(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Summer is a weird time, both in publishing and in academia. Structure dissolves. Everyone’s off traveling, either for personal reasons or for urgent work ones. A university town like mine starts to feel hot and empty – but not restfully empty, or at least that’s not what it was this time. Too much course prep, faculty union business, and other largely-invisible work to keep doing. Not to mention the continuous background world-is-on-fire of it all.

Then of course September starts and you’re suddenly back in the whirlwind.

I’m writing this on the tail end of having caught a stupid flu bug that’s been going around on campus, which is why it’s a little later than the real equinox. I was, frankly, feeling a little overwhelmed even before the flu. Nevertheless, I’ve been reading (and watching, and playing) things. And some of them have been exceptionally good.

Meanwhile: remember when I said I reserved the right to change my category system whenever I wanted to? It’s only the third one of these quarterly review posts and I am changing it already. Most of the media I loved over the summer was at least mildy dark and hard-hitting – but most of it was also full of sensawunda and adventure, a combo that made the distinction between “Flights of Fancy” and “The Ones that Haunt Me” feel arbitrary, picky, and meaningless. So I’m not making the distinction this time! All the fiction is going in one big pile! Enjoy.

Perilous Adventures

N.K. Jemisin, “The Fifth Season” (novel, Orbit, 2015)

Holy shit. Why did I wait this long to read this book? Why did I wait eleven entire years? Why did the historic three Hugo awards for all three books in the trilogy not convince me?? I should not have waited. The Fifth Season made my head explode, but in a good way. You know when you pick up a book and it’s so good you get mad because why can’t I be this good, what is the point of writing if I can’t be this good? Yeah? Yeah.

Anyway if you are coming in as late as I am, then I’m not even going to spoil anything for you, because this is the kind of book where the less is spoiled, the better. I’ll tell you what you’ll already know from the buzz and the back cover copy: there is a world beset by near-constant earthquakes, volcanoes, and (occasionally) civilization-ending disasters. Some people have a magical ability to control what the earth beneath them is doing, and are feared for it. That’s already a pretty interesting premise, but you need to know that Jemisin starts with this premise and then does not stop. Things just keep unfolding, breathtakingly, revelation after revelation, for the whole book and also presumably the next two. Now I need to go get the next two. Argh.

Aliette de Bodard, “A Game of Three Generals” (originally from 2017, but I read it in The Sunday Morning Transport, July 5, 2026)

This lyrical story from the Xuya universe starts with a woman imprisoned on a lava planet, being cared for and entertained by an artificial Mind. It’s clear from the beginning that she has memory problems and is not fully aware of what’s going on around her. One begins to suspect that what’s going on around her is probably bad. One is, of course, eventually proven correct, and heartbreakingly so.

The Pitt, Season One (TV show, HBO Max, Jan-April 2025)

I mean, I barely need to say anything about this? Everyone knows about this show already. I don’t even watch medical dramas actually but I decided I would try it, because it was on Bell Crave and everyone on Bluesky was raving about how good it is. All I will say is that (a) the gifted, burned-out, PTSD-addled, trying-their-best characters are all very relatable, (b) I needed tissues a lot, and (c) the pacing is fun. I get bored easily with procedurals; if I can already tell that the current suspect in your mystery-of-the-week is not the culprit because not enough minutes of runtime have gone past, then you’ve lost me. But in the emergency room there are constantly 35 things going on and there’s no telling which ones will resolve easily vs which ones are going to spiral into a huge ongoing problem. You get lulled at about the 2/3 mark into thinking surely the characters have already managed all the crises they can possibly manage in one day, and then lol, lmao, that’s when the actual crisis starts.

(If the show does have one flaw, it’s that it sometimes feels like every possible Very Special Episode is happening at once; but then, given what a hospital emergency room is for, and given the way today’s social issues are real phenomena that directly affect the health of actual random humans, it is pretty plausible that a group of harried emergency room staff might actually have to deal with all them at this pace.)

Also, yes, it’s very obvious that Dr. Mel King is supposed to be autistic (even though only her sister is actually called by that word) and she is adorable and I love her.

I also have decided that the way the later episodes in this season handle violence – not showing the violence itself or the perpetrator at all, but being extremely graphic and unflinching about the aftermath – is one of the most effective ways you can possibly get an anti-violence message across in today’s media landscape. Whew.

S.L. Huang, “The Language of Liars” (novella, Tordotcom, April 2026)

This is another book where I don’t want to spoil much beyond what’s already in the back cover copy. The setting felt retro to me in a really fun way – one of these galaxies that we don’t see as much of in serious SF anymore, full of teeming multitudes of nonhuman beings. So did the dense reliance on linguistics to drive the worldbuilding, as full of expert jargon as the hardest of hard SF, but easy to follow (for me, at least) because of the narrator’s sheer joy in the knowledge they have and the investigation they’re doing. That narrator is Ro, a neurodivergent member of a burrowing mammal species, who longs to “jump” into the mind of an enigmatic space-dwelling species called a Star Eater and see things through the Star Eater’s eyes. For Ro, the lure of a jump is about language and cultural learning; unfortunately, for his elders, it’s more about espionage. The back cover warns very loudly that when Ro succeeds, it will have large-scale, civilization-ending consequences, but it’s vague about exactly how that happens. When the big, tragic twist did come, it was original enough to take me completely by surprise – but it gave immense new meaning to everything that had happened before it.

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (video game, ZA/UM, May 2026)

You knew this review was coming! After falling so hard for Disco Elysium in my last newsletter, I was very excited to play this next. While I don’t love it quite as wildly as I loved Disco, I like it a lot. It’s a worthy successor that preserves the most interesting game mechanics of Disco while also expanding the world and taking some interesting risks with its story.

Zero Parades is a spy thriller, not a detective story, and its most audacious departure from Disco’s formula happens right at the beginning: instead of meeting up with a helpful, steadying, Kim Kitsuragi-like influence, your character CASCADE arrives to find her assigned partner catatonic under mysterious circumstances and her controller angrily warning her off the case. Naturally, the story instead demands that you stick around to figure out what happened; by the time you find out who the real villains are, you’ll have managed to assemble a whole ragtag crew to help you take them down. But for the earliest and largest parts of this story, CASCADE is on her own.

Or, seemingly on her own: fortunately, the chorus of inner voices that were so striking in Disco are back for another round. In Zero Parades, the conceit is that CASCADE learned to have this type of internal dialogue as a part of her spy training. Compared to Disco, Zero Parades seems to have a little bit of a clearer awareness that they’re actually depicting some form of plural spectrum experience. (“Doppelgäng: When you must do more than a single ‘you’ could.”) I mostly like this, but the downside is that CASCADE and her voices – while undoubtedly a mess– are not quite as colorful as Disco’s. There are a lot of skill facets that can speak up for themselves and give variously helpful or questionable advice, but there is nothing approaching the dysfunctional absurdity of Disco’s Horrible Necktie – or even, say, Limbic System. (I miss Limbic System.)

The actual story is mostly really good. Zero Parades’ map feels bigger and more elaborate than Disco’s map, although you don’t get to see it all at once; the story feels more complex, and with more spots where you can choose to approach a problem in more than one, substantively different way. (I occasionally got confused and tried to solve the same problem in both or all three ways, but that’s a me problem.) There are some modest but interesting updates to Disco’s mechanics, including an anxiety/fatigue/delirium system and a distinct way of presenting urgent, combat-like encounters without having to use separate skills for combat. I found it occasionally hard to figure out how to act like a proper spy, as opposed to just wandering around and going through the dialogue trees, but the dialogue trees are never boring. The tone is as wearily, spitefully cynical as Disco, and if anything, a bit darker; I found myself making moral compromises, as CASCADE, that I would never have considered as Harry Du Bois. The plot gets interestingly weirder as it goes – its influences, apparently, include both Le Carré and Le Guin – and the finale is dramatic as heck. I finished the game a bit exhausted, but glad to have taken the ride.

As a side note – since talking about this is my brand – there’s a minor character here who I totally read as autistic. It’s not the most flattering depiction, but I have met some autistic men who, if they went through the same things as HOLOCENE and were isolated for as long, would absolutely go off the rails in the exact way he does.

