This looks like a fun watch, but it is also reminding me of how bleakly cynical I found the end of the novel. All the more so because neither the characters nor the author seemed to realize it.

📘❤️ IT'S PUBLICATION DAY! ❤️📘 The Forest on the Edge of Time published with Tor Books! It's an absolute dream come true, and I'm enormously grateful to everyone at Tor who's supported my book. 🌟

Authors who protest book banning because it “narrows the world” for young readers, but boycott young readers in certain markets because you oppose the policies of their governments (for which they are too young to vote) - do you not see how these are effectively the same?

Gaiman is already suing one of his accusers. If he had any actionable claims against "There is No Safe Word", he would have sued New York Magazine and Lila Shapiro. The fact that he is instead pointing readers to some random substack article tells us all we need to know.

New blog post: completely unexpectedly, Wonder Man is not only a good show, but one that has inspired me to write about the MCU again. Its success, however, is rooted in avoiding the things that the rest of the franchise is chasing, to its detriment. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/02/wond...

I see we are once again complaining about people of color being cast in a story about the Middle East in antiquity, while sparing barely a glance to the ranks of British and American white people who have been cast as Greeks, Turks, and Italians.

New blog post: completely unexpectedly, Wonder Man is not only a good show, but one that has inspired me to write about the MCU again. Its success, however, is rooted in avoiding the things that the rest of the franchise is chasing, to its detriment. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/02/wond...

Is there actually a chance that winter in North America would end on February 2nd? I feel like you're all blaming a groundhog for what is actually a fact of geography.

Happy to see Paul Kincaid's Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction on the @locusmag.bsky.social recommended reading list! locusmag.com/2026/02/2025...

Wonder Man is the freshest, most interesting thing the MCU has produced in years. So naturally it's been released with little fanfare and with the absolute promise that there will be no continuation to its story (which it doesn't need, but could definitely support).

The Great Tolkien Reread continues with "Three is Company", "A Short Cut to Mushrooms", and "A Conspiracy Unmasked." In which the hobbits make their way to the edge of the Shire, the Black Riders appear, and we discuss Tolkien's unique use of foresight. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

The Great Tolkien Reread continues with "Three is Company", "A Short Cut to Mushrooms", and "A Conspiracy Unmasked." In which the hobbits make their way to the edge of the Shire, the Black Riders appear, and we discuss Tolkien's unique use of foresight. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

The cold open of this week's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms:

📣 It's here: the 2026 @strangehorizons.bsky.social Criticism Special! 💡 A whole week of critical insight, with a new essay and new review every day. A podcast, a roundtable, an *editorial*. 📚 The weird! Anthropology! Non-anglophone SFF! Plus thoughts on fantasy series, adaptations, film and more.

I'm just going to keep saying this: I will take headlines like this seriously the day even one of these AI-peddling ghouls treats actual human beings with anything resembling the sympathy and compassion they keep demanding for their software.

The good folks at @inkle.co were kind enough to send me a Steam key for their new game, TR-49, and it is a delight. Short and sweet - I finished it in two evenings - and perfectly pitched between challenging and frustrating, it's a fantastic addition to lineage of Her Story/Roottrees-derived games.

This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

Behold my many different types of Tolkieniana.

NEWS! My next book, TRANSLUNAR, about a closeted trans woman who's an astronaut in the sixties, is coming out in fall 2027! It'll be on Wildthorn, Tor's brand-new general fiction imprint -- a dream, as it lets me work with @englelaird.bsky.social on my literary and historical fiction as well as SFF.

"Americans, know that all Europeans hate you" is probably not the most useful way to approach the current situation. But as someone who has spent the last 2+ years scrolling past the opinion that my murder would be an act of decolonization, I feel like you guys could stand to practice some stoicism.

Over at @lawgunsmoney.bsky.social, I have posted my traditional list of the books I'm looking forward to in 2026. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-...

"Average person starts wars over Nobel Peace Prize" factoid actually just a statistical error. Spiders Donald, who thinks about the Nobel Peace Prize every day and has started 10,000 wars to get it, is an outlier and should be impeached.

I see that it is once again necessary to re-up this simple but, apparently, hard to grasp point.

Rachel Reid writing Heated Rivalry in 2019: behold this detailed timeline of Shane and Ilya's relationship from 2008 to 2017 Rachel Reid writing Long Game in 2022: this book begins two years after HR and spans about a year Me: doesn't that mean- RR: NOPE! There will be no date markers whatsoever!

