2026 Nerds of a Feather Awards Recommended Reading, Part 1: Fiction Categories

The wheel turns, the turtle flies through space, and once more time brings our feet marching dutifully back to the foot of Mount Awards Season. Welcome to another round of Nerds of a Feather Recommended Reading.

As is traditional, we have pulled together the combined suggestions of our roster of contributors and editors to bring you a four part list of all our absolute favourites from 2025, ready for some last minute reading, watching, perusing and pondering before you have to submit your Hugo Awards nomination ballots. We make no guarantees for completeness - we are, after all, only mortal nerdly birds with a limited capacity to drink in the inexorable river of genre works* - and fully admit that this list is highly subjective. There will be fabulous works we missed. If such is one of yours, take this as your call to shout about it, wherever you yourself talk about genre.

On which point, while we do our best to cover as much ground as possible, there are some categories and formats where we just hadn't read widely or deeply enough, and so have nothing to suggest. This says nothing about the strength of what was produced in 2025, but is merely a reflection of the interests of our writers. As ever, this list is merely a starting point and inspiration, not an attempt at the comprehensive. Caveats aside, though, we hope you enjoy and are inspired to nominate from and discuss these lists.

Today brings Part One, all about the prose fiction categories.

*but a near limitless capacity for torturous mixed metaphors

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Nerds of a Feather 2025 Recommendation List Series:

Part 1: Prose Fiction Categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Series, Lodestar Award)

Part 2: Visual Work Categories (Graphic Story, Dramatic Presentation)

Part 3: Individual Categories (Editor, Fan Writer, Professional Artist, Fan Artist, Astounding Award for Best New Writer)

Part 4: Institutional Categories (Related Work, Semiprozine, Fanzine, Fancast) and New Hugo Award for Best Poem

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Novel

Afifi, Nadia, A Rebel's History of Mars, [Flame Tree Press]
Allan, Nina, A Granite Silence, [riverrun]
Bassoff, Jon, The Memory Ward by Jon Bassoff, [Blackstone Publishing Inc.]
Bhatia, Gautam, The Sentence, [Westland IF]
Birch, Jenny, Woven from Clay, [Wednesday Books]
Brown, Gareth, The Society of Unknowable Objects, [Bantam]
Burnham, Sophie, Bloodtide, [DAW]
Catrileo, Daniela, Chilco, [FSG Originals] (tr. Jacob Edelstein)
de la Chevotière, Robert, Tall is Her Body, [Erewhon]
Chung, Bora, Red Sword, [Honford Star] (tr. Anton Hur)
Elliott, Kate, The Witch Roads, [Tor Books]
Elliott, Kate, The Nameless Land, [Tor Books]
Ennes, Hiron, The Works of Vermin, [Tor Books]
Fayne, Rickey, The Devil Three Times, [Little, Brown and Company]

Fellman, Isaac, Notes from a Regicide, [Tor Books]
Foster, Alex, Circular Motion, [Grove Press]
Geon, Caspar, The Immeasurable Heaven, [Solaris]
Harrow, Alix E, The Everlasting, [Tor Books]
Haynes, Justin, Ibis, [Harry N. Abrams]
Hodgson, Antonia, The Raven Scholar, [Hodderscape]
Ibrahim, Salma, Salutation Road, [Mantle]
Ingold, Jon, Heaven's Vault: The Flood, [Inklestudios]
Ishizawa, Mai, The Place of Shells, [Sceptre] (tr. Polly Barton)
Jackson Bennett, Robert, A Drop of Corruption, [Del Rey]
Johal, Gurnaik, Saraswati, [Serpent's Tail]
King, Raymond, Alien Nation, [Visceral Books]
McEwan, Ian, What We Can Know, [Knopf]
McKenna, Jude, The Eye of Atlas, [Liminal Horizon Press]

Meijer, Eva, Sea Now, [Two Lines Press] (tr. Anne Thompson Melo)
Menger-Anderson, Kirsten, The Expert of Subtle Revisions, [Crown]
North, Claire, Slow Gods, [Orbit]
Onyebuchi, Tochi, Harmattan Season, [Tor Books]
Park, Silvia, Luminous, [Simon & Schuster]
Rameera, Alysha, Her Soul for a Crown, [Sourcebooks Casablanca]
Reyes, Ruben Jr., Archive of Unknown Universes, [Mariner Books]
Russell, Caskey, The Door on the Sea, [Solaris]
Swan, Richard, Grave Empire, [Orbit]
Swift, E. J., When There Are Wolves Again, [Arcadia]
Tesh, Emily, The Incandescent, [Tor Books]
Theodoridou, Natalia, Sour Cherry, [Tin House]
Thien, Madeleine, The Book of Records, [Granta Books]
Wells, Martha, Queen Demon, [Tor Books]
Wilde, Fran, A Philosophy of Thieves, [Erewhon Books]
Wilson, Lorraine, The Salt Oracle, [Solaris]
Yu, An, Sunbirth, [Grove Press]

Novella

Beker, Syr Hayati, What A Fish Looks Like, [Stelliform Press]

Biswas, Sharang, The Iron Below Remembers, [Neon Hemlock]

Cahill, Martin, Audition for the Fox, [Tachyon Publications]

Donnelly, Lara Elena, No Such Thing As Duty, [Neon Hemlock]

García Freire, Natalia, A Carnival of Atrocities, [World Editions]

Huff, Drew, My Name Isn't Paul, [Independently Published]

Knighton, Andrew, Walking a Wounded Land, [Wizard's Tower Press]

Kurella, Jordan, The Death of Mountains, [Lethe Press]

Larraquy, Roque, The National Telepathy, [Charco Press] (tr. Frank Wynne)

Lowachee, Karin, The Desert Talon, [Solaris]

Lowachee, Karin, A Covenant of Ice, [Solaris]

Majolagbe, Kehinde, The Ballad of Nod, [Independently Published]

Martinez, Felicia, The Other Lives of Altagracia Sanchez, [Querencia Press]

Mohamed, Premee, The First Thousand Trees, [ECW Press]

Papadopoulou, Ioanna, The Castaway and the Witch, [Ghost Orchid Press]

Making History by K. J.  Parker

Suplex and Sorcery by June Orchid Parker

Family Secret Memories by Mohammad Qassemzadeh

Lives of Bitter Rain by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Aerth by Deborah Tomkins

The Memory of the Ogisi by Moses Ose Utomi

Short Story

Chandrasekera, Vajra, "Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon", (Sunday Morning Transport, 06 July 2025)

Drnovšek Zorko, Filip Hajdar, "The Place I Came To", (Lightspeed, Issue 184)

McMahon, Will, "The Exquisite Pull of Relentless Desire", (Lightspeed, Issue 176)

North, Emet, "Resurrections", (Strange Horizons, 21 July 2025)

Quinn, Timothy, "The Warfighter", (Small Wonders, Issue 23)

Radovich, Nadia, "Looped", (Heartlines Spec, Issue 9)

Rigathi, Kevin, "If Memory Serves", (Will This Be a Problem edited by Olivia Kidula and Somto Ihezue)

Tryantafyllou, Eugenia, "Some to Cradle, Some to Eat", (Lightspeed, Issue 177)

Valente, Cathrynne M., "When He Calls Your Name", (Uncanny, Issue Sixty-Five)

Wernicke, Bree, "Jack of All Faces", (Small Wonders, Issue 22)

Zhang, J Y, "White Smoke from the West", (Heartlines Spec, Issue 7)

Series (Qualifying Work)

Scalzi, John, "Old Man's War", qualifying work The Shattering Peace, [Tor Books]

Scott, Melissa (and Lisa A. Barnett for the first two books), "Astreaint", qualifying work Point of Hearts, [Queen of Swords Press]

Tchaikovsky, Adrian, "The Tyrant Philosophers", qualifying work Lives of Bitter Rain, [Head of Zeus]