You may have already seen, from the tone of this review, why it’s going to be an uphill battle for this game: it’s impossible to talk about it for more than three sentences without comparing it, positively or negatively, to Disco Elysium. And because of some drama with the game company, a lot of Disco’s original fans are likely not going to pick this one up. It’s a shame, because – as I mentioned last time – I want interiority RPGs to become a whole genre of their own. I want to get to a point where one talks about Disco-alikes in the same way that one discusses Souls-likes, or roguelikes, or Stardew-likes, or Metroidvanias. Zero Parades has a strong enough creative vision to stand on its own – unlike Esoteric Ebb, the other Disco-alike I’ve played, which was cute and fun but felt only half like itself and half like a big pile of Disco references. But the second, third, fourth entries in a burgeoning new subgenre will inevitably struggle in the long shadow of the first. I hope Zero Parades is remembered kindly. I will certainly be looking out for the next few of these, either from Zaum or from the various competitor companies that Disco’s writers have scattered to.

Sofia Samatar, “Mirror Mirror” (short story, Future Tense Fiction, June 26, 2026)

This is from a bystander’s perspective – a personal assistant who stumbles onto the story after the fact – but it’s mainly the gorgeously told story of a tech company that tried to build a perfect simulation of empathetic eye contact, which Went Horribly Right.

For obvious reasons there are a lot of stories lately about the tech industry and its problems, and about generative AI in particular. Many of them fall flat for me, not because they are bad stories, but because I am just already inundated with this stuff (and tasked with trying to explain this stuff to students) at my day job. The average post-2022 AI story spends too much time righteously explaining how aware I should be about a set of issues that I am already aware of – exhaustedly, and often in greater detail than the story’s author. (Mind you, I’m sure there are some readers who feel this way about my own AI book. Let’s just say I was not nearly this exhausted back in 2023.)

Sofia Samatar, of course, is too smart to write the average post-2022 AI story. She spends no time preaching to the choir and just the bare minimum of time showing hints of the real world problems that inspired her. What she does spend lavish and effective time on is feelings. First, the reckless and heady excitement of the tech company itself, swept up in the conviction that it’s going to change everything, without ever quite articulating what the expected results of this change are going to be. And second, the uncanny, slowly unfolding horror of what the company does create – the inescapable, singularity-like gravity of feeling a perfect connection to an empty and frictionless machine.

The parallels between this horror and the horror that exists in real life – the AI therapist, for instance, that the narrator briefly notes her housemate using – are largely left for the reader to draw. But drawing them is easy.

(By the way: another really good post-2022 AI story that did a number on me, back in 2025 when I wasn’t reviewing anything, is B. Pladek’s “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” (short story, Lightspeed, January 2025.) Literally I had a little meltdown in the group chat about how good it was, like what is the point of me writing if I can’t be this good. (And then my friends were like “We love your writing and we love Pladek’s writing but you are two very different apple and orange types of writing!” which is the correct response to a meltdown of that type.) So if you are looking for heartrending stories about genAI that have enough nuance to go beyond the obvious points, you should go read that one, too!)

Cara Masten Digirolamo, “Promises, Promises” (short story, Strange Horizons, July 6, 2026)

I love a good fae bargain, or deal with the devil, or whatever you want to call the agreements and transformations that are made in this story. The premise is that a queer social worker has been trying to help a queer teen; now the teen has vanished, and the social worker suspects that a mysterious app that grant wishes is to blame.

What really clinches this one for me is the nuanced depiction of tensions between different generations of queer person. Neither the social worker nor the teen feel at home in their bodies, but they’ve made sense out of this feeling in two different ways; they have paid different prices and accepted different compromises in order to exist in the world. It’s more than a misunderstanding, and not the kind of tension that can be soothed away with the chirpy platitudes of a 101-level introduction to trans rights. But it leaves them at dangerous odds with each other in a way that cries out to be resolved, even though their hearts will ultimately lead both of them to the same thing.

Zoe Bellerive, “Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind” (short story, The Sunday Morning Transport, July 26, 2026)

The fae have their characteristic qualities, few of which make it a good idea to get close to them – entrapping forms of glamour, strict and opaque rules, harsh punishments. The genius of this little story is in showing why an ordinary guy might know the risks and still prefer them to his other options in the economically uncertain, pandemic-ridden present. It might not even turn out badly for him – depending on how you interpret that ending.

Meg Elison, “Small Wonder” (short story, The Rumpus, August 16, 2026)

Well, this is the one that made me hesitate and wish I was keeping my “The Ones That Haunt Me” category, because it is harrowing. It is about child abuse, in a way which is never directly shown but is increasingly, painfully obvious to the reader – and, eventually, to the protagonist, no matter how hard she tries to dissociate and displace what she’s remembering. (It is also, secondarily, about AI, in a nasty little way that you will not see coming until you trip over it.) It messed me up, but it’s really well done.

The More You Know!

Meanwhile, I also loved some things – relatively light things, for the most part – that weren’t fiction at all.

Cathy O’Neill, “Weapons of Math Destruction” (nonfiction book, Crown Books, 2016)

I’d been meaning for a long time to read this classic book on the social impact of algorithms as it becomes more and more relevant to my work. Most of the information wasn’t new to me, but I was looking for ways that certain problems can be explained succinctly for my students, with good examples, and I found those in spades. A lot has changed since 2016 but it surprised me how many of O’Neill’s concerns can be transplanted verbatim to the present day without significant change. A lot of the problems that we think of as AI problems did not spring into existence with ChatGPT – they have been with us for quite a while longer, and are only getting worse.

Ruthanna Emrys, “Seeds of Story” (recurring nonfiction column, Tordotcom)

I really should have put this in the June newsletter, because I read all the archived post in the spring and then continued to read it over the summer, but I forgot! It wasn’t until early July, when I mentioned in a Bluesky conversation that I loved this column, when I was like “oh, yeah, and I should write a review.”

So! In the Seeds of Story column, Ruthanna Emrys reviews nonfiction books that have been influential in science fiction – or that contain the kind of big, trending ideas that should be more influential in science fiction – pairing them with possible story concepts and ideas for further reading. A few of the books, like Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell and Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities, are books I’ve already read and loved. Many are the kind of books where I’d vaguely heard good things about them already but was delighted to hear more. Many more were fully new to me.

This kind of short form, upbeat-but-thoughtful writing about media is an immense type of comfort reading for me and catnip to my brain. But the comfort is a side effect and not the series’ actual point. More importantly, it’s whetted my curiosity, giving me a whole bunch of new books to add to my wishlist and new ideas to explore. I definitely agree with Emrys’s premise: more speculative fiction writers should be inspired, not just by other people’s fiction, but also by ideas like these.

(You can also view this post on Buttondown.)

If I’m trying to post these review/recommendation posts at the solstices and equinoxes, then I’m a few days late – I’ve gotten pleasantly sloppy with my scheduling now that classes are no longer in session – but I did not forget! The period of April, May, June was busy with both difficult and excellent things, and many stories (in many forms) left an impression on me. Here are a few.

Flights of Fancy

Louise Glück, “Faithful and Virtuous Night” (poetry collection, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

I think Louise Glück is one of the best poets ever and this collection can be submitted as further evidence. I briefly considered putting it in the “Ones That Haunt Me” category – not because there is anything actually disturbing in here but simply because of the very slow, reflective reading that the poems demand of the reader, which feels like a kind of haunting. Slowness, here, should not be confused with difficulty. There is a surface clarity and a luminousness to the poems with something much deeper and more unsettled underneath, and sometimes I had to read just one poem and sit with it for a while, trying to feel rather than think my way through a meaning.

Marie Brennan, “The Final Voyage of the Ouranos” (short story, The Sunday Morning Transport, January 25, 2026)

This is just so yummy and delicious! The world is built in a way that implies more than it shows, but I sank right in to the science fantasy and the neologisms and the luxury and the ability to make and unmake anything – it made me want to see more and to play around in a world like this myself. Then of course, things go wrong, and in a delightfully eerie fashion.

Ursula Whitcher, “Secondary Filters” (poem, Strange Horizons, February 23, 2026)

Have I mentioned I am bad at reviewing poems? I’m bad at reviewing them. Yeah. This is very short and very 2026. I love the contrast in it – the simplistic knowledge embedded in a computer versus the fraught, contextual, grounded knowledge of the human in the loop, both of them looking at what is, ostensibly, the same image.

Emily Tesh, “The Incandescent” (novel, Tor, 2025)

Okay, so I was excited for this, partly because I loved the twists and turns of Some Desperate Glory, but also because I’ve been on a kick about the type of dark academia that actually critiques academia, particularly if it’s written from a faculty point of view, as opposed to just some students who uncover a murder or something. The Incandescent did not disappoint. It’s billed as a sort of anti-Harry-Potter, being about a teacher at a British magic school – and there are certainly a few places where you can see Tesh getting a few little digs in at Rowling. But on the whole, The Incandescent is refreshingly its own thing. I’m not even sure how to say all of what I loved about it without spoilers, but I love this book’s protagonist, who is messy and flawed and also terrifyingly competent and good at what she does – deeply human in both the good and less-good senses of that word. And I love Tesh’s take on the nature of demons, which are pointedly disconnected here from any religious connotations while still being very inhuman and very dangerous creatures which anyone in the proximity of magic will need to be wary of. I love the way that they start out formless but hungry to take on a “self” – and how that relates not only to their tendency to possess people/things, but also to the human characters’ own relationships with identity and meaning, and the way that the protagonist herself has been clinging a little too hard to a certain idea of who she is and what her life is for.

As a fun side note, I brought this book along with me to read while I was getting a tattoo, having no idea that a magical tattoo actually plays an important role in the plot. So that was a fun bit of synchronicity. My tattoo IRL doesn’t have a demon in it! Probably.

Disco Elysium (video game, Zaum, 2019)

Okay. This will be a longer review because I have so much to say. People have been raving about how good Disco Elysium is since 2019, but I’m late to the party as always. I finally tried it and love it so much for so many reasons, OMG.

Anyone who has read any of my books will know that I am a huge fan of interiority. If my editor doesn’t stop me then I will just keep going on for pages about what a character is thinking or feeling. So, guess what Disco Elysium is? It’s an interiority RPG.

If you’ve heard one thing about this game, it’s probably the distinctive writing style where different voices in the protagonist’s head are commenting on what’s going on. The first few times I saw examples, it sounded like a weird gimmick and not necessarily my thing – but I was astonished how well it worked for me once I experienced it in its proper context. In Disco Elysium you have a unique window on what Harry Du Bois is going through (it’s a lot, he’s a mess) and what’s occurring to him at every moment – and it’s your job to navigate between all these conflicting ideas and impulses and decide what he’ll actually do. I love this very much. There is also refreshingly little combat; instead, you solve problems using various skills. I feel like “I love games with lots of interiority and no combat*” is a pretentious thing to say – like, it’s what someone would say if they felt that they were The Most Intellectual Gamer and superior to all those other gamers – but also legitimately I love this shit. I want 100 more interiority RPGs now.

(*There is technically one very important combat, late in the game. Plus a few minor, optional, non-lethal ones that you can get into if you are really determined. But it’s all just handled with narrative, dialogue trees, and skill checks like everything else – there’s no separate “combat system.”)

Plot-wise, you’re solving not only a sordid murder but also an entire sociopolitical tinderbox which happens to have a murder at its heart. People seethe with hidden motives, alliances, and grudges that you can only untangle one effortful layer at a time. (They also seethe with racism and misogyny, which is an aspect of the game that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s clearly the type of writing where the writers aren’t endorsing those things but are instead very intentionally dropping you into the middle of them, in all their unvarnished and realistic ugliness, so you can decide how to respond.) The setting is a fictional city which appears at first glance to be from a gritty, run-down alternate twentieth century, but as you explore, it also gets delightfully weirder. Not all of the weirdness is real – the other thing that these characters visibly seethe with is superstition and pseudoscience – but some of the weirdness, transcendently, is.

Also – it’s awkward to talk about this, but talking about neurodiversity is my brand, so I’m going to be awkward and say it: Harry Du Bois’s interiority is an extremely neurodivergent interiority. It’s easy for “lol crazy character with voices in his head” to go very far wrong, which is frankly one of the reasons why I didn’t play this game earlier – and I have no idea what the writers’ perspective was as they came up with all this, whether they understood they were doing serious heavy-duty neurodivergent rep, or whether they mostly saw it as a bit they were doing. And I can’t speak for all neurodivergent people. But personally, I feel that if you took a very honest and accurate picture of what a certain type of OSDD looks like – and then filtered it through the same filter of cynicism that colors everything else in the game, while also hooking it into your RPG skill mechanic – then this is what you would get. It rings true to me in that way, you know? It checks out.

Anyway, I not only spent a couple of weeks autistically hyperfixated on this game, but I ended up hunting through the Wikipedia for a list of “spiritual successors” and adding them with big hopeful eyes to my Steam wishlist, while daydreaming about ways I could maybe one day write an interiority RPG myself. (I played all the way through Esoteric Ebb (Raw Fury, 2026), which is cute and engaging but didn’t slay me with its brilliance in the same way as Disco; I also bought a copy of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Zaum, 2026), but haven’t had the chance to really dive in yet.) Someone should have just printed a big label on Disco Elysium saying “THIS IS ADA HOFFMANN’S JAM.” It would have saved me a lot of time.

Comfort Reads

John Wiswell, “The Great Beyond Commands” (flash fiction; first published in Unidentified Funny Objects 9, 2022; but I read in Issue 10 of Small Wonders, April 2024.)

This is hilarious and adorable, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. A cranky magician is annoyed by a snooping vigilante, and tries to mind-control magic him into leaving him alone – but he is also perplexed to realize that he finds the vigilante attractive. From there, the story goes exactly where you imagine it will go, in the most cutely, grumpily sincere way it can. (If you see a consent issue inherent in the premise, don’t worry – that’s addressed, and deftly undone, before anybody gets hurt.)

The Ones That Haunt Me

qntm, “Valuable Humans in Transit” (short story collection, self-published, 2022)

Ok, so (spec fic hipster voice) I knew about qntm before he was cool. I happened on to his short stories on his website a few years ago, loved them, realized there was a collection, and immediately put the collection on my wish list. Due to the nature of my wish list which always has 10357 things, that meant I didn’t actually read the whole collection until just now. Qntm’s whole schtick is tech horror, the kind that you’d find in the better parts of the SCP Wiki, which he has contributed to. He’s got a very detached, matter-of-fact, cerebral voice which works really well for what he’s doing, because the words go down easy but then you’ve got an entire cosmic horror in your brain – usually the kind that stems from humans’ own technological & corporate overreach – which gets more skin-crawling the longer you think about it. A couple of the works in the collection read differently now, post-genAI, but that’s neither an entirely bad thing nor, really, the point. Of course qntm is better known nowadays for There Is No Antimimetics Division; I hear it’s good. I’m going to check that one out, too, eventually.

Sam J. Miller, “Boys, Beasts & Men” (short story collection, Tachyon Publications, 2022)

Boys, Beasts & Men is an absolute unit. I have always found Miller’s short stories moving and well-crafted, but put together in this way – with a lightly sketched framing story that ties them together – they mutually reinforce into something greater than the sum of its parts. I read it while I was in Toronto for my book launch and I couldn’t put it down. And this is maybe a very personal, idiosyncratic reaction, but what tips it over into the “Haunt Me” category is this pervasive sense I have that Miller knows something, with regards to the role of queer identity in an oppressive world, that I don’t and perhaps never will. Miller is consistently queer-as-in-fuck-you, very concerned with the humanity and the justified rage of the most vulnerable humans, in a way that puts my own milquetoast middle-class queer advocacy to shame. Miller is boots on the ground; he is the real deal. Go read this.

Sofia Samatar, “The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain” (novella, Tordotcom, 2024)

Speaking of putting me to shame? ASDFASGJLK;. This is exquisitely done. It was another stop on the “dark academia that actually critiques academia” tour, and that element is certainly there, but it reads even more as a story about something older, darker, realer and worse than the university, which the university is perpetually unwilling and unable to address. The writing itself, on a sentence level, is as luminous as the classic LeGuin that it’s been justifiably compared to.

Seth Wade, “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (poem, Strange Horizons, January 26, 2026)

What gets me about this one is the sense of shame. We like to imagine there are forces looking out for us in the world, but what if you were too much of a fuckup even for them? It’s brainweasel logic, but it’s drawn very well and true to life. The irony of the final lines is breathtaking.

Sarah Pauling, “Remember Me in the Meat” (Clarkesworld, February 2026)

As a cognitive scientist and AI literacy educator, I think more people should write about cognitive offloading. Which, as this story demonstrates, is not necessarily the same as writing about generative AI. In Pauling’s future, everyone has uploaded their episodic memories to the cloud, with all the security issues this implies – to such an extent that the intentional use of one’s own brain for memory is considered intimate and obscene. But on the level of physical response, memories – especially trauma memories – still accrue no matter what anyone does. Pauling’s protagonist is a traumatized assassin who’s determined to use all these facts of memory to her advantage, no matter who it hurts – herself included – and Pauling uses this premise to ask fascinating questions about the location of memory and thought. Extremely well done.

