New Book Review: Psychopomp & Circumstance Review: Eden Royce’s Haunting Novel "a beautiful exploration of grief, not as something to be feared, but as a process that connects us to the past " gnofhorror.com/psychopomp-c... @edenroyce.bsky.social

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Notice how people are using this about Elon's trillion dollar deal, which happens in 10 years IFF: - The ai bubble doesn't pop - He makes an army of 1 million robots - He octuples Tesla's value - He doesn't die Etc It's very much subjunctive, very much future tense. And yet.

There's an interesting grammatical tense used only to talk about powerful, wealthy people, where they have simultaneously done the thing, are doing the thing, and will do the thing. Totally divorced from the concept of linear time, the only important element is: important person and thing.

These are terrible people who enjoy suffering they believe to be justified. I think it’s important to add that this is caused by the Conservative Protestant Work Ethic, just world illusion, and deservingness judgments, not just pure sadism. Dismantling those permission structures is essential.

I love trash, so much of what I deeply love is not good, yum yum garbage

More people on here would be more able to parse this distinction if more of us were more comfortable with admitting that we are at times total raccoons who enjoy without regard for quality

It is actually okay to love stuff that is not Great Art, get the fuck over yourself

"Women are not usually into science fiction"is legitimately one of the stupidest, most divorced from reality sentences I have ever read in my life

Last review of the week is the always thoughtful @tristanbeiter.bsky.social on Eden Royce’s Psychopomp & Circumstance (@tordotcom.bsky.social): “one of the core questions of the novel is choice […] what it is even to have choices—and all the many ways that choices are constrained.”

I can't articulate it well but I don't care what punctuation/ set of words is the current tell for Chatgpt. I'm not changing my voice or the way I write for this program, my writing will evolve the way it evolves. I am not panicking that it uses em dashes. They should panic and pay me.

That line of reasoning sounds very very dangerous to me. Allowing the machine to use certain tools and stepping away from them. Giving them up. It sounds exactly like what they want us to do...IMO at least.

Does someone who suggests that not know any children? Children think about death *constantly.* It's out there! It's scary! *Bridge to Terabithia* keeps coming back even though its real dated at this point because kids *need* to have a chance to process death and it's an opportunity to do so.

this is something that was discussed at large when i wastaking classes for teaching children’s lit. adultery, death, poverty, illness etc. are all part of many children’s lives, and it’s extra important for them to have stories that help them process and understand it

Anyone who thinks that any single topic is too dark for YA has never actually tracked content warnings in books, YA or not. The difference is that in YA the number of separate "darker" topics is limited, and they will be the focus of the story, not a one-off mention.

I saw somebody the other day suggesting that "main character death is too dark for YA" and I can't stop thinking about it. both because I have YA stories where protagonists die and also because when I was a teenager I had to attend the funerals of several friends, including my first boyfriend

I grew up in a small town in PA farm country. I know tons of gardeners: the annual "oh no I have a billion zucchini all at once" dance, make mountains of pesto, etc. Not a *single one of those people* could feed themself on just their garden even during peak harvest, even aside from dietary balance

That’s the kind of kneejerk dismissive advice that makes me violent. Telling people to just grow their own food is tantamount to telling them to eat cake.

obviously opposed to religious violence but I think if you are implementing an actual plan to banish the night then some kind of state-condoned moon priestess should be allowed to ritually sacrifice you, willing to be flexible on that one

This in turn revitalizes local economy: local restaurants flourish. People go to stores and browse and buy things. Working class people with extra money are way more likely to spend their money on things that help develop strong communities.

Working class people should be able to buy nice clothes that last. They should be able to go out to dinner with their loved ones. They should be able to have safe and reliable transportation. They should be able to buy their kids toys and have phones that work.

I'm not sure which world these people (the person Derek is clowning on, not Derek) want to live in, but a world in which working class people cannot occasionally spend $200 on a nice night out (and this was his birthday!) is a world in which every business suffers except Walmart.

Periodic reminder that anyone who says "the Bible is unambiguous" is seriously deficient in understanding of how the Bible works, how reading works, or (most frequently) both.