West, Michelle, "Essalieyan", qualifying work The Wild Road, [Rosdan Press]

Lodestar

Hartman, Rachel, Among Ghosts, [Penguin Teen Canada]

Knox, Elizabeth, Kings of This World, [Allen & Unwin]

Film Review: Arco

Look up and make a wish

First we have the far future. People live on platforms above the clouds, where they practice subsistence farming. With the help of multicolored robes adorned with pretty diamonds, they routinely travel to the prehistoric past to recover samples of usable species; there are hints that something caused an ecological catastrophe that made the surface unlivable. The family we follow has a girl and a boy, but the boy, Arco, is still too young to join the time-traveling expeditions. Because it’s a human universal, even after the end of civilization, that kids have an instinct for getting in trouble, the boy steals a suit and attempts a time jump on his own. As can be expected, he gets lost, and thus we have a movie.

Then we have the not too far future. The environment is still in the middle of falling apart; one day can bring a killer hurricane and the next a massive forest fire, and the solution of rich people is to have retractable glass domes built around their houses. That way you can have your dinner in peace while nature rages outside. The family we follow in this era has a preteen girl, a baby boy and a robot nanny. The parents are perpetually busy at work in some other city, and the girl, Iris, is tired of feeling lonely. So fate fulfills her wishes one day, when Arco crash-lands in her neighborhood.

The plot of the French animated film Arco brings to mind E.T., with the strange visitor hiding in a child’s house until they can return to their parents. The main difference in this case is that Iris and Arco can talk to each other. She’s excited about showing him all the cool things of her modern life, but he’s rather guarded about how much of his time she can be allowed to know. This dynamic only gets a brief time to develop before we have adult authorities, mysterious stalkers and natural disasters converging to get in the way of this adorable pair.

A curious contrast to the beauty of this moment in the kids’ lives is the stunted development of the trio of stalkers who jump out of nowhere to find Arco and obtain proof that time travel is real. They’re introduced as antagonists, but soon enough their clumsiness neutralizes any threat they may pose, and they spend the rest of the movie looking goofy and obstructing our heroes’ quest for no good reason. I hear many viewers enjoyed these characters; I found them mostly annoying.

One feature that stands out about the overall tone of Arco is how obviously it’s not an American or Japanese cartoon. It’s far too common for children in American cartoons to be overly expressive of their emotions, whereas children in Japanese cartoons can sometimes speak with such deep introspection that believability is stretched. The two lead children in Arco come off as more relaxed in their inner life, which makes the stakes feel starker later, when it’s time to panic. The naturality with which they let themselves feel their emotions ends up being key to the gradual way these two start falling in love without having a clue of what romance is.

There’s an element of irony in the suggestion that Arco’s description of the post-disaster world will inspire Iris to get to work to mitigate the disaster that in her time is still ongoing. But her success is more visible in the personal sphere. Her family life is strained because she almost never gets to see her parents, who work a lot to afford the storm-proof house where she lives. When one looks at the family Arco comes from, and the magnitude of the effort it takes for his parents to find him, the implication is that Iris changed a society where parents rarely spend time with their kids into a society where parents move heaven and earth to see them. This side of the story is more impactful than any environmentalist lesson that could be read in the plot. Viewers probably already know the dangers that surround us, so Arco can just show the full extent of the climate crisis without turning preachy; the images suffice.

The gorgeous animation and the careful balancing of tension and humor highlight the small tragedy at the core of the story: two children having a wonderful, one-in-a-lifetime experience whose full meaning they can’t yet grasp. They just know something special is happening to them, and they don’t have a name for it, and it will take them decades of growth to appreciate those fleeting days of magic. The part of the movie’s ending that is happy gives both Iris and Arco a blunt reminder of the cruelty of time, a hard truth that not even time travel can fix. That’s the thing about growing up: if it tastes bittersweet, you’re doing it right.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

A Russian nested doll of stories, characters and relationships, and yes, magic

Jamie is a grad student in Massachusetts, working as best she can to teach classes and make her way in the world. She’s also a witch, has been for years, and has gotten more and more interested in the uses of magic. But it is her relationship with her mother, and the story of two women in the 18th century, and a book, and the story within that book, that truly drive and reinforce the narrative.

This is the story of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

On the level of basic plot description, the novel is a relatively straightforward affair about Jamie’s relationship with her mother, and about uncovering what happened to her other mother, Mae. This proceeds as Jamie struggles with her relationship with her mother, with her spouse, Ro, and with the nature and uses of magic. Oh, and there is also drama and issues with her graduate studies and classes in the modern day.

Anyone with a parental relationship as an adult will find a lot here to think on and absorb. There is a real dividing line from when you stop being a child and start being an adult with an adult parent; and what life is like on that other side can be uncomfortable, especially if relations have had a break for a time. This novel explores the implications of that sort of relationship intimately and with feeling.

The narrative is far more than the sum of its parts. It is a rich dive deep down in levels and layers that wind up influencing and talking to each other, and to the reader. The novel works on those interlocking layers. At the very top, this is a story about a mother and a daughter and how they try to reconnect, with the daughter teaching magic to her mother, and the use of that magic having all sorts of spinning consequences. This impacts severely the relationship. And since this is a Charlie Jane Anders book, nearly all of the sympathetic characters are queer.

Jamie’s graduate studies center on the author Sarah Fielding, a real-life author, and sister of the more famous author Henry Fielding. The story of 18th-century women like Sarah is part of this novel. Anders devises a fictional novel of hers called Emily, making the text (and Jamie) focus on that book and speculate on the relationship between Emily and one Charlotte Clarke. Charlotte is a fascinating real-life character who transgressed gender roles in complicated ways, was often known as Charles Brown, and dressed in men’s clothes. In real life we don’t know how much Charlotte and Sarah knew each other. In this novel, bits of a speculated relationship between the two is a “level” of the story underneath the main ones.

The novel is like that: levels upon levels, echoing and reflecting on each other, like a layer cake. From the top:

• Main day story of Jamie, Ro (her partner) and Serena (her mother). Plus magic.
• The story of Serena and her partner Mae (Jamie’s parents). It’s a tragedy in many ways. I was moved to tears at points.
• The story of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Clarke. Anders takes what we know and, thanks to it being part of Jamie’s thesis, has her speculate on the relationship.
• The fictional novel Emily by Fielding (which we get excerpts and commentary on, since this is Jamie’s thesis).
• Finally, inside Emily there is a layer further down: a fantasy story, the Tale of the Princess and the Strolling Player, that definitely has connections at least up to Fielding and Clarke’s story, and, I think, all the way to Jamie and Ro’s as well.

Although there is no actual time travel involved in this book, what comes to mind when reading it is Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, which focuses on the early 19th century, and the work of an imaginary Romantic poet’s work and its importance to the narrative. With all these layers influencing each other, I am also reminded of the Dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

So the novel is extremely geeky in a literary sense. It’s a fascinating high wire act from Anders. It’s also a very science-fictional geeky book. For all of the focus on an 18th-century author, the novel lives in a modern context and has plenty of references and genre awareness—not to the degree of, say, a Jo Walton novel, but enough for someone new to genre works or movies to find it just very slightly off-putting. That said, this IS the novel to give your queer or queer-friendly friend who has never read science fiction or fantasy before but wants to try it out.

That subject has been in the water in recent months. Here, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, there are no spell-slinging wizards; the magic is subtle. While people might reach for Kelly Link here, what this novel made me think of (besides earlier works by Anders and the aforementioned Tim Powers), is Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb)’s Wizard of the Pigeons, where magic is also very subtle and hard to notice.¹ The threat in that novel is mystical, whereas the challenges Jamie and her family and friends face are all too real and present.

The theory of magic, such as it is for Jamie and her family and friends, is one of discovery and of liminal places. There is a numinous, mysterious and only-vaguely-understood nature of magic that is very much against codified rules. Jamie, who has been practicing this magic for some time before the book, has theories about it that don’t always seem to align with the actual results. Serena, to whom she teaches magic, has her own ideas on what it’s good for. When Serena and Jamie find other practitioners, the bounds and sphere of actual theory, craft and knowledge expand further. At no point is there a Sandersonian ruleset defined. Magic is, in the end, mysterious. And it’s not the entire focus of the book, as witness the book’s Kelly-Link-like title.

The voice in the writing of Lessons in Magic and Disaster is contemporary and open. In this year of 2026, Jamie’s voice resonates as someone you might know, or at least be neighbors with. Her concerns and problems, aside from the issues of magic, and of the 18th-century material mentioned before, are of this moment too: the rising intolerance against queer people, and the difficulties of relationships with a spouse and a mother. It’s not a comfortable read, given what Jamie and those around her go through, but Anders makes the experience easy for us to immerse in, and find sympathy in both Jamie and her mother despite their differences. There are no easy answers at the end. That in itself is a form of magic.

There is a point in the novel where Jamie finds a thesis statement (or thinks she has) for her study of Fielding. It’s really an echo for the thesis statement for Anders’ s novel as well, and so, atypically, I am going to quote it verbatim:

So now Jamie is thinking of Emily as a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart’s desire in spite of everyone else’s expectations. Emily is a book about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind to move to towns at the very start of industrial capitalism, and the changes that people can make in those places. It’s about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and Emily’s struggle to have both.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a queer, immersive character study that sometimes uncomfortably (in a good way) speaks to fractured relationships, both familial and otherwise, and the costs of both action and inaction in dealing with challenges. Plus magic.

Highlights:

• Character-focused, immersive story
• Russian-doll narrative, layered story reinforcing and exploring theme
• Possibly a very good fit for a first SFF novel for queer-friendly readers

Reference: Anders, Charlie Jane. Lessons in Magic and Disaster [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve thrown a number of books and references at you, the reader, in this review, but the book is like that, too. There are both a Historical Note and a strongly felt Afterword where Anders reveals her thought process, ideas, and a reading list. And a music list, because she’s like that.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Microreview: Cold Storage

If exploding zombies are your thing…

Cold Storage is the latest iteration of the fad for fungus zombies, which seem to be still in vogue. This time, they’re the result of a medical experiment that was once aboard Skylab and everyone forgot about until it escaped an oxygen tank that fell on Australia. In an extended prologue, we witness the disaster that happened two decades ago when a comically understaffed team of experts went to contain the mutated organism and lost one member in the most gruesome way. This is the type of fungus that takes over the nervous system and compels the victim to seek a location for optimal dissemination. That’s scary enough, but on top of that, the infection ends up blowing up your guts all around you. The movie delights in showing the many ways this can deform a cadaver.

Another member of that ill-fated team, played by Liam Neeson, suffers an unspecified back injury that conveniently keeps him out of the main action in the present, when the military building that kept the last sample of the zombie fungus (now decommissioned and repainted as a self-storage facility) has a minor electrical mishap with catastrophic cascading effects: a freezer malfunctions, the fungus starts growing again, it breaks containment, and it climbs up the food chain until it becomes a problem for humans. Liam Neeson is dragged back from retirement to save the day again, but he spends most of the movie traveling to the site of the crisis, and most of the rest of the movie lying on the floor because his broken back can’t handle gunfire recoil. Why do you even hire Liam Neeson to not let him do Liam Neeson stuff escapes me.

Instead, our heroes are Joe Keery, fresh from saving the world in Stranger Things, and horror veteran Georgina Campbell, whose character is very tired of running from monsters and just wants to hide and wait. These two stumble into the whole world-ending menace because they’re bored and decide to investigate a weird noise in the self-storage facility where they work the night shift, and discover the alarm that was triggered by the broken freezing system. Meanwhile, the fungus has already spread to the local fauna, and when the shambling victims cross paths with our heroes, it’s time for them to run for their lives.

It helps that they have more plot armor than Bugs Bunny. The fungus zombies repeatedly ooze, spittle, burst open and projectile-vomit their gooey innards right next to our heroes, and somehow not one drop of infected material splashes onto them. When you consider that this fungus has been shown to be able to penetrate cement and metal, the protagonists’ eventual survival can only be explained because their names are on the poster and aren’t allowed to die. So the gore quota is met by an array of secondary characters established as unpleasant enough for it to be OK to enjoy watching them suffer the most spectacularly messy deaths. This movie has a lot of fun with zombie makeup, and even more fun with throwing zombie guts at every surface.

Cold Storage is the kind of supremely silly flick that demands out loud that you switch off your brain. There’s no point in pausing to question the multiple instances of military bureaucratic dysfunction that it must have taken for this plot to happen. Don’t expect any implied reflection on the problem of badly maintained public infrastructure or the irresponsibility of storing hazardous materials near civilian areas (one character has a small atom bomb hidden in a house with children, and it’s treated as a nonissue). Just sit and savor the spectacle of a screen smeared with squishy rotten organs. Hey, the world is ending anyway, right?

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Nanoreviews: Matryoshka; Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur; The Rainseekers

These are three novellas from quite different corners of science fiction that I read over January. One, Matryoshka, is a backlist title that's been on my shelf for some time, while the other two are new releases.

The odd thing is you will see I've given all 3 the same score (give or take a few decimal points; I do think Matryoshka is probably by a small margin the strongest), but that flattens just how diverse in their strengths (and their flaws) these three works are. Suffice to say that I think if any of these is in a niche that is to your taste, you will find it enjoyable and engaging.

Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto

This is, as far as I can tell, Pinto's only longer-form work outside his very good and underappreciated Stone Dance of the Chameleon series of early 2000s grimdark doorstoppers, and it is a very different beast to those. A slim novella clocking in at under 90 generously spaced pages, it opens with our point of view character, Cherenkov, hooking up with a complete stranger in post-World War 2 Venice and then following her through a portal to another world, called Eboreus. So far, so portal fantasy. What follows, though, is something considerably more abstract and more surreal.

Cherenkov and the woman he followed to Eboreus, Septima, are quickly set on a mission across a trackless sea and towards an increasingly fierce white light to find an old man who is probably a Neanderthal. It turns out that the closer one gets to that white light, the slower time moves. By the time the two return (with a third person, who had been lost in time), years have passed in Eboreus and decades in the real world. The plot, such as it is, plays out the consequences of this time dilation.

Matryoshka is probably best described as science fantasy. The story is played out like a fairy tale, but the time dilation at the plot's core seems pretty clearly to be a matter of physics (if not understood as such by most of the characters) rather than magic. The plot is sketched lightly and its logic deliberately surreal and disorientating. Through this choice of narrative voice, the themes Pinto seeks to explore—dislocation in the face of the Holocaust and in the face of modernity more generally—are also sheeted onto the reader trying to make sense of the action. This is in general very effective and quite clearly deliberate, but in a few places the generally elegant prose clunks or is missing just one more plot breadcrumb to pull the reader along. Those quibbles aside, this is a bold and creative work by an author whose work deserves more attention. Recommended if you enjoy surrealist approaches to speculative fiction.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

McDonald is a science fiction luminary, with works across a wide range of subgenres to great effect, from the sweep of centuries on Mars in Desolation Road to near-future brilliance in The Dervish House and River of Gods to cartel wars on the moon in the Luna trilogy. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur explores yet another corner of the genre in a near-future post-political-collapse America. The point of departure from our timeline to the one of the book is the existence of the B2T2: "A place where two times lay up against each other, close as kittens, separated only by the finest layer of space-time fur, that could be stroked, and parted." This hole in time caused religious and political upheaval and, related to the anomaly or not, significant civil war within the former United States. It also allows for the rise of a truly idiosyncratic new form of entertaiment across these shattered states: dinosaur rodeo.

McDonald's masterstroke is to tell the story of this world from the perspective of someone deeply shaped by its differences from ours but with no understand of, or agency over, it. Tif is an orphan in his (late, as I read it) teens, his parents killed in early exchanges in the early battles which shaped the geopolitical present of the book. From a young age he is obsessed with dinosaur rodeo and aroused by the buckaroos; he's gay with little drama about that fact (and Arabic with a fair bit more drama in the Christian theocracy of the future USA). He runs away from the orphanage he ended up at after his parents' death and begs, borrows, and blowjobs his way across the American southwest to get a job mucking out stalls at a dinosaur rodeo. The book opens with him being fired from that job for letting a dinosaur escape. Shortly after, he acquires the titular accidental dinosaur, and the rest of the book is a road trip where Tif attempts to find a home and send his dinosaur back to the past (mandatory under time travel rules to minimise the risk of paradox).

There is a lot to like about this book. McDonald has frequently brilliant turns of phrase, tuned precisely to the register of the under-educated, dinosaur-obsessed, working class teenager who is our point of view character ("Tif folds himself into the big chair and all the sleep that hid in the night creeps up and settles in his lap"). The character work, if briefly sketched (appropriate for a novella), is well done and convincing. As an idiosyncratic, working class view of trying to make a life in a pretty grim future, it is generally successful. The thing that holds a good book back from being great is that it seems to have precisely the wrong amount of plot for a novella. There's too much plot and too wide a sweep for a short story, but it includes so much that it feels overcooked for a novella. The plot races at breakneck pace when it feels like it should proceed more sedately, and some scenes are over almost before they begin. The overall impression is that the story could have done with another 10 or 15,000 words of breathing room. As it stands, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur feels just a little bit more like a genuinely excellent penultimate draft than a fully realised finished article.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

The Rainseekers is The Canterbury Tales on Mars, or (perhaps a more genre-appropriate comparison) a condensed Hyperion in mundane SF mode. Terraforming on Mars has proceeded far enough that there has been snow for some years, and the book focuses on a group of 40-odd people trekking out from the safety of Martian dome cities in an attempt to be the first to experience rain. Our narrator, Sakunja Salazar, is a former future!Tiktok star who since making more money than she knows what to do with in that career has turned to photography and journalism and is along for the ride. The book is about equally split between her frame narrative and the stories told to her by several of her fellow pilgrims (it's barely expressed as such; the trek is definitely a pilgrimmage) about their lives and what brought them to be out here, seeking Martian rain.

These pilgrims come from a wide range of backgrounds, from the descendant of the genius scientist who designed the orbital mirrors which have over decades warmed Mars and melted ice to the talented engineer brought low by trauma and addiction. Kressel has a deft touch with these nested stories, bringing depth to their subjects in a short word count. We get Sakunja's story as well, both through the narration of the frame story and her own background as narrated to one of the other pilgrims, and the emotional beats are equally well done.

I have two quibbles with the novella, one structural and one genre-related. Structurally, the balance of frame narrative to nested stories seems off. There is more to the frame narrative than an excuse for the stories, but there isn't quite enough to it to stand alone either. And for a party of 40-odd pilgrims, it feels weird that the story only gives us the stories of a handful of them. The balance is just slightly off in a way that means you finish the book feeling like you've missed something. In terms of genre complaints, there is a fair bit of "as you know, we realised [x thing happening in the 2020s] was bad" backfilling of the timeline between now and the novel's setting, and some of this is quite clumsy. The pilgrims and the Mars they inhabit are believably and authentically sketched; the history of the Earth they left behind to come there, not so much. It detracts only slightly from the narrative, but I do think it's worth noting when some of the SFnal elements of a SF narrative are one of the story's weaknesses.

Overall these are quibbles, though, and this is a nuanced, emotionally resonant set of stories that I think a lot of readers will enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.