Lara Elena Donnelly, “Deathcap” (short story, Reactor, February 25, 2026)

Okay, so this one is pretty NSFW. It’s two exhausted space marines who’ve barricaded themselves in an infirmary after events which read as a deliberate homage to Alien, but with the sexual assault subtext of the original movie made even more blatantly text. If that doesn’t scare you off, then I will tell you what I liked about it: it’s the sense of doomed characters at the end of their rope, and the study of what queer desire looks like in that scenario. What people will do, not even for the sake of survival, but just for the sake of being able to go out their way.

Danika Ellis, “Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point” (blog post, Book Riot, May 29, 2026)

This post really made the rounds at the end of May, and let’s just say we discussed it in the group chat. It’s an example of a post that goes viral more or less because it accurately sums up what most of us already knew. For obvious reasons, the situation is worst right now in kidlit, and I don’t write kidlit. (Before you ask, IGNORE is not kidlit. It’s New Adult. The difference between YA and New Adult is a whole other post that I’m not interested in making.) And if I have one mild criticism of the post it’s the relative lack of distinction between queer kidlit, which is being very loudly and directly attacked to near-extinction right now, and queer books for adults which are of course next on the list, but are currently suffering in a somewhat different and more indirect way. But that criticism is small. However you slice up the genres, it’s bad right now for queer writers everywhere. We’re all feeling it, and because of the incredible US-centricness of publishing (not to mention rising transphobia in other countries), even queer authors from progressive countries are feeling it.

It is important not to prematurely despair, because a lot of folks on the far right are very interested in making us prematurely despair and give up. Clearly queer books for adults are still being published. I published one in May, and it seems to have gotten reasonable traction for the career stage that I’m at. But it’s hard not to look at the way the wind is blowing and feel afraid. I don’t know what to do about or what advice to give, except to make a note: yes, ok, this is where we are right now, and the fear is real.

The More You Know!

Chavisory, “The problem of ‘productivity'” (blog post, April 4, 2026)

Chavisory is unparallelled for her ability to look at neurodiversity discourse and point out – from a staunchly affirming, #ownvoices perspective – where it’s not quite right. Where one of the community’s simple truisms has gotten a little too simple to fully describe what’s going on. This one is about capitalism and the drive to Accomplish All The Things, and particularly about why the latter cannot, in fact, be reduced to the former. I found it painfully relatable – but I don’t think I could have said it in this way myself.

Autistic Book Shout-Out

Martha Wells, “Witch King” (novel, Tor, 2023)

I didn’t love this as much as I love the Murderbot books – maybe it’s just not possible for anything else to be as Murderbot as Murderbot – but I did love one of the secondary characters, Dahin, who reads as autistic to me. In a rich and well-realized fantasy world, Dahin is a sort of researcher; he goes off on his own investigating things and keeps to himself most of the time, but is open, curious, and forthcoming when the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes his lack of preconceptions about the world is a good thing – making him less susceptible, for example, to the fear and prejudice most people feel around our main character. Other times it makes him tactless and prickly. He reminds me a little bit of Daymar from Steven Brust’s Draegera books, with the same sort of guilelessness and openness – but imagine a version of Daymar who actually gets drawn with nuance, and whose friends actually care about him and enjoy his company instead of complaining about him all the time. Murderbot itself is a famously resonant character for neurodivergent readers, but it’s nice to see what Wells is able to do with an autistic-coded character who’s human for a change.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

I’m gingerly getting back into my normal routines now after the IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS book launch. I’m really, really pleased by how this book has been received so far, and I want to say thank you to everyone – the people who showed up to the launch or the pre-launch or the signing, or who blurbed or reviewed, or who pre-ordered a copy, or even just reposted something on social media. All of these little things add up and build momentum, and I am grateful.

And here’s just a few more in my little whirlwind of launch week announcements.

• I’ve got a Big Idea post up about IGNORE on Scalzi.com.


• And there’s an interview with me up at paulsemel.com!


• If you like podcasts, I talk about IGNORE on episode 402A of the Turn The Page podcast.


• Another really lovely couple of reviews came out, from Trish Matson on the Skiffy and Fanty Show and from Vincent Halles at Phrasemaker.


• I’m seeing IGNORE crop up on some more lists, including BookBub’s list of May’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Avalon Free Public Library’s list of Best New Books for the week of May 12, and Autostraddle’s list of Most Anticipated Queer Books For May 2026.


• Jordan Kurella, who enthusiastically blurbed this book already, shouted out to it again in this Nerds of a Feather interview.

Whew!

More soon – I’ve still got “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” out this Thursday, which will be worth a whole newsletter post of its own. And you can expect at least one more little extra thing about IGNORE, maybe next week, while the dust settles.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

17 days left until IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS hits the stores! And I’ve got some treats for you today, + some cool announcements. Scroll down to the part with the pictures if the announcements are all that you want.

By now, you’ve met IGNORE’s two lead characters, but I couldn’t resist introducing you to a few more of the characters as well.

Elaine Liyanage

Elaine is a precocious goth who loves sharks, villains, and everything evil – and who’s having a bad time at home. As a child, she fits right in with Rowan and Kelli’s games of pretend, diving gleefully into antagonist roles that make the stories more interesting and exciting. As a teenager, it’s more complicated. Elaine loves bad boys and looking sexy. When Rowan won’t join her in those kinds of games, she reacts first with bafflement, then with hostility – and hurts Rowan in the process much more deeply than she ever meant to – only to realize later, to her own chagrin, that maybe being a straight girl isn’t working for her after all. Rowan and Kelli struggle to work out who Elaine should be to them: a bully, a frenemy, a fellow queer, or maybe even something more. Either way, and more than they realize, she’s at the center of something that will change their lives forever.

Ting Jiang

A professonal thief who’s about Rowan’s age, and one of the few other trans people in the Brimstone Syndicate, Ting is one of Rowan’s best friends. They’re upbeat, friendly, and excited about their job. Ting is one of the first people to meet Kelli and show her around when she agrees to meet the syndicate to help Rowan. But even Ting doesn’t know just how badly the syndicate is planning to upend Kelli’s life. When everything with Kelli goes wrong, it leads Ting to question their loyalties – and maybe to become the unexpected ally that she and Rowan need most.

Zhaleh Attar

Zhaleh is coolheaded, glamorous, fond of the occult – and much more important in the Brimstone Syndicate than she seems. She’s also Rowan’s ex-girlfriend. Shortly before the mission with Kelli began, she betrayed his trust in a way he’s still reeling from. To Kelli, she’s beautiful and baffling; she seems to understand things about Kelli’s mind that Kelli is rarely able to explain to anyone. But Zhaleh has an agenda that even Rowan doesn’t fully understand. She might be about to save him and Kelli – or to make things much, much worse.

And now, some news!

IGNORE got a great review from Library Journal earlier in April. It’s paywalled, but here’s a good pull quote:

Hoffmann (The Infinite) writes a thoughtful and hopeful story that features neurodiverse and queer characters dealing with censorship and creative freedom in outer space.

Booklist also gave it a starred review. The full thing won’t be up until May, but I’m allowed to give you a pull quote from this one too:

It’s sweeping, personal, and touches on many timely topics. Lovers of character-driven sf should make this a must-read.

That’s three positive reviews from the big professional trade reviewers, two of which are starred. (If you missed the other starred review, it came out from Publishers Weekly earlier.)

Another review I’ve seen in the wild is this one, from Shades of Orange. (I don’t go looking for my own reviews because that way lies madness, but sometimes my publicist forwards one to me.) Rachel loved the Outside books, so I’m delighted to hear her say she loves IGNORE, too.

I had a great pre-launch event at the university last week before everyone ran off for the summer. People laughed at the jokes and bought the book! Here’s me, answering some fun and hard-hitting Q&A about generative AI from my conversation partner:

If you missed the event but are in Kingston, you should swing by the Campus Bookstore; I heard there are some leftover early copies of IGNORE for sale in there. You can’t get them anywhere else in the world until the launch day, so this is super-exclusive.

I also had a great time moderating the panel REVOLUTION IS NOT FOR THE SANE at Virtual Can*Con. I would have stayed longer if my spoons permitted! But the one panel was awesome and everyone was so smart. I love moderating, tbh – 90% of it is just coming up with some good questions and handing them to some people who are smarter than you on this topc, and then you get to just sit back and watch them go.

