Thinking about an Indigenous colleague's observation that starting a resolution in the depths of winter is counterintuitive. Wait until nature wakes up, friends; it's okay to rest and reflect while the nights are still long.

Bienvenue à Montréal

Very happy to introduce a new tool, BookReconciler! You can take spreadsheets with book data and add subject headings, descriptions, ISBNs, HathiTrust IDs, & more. You can also cluster editions & variations of the same "Work." Led by @thisismattmiller.com and supported by @post45data.bsky.social.

Beware: your to-read list shall grow, quite a lot!

Here are the top 10 most popular post-1945 American authors at the Seattle Public Library over the last 20 years.

I told my SFF students that I'd give them "a few" recs for holiday reading. Reader, I gave 17. 😂

Glad to see @worldsbeyondnumber.bsky.social on this list - it's doing some of the best fantasy storytelling of the past few years, imo. "54 episodes of pure gold," indeed. Excited for their upcoming turn to SF!

It started on the weekend. Ice pancakes form and travel down river toward my bridge 🌿

You really have to read this thread. The genius of Tom Stoppard, the fragility of memory, the magic of theatre — and the glorious stubbornness of a researcher who would not stop.

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

Some more details on my new #ScienceFiction anthology, including one inclusion that I’m especially happy about (thanks in large part to Brooks Hefner’s terrific work in *Black Pulp*)

If you're interested in poetry and AI, can I recommend Toward Eternity by Anton Hur? There's an AI, and later, multiple AIs, who are, as they say, "built on poetry," who think that "Poetry, not your body, is the true vehicle of your soul."

Great news! This is out: Opening the black box of EEBO academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...

Eligibility lists are now OPEN for Canadian speculative fiction works published in 2025. If you purchased a 2025 membership to vote in the Aurora Awards this past year, you can head over to www.csffa.ca and log in to add works to our lists. 1/

Congratulations to Vajra Chandrasekera (@vajra.me), recipient of the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for Rakesfall! Chandrasekera's book was chosen by authors Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse.

Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered." culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...

Reading the Northanger Abbey chapter of @devoney.bsky.social’s latest book and this “turn a Romance into a novel!” table is killing me 😂

Hampsterdance started as a friendly bet between Canadian artist Deidre LaCarte and her sister. She made a page of animated hamsters set to a chipmunked loop of Whistle Stop from Disney’s Robin Hood (1973). Within months, it took over inboxes & office desktops. Today, it's gone from the live web.

Short story rec on using AI to plan your (social etc) life: Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer. (It's not all bad, though!) clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

brb, modifying my SF course slideshow for next year 🔥

Aaron Burr: "And Hamilton wrote...the other...51!" [Federalist papers] Me, every time: "🙏 I love the digital humanities" companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/?chapter=...

Major congratulations to all the Nommo award nominees for 2025! It was an honor to be able to make the announcement virtually at Seattle worldcon. I've read almost all the nominated stories and they represent some of the best of African speculative fiction. You should definitely check them out!

The Hugo Awards are this weekend, and I start teaching my Hugos course on Wednesday! It's fun to teach a "contemporary literature" course and have it be contemporary, indeed!

BTW, if ppl are looking for repositories of scientific films that can be viewed online, I created this list for a class I taught several years ago on science and film. Happy to hear about any that are missing! library.seattleu.edu/guides/FILM3...

A reminder that Rice/Wake Forest’s Course Workload Estimators are helpful for thinking through class labor (and showing your process to your students, if you like)

Thinking about this more and I really like how it opens up reading as a learned skill that is embodied in a context. I think that's a powerful way to think about it in the wake of AI and in reports of literacy problems.

New from Internet Archive Canada: Queen’s University Library has digitized a collection of rare, self-published sci-fi & fantasy fanzines, making long-lost voices from 1940s–1980s more widely accessible. ⚔️ Start your side quest: blog.archive.org/2025/07/15/s... @internetarchiveca.bsky.social

I've been to @joiedelivresmtl.bsky.social, the SFF, bilingual bookstore in Montreal, four times since it opened four weeks ago. If I could, I'd be there for these two talks as well! Support your locals!

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and starts in 2024—a 31-year leap. Are creators imagining futures that are closer or further away? Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting. doi.org/10.18737/552...

I put all the Heritage Minutes in chronological order by event so you don't have to. 🇨🇦 (I was looking for this and couldn't find it, so it became a weird hobby. It genuinely may be of interest only to me.) www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

There's just so many books to read!!!

There is one obvious piece of #CanCon to mark the passing of Brian Wilson, and that of course is this: youtu.be/Ch84fmOa414?...

Well, this has inspired me to do my recs for the week on 18th century women writers! As Dr Theadora Jean says there's a whole ton of women writing in the 18th century and there are some FANTASTIC reads in there! Here are 10 recommendations to get you started! 🧵

It's the final hours to support @locusmag.bsky.social, an excellent SFF magazine that publishes stories, essays, news, interviews, etc. There are so many great perks left, too - Zoom chats with authors! Funky pins! Signed editions!

Let’s do a bit of literary history next. This set is inspired by early modern books in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Folger Shakespeare Library collections. Shakespeare’s First Folio makes three biscuity appearances here. Honourable mentions also to Milton and to Beaumont and Fletcher.

I'm reading Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe and it's been a while since I've had so much fun in sff?! It also reads like an 18thc novel to me - picaresque, psychological, wild stuff that may be allegory or may be Truth or may be just a plain old scam!

A long-awaited labor of love, essay collection by me and Jo @bluejo.bsky.social collecting essays on the history of science fiction & fantasy, the craft of writing, and what genre is and does. A rich read for anyone who enjoys thinking about what makes the books we love so great!

This was a lovely event about Amal El-Mohtar's new book The River Has Roots, not least because @amalelmohtar.com mentioned Data and Wisdom by Julia Flanders and talked about models! The digital humanities / fantasy connection of my dreams!

I read Lisa's stellar dissertation, and I'm so excited to see this dataset in the wild! ✨

It's been a while since I read a poem. Here's one I read today: "Maybe the soul is not so different from a common grackle, hopping about and foraging for smithereens from an economy of sacrifice beyond its comprehension."

Avoir une librairie bilingue, ces jours-ci, c’est « les ventes de livre sont en hausse au Québec » and "tariffs are going to collapse the Canadian book industry on April 2nd" Le livre en français au Canada est produit localement ou est importé d’Europe (donc pas de tarifs)

I've played (and taught) The Quiet Year and The Deep Forest several times - they're a great intro to games and ask thought-provoking questions about sff and decolonization. I'm excited to have yet another game from @lackingceremony.bsky.social to build communities with my friends!

Want to listen to a story about empire, resistance, and friendship? Imo, @worldsbeyondnumber.bsky.social is among the best right now. It's a collaborative fantasy story about The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One, and it's free anywhere you find podcasts.

Down a research rabbit hole, I’m reading the 1st page of an 1863 novel, *The Story of the Guard* where the narrator describes the arrival of magazines, books, & newspapers to their "quiet & remote" life thus: "Our brain-rations came twice a month" Brain. Rations. archive.org/details/stor...

Worth noting that Le Guin is paraphrasing Tolkien: "The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist...If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar."