“Well, the line between what is on the page and what is imagined is very, very blurry. A lot of queer scholars have pointed out that, had a book been coded as heterosexual, we would just read it as officially heterosexual rather than read it as coded or call it a reading.” @deanleetal.bsky.social

Just galleyed a FANTASTIC bonus essay on fungi, extractivism and SFF, which we shall publish once we hit our next milestone of $24K!

🎙️ RELEASE THE PODCAST HOUNDS 🎙️ In this month’s Critical Friends, @deanleetal.bsky.social and @williamshaw.bsky.social discuss queer SFF with me - where it’s at, where it’s going … and how it might teach us to read all fiction more productively.

Wednesday review time, it’s Wednesday review time. As ever with @octavia-cade.bsky.social, we get a profound meditation *as well as* a book review. “I don’t believe that Rex is wrong to find the concept of techno-optimism appealing.”

smart, fun conversation is smart and fun.

I had the privilege of appearing on Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast! Me, Dean Leetal, and Dan Hartland talked about queer literature, censorship, fandom history, and outer space. Check out the episode (including a full transcript) here: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

🎙️ RELEASE THE PODCAST HOUNDS 🎙️ In this month’s Critical Friends, @deanleetal.bsky.social and @williamshaw.bsky.social discuss queer SFF with me - where it’s at, where it’s going … and how it might teach us to read all fiction more productively.

"the Pulitzer board ... named Angel Down the best work of fiction published in 2025, and as a genre reader and critic, I am here to say that this verges on an insult." @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social on top form here: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Strange Horizons is currently at $20,700 out of their $22,000 base goal! Share it! Donate! Share some more! We want Strange Horizons to keep doing their good works www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s...

Sooooooo good. 😍

Hot on the heels of its shortlisting for the @ursulakleguin.com Prize, here's Amritesh Mukherjee with a great, heartfelt piece on Mad Sisters of Esi. "Unlike traditional fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, with its tidy laws and ironclad rules, Mad Sisters thrives on chaos."

Half-way through the annual Strange Horizons fund-drive, we've just passed our next milestone of $17.5K. We can now release the next piece from our special issue, which is Paul March-Russell's Nonesuch: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no... To get us to our goal: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s...

That @tristanbeiter.bsky.social is back at SH, this time on the poetry beat, which he always patrols especially well. “anOther Nemesis offers an interesting picture of feminist and decolonial poetics with a breadth of focus [and] structural tensions that cleave under pressure.”

The week's first review at SH is a doozy. Do take the time to sit with it. Nader Elhefnawy returns to the reviews dept with a corker of piece on on the utopian, the neoliberal and the radical. "Davidson’s reliance on a popular but untenable reading of history slights much of the field he surveys."

Listen, gang: we’re just a few hundred dollars from unlocking Paul March-Russell’s review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch. You’ll want to read this one - on historical and fantasy fiction, on biography and genre, on what novels do well and what they do not. But we need those few dollars more …

That @alexyquest.bsky.social is back at SH today, reading a volume of Rebecca Roanhorse's short fiction. "The throughline of these stories is not simply the representation of Indigenous and Black characters, but rather themes of fraught identity."

Wednesday sees @rachelcordasco.bsky.social take a look at Nguyễn Bình Phương, in translation courtesy of Khải Q. Nguyễn. Fittingly, Rachel focuses in this piece on the function of language. "What does it mean for a language to center itself in the present and flow outward to the past and future?"

On literary darlings and speculation: a review of George Saunders’ Vigil by David Soyka. “Why might a work so seemingly trite, and predictable, receive so much mainstream literary coverage?”

Heaven help me, but I’ve tried to be hopeful about UK politics. I am sorry in advance re: the digit on the monkey paw for which I am now responsible.

The next piece to be unlocked in the @strangehorizons.bsky.social fund drive is a really great review essay by Paul March-Russell of @sffoundation.bsky.social, on the latest from Francis Spufford. It goes deep, in a number of ways - and we need less than $2000 to get there. Do help if you can!

UPDATE: We have just crossed our next milestone of $15K, and are delighted to unlock this beautiful poem by Rose Mary Boehm: Log 6324, Earthdate Unknown: brucespoems.blogspot.com/2015/06/othe... We're now less than $7K from meeting our base goal. Help us get here: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s...

Friday at SH is Sinclair Adams on Tlotlo Tsamaase. House of Margins emerges as formally inventive, generically mixed - and often intellectually stimulating - though not without a few faults. Still, it "ultimately imparts a story about hope and renewal by meeting hardship with faith and love."

From @williamshaw.bsky.social, a review of Dead Boys in Space, a "thoughtful" poetry collection in which the HIV/AIDS crisis is reimagined - and millions live differently. "As the title suggests, this is a collection about grief, both for an individual and for a whole cohort of people."

48-hour-update: thanks to you, we have crossed 50% of our base goal. Help us reach it, and then to our stretch goals - more writers' pay: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s... On a selfish note, at $12.5K we release a banger of an essay on world building, that I can't wait to share with you all!

While the fund drive is one, we’re also still doing a regular issue this week. First review is a debut with us from Akumbu Uche, on Kill the Poet, Save the World! by Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu. “Whether you fall in with the geeks, the mystics, the revolutionaries, or the romantics” there’s a poem here.