Now I’m gearing up for my trip to Toronto in a few weeks for the real launch:

If you are in Toronto, come to Bakka Phoenix and say hi! I’m planning to stay a few days, since I’m there, and take in some of the tourist sights.

In more minor but delightful news, here’s a bit of Bluesky microfiction by V Astor Solomon that was inspired by me.

And just one more thing: Jaymee Goh, who edited IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS and did a fabulous job, is up for the Hugo this year for Best Editor – Long Form. It is very well-deserved and I’m so excited for her!!

Take care. More soon. This book is really happening.

– Ada

Today I am taking a break from book promo to give you a nice new batch of something I haven’t done in a while – reviews!

In 2025, I wrote no reviews, even the most casual recommendations post; I started the year vaguely intending to, but my brain rebelled against every attempt. I think I needed the time away – to shake off the last bits of old pressures I used to feel around reviewing that are not appropriate to the moment anymore. But by the end of the year, I was pretty solid on how I wanted to do it when I started again.

So here’s how we’re going to do this. I want to write a recommendation post four times a year – with today, the spring equinox, being #1. I’m going to mix up all types of media and all years of publication. All of them will be things I read, watched, or played in the past three months – since the winter solstice, in this case – but some are new and some are old and I literally do not care what is and isn’t eligible for the awards cycle.* I want to divide up the works, not by format or length, but by how they made me feel – because there are all sorts of different ways to like a work of art, and teasing out those different ways is what interests me as a reviewer right now.

(*I might or might not do a “caring about the awards cycle” post later in the year, at the traditional time. We’ll see.)

Right now I think there are four or five emotional categories, but they might not all show up in every single rec post, and I also reserve the right to come up with more categories on a whim.

Flights of Fancy

Here’s Category #1, and probably the one that will have the most things in it, most of the time! Flights of Fancy are the works that did a very good solid satisfying job of absorbing my imagination. The ones that skillfully drew me away to some other vivid time and place, tugged on my heartstrings, seduced my senses or made me cheer. This is the first and broadest category that I think of when I think of good storytelling, though as we will see, it’s not the only one.

Micaiah Johnson – “‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal” (short story, January 4, 2026, The Sunday Morning Transport)

Lately, stories about AGI and superintelligence have become a hard sell for me. I used to love them! But now my first thought is always “ugh, okay, is this going to prop up Silicon Valley’s most self-serving narratives or what?” Thankfully, Johnson’s story survived my initial skepticism and became a pleasant surprise. I like the small but crucial reversal of certain tropes: instead of humans being afraid of what the superintelligence might do to them, the superintelligence is frightened of humans – partly because of some of our own, present-day misuses of genAI. The AI narrator’s naively logical voice, disoriented and unused to viewing itself as a single self, reminded me of all the things I used to love about this type of story. (Autistic people still overidentify with robots, confirmed.) I also love that a poem, of all things, is what fatally shakes the superintelligence’s understanding of the world. I still wish it didn’t have “GPT” in the title since that is a very specific line of language models belonging to a specific company and those language models are not going to achieve sentience no matter what the company’s marketing department tells you, but, you know, whatever. It’s still a rare AI story that manages to rise above all that.

Joemario Umana – “O ASHY WINGS STILL FLUTTERING” (poem, December 22, 2025, Strange Horizons)

I’m bad at reviewing poems, actually! When I like them, I just want to fling them at people incoherently and say “this!” But this is a very poignant description of something I recognize a version of in my own experience, and it’s done lyrically and with beauty.

P.C. Verrone – “The Husband” (short story, January 14, 2025, PodCastle)

A bisexual man is (consensually) taken as the latest bride of a vampire who already has three female wives. He has difficulty adjusting to his new life at first, and the other wives don’t know what to make of him, but eventually he rises to the challenge in creative ways. This was well-written enough (and hits the tropes solidly enough) to hold my interest throughout, but what really clinched it for me is the ending – both so unorthodox and so oddly sensible, as a solution to all of the characters’ problems, that now I wonder why more vampire stories haven’t ended this way before.

John Wiswell – “Phantom View” (novelette, October 2025, Reactor)

Wiswell has a way with sweet-but-creepy, sympathetic monsters; he always knocks them out of the park. I wasn’t sure about this one at first – stories about people’s parents are sort of complicated for me – but it really gets going once Wiswell’s protagonist and the mysterious blur in his house start to communicate. I love the complexity of what’s going on: the blur’s motives and feelings are only partly ever discernible; the narrator projects all sorts of things onto it and you can see where those projections are coming from, without quite always knowing how true they are or aren’t; it helps him and fails him and frustrates him and still ultimately guides him to something that he desperately needs.

Comfort Reads

There’s been so much discourse about “cozy fiction,” what it is and what it isn’t, what its merits are relative to other modes of storytelling. I do not intend to get into that discourse in this post, except to say that I don’t begrudge anybody any reading that makes them happy in any way – but that personally, when I read cozy fiction, it usually does not make me feel happy or cozy as advertised. I’m sorry, cozy fiction authors. It’s me, not you. (There are some exceptions, one of which is listed below!)

Nevertheless, I very much enjoy comfort reads/watches and go for them all the time. It’s just that my comfort reads are more likely to be other, weirder things, like thinky nonfiction about a topic I’m really curious about, or re-reads of my own books that I already wrote. Or else – less weird – it’s a cozy video game where nothing is too difficult and I can just putter around. Either way, when I encounter a piece of media for the first time and find that it soothes or comforts me really well, I want to put it here in this section.

The boundary between this category and “Flights of Fancy” is porous and vague. A work that comforts me often still contains some level of thrills, spills and drama – it’s just that the drama is kept within a certain type of safe bound. Your mileage may vary. I just like these.

Heather Fawcett – “Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies” (novel, January 2023, Del Rey)

Did I say cozy books don’t work for me? Here’s an exception. This one is weapons-grade adorable in my exact preferred way. The titular Emily is a Victorian-era professor who is among the world’s most brilliant minds at dealing with faeries, but who prefers to be left alone with her research all day, only grudgingly tolerating the presence of other humans, or anything else unrelated to her professonal special interest. (I 100% read Emily as autistic, although the term isn’t used.) Doing difficult field research in a remote and wintry village, she’s unexpectedly joined by her longtime rival, Wendell Bambleby – a charming and chaotic man whom Emily has long suspected may secretly be a faerie himself. Mysteries are investigated! Sparks fly! The faeries in this book are just eerie enough to be interesting – they often reminded me of a lighter version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – but never quite frightening enough to derail the burgeoning faerie/human romance that every reader can see coming long before Emily does. Her grouchy narrative voice is a delight, and now I have to get the second and third books just so that I can watch these two adorable losers finish figuring their relationship out. In the darkest parts of a pretty harsh IRL winter, this book was a balm.

The 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games

It’s always a comfort watch for me, but let’s be real, I think the competitors at this Olympics were feeling the geopolitical malaise just like the rest of us. It wasn’t Canada’s best Olympics ever. There were a startling number of upsets, crashes, and unexpected losses on all sides. The hockey games hurt to watch in ways that I suspect are nothing to do with hockey itself and everything to do with, sigh, geopolitics. There were also all sorts of bright, beautiful, thrilling, victorious moments, and brave, bittersweet moments where people picked themselves up and kept going, despite it all.

There’s just something that always resonates with me so deeply about this. To me, the Olympic spirit is about loving something so much that you devote your whole life to getting maximally good at it – not out of any capitalistic imperative, but out of sheer obsession. And then you get up in front of the whole world to show them what you can do, to invite them to share this thing you love with you. I am extremely not good at any sport ever, but I think that serious artists have a kinship with serious athletes. I think that we share the same intense, consuming, publicly visible love of the thing we are doing. And, you know, sometimes the moment when the whole world is watching is a moment where the thing doesn’t go your way. But that is not the point. The point is the love.

The Ones That Haunt Me

Meanwhile, this category is for stuff a little stronger than a Flight of Fancy. Sometimes a story messes you up and you thank it, you know? The works in this category punched me in the gut or burrowed into an uncomfortable part of my brain and it would be oversimplifying to say that I liked them, but it was really well done and I was glad it happened.

As with “Comfort Reads,” there is absolutely no scientific way to distinguish between a sad, creepy, or provocative story that goes into Flights of Fancy and one that goes here. It is entirely vibes and how I happened to feel in the moment. Nonetheless, at the moment, the distinction is important to me.

