Publication day! The Recollections by Christopher Priest is out today. Get your copy from our website or in other places where books are sold. briardenebooks.uk/product/the-...

I think about this every day. The reading habits of even the most dedicated readers are being eroded by labor intensification.

Spotify is bad for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is the pivot away from curated playlists toward heavily algorithm/UI driven content has completely degraded its usefulness as a way to find new music.

_Now there’s too much Gettyism, the idea that if a thing can be financed it must be right and desirable_

_Paths run from gate to gate, and shrubs inside the paling seclude the place from the street—it is not sad, just cosily melancholic_

You should be paying attention to @strangehorizons.bsky.social this week, since it's our special issue on fungi. ("Perhaps all speculative fiction is just looking for "a shortcut to mushrooms'!" suggests @gautambhatia88.bsky.social.) There is fiction, poetry, nonfiction. There are mushrooms.

I keep coming back to the leaded petrol analogy for LLMs and coding Harms that are manageable when it's only used by a small number of experts become catastrophic pollution when it's used broadly throughout society The worst part of this is that the experts won't see or understand the harm

This aligns with my opinion that young people into synthwave are the equivalent of 90s kids into swing. Sparks = Benny Goodman

alas (and, yes, one could claim that a lot of climate fiction fits that category but b/c it most often comes from the direction of lit fic the ways in which it is literary and grounded [or not] are different from writers who work more solidly from the sf tradition)

In case it is not emphatically clear, Cartilage Free Captain stands in vehement opposition to the appointment of Roberto De Zerbi as Tottenham Hotspur's next manager/

Never felt so upset with Spurs

This is why @chloroformtea.bsky.social is one of my favorite critics right now: “I’m mad about it because it epitomises one of the main problems I see in a lot of contemporary SFF: the determined unwillingness to let anything be subtle.”

"I have a lingering suspicion that many people who read books about SF aren’t really looking for an introduction to the field so much as for a good fight" locusmag.com/review/trace...

I've been sick for the past week+ so my bi-monthly newsletter won't be out this coming Tuesday as per usual. But that gives you just over a week to peruse the archives and sign up if you enjoy what you find there: buttondown.com/wmhenrymorri...

Post-Ithaca notes, abbrev. Some recommended reading (essays which you might have missed) and also re-highlighting your small press recs from earlier, which have been super fascinating browsing. More at length later after I finish this talk! vajra.me/2026/03/29/r...

In perhaps a career first, Petzold's latest film is optimistic. With a wordplay on mirror and projector, the film can be read as a coda on making films as therapy.

"...in the bland “utopia” of value pluralism, where one thing is as good as the next, there are musics that hunt for an exit." – S.D. Chrostowska, Utopia in the Age of Survival

I've been sick for the past week+ so my bi-monthly newsletter won't be out this coming Tuesday as per usual. But that gives you just over a week to peruse the archives and sign up if you enjoy what you find there: buttondown.com/wmhenrymorri...

like what are we doing here, which of these is actually going to fire the imagination of someone who's just browsing, going to stick in the imagination of a reader who will come back to it, suggest it to others

This series is very, very good and imo exactly what the series Hugo should be recognising. Suspect a lot of people will be struggling to fill up their series ballot; if you have a spare you should absolutely nominate Astreaint.

When you ILL ICFA:

This real estate ad is harassing me.

This is an excellent close reading (and I mean that in the full sense of the term—adding context and conjecture and a pov to what could be seen as a minor part if the book):

"it has become a truism that "the contemporary" must be imagined in synchronic terms on a linear timeline...a different kind of asynchronous contemporaneity where jump cuts reveal commonalities among works responding to structurally similar historical situations." @nathankhensley.bsky.social

This is great! I did not go into this expecting to learn something new about Wendy Carlos!

When you ILL ICFA:

“Proceeds Will Go To…: A Brief Guide to Selling Art and Merch to Raise Money for Direct Support and Mutual Aid, which is available to download for free…” Great resource at www.birchwoodpalace.com/pdfs

At some point we’re going to need to move from breaking the ground to sowing it with wild flowers

"The movie is very effective at what it’s doing. It’s its choice of what things to do that lands as strange." #ProjectHailMary has been hyped to the stars and back, but I think the parts of the story it's *not* telling are more significant. My review for Nerds of a Feather:

Doing some background research on Lord Dunsany (specifically the fact he was injured by the IRA during Easter Rising b/c he went to Dublin to help the British army) and I came across Edward James's wonderful blog project to collect info about sff writers and WWI. Great resource!

I love Tom Bombadil and wish he’d been in the movies, but at this point the only Middle Earth media I want to watch is a Voyage of Earendel prominently featuring Bilbo‘s actual poetry, or some silly comedy of manners set in the Shire with a quirky elf or dwarf visitor every few episodes

A #BlueskyLullaby for tonight: We're coming up on the third anniversary of the death of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Here's his sparse, gentle, dissonant, wistful, mysterious song "Bibo No Aozora" ("Beautiful Blue Sky"). See you around. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wku3...

In case there was any doubt: I approve.

The ultimate indignity with having a bad cold is that sinus and chest congestion means I can't stand the thought of dairy. I'm part Danish, English, and Swiss--I always want dairy. Heck, a great great grandfather and a couple of great uncles of mine were literally dairy professors.

Aaaaah! It's here! You know my aspec angle. You know my cosy sff angle. And BY THEIR POWERS COMBINED, "That Soft and Gentle Feeling: Relationships In Cosy SFF" was written! And then found a lovely home at Strange Horizons. 😍 (Yes, that reference was absolutely necessary. Sorrynotsorry.)

You know I can’t let this pass by: Nero Wolfe mention!

A brief thread on Audition from the weekend:

I was just saying yesterday...

I finished this collection recently, and it's genuinely lovely/weird. Enjoyed it a lot!

To put it another way: Audition combines social realism with magic realism (esp. the Latin American form that is political critique) with space opera with not exactly "hard"/classic sf but the same type of move those who wrote those genres made when describing the alien (esp. Arthur C. Clarke)

What Pip Adam’s Audition explains and what it leaves unexplained is fascinating because it lays bare both literary realism and the methods of science fiction And the reading experience is contrapuntal to the experience of the characters

More than anything, I think what killed Timescape was a mixture of low sales and low output, combined with the fact that Simon & Schuster (sorry, that's the S&S above, they owned Pocket) was doing a lot of downsizing after acquiring a ton of stuff.

The part not made clear, though, is that Baen was actually an independent publisher that S&S *distributed,* not an imprint of Pocket, like Timescape was. And Pocket continued to publish its own sff books throughout the 1980s, esp. Star Trek novels.

Middlemarch when I was 24

Woah. I had no idea that Baen directly replaced Timescape:

other things to write first, but I think I’ve found a way into writing about Renee Gladman’s Ravicka books that will do them (some sort of) justice without completely breaking my brain

So excited about this #SFinTranslation magazine because of all of the amazing people who will be writing for it!

What Pip Adam’s Audition explains and what it leaves unexplained is fascinating because it lays bare both literary realism and the methods of science fiction And the reading experience is contrapuntal to the experience of the characters

Can we take a moment to admire Briardene Books? Four years, four books, all impeccably edited and full of chewy, insightful SFF criticism (full disclosure, one of them is mine). And all with absolute banger covers by Tom Joyes.

Just found this random note—somehow I neglected to cite the actual source: “Modernism and postmodernism are not chronological eras, but political positions in the century-long struggle between art and technology.” (359) I’m going to guess Jameson?