Lot of anniversary posts on my feed this week reminding me that ten years ago, both David Bowie and Alan Rickman died right around my birthday, and I was still young enough that this felt shocking and not like the sort of thing that just happens with increasing regularity.

Really is something Tolkien-y in the air this year. Weird Studies (@weirdstudiesphil.bsky.social) kicking off with an episode about "On Fairy-Stories":

The Great Tolkien Reread continues today with "The Shadow of the Past", an infodump chapter that unexpectedly lays out much of what The Lord of the Rings is about, and is also an effective, disquieting reintroduction to Gollum. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

The Great Tolkien Reread continues today with "The Shadow of the Past", an infodump chapter that unexpectedly lays out much of what The Lord of the Rings is about, and is also an effective, disquieting reintroduction to Gollum. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

Why, it's almost as if Stancil is a perfectly normal person and a good egg, and it's the people who have made obsessing over his every action as if it proves his innate perfidy who are the weirdos.

Rewatching the first episode of Pluribus, and it's just making me mad all over again how stupid and criminally careless its "scientist" characters have to be for the entire series's plot to even happen.

Erich von Däniken, popularizer of the idea that non-white ancient people were incapable of building monuments, died yesterday, prompting many people to say "that guy was still alive?!?". In honor of his passing, I think @ifbookspod.bsky.social should do a special episode on Chariots of the Gods.

is it time to start blogging through The Lord of the Rings, yes, I think so

One for those 'most anticipated books of next year' lists. Allan on Priest on Ballard and everything in between.

And we're off on my reread of Lord of the Rings, 50 years since I first read it. Here, I outline why it's three different books in one (and I don't just mean The Fellowship, The Two Towers and the Return). #Tolkien #lotr

Wicked: For Good is nowhere near as good as the first movie (which was, itself, only OK). But I continue to be flabbergasted by how these movies are, by some margin, the most explicitly and unambiguously anti-Trump works to come out of Hollywood in years.

With a knock on your door, a kindly wizard invites you to join us on Shelved By Genre's LORD OF THE YEAR, in which we will consider the popular but contested works of JRR Tolkien, kicking things off with a long rumination upon the first four chapters of THE HOBBIT: rangedtouch.com/2026/01/02/t...

On the second day of the year, I sat down to answer emails that have been glaring at me for a response for an amount of time I will not publicly disclose, except to say that at one point the phrase "a turducken of shame" was used.

I love this style of article writing, in which you spill a thousand words without saying anything about what's going on, allowing everyone to project their own ideas on the situation. Reading this, you could easily lump together the homophobic reaction to the show with the Will/Mike shippers.

Big thanks to everyone who joined me this year on A Meal of Thorns, and to everyone who listened along and supported us! Feeling like a thread as we leave 2025 behind us: a chance to boost these again. Great guests & great books—take a look, and take a listen wherever you find your podcasts!

Paused the Stranger Things finale after the [Big Event] to make some tea and have just realized there are 45 minutes still left in the episode. Sigh.

Explore @NussbaumAbigail’s review of @rainewilson.bsky.social: “Wilson describes THE SALT ORACLE as her attempt at dark academia, and indeed, despite the novel’s borderline-apocalyptic setting… some familiar academic quirks quickly establish themselves.”

It's been a busy week for me, writing wise, so before we get properly into 2026, let's cast our minds back to last year with a recap of everything I published in the last week of 2025.

A blank slate

There are 5.5 hours left in 2025, but nevertheless I'm going to take the chance that my year's reading is concluded. Here are my best reads of 2025, an idiosyncratic bunch of choices in a year that did not seem to have many big, zeitgeisty books. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

I take no leave of you, 2025. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.

There are 5.5 hours left in 2025, but nevertheless I'm going to take the chance that my year's reading is concluded. Here are my best reads of 2025, an idiosyncratic bunch of choices in a year that did not seem to have many big, zeitgeisty books. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

My biweekly chapter-by-chapter reread of The Lord of the Rings gets into the book proper this week with a discussion of "A Long-Expected Party". Click through to learn how J.R.R. Tolkien is (and is not) like Jane Austen. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Abigail is a fantastic critic and reader. This reread promises many riches.

My biweekly chapter-by-chapter reread of The Lord of the Rings gets into the book proper this week with a discussion of "A Long-Expected Party". Click through to learn how J.R.R. Tolkien is (and is not) like Jane Austen. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Nothing like saying something as uncomplicatedly and obviously true as "MTG is antisemite" and immediately being told "but remember, not all criticism of Israel is antisemitism" to make me take seriously the left's commitment to suppressing antisemitism within its ranks.