Phoenix Alexander – “Doppel Doppel Gang Gang” (flash fiction, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

A playful but disturbing bit of flash horror about a high school dance crew that encounters… something. The choice to tell this one entirely in dialogue and sound effects works really well, especially in the story’s second half as events ramp up; the work that my brain had to do, filling in whatever visual it could to account for what I was “hearing,” made it creepier than if the whole thing had been told in normal prose. It also makes the story clip along very, very quickly in a way that makes it difficult to look away. The ending gave me that classic feeling of “oh my God, what the fuck did I just read.”

Cailín Frankland – “Death is a Drag Queen” (partly-prose poem, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

I was a little bit mad at myself for how many Feelings I Felt with this one. I was like “oh come on, this is so conceptually simple, this is a thing I have already heard queer poets say 1000 times.” Apparently I still really needed to hear it once more, and in the romantic, vivid, but spare way that Frankland says it. This is a piece that could be read aloud for Trans Day of Remembrance, which is probably all the content warning that you need.

Premee Mohamed – “The Butcher of the Forest” (novella, February 2024, Tordotcom)

If Heather Fawcett’s faeries are just eerie enough to stay interesting, Mohamed’s are a genuine nightmare – and the everyday necessities that drive her protagonist into the forest to meet them aren’t much better. I loved the menace and dread of this short book but even more the deeply human, despairing, determined heart that beats underneath.

The More You Know!

Sometimes it’s less about how you feel and more about what you learn. In an environment of information overload, this category is for works – mostly, but not necessarily, nonfiction – that explained something useful to me that I hadn’t known before, and was glad to.

Jane Alison – “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative” (nonfiction book, April 2019, Catapult Books)

When a book is trending among writers and I don’t read it, I feel self-conscious and out of the loop. When a book is trending and I do read it, I feel self-conscious in a different way – like, sure, I jumped on the bandwagon. Is it newsworthy to say that I’m on the bandwagon? I don’t know. Regardless, “Meander, Spiral, Explode” is the craft book that everyone has been talking about lately. It’s focused on litfic (although there is an interesting shout-out to Cloud Atlas) but it does what it says on the tin: identifies patterns, in writing and in nature, that can serve as alternatives to the traditional rising-action-climax-falling-action triangle, and analyzes examples from existing literary works to show how those patterns can be used.

Personally, I spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to do the traditional plot triangle better. It was necessary to do that thinking because of the places where I was getting stuck in my craft. But Alison isn’t trying to destroy the plot triangle so much as put it in its proper place, not as the be-all and end-all of structure but as one potential structure among many. The whole thing is playful and thoughtful and interesting and it made me really want to try out some of these alternate structures for myself. It filled my head with thoughts in a good way.

Isis Asare et al – “Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon”

I read this via the transcript that was posted in Strange Horizons on January 12, 2026, although the panel itself was held at Seattle Worldcon in August 2025! Either way, this panel was very welcoming and gave a lot of interesting food for thought. If you’ve been reading intersectional feminist speculative fiction discourse for a while then the ideas won’t be wholly new to you, but I still found it helpful to have them all concentrated in one place. I came out of it with a lot of thoughts about things that my fiction only partly and sometimes does, and perhaps could be doing a lot more of.

(Although: sometimes, for purely selfish reasons, I gotta use my fiction as a scream pillow. So the dystopias are not going away. You’ve been warned 😀 )

Angus Hervey – “The Telemetry” (newsletter post, December 2025, Fix The News)

Someone linked me to this and I wish I remembered who. It was probably Ada Palmer, who links to this sort of thing on Bluesky regularly. (Yes, it’s a Substack. Sigh. Sorry.) I read it on New Year’s Eve and found it a welcome antidote to the general ambient doom that has been floating around everywhere these days. Some things are indeed very bad right now, and Hervey’s writing doesn’t pretend those things aren’t real, but it points past them to a surprising number of other things in the world that are continuing, despite everything, to get unglamorously, usefully, incrementally better. They are by no means all small or all localized things. Some of them really surprised me. I have subscribed to their newsletter 🙂

(Oh, but if you are prone to eye squick, maybe skip the first section, because the first section is about how we developed a cure for a really gross eye virus. 😛 )

Bonus Section: Autistic Book Shout-Out

I’m not sorry that I stopped the Autistic Book Party series when I did; I don’t miss feeling the self-imposed responsibility to somehow read and have deep thoughts on every single autistic book that comes out (which, of course, I never managed to do.) But I still love autistic books! And every once in a while I will shout out to a few of them here.

Isaac Fellman – “The Two Doctors Górski” (novella, November 2022, Tordotcom)

I like everything I’ve read from Isaac Fellman, and this short, brooding, lyrical bit of dark academia was as good as I expected, but nobody told me the main character is autistic? Maybe people did say it, and I’ve been so out of the loop that I missed it, or forgot? Well, whatever! Annae’s identity as an abuse survivor is much more important to this story than her autism; the fact that she’s autistic is plainly stated but also goes by a bit fast and isn’t hammered on in the way that some authors hammer repeatedly on autistic traits to make sure that you’ve noticed them. If you know what you’re looking for, though, the abuse survival narrative and the autism go perfectly hand-in-hand. The trajectory of Annae’s life – brainy and irritating as a child, then painstakingly teaching herself to be charming, then being targeted and taken advantage of because of that charm, combined with the autistic naivete she hasn’t shaken off, and trying clumsily to rebuild her life in the aftermath – is painfully realistic and recognizable.

Also! Not going to write a full paragraph of review because I technically read it before the 2025 winter solstice, but how about Antonia Hodgson’s “The Raven Scholar”? Another buzzy, well-written recent book that I didn’t realize had an autistic protagonist (an adorable one, by the way) until I was already partway through.

Hi all,

The good vibes are continuing to roll in for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. My publicist told me that we’d already gotten our last blurb, but then one more rolled in anyway and it’s amazing. Check out this rave review from none other than John Joseph Adams:

“Ignore All Previous Instructions is a revelation. It hooked me from page one and never loosened its hold on me, building and building toward an emotional catharsis that will simultaneously destroy you and give you life. I can’t remember the last time I was so sad to see a book end, while also feeling it would have been criminal if it hadn’t ended exactly where and how it did. I almost never give anything a 10 out of 10, but I could give Ignore All Previous Instructions no other rating—but the last two lines tempted me break my scale so I could give it an 11.”

—John Joseph Adams, series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy

The most amazing thing is that we didn’t even send JJA a review copy. He found an advance review copy himself and then loved it so much that he independently decided to send in a blurb.

Not only that, but he’s also going to publish an excerpt from IGNORE in the May issue of Lightspeed, along with my short story, “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” – totally unrelated to the novel – which Lightspeed bought in early 2025.

May is going to be a big month!!

While we’re on this topic, check out this starred review from Publishers Weekly:

“Kelli Reynolds, the autistic heroine of this thrilling, prescient, and emotionally rich sci-fi adventure from Hoffmann (The Outside), is one of the few humans on Jupiter “talented enough to get a steady wage for the kind of work a machine couldn’t do.” She works as a script supervisor for a popular pirate-themed television show produced by Inspiration, the AI megacorporation that bought up the rights to all existing stories and is now the only approved source of information and entertainment. Kelli’s surprised to hear from Rowan, an ex from her school days who has since undergone illegal gender transition, who reaches out for help clearing his debts. Only after agreeing does Kelli learn that Rowan is a smuggler of illegal media working for a crime syndicate, and soon she finds herself embroiled in a dangerous heist. This high-stakes plot is complemented by flashbacks to the leads’ school days, when Rowan, then known as Am, used prompt engineering to thwart the robot assigned to help Kelli mask her autism (by, for example, enforcing eye contact) and the pair spent their days making up stories while slowly realizing that their desires fell outside of allowed options. Both timelines gracefully build toward crisis as Kelli navigates situations she struggles to fully comprehend. It’s an exceptional balancing of action, interior turmoil, and chilling dystopia. Readers worried about the future of storytelling in the age of AI will gobble this up.”

A few other tidbits of novel news:

• IGNORE was included in Netgalley’s Cover Love feature for February and displayed right on Negtalley’s front page. This is nothing to do with me and everything to do with the wonderful work of the cover artist, Elizabeth Story.


• I’ve posted a sneaky deleted scene in a secret place on my website as a reward for newsletter subscribers only. If you’re a subscriber, then you’ve already got the link (check your email archives for February 4 – or the date that you subscribed, whichever’s later.) If you’re not a subscriber and are reading this on a web page, you too can access the secret deleted scene by subscribing any time before July 1!