PSYCHOPOMP & CIRCUMSTANCE is out today! This is a Southern Gothic fantasy with family secrets, Gullah funeral traditions, a beautifully strange house, and a generous sprinkling of magic. In hardcover, eBook, & audiobook Available wherever books are sold. #booksky #Blackbooksky

The cover stopped you in your tracks. Oh, but there's more. So much more. A contentious funeral. Loss, secrets, control - and hope. All through the eyes and spirits of Black family. Stop again, realize that it's release day and a perfect day to pick up your: Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce.

i am friends with and related to a lot of white men and exactly zero of them have had a Nazi phase we really do not need to normalize Having a Lil Nazi Phase

i actually don’t think the “average” american millennial man had a nazi phase. it’s not some boys will be boys shit. this makes me side eye you and your friend group, sounds like a personal problem

We kick off the week at @strangehorizons.bsky.social with Kyle R. Garton on Fadi Zaghmout's fantastical parable, The Man of Middling Height (translated by Wasan Abdelhawq for @syracuseup.bsky.social). The book "will provoke much discussion, and—hopefully!—controversy," Kyle argues. Why? Click!

The teeny tiny No Kings things in very red areas are so huge Say like five or six people show up. None of them knew each other before. Suddenly they’re all friends. And maybe from that you get a group that does longer-term organizing that can punch *way* above its weight considering where it is

"Even a building like the Mansueto Library conveys certain priorities: The stacks are all underground and unbrowsable, so that the reading materials need to be retrieved electronically—rendering the visible half-domed building little more than something interesting to look at."

I don't want a relationship with my computer, my appliances, or my phone. I just want them to function without fuss and certainly without opinions or suggestions. I have living, breathing friends and family for relationships. Tech bros need to try that.

This. You know what book this type of contract could have stopped from happening? The Traitor Baru Cormorant. I believe Baru was a short story first and then was turned into a book. I might be wrong. Baru is one of my fave books and thus contract would have taken the rights from Seth.

I agree that this is one important thing novels and other forms of writing do, but I've come around to Ursula Le Guin's view that long form writing *does things to readers,* that the point of the book is what it does, and what a good book does can't be expressed in terms of what it says

It's clear that HBO has way too much capital sunk into that IP, which is why we're getting a *third* show (love that Tanselle Too-Tall is a woman of color from Aus!). But we desperately and truly need other fantasy novelists' works adapted. For the love of everything, I am begging and pleading.

"Having one's book banned is not a prize. It's an assault on the right to read.[O]fficial acts of censorship beget quiet censorship...in anticipation of criticism. Out of fear or simply to avoid extra work in the future, library staff remove books, limit access...or don't purchase the books at all."

Today's Classic Cover of the Day is Brian Jacques' Redwall! Troy Howell illustrated the US editions of the series, including the 10th and 20th anniversary editions of Redwall

I think we’re really going to have to do a lot more of this. A massive deprogramming so that people can read more than ten words at a time without anxiety. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...?

Announcing the 2025 Rhysling Award Winners The Rhysling Award honors the year's best in speculative poetry ✨ Nominees were selected by the membership of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Each member is allowed to nominate one work in each of two categories: Long and Short poem thread/

“good news, we’ve created the playroom that tells kids whatever they want to hear and makes them not care about their parents from the seminal Ray Bradbury short story, Don’t Create the Playroom That Tells Kids Whatever They Want to Hear and Makes Them Not Care About Their Parents”

This. Do something cool for someone and then move on.

This is explicitly why they are trying to destroy education . It’s why they started with cultural studies and k-12. And why they recruited women to attack teachers of color and people thought was a joke

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Per my last repost, I have a new poem out at @cartridgelit.bsky.social about Outer Wilds, tomatoes, change, decay, and the promise at the heart of it all. I'd be honored if you checked it out! cartridgelit.com/2025/09/25/s...

I see a lot of artists on here questioning whether they should be promoting their work in the current political climate. The answer is always yes. ART: books, music, film, painting, sculpture - all of it - is the most accessible way to communicate complex topics, ideologies and emotions.

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

NEW #poetry on Cartridge Lit today! Check out Tristan Beiter's #poem "Solanum," inspired by the game #OuterWilds. cartridgelit.com/2025/09/25/s...

Sometimes a column is about something specific, and sometimes it's just about everything I've been reading and thinking about, and this one is definitely the latter!

I have two responses to this column (which was great): 1) Not SFF, but this is how I felt reading Hild and Menewood by Nicola Griffith. My reading notebook pages for them are just quotes quotes quotes all the way down. 2) Fuck me the universe is really laying on thick that I should read Helm.

Last night I finished North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher and I can’t recommend it enough. Lovely storytelling and some of the best worldbuilding I’ve come across in a while. Also, to sweeten the deal, almost every last character is gay 🌈