Another great episode, and it's years since I read SoZ, but the most striking thing to me is their critique of Brunner 'failing to see solutions'. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I think it's relatively rare to hear contemporary SF novels praised for offering solutions. Interesting disjunct.

Gotta say that @casella.bsky.social is making a very strong case for deserving a Hugo Award win. This is a really excellent podcast episode.

A very worthwhile and engaging listen here on John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), though I'm surprised by the view that it is "a relatively easy book to get your head around"!

Amazing that SH is nearly halfway already. Thank you so much to all who’ve donated, can confirm it means a lot. 💜 In fact, another review has been unlocked: @notquitehydepark.bsky.social on @adamroberts.bsky.social’s Short History of Fantasy. Important review of important book. (It’s how we roll.)

It's always good to talk the talk with @casella.bsky.social, even when it's about something as sticky as Stand On Zanzibar. I *think* we came out feeling it had been worth hacking away at it. We certainly covered a lot of ground in and around what is a troublesome book. How well? You decide ...

It’s the annual Strange Horizons fund drive! Donate to keep an important mag going and to unlock our special issue. Reviews-wise, *already* unlocked is @akankshya.bsky.social on Bora Chung. Still to come: @notquitehydepark.bsky.social on @adamroberts.bsky.social and March-Russell on Spufford …

It’s the annual Strange Horizons fund drive! Donate to keep an important mag going and to unlock our special issue. Reviews-wise, *already* unlocked is @akankshya.bsky.social on Bora Chung. Still to come: @notquitehydepark.bsky.social on @adamroberts.bsky.social and March-Russell on Spufford …

Let's try this again... 🗣️ The Strange Horizons Annual Fund Drive to keep us up and running in 2027 will begin on Sunday, 14 June, 2026 on BackerKit! 🗣️ You can sign up to show your support and receive a notice when the Fund Drive goes live at the link ⬇️ www.backerkit.com/call_to_acti...

We were lucky to get some late returns for Branagh in Eyre’s production of The Tempest at the RSC in Stratford last night. It was an avowedly theatrical staging, almost panto in places, and very gentle - little of the showbiz dazzle & loud declaiming of Stewart in the role under Goold 20 years ago.

Something slightly different at SH today, but we like that every now and then, right? On SF in Yi-Ling Liu's partial The Wall Dancers: "Just like many other personalities in Liu’s book, Chen Qiufan strives to prove to the Party that what he does is useful, while also staying true to his values."

There are notable exceptions, but I’m largely an oeuvres magpie: what are the one, two, three works that are going to be the most interesting to me?

First review of the week over at SH is a long one, and brilliantly so. Here’s @octavia-cade.bsky.social on this year’s Climate Fiction Prize shortlist. Producing this *after* the winner was announced for me lets the shortlist breathe some more - and affords alternative readings to the judges’.

It's not entirely a surprise to me that the Critical Friends episode about established writers has attracted less discourse than the one about debut writers, but it's probably a topic I worry about more.

For the next two weeks, appearing Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—the 38th novelette, " – Ekumen ain't everything – " thecityofroses.com/chapbooks/no... (In which morning ablutions are seen to, a carnival’s attended, by various bodies, a middling blow is struck, and a number of cats is itemized.)

Friday's review at @strangehorizons.bsky.social saw @deanleetal.bsky.social return to our pages, to read Shelly Page's Charmed and Dangerous. I always enjoy how Dean's reviews centre an experience of reading. "Even though the book is light and sweet," they say here, "it respects it readers."

OK, I’d been staying strong until now. *Thanks, Larry*.

If there was any figure in any media I consumed as a young person who made me think "Yeah, that's who I want to be when I grow up", it was Giles.

🎧 The one that tackles the ‘where to start’ dilemma! “Part of it is to work out whether they are the reader the likes spiders or the reader that doesn’t like spiders. And then start from there,” suggests Duncan Lawie. Who might be meant?! 😆 📚⚔️ #FantasyBooks 🚀 #SciFiBooks 🪐📚💙 #BookSky 🦋 #Podcasts 📻

Reviewers on Reviewing: in the this roundtable discussion, @chloroformtea.bsky.social asks @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social, @danhartland.bsky.social, and @princejvstin.com about the effects of payrates (and lack thereof) in the SFF reviewing scene.

Comment on this month’s podcast from a guest on last month’s, noting the layered exchanges between the two. This is the aim! Note last month’s other guest, @alexyquest.bsky.social, is in this Month’s episode itself, with some specially recorded audio following up on the discussion around debuts.

It feels like we’re staring down the barrel of creative institutional collapse akin to the 70s and New Hollywood Consolidation of power into a few hands leads to industries that forget their obligation to artists and audiences alike A lot of great work will go unappreciated until we right the ship

Wednesday's review is Shannon Fay on The Sound of the Dark, the latest from Daniel Church and @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social - a book which "changes gears and goes from being a slow-burn creepy mystery to an unchained horror novel." We also reviewed Church's The Hollows; he seems very good at mood.

Correct; weird fiction is when you read weirdly

The Strange Horizons Kickstarter to fund 2027 will begin on Sunday, 7 June, 2026! This is a critical time for SFF publications when the existence of venues publishing short speculative fiction, poetry and non-fiction is sometimes uncertain. We hope that you will keep us publishing for another year!

A new issue of The Comics Courier! And this one features @kathrynthehuman.bsky.social among other great writers!