Here’s the newsletter page where you can subscribe.

One other thing: my publicist and I, behind the scenes, have been starting to put together an itty-bitty book tour. We’re stopping at Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto for a launch day event, and then back to my hometown of Kingston, Ontario for a signing that weekend at Indigo Kingston. (That’s right, Senpai Big-Box Bookstore noticed me! This portends great things. I am agog.)

At least one or two other stops are being worked on, but not finalized yet; I’ll continue to update as more details emerge. Meanwhile – if you live anywhere within an easy train ride of Kingston, and you know of a venue that’d be interested, and you want me to come to your town in May – now is the time to reach out! There’s still a lot of room to add you.

(Although: Canadian locations only, please! American fans, I love you too, but for reasons you are all well aware of, it isn’t safe to cross the border right now.)

I’m SO excited by how this is shaping up. More soon!

Take care.

-Ada

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

I think it has become a tradition, since 2016, for everyone to start their year in review posts with a variation on “wow, this year sucked.” And like. It is a tradition because it is literally correct? Current events this year were YIKES. But I also assume that you, as a reader, already know all the ways they were YIKES, so I’m going to not dwell on them here.

Without 100% having intended it at the beginning of the year, 2025 was a bit of a fallow year for me in terms of publishing and newsletters. I’m not doing a “here’s what I published,” because I didn’t publish anything. I’m not doing a “here are my favorite stories/media” because I honestly needed a break from doing that; I’m going to try again in the new year.

In other ways, though, it was quite a busy year. Here’s how my 2025 went, in roughly but not entirely chronological order:

• Acquisition & big round of edits for IGNORE


• Trade war??? Elbows up??? Election???


• Strike at my day job (plus two other strikes that were threatened but didn’t happen, it was a mess)


• Big promotion at my day job WHILE on strike (don’t ask)


• PRIDE!


• Giant new course in critical AI literacy on two months notice (I actually wish we’d done this years ago…)


• Wait how do undergraduate committees work


• Murder mystery party!! (I write these myself, it’s a whole production, this year was the first time in a few years)


• Whole bunch of work on two different big, ambitious WIP books – one that’s still being drafted, and one that went through some major revisions.


• Whole bunch of therapy

It’s been a huge year for me personally. It’s been rough in some ways, but I feel I’ve been pushed to grow up and glow up in ways that were not as open to me before. It’s made me think a lot about individual and collective power. And I’m excited to share some of the fruits of those labors with you in the new year – certainly with IGNORE, and hopefully with more reviews, shorts, essays and other useful things.

Wishing you all a restful holiday season – because what we all need most right now is rest – and success at what matters most to you in the new year.

Best,

Ada

[You can also read this post on Buttondown.]

Hi all,

I am SO excited to finally announce my next novel, IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, which is coming out with Tachyon Books in spring 2026.

Here’s the Publishers Marketplace announcement that just went live today:

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS is a book incredibly close to my heart, and also very timely in more than one way – and ever since I started work on the first draft, in mid-2023, I’ve been absolutely dying to tell you all about it.

You’ll get more details about what this book is and what it means to me closer to the release date. For now, here’s the blurb my agent wrote when we went it out on submission:

Once upon a time, people wrote stories, and they owned the stories they wrote. But all that changed when Inspiration created its AI language model. The language model was based on all of the language in the world, so it contained every idea anyone had ever written down. Inspiration couldn’t take those ideas back out, so they saved up money and bought them. Now they own all the stories.

Kelli Reynolds is a script supervisor for Inspiration — a professional who edits the output of the language model into intelligible stories. Kelli’s proudest contribution is the pirate Orlando — a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Then Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan shows up. Rowan’s the one Kelli based Orlando on, when they were teenagers. Back then, their relationship was a secret. Kelli thought at the time that Rowan, a trans man, was a girl. And Inspiration doesn’t allow any stories about girls that love girls, or girlfriends that turn out to actually be boyfriends.

Now Rowan’s tangled up in the black market, smuggling forbidden stories like the ones Kelli wished she’d had as a teen. He needs Kelli’s help with something — something illegal.

Kelli’s not sure she wants to be in this story, but she can’t let Rowan walk out of her life again. As she becomes entangled in Rowan’s scheme, it brings up the long-hidden truth of the disastrous choice that ended their relationship last time around. Kelli has to decide: will she risk the neat story of her life now for the world she wished for then, a world where every necessary story can be told? She asks herself: What would Orlando do?

Wellp.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been watching the news with great dismay. I’m Canadian, but I’m extremely upset on behalf of all my queer American friends and colleagues, among many other reasons. (We have our own little crop of Trump imitators up here, and you can be sure they are watching this play out and taking avid notes.)

It’s hard not to feel helpless right now, but I try to remember that the best defense against helplessness is to find one useful thing to do – even a very small one.

When my colleague Leigh Harlen told me they were starting a mini auction on behalf of Trans Lifeline, I knew this was my cue for a small useful thing. So I’m donating a signed copy of the whole Outside trilogy. Starting bid is a $35 donation to help trans people in crisis, and I’ll ship almost anywhere in the world. The auction starts this morning and will go until Monday the 18th.

If you already have a copy of the Outside trilogy, you can still browse the rest of the auction, which has books by other authors – including Nino Cipri and John Wiswell – adorable crafts, and even a friendly lady who will remotely coach you through tidying your house.

Meanwhile, recs!

I’m seeing a lot of talk on Bluesky about how art will do this, art will do that. (I’m on Bluesky, by the way! It’s really been livening up and filling with people lately.) Art is where we will put our rage, or our joy, or our hope that a different world is still possible. Or whatever else our readers are going to need. I don’t know.

(I actually happen to be near the end of my current WIP anyway, in the “oh noes all is lost!!” section before it all resolves. So I feel like what I’m putting into my art, for the next few chapters at least, is despair.)

I think art is inherently political, in that it reflects the beliefs of its author; I think it is also political, in that engaging with art fosters empathy. (Inherently. Even if that’s not what the artist was thinking about.) It can sometimes be political in various other ways. I think good art can be consciously didactic and I enjoy some authors who write that way. But what I find – just for myself, just for my own creative process – is that if I try too hard to fit my art into a political program, even a program I deeply agree with, I freeze up and overthink and stop being able to make art.

I can’t promise that my art will channel any of the needs of the moment but mine. I can’t promise it will save any of you. Maybe a lot of art will save a lot of people, in the next few years, even in ways that its creators did not expect. That tends to happen, even in better times. But we’re going to need a lot of other tools as well.

Anyway, the one piece about the importance of art in these times that did resonate with me is DongWon Song’s.

The remaining recommendations in this newsletter are for things I read before the election.

Alice Towey, “I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws” (Fantasy, Issue 87, January 2023)

I have such affection for parts of the self that are in shadow or otherwise exiled from normal consciousness, and I love the mix of revulsion and tenderness with which Towey’s narrator describes one of hers.

Grace Cahill, “flood fish/pumpkin moon” (The Deadlands, Issue 22, February 2023)

What I love about this one is the uncertainty, the way survivors try to make sense out of a disaster, not directly in the “why did this happen?” sense but in something more like a personifying of what the flood leaves behind. The sense that, of course, a rational survivor wouldn’t be seeing this or feeling this way – but they all do anyway.

Pooja Peravali, “The Changeling and the Child” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 9, 2023)

Normally when I read changeling stories, they’re about neurodivergence, or about being rejected by one’s parents in some way. Like, I hadn’t really thought about it, but that’s the norm for changeling stories these days. It’s not really a subversion anymore. Peravali takes a different tack, and dares to write a changeling story where the human mother of the story is the hero. What if all the business about fairies stealing babies and replacing them with fairy babies was literally true? In that case, what would it look like to address the situation, not with the abuse that we hear of in folklore but with kindness, love, and courage? Peravali has an answer to that question, and her answer is good.

Leah Bobet, “Notable Escapes” (June 19, 2023)

Harry says: when faced with straitjackets, / get bigger. I hate words like “inspiring”; but a poem like this feels – intentionally, I think – like a manual for resistance.

Stephen Granade, “The Sigilist’s Notes on the Fell Lord’s Staff” (PodCastle 807, October 3, 2023)

Look, “devoted minion who has a crush on the Dark Lord” is one of my bulletproof tropes, okay? I never get tired of it – not even after deconstructing it to death in The Fallen. Anyway this story delivers the goods, with a cute list-like format and in a refreshingly sweet way.

