attempts to put my finger on it. There is no "real" underneath, only the text.

Video Game Review: Ghost of Yōtei by Sucker Punch Productions Let the wind gently guide your hand to the purchase button says Joe DelFranco at the blog: www.nerds-feather.com/2026/03/vide...