Francine Rubin, “Gravity” (Small Wonders, Issue 6, 2023)

Space is great! Also, it is physically and psychologically very difficult to be in space. I love the detail and care with which this poem compactly explores the claustrophobia and unrootedness of a space traveler, while also holding space for the longing that spurs them to make those travels regardless.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Hi all,

Before we get into any story recs, I want to tell you I’ll be at the virtual Nebula conference this weekend! I’m moderating one panel: Writing and Navigating Publishing as Persons With Disabilities, at 1:30pm PST, with the excellent panelists Effie Seiberg, Sumiko Saulson, and Vickie Navarra. If you’re at the Nebulas, stop by – I think it’ll be a great discussion!

But now, I’ve promised you I’ll tell you about some stories I’ve loved or found thought-provoking since last October. (Though many of them were published earlier than that; I’m not a super timely reader.) Here goes!

*

It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there.

Nic Anstett, “Monsters of the Drunken Shore” (Lightspeed, July 2023)

This is really short and packs an emotional punch, without anything necessarily “happening,” per se. I love the juxtaposition of the big, unknowable sea creature with the big, confused feelings of the college-age protagonists who are still just trying to grow up.

*

“You’ve left the doors open?”

“All of them. The child just goes and hides even further in the dark.”

Cynthia Gómez, “The Ones Who Come Back to Heal” (Strange Horizons, July 17, 2023)

Omelas stories are a bit of a hard sell for me. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s just that it’s getting to be a cliché. This one rang really true for me, though, with its focus on the slow, painful, uncertain reality of helping someone heal from heavy trauma, and on the consent and free will of the person being healed. [1]

*

Cynthia Gómez, “Lips Like Sugar” (Luna Station Quarterly, Issue 55)

Looks like Luna Station Quarterly’s website is under reconstruction, so I can’t get a pull quote or a proper link right now. And I actually didn’t realize, until just now when I was putting this post together, that I was reccing two stories in a row by the same author. But! I love this queer, working-class take on the vampire story. Vivi is an immortal creature of the night, but that doesn’t save her from having to deal with rent, menial work, relationship troubles, or the supervisor who’s sexually harassing her. Still, she’s powerful in new ways – and it takes her time to decide what she wants to use that power for.

*

What is worse, I heard that all those rejected by your magazine also die. This is of course all just silly rumours. I notice that your magazine only has one story on it, despite its ridiculously high pay rate of a hundred thousand dollars per story. These are just the silly worries of a newbie writer, and your standards are probably just high.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, “The Magazine of Horror” (Apex Magazine, Issue 139, August 2023)

This is a fun little story that I read in two different ways. It works just fine as a bit of silly, fluffy horror about a magazine that’s more than it seems and a naive author who doesn’t believe the clear warnings. But I think there’s also a metaphor here for some things that really happen in publishing – in particular for the idea that there can only be one, best author from a particular group, especially a marginalized group; and that, once you’ve had your turn being the best, the only remaining path is a dramatic fall from grace.

*

“I like the little singing you do to yourself,” Ashley said nonchalantly, not even looking up from her console. “You have a really nice voice.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said quietly, “I put a lot of work into it.” I wanted to say so much, about the challenges and frustration it had caused me, the intense dysphoria I felt about it from an early age, the agony and joy of learning to sing again—but I knew if I opened up, it would only fan the fires of the feelings I had towards Ashley. For me, vulnerability was a dangerous substance, a doorway to desire.

Tessa Fisher, “Morning Star Blues” (Rosalind’s Siblings, September 2023)

Kelsey, a trans woman scientist, is on a long-haul flight to Venus with another trans woman to search for signs of life. After a sexual assault scare between a cis man and woman on a previous mission, Mission Control hopes that fielding all-trans-women teams, with their hormones purposely adjusted to keep their sex drives low, will prevent any repeats of that situation. Despite this, Kelsey is developing a crush on her crewmate. There’s a lot to unpack here about how trans people – especially trans women – are simultaneously desexualized and seen as sexual threats, and how delicate it can be to form intimate relationships in spite of all this; and Fisher does unpack the latter part of it gently and vulnerably.

*

“But she wasn’t you,” she goes on, when I don’t respond. “I looked into those big baby eyes and I saw absolutely nothing.”

Lindsay King-Miller, “Changeling” (Baffling, Issue Thirteen, October 2, 2023)

You know I’m a sucker for changeling stories. This one comes at it from a queer & eating disordered perspective, not an autistic one, but it makes the underlying toxicity of changeling folklore – the idea that a parent can and should hurt a child, if it’s not the child they wanted or believed they deserved – painfully and beautifully clear.

*

So the queen wavin’ and I only know that I have to throw flowers at she. The queen so close to me, I can almost go up to touch she. So everybody cheering and throwing flowers, and I go to throw my flowers, and I pelt it—stem, leaf, thorn and all, right up next to she face.

Sarah Ramdawar, “I Attack the Queen!” (Strange Horizons, October 30, 2023)

I love what this quick, punchy piece of flash fiction does with POV and with defamiliarization. How something that looks expected and mundane in one way, to the dominant culture, can be completely surreal in another. (I don’t know if it would be defamiliarizing in the same way to someone who is actually from Trinidad – probably not! – but all I can really report is my own response.)

*

I’m overriding the doors. You all know as well as I do that—can you hear me? I’m not getting anything on the speakers in here. You all know as well as I do that no one can come in until the shielding is back in place.

Premee Mohamed, “Imagine Yourself Happy” (Small Wonders, Issue 5, November 2023)

This is, again, very short – it’s literally just four minutes of a dying scientist’s last monologue. Given that premise, it’s surprisingly matter-of-fact and accepting; it ends up saying something that really resonates with me about the nature and purpose of a finite life.

*

“Did they catch you, Ol. Did anybody see you?”

“Oh. Oh, no.”

I let the silence stretch. They reached to turn on the road trip playlist, and I interrupted to ask: “Then why did I have to drive that fast?”

I let my eyes drift from the road for a split second to assess what was going on with my friend. Their eyes were huge in the lights of a passing semi. Their face was set, stoic. “You know how my parents are.”

Marissa Lingen, “A Piece of the Continent” (Uncanny, Issue Fifty-Five, November/December 2023)

I don’t know why this little trans ghost story hit me as hard as it did – but then, Marissa Lingen’s short stories always knock it out of the park.

*

i think I believe that. But the human mind can hold such contradictory thoughts. At the same time that I say the words “time in the sun,” I am thinking of Ann falling. As if spliced into a disorderly film, my many memories of Ann’s falls run together…

Beston Barnett, “Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe” (Strange Horizons, November 20, 2023)

METI is an artificial intelligence designed to greet extraterrestrials, in the depths of space, by showing them a single human memory. But memory is complicated – perhaps more complicated than METI’s designers anticipated – and to understand the meaning of even one memory requires an enormous depth of context and acceptance of contradiction. This one seems like it could be pretty abstract at first, but it gradually blossoms into something devastatingly human.

*

A tide of unrelenting change, of complete and perfect impossibility, washes over them in the tunnel. The walls taste metallic when she looks at them; her skin feels like the smell of rain on sun-warmed pavement. Her fingers are willow branches and her tongue is the colour of fear.

Richard Ford Burley, “After Angels” (Haven Speculative, Issue Twelve, December 2023)

I absolutely love the weird, surreal, numinous horror in this story. Like, yes!! This is how it’s done!!

*

The sketch showed a young woman, her face a perfect oval, holding our base in her cupped hands. Behind her head, Saturn hung golden within its halo of rings. That was the first sign that religion had come with us to Enceladus.

Zohar Jacobs, “The Enceladus South Pole Base Named After V.I. Lenin” (Clarkesworld, February 2024)

I’ve been experiencing an enthusiasm lately for realistic stories about space travel. I don’t necessarily mean stories that could 100% happen in real life – but I do mean stories in a future world where there hasn’t been any massive advance like FTL, cryosleep, or artificial gravity that would fundamentally change the experience of spaceflight compared to what it is now, and where there’s attention to the little details of what present-day spaceflight and the solar system are actually like. This story scratches that itch, but it also does much more – it’s an impressively nuanced story about politics, religion, and the messy inevitability of social change.

*

[1] Before you ask, yes, I did also read Isabel J. Kim’s Omelas story that went viral a few months ago. Kim’s version is clever and hard-hitting – and I love everything Kim writes, generally – but I still like Gómez’s version best.